On the continuity of religious ritual

I've been wanting to write something up about how at Mass we worship God just as Homer described his guys doing 3000 years ago, and how this is essentially different from Protestant worship and is cited as proof that them Catlickers are a bunch of pagans, etc.; but the continuity of the human "how" of divine worship is a powerful proof that we've got it right - we worship the way mankind has always worshiped.

From the beginning of book 3 of the Odyssey in Fitzgerald's translation:

The sun rose on the flawless brimming sea
into a sky all brazen --- all one brightening
for gods immortal and for mortal men
on plowlands kind with grain.
                               And facing sunrise
the voyagers now lay off Pylos town,
compact stronghold of Neleus.  On the shore
black bulls were being offered by the people
to the blue-maned god who makes the islands tremble:
nine congregations, each five hundred strong,
led out nine bulls apiece to sacrifice,
taking the tripes to eat, while on their altars
thighbones in fat lay burning for the god.

See what he did there? That's a bare outline of the liturgy of the Eucharist. The congregations face east, the people offer a sacrifice to a god by placing it on an altar and burning it, and they eat part of the sacrifice. While Homer wasn't writing a liturgical handbook, he has captured the essence of how mankind has always worshiped the divine.

The differences: our offering is a man who is also the God being worshiped; our sacrificial victim died once and not at every offering; and we eat the victim.

Now, I was gonna scour Homer and the other ancients for other instances of divine worship and write up some more stuff in this vein, but it's 1:57 a.m.

What literature is all about

Paul Gruchow, via the Laudator:

At the University of Minnesota, on another spring day, I heard the poet John Berryman fail to lecture on The Iliad to a room jammed with students. He sat down at a table, as was his custom, put on his reading glasses, lit a cigarette, which he held at bottom of the space between his trembling index and middle fingers in the way that drunks do, and began to read to us from the poem in his dark voice, oddly powerful coming from such a frail man, paying as much attention to the stops in the lines as to the accents. He read to us the scene in which Hector and Andromache say farewell to each other. Hector is destined to die and Andromache to be hauled into slavery, and both know this by premonition. When he came to the end of the scene, Berryman was weeping and so, unexpectedly, were we. He made no effort to hide his grief, running from an ancient pen across the long centuries through a modern language into our hearts. He did not even brush away his tears. We sat, stunned, until he got up and left the room without another word, and then we, too, gathered up our books and emerged into the cruel sunshine. I hurried to my office (I was editor of the student newspaper) and locked myself in, and it was an hour or two before I could see anybody. It was the first time, I think, that any of us had ever been taught what literature is all about.