"As Time Goes By..."

Friends,

Pressing affairs demand my attention elsewhere. I will be on "vacation" until Friday, November 13th, when I will again put fingers to keys for the next installment of "Labyrinthus." Even if the foundations of the Republic are not secure, the Pillars of the World will certainly remain intact till then. In the meantime, Happy National Mole Day (that's today), All Hallows and All Souls Days, Samhain, Guy Fawkes (where is he when we need him?) and Armistice Days. It will be Sadie Hawkins' Day when next I post.

Pax,
Greg Wilcox, Peregrinus

"Inscribed in the Book of Life"

Walking the Labyrinth-September 25, 2009-The Russian Orthodox today celebrate the feast of the Venerable Dosithea of Kiev, a female recluse who spent most of her life living in a monastery, her fellow monks believing her to be a man. As daughter of a Russian noble family, she was educated in a convent where her grandmother lived as a nun. When she returned home, her parents told her they had arranged her marriage; the young woman promptly ran away from home. They searched for her in numerous convents but it never occurred to them to look for her in a monastery. She lived as a recluse for more than thirty years in the famous Monastery of the Kievan Caves. Her spiritual counsel came to be valued by Russians, peasant and noble alike; from 1744 the Empress Elizabeth chose Dosithea (thinking she was the monk “Dositheus”) as her confessor and spiritual director. When she died in 1776, her brethren discovered “Dositheus” was actually “Dosithea.” From that time they began venerating her as a saint, undoubtedly for her piety—but perhaps also because they figured only a woman of great holiness could live cooped up with a bunch of men. 1066 was a difficult year in England from the get-go. On January 5, the holy but incompetent King Edward (called "the Confessor") died childless, leaving three men, all ambitious and each with an army at his disposal, claiming the throne. One, Harald Sigurdsson, nicknamed Harald Hardrada (“Harald the Stern”), was King of the Vikings in Norway. The second, Harold Godwinson, a powerful English nobleman who the dying Edward appointed protector of the throne, pushed his claim and bullied his way to the crown before Edward's body was cold. He was proclaimed King of England late in January. The third was William of Normandy (known to history as William “the Conqueror”—a hint as to how this whole thing ends). When word of Harold’s coronation spread, both Harald and William began assembling invasion fleets and armies. Hardrada was the first to sail for England, with more than 300 ships; he arrived in mid-September. The Vikings defeated a local militia shortly after coming to ground and Harald thought the country would be easy pickings; on the morning of September 25, though, his sleeping army was attacked by Harold Godwinson’s force, which had marched--fully armored--185 miles in less than four days. They attacked across Stamford Bridge as soon as they came on the scene. Most of the Vikings were unarmored and in the ensuing slaughter Hardrada and many of his nobles were killed. After the remainder surrendered, Harold allowed them to leave on their promise they would never again attack England. So great was the number of the dead that less than 20 of the original 300 ships returned to Norway. Harold’s victory was short-lived. While his men were recovering from the fight, word came that William of Normandy had landed in Pevensey with 7000 men. Marching 241 miles, the English met the Norman force on October 14. The Battle of Hastings, fought on what is now called Senlac (“Blood-lake”) Hill, saw the complete defeat of the English army (Harold died, shot through the eye with an arrow). It marks the end of “Anglo-Saxon” England and the beginning of a new language—which would give rise to Chaucer, Shakespeare and the King James Bible (and, in its distant future, episodes of “South Park”). Vasco Nunez de Balboa was the sort of conquistador who gave other conquistadors a bad name; the worst of a sorry lot. He was an unusually cruel man in an age of casual cruelty. We remember his name, to the extent we do, because history tells us he was the first white man to see the Pacific Ocean (it’s hard to say someone “discovered” the Pacific, but we can accurately say he went looking and found it). While pillaging and murdering the Indians of eastern Panama, Balboa heard of “the Other Sea” on the far side of the country, with beaches covered with golden sands (this story came to him, I have no doubt, from Indians who wanted him to do his “exploring” elsewhere). In search of gold, not the Pacific, Balboa with 190 Spaniards, a few native guides, and a pack of dogs began his journey across Panama. On September 25, from the top of a ridge of the Tumaco Mountains, they saw the ocean (they called it “the South Sea”). Hastening to the beach, they made the unhappy discovery the sands weren’t gold. Undeterred, Balboa waded out into the water, drew his sword and claimed “these waters and all adjacent lands” for the King of Spain. That’s a lot of water and a lot of land, too. Besides the King of Spain, few others were willing to accept the claim. When Balboa returned to the Atlantic side of Panama, he became embroiled in political disputes with authorities sent from Madrid. Balboa was more successful as conquistador than politician; he was found guilty of treason—one of a few crimes he hadn’t committed—and beheaded in 1519. His inept executioner had to strike three times before finally severing Balboa’s head. In 1690, the first newspaper was published in the American colonies. On September 25, Benjamin Harris of Boston issued Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick with the announcement it would be published once a month or oftener “if any glut of occurrences happen.” The Royal Governor of Massachusetts didn’t like what he read and four days later Harris was arrested, his press confiscated and copies of the Publick Occurrences were consigned to the flames—all, it seems, but one. It was sent to England, put in a royal archive and forgotten. In 1840 a clerk found it in a stack of old colonial documents. The only surviving copy of Publick Occurrences is now in the British Museum. Melville Bissell was born on September 25, 1843 (his last name is the giveaway). In the mid-1870’s, Melville and his wife Anna owned a crockery shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One evening an irritated Anna sat her husband down for a family discussion. She was tired of spending a couple of hours every day cleaning the clay powder and sawdust from the shop floor. He liked to tinker with things mechanical—couldn’t he come up with something to help her? Within a few days, he did—and today’s Bissell sweeper is almost unchanged from his original design. Anna thought the sweeper was fantastic. She not only used it herself, but began telling other people about it. Melville patented the Bissell Sweeper in 1876 and Anna insisted on taking charge of marketing it. She was a natural. They opened their first manufacturing plant in 1883 and Anna took the Bissell on the road, America’s first traveling saleswoman (Bissells in those days were $1.50). When Melville died unexpectedly a few years later, Anna stepped in as the first female CEO in America. Under her guidance, the company became a national brand, then an international one. When she died, her obituary was titled: “The Lady Who Swept the World.” On September 25, 1890, two events of note: Sequoia National Park was founded, and the Mormon Church reversed its teaching on polygamy. Fortunately for the Mormons, the President of the Church received a revelation that it was time for things to change shortly after Congress made plain Utah would not be admitted into the Union as long as the Church held its polygamous tenets. God evidently changed His mind and so did the Congress: Utah became the 45th State in 1896 (and, incidentally, the first State to grant women the right to vote). William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897. He lived most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi, the setting (under the fictionalized name of “Jefferson”) for many of his novels and short stories. In his thirties, money lured Faulkner to Hollywood to crank out screenplays—he worked on twenty during his twelve years there (“To Have and To Have Not,” “The Big Sleep,” and “Drums Along the Mohawk” among them). As his reputation grew, he began to feel restive. While working on “The Big Sleep” with director Howard Hawks, Faukner complained he would write better at home than at the studio. Hawks told him that was fine, go write at home. A couple of days later, having heard nothing from Faulkner, Hawks went to his Hollywood home to find it empty. Faulkner had flown back “home” to Mississippi, where he finished the screenplay. On this day in 1956, Bobby Darrin topped America’s music charts with Mack the Knife. It won him a Grammy. Today is the 268th day of the year; 97 days remain till 2010. The ancient Roman calendar reckons today as ante diem VII Kalendas Octobri; devotees of the Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece counted this as the third day of the celebration of the annual rites, when the sacred wheat was gathered. It is the seventh day of the Jewish High Holy Days—the Ten Days of Awe. The Congress of the United States has declared September National Prime Beef Month (I knew I could find something they’d done worthwhile in the last 200 years), while the Tolkien Society celebrates this week as Tolkien Week (September 22 was “Hobbit Day”) and the American Vegetarian Association has instituted Hug-a-Vegetarian Day—no doubt to counter the month-long, Congressionally-mandated celebration of meat-eating.

