Cricket is a useful metaphor for all sorts of things. It teaches patience: something which in its ordinary form lasts a day, and in its extraordinary forms lasts between three hours and five days can never be reduced to instant gratification; satisfaction comes from long periods of strategic thinking punctuated by moments of sheer brilliance.
The current Pontificate seems to me more and more like the Edgebaston Test of the 2003 Ashes: it is absolutely absorbing. The Pope has taken a long view about the importance of winning the Battle of the Liturgy; his opponents think that they can just turn up and win. They think that he has some respectable players on his side, but are ignoring the fact that he has developed them, and continues to develop them, as a team. They think, deep down, that they are invincible. We know that they are wrong.
One of the strategic mistakes the opposition has made is to think that it owns the idea of “Reform of the Liturgy”, forgetting that for anybody under the age of forty, the liberalisation of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass is a major reform; that being able to attend the traditional Rite is as transcending an experience as it must have been to attend a folk Mass in the early 1970s.
Another is to think that the Pope’s use of old vestments, or his new MC’s arrangement of the altar at St Peter’s will only speak to the old or nostalgic: they forget that the under-40s have been brought up to question, to ask why things are as they are, and that the Pope has answers.
Another is to think that their Year Zero has any significance for anybody who wasn’t around at the time: they congratulate themselves on a tremendous change without realising that for anybody who doesn’t know what came before, change is what is about to come.
So Edgebaston: a team whose opponents think doomed to failure is showing that it has learned, and that it is more than capable of taking on a powerful opposition. It understands its own weaknesses as well as those of the opposition, and is therefore better placed to capitalise on them against a team of cocky, self-confident, chippy – what I hope 2008 will tell us are – also-rans.
Bubbles exist to be burst. Some of us have our pins ready.
Posted by rccarchivist 