I LOVE CALENDARS AND what they tell us. I don’t mean what date it is, but what a calendar says about the people who use it. Our civil calendar, the Gregorian, has been around for more than 400 years, though it was adopted by Great Britain and her colonies (that means us) only in 1752; the Russians didn’t begin using it until the Tsar abdicated in 1917. Most cultures and religions have other calendars they continue to use, even if just for nostalgia’s sake (like Chinese New Year), alongside the Gregorian. Religious calendars point back to earlier times—the Christian Church, indicative of its unhappy division, has two Church years—the Western Church begins its new year on the first Sunday of Advent (4 Sundays before Christmas) while Eastern Christians mark the year from September 1st, following the use of the long-vanished Byzantine Empire. For those interested, the Orthodox Churches have a further—uh—difficulty—because some refuse to accept the Gregorian calendar as the “Pope’s calendar” and cling to the old calendar instituted by Julius Caesar, the so-called “Julian calendar.” It is confusing—and I’ve left a lot out—but fascinating, too. Lest that be not confusing enough, though, Jews and Muslims each have their own religious calendars, based not on the sun but on the cycles of the moon. That means, unlike Christmas which falls predictably every year, the dates of major Jewish and Islamic holidays vary from year to year. Today, while Christians—well, some Christians—celebrate the Feast of St Dosithea (she’s one of 24 saints on the Church’s calendar today), Jews are in the midst of the most sacred season on their calendar, those days commonly called the High Holy Days. This is the seventh of the Ten Days. These ten days, which begin with Rosh Hashanah and end with Yom Kippur, are days of feasting and fasting. Rosh Hashanah (which literally means “head of the year”) is a two-day New Year celebration. According to some Talmudic scholars, God created Man on this day. But if Rosh Hashanah is celebrated by eating sweets and going to parties, the Ten Days focus on what is now a far less popular aspect of the holidays—repentance: sorrow for sin and a determination to turn from it.

Classic Judaism depicts God during these Ten Days, pondering the life of each person, the Book of Life open before Him. He examines each one of us and decides whether or not our name will be written for the upcoming year in His Book. Ten days of repentance, ten days to examine ourselves and turn from our sins. Yom Kippur, the last of the High Holy Days, is set aside for fasting and prayer. This is the day God writes in His Book so Jews greet each other on Yom Kippur with “Good Signing (in the Book of Life).”

Some Jews today are uncomfortable with the idea of sin (they aren’t the only ones!) and the Ten Days are sometimes diluted down to a time of reflection not on sin (which so many people, Jewish or not, don’t really believe in, anyway) but on self-improvement. One prominent rabbi says “We all have character flaws and bad habits we can turn from on Yom Kippur.” I won't digress on how 'sin’ has disappeared from our religious vocabulary (and even more from our religious consciousness) in only a few short decades, but without sin, there is no evil and without evil, no need of redemption. Now many today (including my good friend Andrew) will jump in here and say “Exactly! I don’t need redemption! I don’t want it. I didn’t ask for it and I can live quite happily without it!” (I think that’s an exact quote, isn’t it, Herr A?)

I would believe what my friend says if he knew everything. Problem is, none of us do. Saying “I don’t need redemption,” doesn’t make it true. If I have cancer and don’t know it, it’s gonna kill me just as dead. How many of our fellow citizens annually are shocked to learn they have incurable diseases? Ignorance of a fact is immaterial to the reality of its impact.

Forgive me if I draw on my experience. As a priest I have waited by the bedsides of at least a couple of hundred dying people. Forgive, too, this unseemly but apt metaphor. I often sit as a vulture, waiting for the right time to move in. Even after people have been told they’re dying, it usually takes time for the grim message to “sink in,” to move from the mind to the heart. It can be weeks or days or hours but the time will come. I’ve been with people who reacted stoically to the news of their impending death, only to have them later break down. I can usually pinpoint the moment it happens. There is often a physical change on a person’s face and in their carriage the second they realize “I’m going to die this afternoon.” For most of our lives we know the last day is coming, but when it arrives, when the distant fact becomes today’s reality, things change. People who think “I might die today” have a different mindset and (forgive me again) “heartset” than someone who knows “I will die today.” Perspectives change “in the twinkling of an eye” when we hear the trumpet sounding.

When I was a boy in Confirmation Class, one of the games the priest would play with us was “Stump the Priest.” We were encouraged to come up with questions that called into question what we’d been told in class. One day, we were sure we had him. Several of us talked about it beforehand, and agreed our question was unanswerable and we could pile objections on top of our unanswerable question when we forced the priest to admit he was indeed stumped. When the time came, the innocent little girl we’d chosen raised her hand. “Father, how about when a bad person—a really bad person, say, Hitler—is dying and they call a priest and confess their sins and get absolution. Does God let them into heaven even if they’re the world’s worst person?” The priest paused and I jumped in. “That's not fair.”

While he gave us a correct answer (you’ll have to ask me if you want to know what he said), it’s a good question. The answer that ultimately satisfies me, though, isn’t the one he gave. It’s one that unfolded before me, sitting at the bedsides of the dying, hearing not only their final confessions but also their deepest regrets. The physical change that comes over us when we really “know” we’re dying in the next half-hour or so is the dropping of our masks, the falling away of the persona we present to the world. It’s only then, when we have nothing to gain or hide, nothing to hope for or fear, that many of us are honest with ourselves for the first time in many years. Then our lives present themselves not merely as “character flaws and bad habits,” not as regrets for the road untaken, but as profound sorrows for the pain we’ve caused, the hopes we’ve squandered and the sins we’ve committed. It’s then that we become aware for our desperate need for redemption.

On the evening of the first day of Rosh Hashanah, there is a touching ceremony of “doing Taschlich.” The word in Hebrew means to “cast off,” or “throw away.” Participants take pieces of broken bread and throw them into a stream or some other rushing water, so they are carried away. The broken bread is symbolic of our sins. Some rabbis encourage their congregants to say their sins aloud as they throw them away. When I hear confessions, I encourage people to write their sins down so they’ll remember them when the time comes. While I didn’t know about Taschlich when I served as a parish priest, I did encourage something similar to it, less beautiful but still pointedly practical. I would tell people their sins are now forgiven, they no longer exist; and I’d encourage them to shred their list of sins and flush it down the toilet.

When we acknowledge the reality of sin, we can begin to grasp the meaning of redemption. Redemption doesn’t simply make things “okay” again. Redemption genuinely changes and transfigures us. It doesn’t restore, it lifts us to where we have not yet been. Having your name in the Book of Life doesn’t mean “Thank God I’ll live another year.”It’s a promise your life will have meaning, it will be enriching for you and those who share your life. That’s why we’re walking the Labyrinth. So to you, my fellow walkers, I say during these Ten Days of Awe: “May you be inscribed in the Book of Life."

FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, I pulled a book I’ve meant to read for four or five years, but put it off because I was judging it by its cover! Members of the Franciscan Order are supposed to read a biography of St Francis of Assisi every year—and so a note to my writing friends—there’s a steady market for you—and in a similar way, Texans are required—it’s in the genes, I think—to read a certain number of books about the Alamo during their lifetimes. It’s been a couple of years since I added to my quota, so this week I read The Alamo, by Lon Tinkle. He wrote this back in 1959, and my tattered paperback copy had a particularly amateurish illustration on the cover. A couple of years ago, when I was looking for a book to read on this topic, I chose a more respectable-looking hardback, The Alamo and the Texas War of Independence, September 30, 1835 to April 21, 1836. It was an uninteresting re-telling of well-known events and stories; it didn’t even have much to offer about the controversies surrounding Alamo mythology. Unlike many earlier Texas historians, Tinkle draws his account from the eyes of Mexican eyewitnesses—not the familiar accounts of Santa Ana’s generals but as much as possible from records of the Mexican foot soldiers and Mexicans living in San Antonio at the time of the battle (I was unaware, for example, that Santa Ana ordered the alcalde and citizens of San Antonio to collect and destroy the bodies of the defenders when the battle ended). It is impressively researched and documented but so well-written the research simply slips in unnoticed as part of the story. The greatest of Texas historians, J Frank Dobie (on whose histories I cut my teeth), concluded his review of Tinkle’s book: “I had to hold back my tears.” So did I. Don’t judge a book by its cover.

QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“I beg your Majesty to send us no lawyers here (in the New World); they are bad in themselves and a source only of trouble for others.”—Vasco Nunez de Balboa in a letter to King Ferdinand of Spain

“I don't want to be able to see the audience.”—Bobby Darrin

“Without blood, without tears, there is no glory.”—General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna

“A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.”—William Faulkner

"Judge Not"-Dont' Worry. He Didn't Really Mean It

Walking the Labyrinth—September 18, 2009—St Zosimas was an old man who lived in the badlands of Cilicia (south-eastern Turkey) about 1700 years ago. A medieval chronicle tells us “he lived a hermit’s life, a friend to the beasts and wild animals in that barren region.” Zosimas left the big city of Tarsus (St Paul’s hometown), his biographer says, “preferring the wilderness and a life of prayer and solitude to the entrapments of the city.” One day a hunting party rode up to Zosimas’ cottage and stopped to refresh themselves by his well. While they watered their mounts, the hunters asked why the old man lived so far from civilization. “I am a Christian,” he answered, “and seek a quiet life. The Emperor’s persecution of Christians makes that difficult. I fled here, where, with the animals as my only companions, I seek God in peace.” Imagine Zosimas’ surprise to learn the Emperor Diocletian, who had instigated the latest anti-Christian laws, was his questioner. The emperor told the hermit to renounce his faith and he would be left in peace, but Zosimas refused (if he’d agreed, of course, neither his name nor his story would have come down to us). Zosimas was beaten but held firm to his belief. The medieval chronicle tells of a friendly lion who came to Zosimas’ rescue and frightened the emperor and his party away, but if it’s true, it was too little, too late. Zosimas died of his wounds. His feast day is today, on Christian calendars worldwide. Two hundred years before the Emperor Diocletian rode up to Zosimas’ hermitage, another Roman emperor, Domitian, was assassinated on this date. Domitian, whose favorite pastime was killing flies in the imperial palace (according to the Roman historian Suetonius), was so loathed by all who knew him that even his wife joined the conspiracy. He was stabbed to death in his bedroom by a diverse group of household servants, soldiers on the palace staff and petty politicians. For several hours, while Domitian’s body lay on the bedroom floor, a succession of prominent Roman politicians made their way there and kicked or otherwise abused the corpse, proving the raw courage of politicians hasn’t changed in 2,000 years. On September 18, 1714, Georg Ludwig von Braunschweig und Lüneburg, Prince-Elector of Hanover, disembarked at Greenwich, England. Two days later this German nobleman was crowned “George I, King of Great Britain, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc,” at Westminster Abbey. Though fluent in German and French, with a passing knowledge of Latin, Italian and Dutch, George spoke no English. Members of the current House of Windsor are his descendants (the family changed their name at the height of anti-German feeling during World War I). On the same date, 63 years after German George set foot in Greenwich, British troops loyal to his grandson, George III, were poised outside Philadelphia, the seat of the American Continental Congress then in rebellion. They had defeated and outflanked General Washington’s shrinking army and the city lay open before them. On the night of September 18, 1777, while Congressional delegates and the well-to-do fled the city, the Liberty Bell was wrapped in sacking coated with hay and manure and placed into the wagon of militia private John Jacob Mickley. Taking back roads and cutting across private property, Mickley and his companions drove the bell to Allentown, 60 miles outside Philadelphia. At Zion Reformed Church, with the help of the pastor, they pulled up the floorboards and hid the bell. Nine months later, when the British left Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell was returned, all cleaned up, to the city. Charles Lewis Tiffany and Teddy Young opened the doors of a “stationery and fancy goods emporium" in the lower floor of a private residence on Broadway in New York City on this day in 1837. When Young left the company in 1853, it simply became known as “Tiffany’s.” From the start the shop carried unusual items: Chinese goods, Japanese paper mache, terra cotta ware, umbrellas, fans, fine stationery and pottery. In 1843, Young traveled through Europe on a purchasing tour and acquired a large amount of “false diamond jewelry.” It proved popular and sold well, but many customers regretted the shop had no genuine diamonds to offer. Tiffany remembered. He made a tour of Europe a few years later, during the French Revolution of 1848, and found many aristocrats anxious to exchange heirloom jewels for quick cash. Tiffany invested all the company funds in the gems he was offered and returned to the United States with Marie Antoinette's bejeweled girdle and a chest full of other pieces that once belonged to the French crown. He encouraged the press in their frenzied coverage of an unveiling of his new treasures and New York papers dubbed Tiffany the “King of Diamonds." “Tiffany Studios” founded by Charles’ son Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1885, had no association with his father’s firm. The first issue of The New York Times made its appearance on September 18, 1851. The newspaper was founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond, the second chairman of the Republican National Committee, and a banker, George Jones. It was initially called the New-York Daily Times and sold for one cent a copy. Today it sells for $1.50 and has a circulation of just over 1,000,000 copies daily, trailing only USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. You can find old issues of the NYT for sale online: for $10.00 you can buy a 1969 copy of the paper about the first lunar landing (as if it really happened, Melissa!), $20.00 buys a paper announcing President Obama’s election, $30.00 will get you a copy of the paper the day after the September 11, 2001 attack, $40.00 will buy you a copy of the “Gray Lady” with the headline “Nixon Resigns,” for $45.00 you can purchase a copy of the Times printed after the Assassination of President John F Kennedy, $50.00 will buy you a copy of the paper on the day Nazi Germany surrendered. And for $85.00 you can get a copy, still fresh, of the New York Times for Thursday, June 25, 2009 “Michael Jackson Dies at 50.” On this day in 1905, two birthdays: Émilie Claudette Chauchoin was born in Paris. Hundreds of miles away, in Stockholm, Louisa Gustafsson was born. Both would later move to California and change their names— Émilie Chauchoin to Claudette Colbert and Louisa Gustafsson to Greta Garbo. Today is the 261st day of the year, 104 days remain till 2010. On the calendar of the ancient Romans today is reckoned ante diem XIV Kalendas October, the closing day of the Ludi Romani. On this day in 1952, the most popular song in America was “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” by Hank Williams. On September 18, 1981, France officially discontinued the use of the guillotine. Once again, leading our country with resolve and daring, the United States Congress has declared today both National Play-Doh Day and National Chocolate Day: take your choice.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE an Old Style Anti-federalist like me to be unsurprised at the continuing deterioration of the Republic. I thought the nadir of our times had come during the inept presidency of George Bush, but now those days seem almost halcyon. Invective poisons our national discourse everywhere from politics to sports to faith—even education, a topic once uncontroversial, simmers and snaps with turmoil. During the last presidential campaign, candidate Obama said we need to learn how to “disagree without being disagreeable,” but the pronouncements from the White House show little desire to lower the temperature of what now passes for "debate." A lot of people are angry and they get even angrier if you don’t get angry, too.

I’ve always liked the metaphor of the American Melting Pot. I know it’s not a popular one nowadays. Some of us are suspicious of foreigners “coming in to change things” while others worry my particular ethnicity/race/religion/sexual proclivity/social group isn’t sufficiently recognized, appreciated and acknowledged by everybody else. As I suggested in last week’s Labyrinthus, at its old core America is (was?) less a geography than an identity. We are the people who embrace freedom as an inalienable right. The government didn’t (and doesn’t) give it to us—we have it—with apologies to my atheistical friends—from God. Freedom doesn’t mean I can do whatever I want. Medieval philosophers (on the whole wiser than their modern counterparts) called unrestricted freedom by another word—“license”—meaning almost the opposite of what most people take the word to mean today. They understood “license” to mean something like “action without responsibility.” That isn’t freedom. Like it or not (and many won’t), freedom is bound inextricably with morality.Freedom insists I have a God-given right to do what I think I should, but it demands that I recognize the same holds true for every other person. America is an experiment—a 250 year old one—as to whether men and women can live together with that right. Our current inability to face real issues, our tendency to attack one another rather than attack our problems, suggests a dim future for the experiment.

What is a Walker in the Labyrinth to make of it? We cannot ignore it; God put us on the path and He means for us to walk it, if stumblingly. I'll make just an observation or two. In our daily strife—national, familial, personal—you’ll note a recurring tendency. We don’t disagree just about what we think is right or wrong. More viscerally, arguments are built on assumptions about the people we disagree with. Logic doesn’t allow us to disagree about facts—not accurate ones—but we can disagree about the meaning of facts and their importance. That’s not where anger resides. Anger and hatred linger in our confident belief that we know each other’s intentions and that our opponent’s intentions are certainly bad and probably evil.

Jesus said, “Judge not…” and we’ve been assiduously disregarding His words for the past 2,000 years. I choose the collective pronoun purposely here—I judge. Only in the last few years have I come to see how easily and often I judge, and how it’s damaged relationships I cherish. "But we all judge! It’s part of how our minds work!” (That’s me talking—protesting to God because it seems we have an impossible task—we've been given a brain and then told to ignore it when it works.) There are places in Scripture—even in the Gospels—even in the words of Jesus—that seem to say otherwise; where Jesus seems to contradict Himself. Some of His words seem to imply that some form of judgment is necessary. I don’t dispute it, though I do think the matter is more complex than it seems. I prefer for now though, to take His words at face value. To “judge” is not simply to observe facts—to judge is to interpret—to say what something means. It doesn’t simply say, “I see what you’re doing and I disagree with it” it goes further and says “and I know why you are doing it and what you mean by it. I know what your intentions are.”

But we don’t. Or perhaps more accurately, we can do little more than scratch the surface of another’s intention and here’s why: you and I barely know why we do what we do! We don’t know the myriad of things at work in the cobweb corners of our own souls. Even in the highest of human acts—love (agape)—our actions are a confusing mixture of motivations, many having nothing to do with the object of our affection. St Catherine of Siena, one of the boasts of our fallen nature, said that even the love a soul has for God is usually based on what she calls “mercenary love.” St Paul cried out “I don’t even know why I do what I do!” What underlies your love of the things you love or hate of the things you hate? With such limited self-knowledge (if we’re honest enough to admit it), how do we judge the inner workings of others? Joe Wilson, yelled out “You lie!” to President Obama. He didn’t say “Your facts are wrong.” To lie is to intentionally deceive, not make a mistake or exercise poor judgment. The words go not to facts but to character, to inner motivation. Congressman Wilson is as incapable of knowing the President's inner motive as are you and I. Similarly, when ex-President Carter claimed that Wilson’s words or the motivations of the President’s opponents are racially-based, he’s just guessing--and a thousand preconceived notions, faulty memories and unexamined feelings lie somewhere underneath that guess, unseen and unknown. Back and forth it goes: facts and truths have long ago been driven from our discourse.

From one of my favorite books, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers:

Once a brother committed some sin and the monks gathered to judge him. Father Moses the Ethiopian at first refused to go join them, but when they insisted, he filled an old, leaky basket with sand and carried it into the assembly on his back. When the brethren asked him what he was doing, he said "My sins run out behind me, and I do not even see them, and here I come to judge my brother."

FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, I drew a book for pleasure, and it’s been unadulterated. I briefly recounted O Henry’s life in last week’s Labyrinthus and afterward realized how long it’s been since I actually read any of his short stories. I’ve made up for that this week and will continue on (I got a book with 837 pages of ‘em) well into next week. Most of these I’ve never read but will now always remember: “The Shamrock and the Palm,” “A Madison Square Arabian Night,” “The Foreign Policy of Company 99,” “The Girl and the Graft.” No insightful review this week, my friends. I want to close my computer and pick up the heavy book beside my bed-table. The Collected Stories of O. Henry has 212 of his more than 600 tales. My copy was published by Avenel Books; you can find a decent copy on Amazon for about $5-6.

If you can’t think of a gift for someone, I can’t imagine a better one.


QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“How often is it the interest of four or five ministers to combine together to deceive their sovereign! Secluded from mankind by his exalted dignity, the truth is concealed from his knowledge; he can see only with their eyes, he hears nothing but their misrepresentations. He confers the most important offices upon vice and weakness, and disgraces the most virtuous and deserving among his subjects. By such infamous arts the best and wisest princes are sold to the venal corruption of their courtiers."—the Emperor Diocletian

“Emperors are necessarily the most wretched of men since only their assassination can convince the public that the conspiracies against their lives are real.”—the Emperor Domitian, two days before his assassination

“Lente festina”—“Hasten slowly”—Suetonius

“Life would be wonderful if we only knew what to do with it.”—Greta Garbo

“I know what's best for me; after all I have been in the Claudette Colbert business longer than anybody.”—Claudette Colbert

America on September 11, 2001

Walking the Labyrinth—September 11, 2009—Egyptian Christians, called Copts, today keep the feast day of St Paphnutius, a monk who lived in the desert 1600 years ago. During the anti-Christian persecutions under the Egyptian governor Maximin Daia, every priest and monk was to have his right eye burned out and his left leg broken. Why the governor chose these bi-lateral mutilations is unknown, but after Paphnutius was subjected to these penalties, he was sent to work in the copper mines of Sinai. Most prisoners there died within two years, but Paphnutius was accustomed to living in the desert, and not only survived but recovered full use of his mutilated leg. When the persecutions ceased, Paphnutius returned to his monastic life (in the desert—how different could it have been?). He was later made a bishop and attended the Oecumenical Council of Nicaea called by Constantine the Great in 325. A chronicler said that when the Emperor met the pious bishop, he kissed the burnt flesh where Paphnutius’ eye had been. In 1297, the Scottish warlord William Wallace (yes, whose story Braveheart supposedly tells) led a Scottish army to defeat English royal forces at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. The battle didn’t take place on Stirling Field (as the movie suggests) but around the bridge spanning the river. The narrow bridge allowed only two horsemen abreast to cross at a time; when the Scots beat back the initial attack of the English cavalry, the horsemen tried to retreat back over the bridge, crushing the soldiers trying to come to their aid. Pandaemonium reigned. The only survivors of the retreat were those who managed to throw off their armor and swim the Stirling. The leader of the English army, the portly Hugh de Cressingham, was among the slain. Braveheart showed a version of the battle but omitted the aftermath: Wallace found de Cressingham’s body, had it flayed and cured, and made a baldric (a belt slung over one shoulder) for his sword out of the fat Englishman’s skin-probably a bit much even for a Mel Gibson movie. On September 11, 1766, the third Earl of Darnley, John Bligh, married Vicountess Mary Stoute. For eighty years, the Blighs had represented County Meath in the Irish Parliament. The third Earl served in both the Irish and English parliaments for fifty years and more. Mid-way through his political career, most of his parliamentary colleagues recognized that the Earl was mentally—"uncertain"—about himself. He took to claiming he was a teapot, and referred to his various body parts as if this were so (his head was his “dome,” his arms “handles,” etc.). He fathered seven children, though he sometimes publicly worried that if he wasn’t careful in propagating them, his “spout” would come off! No one seemed too concerned about all this and the Earl's political career continued unaffected for another quarter-century till his death. William Sydney Porter, better known to us by his pen name “O Henry,” was born today in 1862. His short stories (“Gift of the Magi,” “The Ransom of Red Chief,” “The Cop and the Anthem” are among the more than 600 he wrote) are noted for their wit, warmth and clever endings. Porter’s life is as interesting as any of his stories. As a young man he worked first as a pharmacist then a draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He wrote his short stories for pleasure. In 1887, Porter eloped with his sweetheart (who had tuberculosis) and got a job working for the Texas General Land Office. His stories won him a popular readership and he was hired by a magazine in Houston; the couple began to prosper. While they were settling into their new home, Porter was indicted for embezzlement—the Austin bank he'd worked in was audited and his bookkeeping figures repeatedly came up short. Porter fled (not a good sign), first to New Orleans and then to Honduras. He continued to write short stories even then (writing about Honduras, he coined the phrase “banana republic”) but came back to Texas when he was informed his wife was dying. She did die shortly after his return and Porter sunk into depression; he quit writing and refused to participate in his legal defense. He served three years of a five year sentence (he began writing in prison, now under his famous nom de plume) and, on his release, moved to New York City. He poured himself into his writing: over the next five years he published 381 stories. During that time he drank himself into cirrhosis of the liver, which killed America’s great story-teller in two short years. On this day in 1875, the world’s first Comic strip appeared in the Daily Graphic, a New York City newspaper. “Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm” was seventeen panels long and drawn by Livingston Hopkins, the Graphic’s political cartoonist. It was not well-received and regular "cartoon strips" would have to wait ten more years before they found an audience. James G. Cutler, a former Mayor of Rochester, New York, patented the mail chute on September 11, 1883. He installed the first one a few months later in the Elwood Building in Rochester. It was a success and the Post Office commissioned two more in New York City office buildings. In 1905, Post Office regulations allowed Cutler’s Letter Boxes “in all office buildings of more than five stories and in hotels taller than five stories and in apartment houses with more than 50 residential apartments.” Further regulations required that they “be of metal, distinctly marked ‘U.S. Letter Box,' with a door which must open on hinges on one side, the bottom of the door not less than 2'6" above the floor." Bureaucratic writing has the same ring at all times and in all places. For twenty years Cutler was the only producer of Letter Boxes in the United States; the company is now headquartered in Torrance, California. The “Miss America Pageant” was first broadcast on television today in 1954. Lee Meriwether was crowned Miss America by a panel of judges that included Grace Kelly; that night, for the first time, Americans heard Bert Parks sing “There She Is, Miss America.” Twenty-five years later Parks was fired from the staff after polls showed he was considered “old-fashioned” and programmers feared he would lose the pageant viewers. The years before Parks’ dismissal, the pageant drew 80 million viewers; in 2008, 3.1 million Americans tuned in. Evidently, Parks wasn't the only problem. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev died of a heart attack on September 11, 1971. He was 77. Khrushchev, who led the Communist Party in the Soviet Union from the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, was removed from power in October of 1964 and forcibly retired. He was given a large home in Moscow, a splendid villa (dacha) in the Russian countryside and a monthly pension of about $15,000. When his opponents in the Politburo felt more secure, they took away his Moscow home and replaced it with a modest apartment, he was moved out of his dacha and his pension was reduced. An angry Khrushchev began writing his memoirs, but was told he wouldn’t be allowed to publish them. Shortly before his death, Khrushchev managed to smuggle his memoirs out of the Soviet Union with the help of connections in the free world. The Party denied him a State Burial. On the ancient Roman calendar, today is reckoned as ante diem III Idus Septembri and the eighth day of the Ludi Romani. This is the 254th day of the year, 111 days remain, leaving only 83 shopping days till Christmas. Johnny Mercer topped America’s music charts today back in 1945 with On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe; and the Congress of the United States of America has not only named September National Mold Awareness Month but also National Piano Month, while, not to be outdone, the United Nations (or Oprah Winfrey? Or both?) has declared September International Self-Improvement Month. I’m gonna pull out my old keyboard and play “Claire de Lune.”


On September 11, 2001, nineteen Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the buildings. Both buildings collapsed within two hours. The hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania, after some of its passengers and flight crew attempted to retake control of the plane, which the hijackers had redirected toward Washington, D.C. There were no survivors from any of the flights.


IT’S EIGHT YEARS SINCE we watched in collective horror the events of September 11, 2009. At 6.30 that morning I was asleep and one of my parishioners called me and told me to turn on the news. My eyes had barely focused on the television screen, when, on the large monitor behind the newscasters, I saw what I later would learn was a second plane fly into the Twin Towers. I know your memories are just as vivid. For the next few hours we all watched together as the story, one event after another, tumbled into our living rooms. Terrified people ran away from the scene of the attack in any and every direction; men and women, trapped in the flames with no possibility of rescue, threw themselves from the 110 story buildings in despair; the Pentagon burned; the national government began to close down; planes seemed to be missing and crashing everywhere and airports all across the nation closed their doors and cancelled their flights. I remember thinking “how long can we simply close everything down?” We went into shock. But briefly. Before any of us knew the extent of what was happening, Americans everywhere began to act. We called each other, got in touch with those we know and loved. We checked our resources and shared what we had. We heard about, and our hearts burned with admiration of, the reckless courage of firemen and policemen and rescue workers who flung themselves into burning buildings and collapsing hallways to pluck the helpless to safety. Through the confusion of the day, we gleaned the details of the 40 passengers aboard Flight 93, who died rather than allow the aircraft to be used to kill more people. In the midst of chaos and reeling in shock, our national character forced its way up through the twisted steel and concrete rubble.

We’ve done it before, time and again. At starving Jamestown, on the bridge at Concord, and in the steaming hall of the Philadelphia State House in July of 1776 (later re-named Independence Hall) we as a people showed our resolve; in the iron words of Webster, Clay and Calhoun, the steel tracks of the first railroads, and the endless rows of Conestoga wagons heading west, we pushed with determination; in the frenzied Secession Winter of 1860; on the bloody fields of Antietam, and by the star-spangled maps of the Underground Railroad we fought forward, not knowing how the struggle would end but with a vision we were willing to die for. Earthquakes, fires and floods have stopped us until we figured out what to do; the Black Days of October, 1929, crushed our economy but we trudged on; four years after the oily smoke from the sinking Arizona blotted the Hawaiian sky, the Day of Infamy gave way to the unconditional surrender of the Emperor of Japan. We as a nation have survived missiles in Cuba, murdered (and lying) Presidents and 53 Americans held hostage in Iran for a year and a half.

There is much to regret in the 233 years of our history—much suffering and injustice and many tears. But there is much to be proud of. Our founding documents, the Declaration and Constitution, were written by old, dead, white men. It’s popular to demonize them nowadays. But their vision, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” is a staggering claim of human freedom. Not for white men but the old English notion of Everyman—all of us. As a nation we have often failed to live up to that which we insist is true. But we’ve never given up the vision. That vision isn’t meant to favor one race or creed, but it embraces everyone who loves freedom. That love of freedom, that brash, bull-in-a-china shop spirit that comes from the mixing of dour Puritans and Southern belles and Mountain Men and Sacajaweas, that often acts first and thinks second, is what was at work in us on September 11. That spirit pushed its way out from the ruins of Twin Towers and the smoke of the Pentagon and shines amidst the wreckage on a field in rural Pennsylvania. September 11, 2001 is part of our heritage; it’s a day of which we should be proud. It’s not so much about what others did to us, but who we found ourselves, once again, to be.

God grant that we can find that to be so in these troublous days.


FROM MY BOOKSTACK, though just barely, comes a book from my friend Dolores the Chef Extraordinaire. She loaned me a copy of The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. I haven’t seen the movie, though I will. But good as it no doubt is (with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson it could be nothing else), I can say with certainty it cannot successfully convey the subtleties of this book. Ishiguro was reared in England and received all his education there; he understands the English character and it comes through as in invites us into the inner world of Stevens, the butler who narrates his life in the book. It’s a life spent in pursuit of "dignity" and consequently, loneliness; a life of "loyalty" given to the service those who he fails to see are undeserving. When Lord Darlington, his employer, expresses admiration for and quietly gives support to Hitler and Mussolini in the decade before the war, Stevens reflects “many of Lord Darlington’s words will seem today rather odd—even, at times, unattractive…however, if a butler is to be of any worth to anything or anybody in life, there must surely come a time when he ceases his searching; a time when he says to himself: ‘This employer embodies all that I find noble and admirable. I will hereafter devote myself to serving him.’ This is loyalty intelligently bestowed.” It was hard for me—with no single Anglophilic bone—to put this book down. It shows a profound understanding of what it means to be English and a deeper understanding yet of the tragedy repeated in so many lives, when we deny life’s deepest joys so we can be maintain the illusions we most cherish-those about ourselves.

QUOTES FORM THE PRINCIPALS:

“Every man dies, but not every man truly lives.”—William Wallace (yes, it was in Braveheart but it’s one of the movie’s few authentic quotes)

“Inject a few raisins into the tasteless dough of existence.”—William Sydney Porter (O Henry)

“For my money, Julie [Newmar] was the best Catwoman.”-Lee Meriwether

“They’re winners, everyone!”—Bert Parks

“If you live among wolves you have to act like a wolf.”—Nikita Khrushchev

Plain Ordinary Everyday Grace

Walking the Labyrinth—September4, 2009—The Greek Orthodox Church today celebrates the feast of the Venerable Anthimos the Blind, who died in 1782. As a child he lost his vision during a smallpox epidemic, but one day at Mass he recovered sight in one eye. He worked with his father as a ship’s mate for some years afterward, but eventually went blind again. He retired to a monastery and took vows, but spent all his time in church praying that God would restore his eyesight. His fixation on the topic was evidently an irritant not only to his fellow monks, but became tedious even to the heavenly hosts: Anthimos told his monastic brethren that during prayer, two angels appeared to him and escorted him to St Mary, the Mother of God. Anthimos was delighted by the heavenly vision, happier yet that his prayers had been heard and his sight was to be restored. He was in for a bit of a shock. The Queen of Heaven addressed Anthimos sharply, telling him his prayers were self-centered, and he would not be getting his sight back. “Your continual prayer that your sight be restored,” she chided him, “is profiting you nothing.” Anthimos took this heavenly kick in the teeth to heart, left the confines of the monastery, and began preaching that people should have faith in God despite their difficulties. Over the years, he became renowned for his spiritual insight and his prayers for the healing of others—especially for those who were blind—seemed to have a special efficacy. September 4, 476 AD is the date historians say the Roman Empire officially came to an end. On that day a German chieftain, Odoacer, told a Roman teenager, the recently-anointed Romulus Augustulus (“little Augustus”) that he couldn’t be emperor anymore. Odoacer took to calling himself the “King of Italy” and sent Romulus, who was evidently a bit simple-minded (no doubt why he was appointed in the first place), to live in a country villa with his aunt. According to medieval chroniclers, Augustulus finished his life quite happily as a keeper of chickens. More than 1,000 years later, in 1554, Friar Cornelio da Montalcino, a Franciscan who’d studied the Hebrew Bible with a rabbi living in Rome, renounced Christianity and converted to Judaism. September 4 of that year, officers of the Inquisition took the former friar in chains to the Campo dei Fiori (“Field of Flowers”) and burned him alive. It was an effective lesson: no Roman Catholic priest is known to have converted to Judaism for the next 350 years. On this day in 1682, Edmond Halley first saw the comet which now bears his name. Halley isn’t famous for seeing it. Millions before him did that. The comet was called after him because Halley figured out (twenty-five years later) that the comet he’d seen in his youth was the same one that had been recorded by astronomers in 1456, 1531, and 1607, and has a 76 year orbit. He correctly predicted it’s reappearance in 1758. That year, as astronomers across Europe noted its presence in the pre-Christmas sky, the comet was given Halley’s name. Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835, while the comet was making a scheduled appearance. In his biography, he said, “I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It's coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it.” Twain died the day following the comet's reappearance. On September 4, 1781, the provisional governor of Alta California, Felipe de Neve, came into the Bahia de las Fumas (“the Valley of Smokes”) with 44 settlers and decided that they would erect a settlement. They named it El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles, finding the area called that on a map made by Gaspar de Portola, a Spanish army captain who’d traveled the valley 15 years earlier. Over the years, of course, the village of our Lady of the Angels has grown to a city of 9,862,049 and shortened its name to Los Angeles. A look outside any window in the city shows that it is still accurate to call it the Valley of Smokes. Today in 1886, Geronimo rode into Skeleton Canyon, 30 miles outside Douglas, Arizona, and surrendered to the commander of the United States 4th Cavalry, General George Crook. He had eluded the cavalry for ten months, but that summer was one of the hottest ever recorded in Arizona, with temperatures every day topping 120 degrees. The streams dried up and the desert grasses withered. Army posts set atop the tall Arizona mesas tracked Geronimo's movements by telescope. When the chief was told the cavalry had been ordered to pursue him even into Mexico, he lost heart and asked General Crook for a parley. After his surrender he (and, ironically, the Indian scouts who’d helped track him) went as a prisoner to Pensacola, Florida and from thence to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he was reunited with his family. Geronimo became an American celebrity, and learned the promotional ways of the Whites: he made a fortune selling photographs of himself, appearing at events across the country—they erected a special pavilion for him at the St Louis World’s Fair. In 1905, he rode with Teddy Roosevelt in his inaugural parade. He died and was buried in 1909 at Fort Sill, but he’s back in the news today. Earlier this year, Geronimo’s descendants filed a suit against the Yale secret society of the Skull and Bones, claiming that six members of the society, while serving in the United States Army in 1918, stole Geronimo’s skull from his grave. The story is being widely dismissed (his body was—and presumably still is—buried under a large pyramid of cement and Arizona stones in the middle of a military graveyard), but some have linked this allegation with the Illuminati (are you paying attention, Melissa?) and the Roswell Cover-up. The first full moon in September’s sky is called the Grain Moon in central Europe, the Wine Moon around the Mediterranean and the Apple Moon by the ancient Romans; the Celts called it the Fat Moon, for the coming harvest. This is the 247th day of the year, 118 remain in 2009. On the old Roman calendar today is pridie Nonas Septembri, the beginning of the Ludi Romani, the Roman Games. It was the major festival of the Roman year, kept in honor of Jupiter. The fifteen-day celebration centered on horse and chariot races, boxing contests, and gladiatorial fights. The Ludi was unlike the Olympic Games of Greece. The Romans who thronged the Circus Maximus (which seated 250,000) were less interested in athletic prowess than combat sports. Thousands died in the annual contests; their families were invited to take consolation from the laurel crown awarded by the City for display on the tomb of the dead athlete. The United States Congress has had food on its mind in Septembers past: this is National Chicken Month, National Mushroom Month, and National Rice Month. Put them together and you have the basics of a patriotic meal. Next time you're tempted to criticize our Congress remember how many things like this they do for us.

I CAN WALK. A commonplace, but as I’ve been either in the hospital or a wheelchair for most of the past three years, I'm still boasting about it. Walking is exhilarating and for the past two weeks, I've been walking every night. I have to wear a big, 25 pound plasticene boot to do it, but that’s a small inconvenience when weighed against the joys of ambulation! I circumambulate Park Ferman every night from 8.30 till 9.30. I listen to the surf crash on the rocks below the beach wall, watch the moon wax each night (from the sliver of Shakespeare’s "horned moon" two weeks ago to the Fat Celtic circle now in the sky as I write); I give space to the raccoons as they bumble away at my approach and avert my eyes from the young lovers trying to hide in the shadows as I pass. I am walking again—and while I walk, I meditate. Not a formal “meditation”—which for me requires a book—but a mediation nonetheless. The word meditation comes to us via Latin—as do so many other good things!—and its old Latin root means “to measure.” I don’t count my nightly steps but I do “measure” and “meditate” on what I see and hear as I walk. What I measure and meditate on as I walk—a dead bird, a plastic cup, a pile of leaves, the moan of a distant buoy—measures something about me and the world I inhabit and the others I inhabit it with.

When I was young, my grandmother once told me I was “extraordinarily ordinary.” I didn’t know what she meant at the time, but I remembered her words. Despite how those words sound, I knew she meant something good by them. Later in life I asked her to explain them. At first, she was surprised I remembered, but she said, “I said that because you are ordinary and everyday but in the most extraordinary ways.” That wasn’t too illuminating, but as I’ve discussed with you before, words have creative power. Her words did for me. They were a gift. I came to understand that I am utterly ordinary but that the ordinary is capable of discovering extraordinary things. Even the most gifted of us is more ordinary than not. We each have the capacity to discover how extraordinary is the world in which we live and the extraordinary characters with whom we share it. Earlier this week, I saw Dr Jack Kevorkian interviewed on television—not once, but twice (I guess he’s written a book). You may recall that he is nicknamed “Doctor Death” (of which he is quite proud), so-called from helping some people kill themselves. He told the interviewer that, all things considered, he wished he’d never been born. His life hasn’t been worth all the trouble he’s had to go through. He said other stuff too, some intentionally provocative, reminding me of a spoiled teenage boy or an arrogant politician—one appointed, not elected, to office. Of course he decried the evils and duplicities of religion and boldly declared his atheism—such things are de rigeur for scientific heroes today. He was a sage spokesman for the Brave World he hopes is coming until—until—the interviewer asked him if he was going to kill himself. Doctor Death became indignant at the question. “Why should I?” he demanded. “You said you didn’t feel life was worth living,” came the answer. The interview didn’t last much longer.

The majority of us who say we don’t want to keep living don’t quite want to die. Why? Pain is bad and suffering is worse, but we cling to life. We cling tenaciously because in spite of the pain and suffering and tedium which can preoccupy us (if we want them to) we still catch glimpses of beauty and uncover fountains of grace, even if we don’t know what it is we’ve found. Dr Death may regret his on-going suffering, but he evidently likes the taste of buttered popcorn or the sound of a barking seal. Though he wishes he'd never been born, he doesn't want to check out just yet. He's waiting for something good. He may not know what, and he might not agree that he's waiting, but that's why he's grasping at life with the tips of his fingernails. I love the glories of a Solemn High Midnight Mass on Christmas, but the unexpected poke of my dog’s cold nose on my bare arm, because she wants me to quit reading and pet her, brings no less delight. My grandmother was right: I find the ordinary to be extraordinary, and brimming to overflow with grace. It’s meant to be that way for each of us, extraordinary or not. Those of us walking in faith, no matter how dim our faith and halting our steps, need to meditate as we walk. We need to measure and weigh the lives we’re living and, as much as we can, measure ourselves. That which gives value to our lives isn’t to be found in the clashing cymbals or bursting cannonades of an 1812 Overture; it’s in the quiet, the ordinary, the humdrum: that’s where we discover grace most often. It’s always there. I can measure it as I walk. So can you.


FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, I pulled Round Up the Usual Suspects, about the making of the movie Casablanca. Casablanca is one of my favorites with a generous handful of the most memorable movie quotes in the history of film-making. “Round up the usual suspects,” “Here’s looking at you, kid,” “I’m shocked, shocked to learn gambling is going on here!” and of course, “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.” I’m sure you know the most famous “quote,” “Play it again, Sam” never actually appears in the movie, though a couple of lines come close. I could fill pages with great lines from this movie, most from the pens of Julius and Philip Epstein, the twin brothers who wrote screenplays for Warner Brothers. These two took an unproduced play, Everyone Comes to Rick’s, and turned it into Casablanca. This book tells how a hundred unforeseen accidents and scores of unlikely people came together to make one of the best movies yet. The author, from a family long-associated with Warner Brothers, drew her information from studio archives and interviews with many of those involved in the production. She gives us the background leading up to the filming (Warner Brothers bought Everyone Comes to Rick’s the day after Pearl Harbor) and brief biographies with some eyebrow-raising asides of the major players on either side of the camera : Paul Henreid, who played the leader of the Czech Underground, was the son of an Austrian nobleman looking for a role that would establish him as anti-Nazi; Ingrid Bergman, who, for the sake of each picture, “psyched herself up” to fall in love with her leading men, in this case, took an instant dislike to Bogart and he reciprocated. “I kissed him, but I never knew him,” she said later of her co-star. Michael Curtiz, the director, was a recently-immigrated Hungarian whose English was not good (his son said of him: “He spoke five languages, all of them poorly.”). Max Steiner, the music director, hated “As Time Goes By,” and wanted to replace it with a composition of his own. The role the censors played takes up a whole chapter, and another is given over to the movie’s production difficulties as one of the first wartime movies made under new government-imposed restrictions on materials—wood, paint, silk, celluloid, even nails. Every new chapter tells of fresh problems which make the success of the picture increasingly dubious. In the end, the author says, it succeeded because of something she says is much missing in Hollywood today—professionalism. I can’t speak to that; I’m just glad it got made. This is the story of how that happened. Round Up the Usual Suspects was published in 1992 by Hyperion Press; the author is Aljean Harmetz. You can find it on Amazon for about $2.50 or $20.00 at your favorite bookstore under its new title: The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II. While you’re at it, pick up the movie!


QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“I was born on the prairies where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures.”—Geronimo

“The buffalo is all gone, and an Indian can't catch enough jack rabbits to subsist himself and his family, and then, there aren't enough jack rabbits to catch. What are they to do? What would any of us do?”—General George Crook

“You're basing your laws and your whole outlook on natural life on mythology. It won't work. That's why you have all these problems in the world. Name them: India, Pakistan, Ireland. Name them-all these problems. They're all religious problems.”—Jack Kevorkian

“I made more lousy pictures than any actor in history.”—Humphrey Bogart

“I made so many films which were more important, but the only one people ever want to talk about is that one with Bogart.”—Ingrid Bergman

Sister Haemorrhoida and the Perversion of Suffering

Walking the Labyrinth—August 28, 2009—St Augustine, who in his youth prayed “O Lord, make me chaste—but not yet,” died today in 430. For the last thirty-five years of his life he was bishop of Hippo Regius, a prominent port city in Roman North Africa—now Algeria. Augustine was one of the world’s most influential Christian thinkers—his views on good and evil, creation, original sin, the sacraments and the Church began discussions and—no surprise!—arguments that continue today. His ideas on what constitutes a “Just War” still form the basis for international law on that much-debated topic. Even the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, quoted the saint in a speech last summer (disingenuously, but still), in support of her views on abortion (Augustine shared the belief, common among physicians of his day, that souls didn’t enter the body until 40 days—for males—90 days for females—after conception; thus he regarded abortions done before “ensoulment” as killing but not homicide. I’m doubting the honorable Speaker holds many other 5th century scientific views with such fervor, but who can say?). So there’s plenty of life in the old Saint yet! His most quoted book, written as a dialogue between himself and God, is his Confessions (the opening line above is taken from there); his most famous-if least read-is The City of God. Augustine wrote more than 50 books and over 350 of his sermons survive; we have them all thanks to the infamous Vandals. In 430 those barbarians, having burned their way through France and Spain, invaded Roman Africa and laid siege to Hippo Regius. During the siege, the Saint died from a fever. So famous was he that even the Vandals, having looted most of the city after it fell, left Augustine’s cathedral and library untouched. Abu Bakr Mohammed ibn Zakarijja al-Razi (known to his Latin-speaking contemporaries as Rhazes), was born today in 830. He was regarded as one of the ancient and medieval world’s greatest physicians, though you and I owe him quite a bit, too. Rhazes, a Persian, studied medicine and alchemy in Baghdad, but collected medical texts from Greece, Rome, India and even China. He wrote A Compendium of Medicine, where he not only passed along but also criticized the world-wide practice of medicine. He discarded the use of wire sutures, substituting animal intestine and developed what we now call plaster of Paris (we should, I guess, say plaster of Persia—plaster of Baghdad?—that doesn’t quite work) to set broken limbs. Rhazes developed a theory which is today a medical commonplace—that of allergies. In a book wonderfully titled Why Abou Zayd Balkhi Suffers from Rhinitis When Smelling Roses in Springtime, Rhazes described allergies and reactions and said that certain things seem to set them off. A rich man because of his many wealthy clients, Rhazes set aside half his week to treat the poor at no fee (now there’s subsidized health insurance!). Towards the end of his life, Rhazes went blind. The man who took his place as physician to the caliph told everyone it was because Rhazes ate too many beans. When told, Rhazes responded “At least I fart out of the proper orifice! That fool farts out of his mouth.” It is his last, and unfortunately, best-known, quote. In 1640 the English army of King Charles I was thoroughly trounced by an army of angry Scots at the Battle of Newburn on Tyne. The King wanted to force the Scots to pray using the Book of Common Prayer. The Scots didn’t want to, and killed more than 300 English footmen to prove their sincerity. One might think the Church of England would do something to commemorate these martyrs to liturgical conformity, but alas!-there are no memorials to their sacrifice. Also today, Stonewall Jackson whipped Union General John Pope at the Battle of Second Manassas in 1862. The recently-appointed General Pope spent his military career cultivating arrogance and brought it to a head at Second Manassas (called by the Yankees Second Bull Run). Pope took command of his army on July 14, 1862, and promptly issued a general order that his men would no longer be retreating from the rebels "as is so much in vogue with you.” They would now go on the offensive. As he tried to track down Stonewall Jackson through July and August, Pope began signing all is communiqués, “Jno. Pope, Headquarters in the Saddle.” Stonewall led Pope’s army on a grand tour through northern Virginia until he finally trapped him at Manassas, where Jackson’s army of 23,000 killed and wounded more than 10,000 of Pope’s 60,000 troops. After the battle, one of Pope’s generals received a communiqué “from the saddle.” He remarked to the officers around him “Pope has his headquarters where his hindquarters should be, and his hindquarters where his headquarters should be.” Within a month, President Lincoln asked for Pope’s resignation and he was sent out west to supervise Indian reservations. On August 28, 1837, two chemists, John Lea and William Perrins (sound familiar?), joint owners of an apothecary shop in Worcester, England, concocted a sauce for a local nobleman who’d acquired the recipe in India. None found the result palatable and their experiments were placed, literally, on a back shelf; the sauce was forgotten. A few years later, Perrins found their bottled experiment and tasted it (as a child I reckon he was the one other kids would get to eat bugs and beetles)—he loved it! Lea tried some. The aging process had changed it into a savory sauce and they began selling it out of their shop as “Worcester Sauce.” An American businessman visiting Worcester (according to the Lea & Perrins promotional materials, Worcestershire can be properly pronounced a few ways: “wust-ter-shire, " “woos-ter-sheer", or “woos-ter-sher" sauce) tried some and brought a case of it home. It sold out immediately and within two years, he was importing it by “the hundredweight.” It’s the oldest condiment sold in America. Ketchup followed within a few years, but originally was not made from tomatoes. George Watkins began selling his “Mushroom Ketchup, for Pies, Puddings & Sauces” in the 1840’s. This is a red-letter day not only for American condiments but sodas, too. Caleb Davis Bradham, fooling around at the soda fountain at the back of his pharmacy the evening of August 28, 1898, blended kola nut extract, vanilla, and what he later said were “rare oils" and produced the first cup of what he initially called “Brad’s Drink.” Later he would re-name it “Pepsi-Cola,” sell the pharmacy and buy himself a factory. Forty years later, to the day, Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, conferred an honorary degree on ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy. The puppet received an honorary degree as “Master of Innuendo and Snappy Comebacks.” Today “Mitch Miller and his Gang” topped America’s music charts with “The Yellow Rose of Texas” in 1955. On the calendar of ancient Rome, today is ante diem V Kalends Septembri, the fifth day before the kalends of September. August 28 is the 240th day of the year, 125 days remain. Today is also “Chinese Halloween,” the Festival of Hungry Ghosts. It concludes a month-long celebration of “Feasts of the Ancestors,” during which prayers are offered for the dead, empty places are left at dinner tables for family ancestors (complete with table settings and favorite foods) and families going out to the theater or a play leave open seats for the departed. On the last day of the Feast, people set lanterns outside their houses to make sure all the hungry ghosts find their way back to the underworld. We are ending National Catfish Month (Congressionally mandated since 1985); more catfish are eaten in Texas than any other State; and it’s illegal, in Tennessee at least, to lasso a catfish.

I’M ON FACEBOOK, but despite all Fr Spencer’s urgings, I’m still not sure why. Slowly it’s becoming obvious that it’s a useful tool to keep in touch with friends and even, thanks to Marsden and Jeff, to learn more about people you thought you knew pretty well. A few days ago, Marsden “tagged” me. I didn’t understand what that meant and was trying to figure it out when Jeff G “tagged” me. Nobody likes to be “it,” so I thought I better figure this out. It ends up being a way people can learn about each other—if there are more nefarious ends, I remain blithely ignorant of them. Marsden’s “tag” had to do with my 15 favorite books, Jeff’s asked the 15 movies that were most influential in my life. I answered Jeff’s day before yesterday and will answer Marsden’s tomorrow (15 favorite books in a house where I’ve whittled my collection down to 5500 essential ones! C'est impossible!). It was fun—not as much fun as when I discovered I could download large size images of ancient manuscripts on the Vatican Library website—but fun still. I won’t pursue this further except to say “Jezebel” remains my favorite movie in spite of all opinions marshaled against it.

I’ve learned quite a bit about my friends from the many emails we've traded back and forth about the Fifteen Movies (I know that sounds like a set-up, but I mean it as a “straight” line). Woody listed “The Passion of the Christ” among his Fifteen, to which Jeff responded, “I'm averse to such movies as ‘Passion’ … Sister Haemorrhoida's little tales of the saints, as told to the second grade [ran]: ‘...And then, children, the Roman soldiers took St. Crispa and they tied her to the stake and...’ The overt message was that being a martyr is great, almost as good as being a nun. The subtext was somewhat less healthy than that.” You may have seen the signs, commonplace around Los Angeles, on the walls of Catholic schools reading “A Catholic Education Stays with You for Life.” Jeff is proof of the pudding! But Woody’s comment, and Jeff’s, got me thinking first about the movie and the prominent place Jesus’ suffering plays in it (titled “Passion of the Christ” so it’s not surprising) and then about the place of suffering generally. That’s something the Labyrinth’s path has for each of us, no avoiding it.

Suffering is too big a topic for a year of Labyrinths, but holding fast to a few things will make our labyrinthine walk joyful in the midst of suffering--ours and others'. Jeff’s 'Sister Haemorrhida' has twisted her suffering into a cat o’ nine tails and uses it to terrify. She’s not singular. Once in the confessional I had a child tell me how frightened she was of God because another priest had related, in gruesome detail, the punishments of the damned—including hot pokers, searing flesh and gouged eyes—and told the young child she could expect the same if she continued her sinning. So let’s agree 'Sister Haemorrhida' and 'Father Caligari' are ill (which is not the same as saying they’re rare). Suffering is not a pleasure, it’s not meant to be enjoyable, seeking it and inflicting it is a perversion of our nature. But if I can state that so dogmatically, I need to equally insist that something in our nature is perverse. Not evil, but corrupted, twisted like a permanently sprained ankle. There is something wrong, and it’s not just with you. We approach a consideration of suffering predisposed to make it something other than it is.

I distinguish between suffering and pain. Pain is a reaction to a stimulus. It may be physical, but can also be psychological or emotional. Pain stops when that which is causing it stops. Suffering is more an attitude than a reaction. Suffering is internal; I carry it around with me. That why Sister Haemorrhoida and Father Caligari are so insidious: they continue to impose on others something which was in times past imposed on them. They perversely cherish and nourish their suffering, clinging to it with a noxious love. They have no pain; all that remains for them is the love of suffering. God didn’t make us for suffering but for joy. It would be trite if it weren’t true. If I distinguish between pain and suffering, I want even more emphatically to distinguish between joy and happiness. Happiness is good and suffering is not, in spite of what Sister Haemorrhoida and Father Caligari may have told you. But what we call 'happiness' passes. We are happy when we win the lottery. We’re happy when we hear from a friend or find a new copy of a cherished book we loaned to somebody and long ago accepted they’d never return it. But we are joyful when we are in touch with God and the world in which it pleases Him to place us and the people who are our family—joy doesn’t go away if we lose a winning lottery ticket or miss the bus or learn that we have cancer. Joy is the unshakable certainty that regardless of what happens, grace is everywhere and we are living in the midst of it. To step into God’s labyrinth is to step into grace, regardless of the circumstances. If we walk in grace, suffering can be seen through new eyes. Sister Haemorrhoida may have passed along the story of the saint’s suffering, but she didn’t understand what she was actually saying. Her tale tells of masochism past made present; it’s a story of perverse pleasure. But the tale untold (because uncomprehended) is a recounting of joy. Not joy because of pain, but joy because the sufferer’s hope is fixed, not on the threatening blade or blazing poker, but on the certainty that God is unspeakably good, the world is holy, and all is grace. It’s not the happy-go-lucky view of pig-tailed Pollyanna. It’s the vision which comes from passing through suffering knowing that there is so much good yet to come.

FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, for the sheer pleasure of reading a good writer, I picked up Hilaire Belloc’s Characters of the Reformation. If you don’t know Belloc’s writing, this is Belloc at his best. At his best Belloc is a literary bull in a china shop. You may not agree with what he says, but he says it so well it doesn’t really matter. He was born in France, and reared in England. In 1895 he graduated with honors in history from Balliol College, Oxford, and was president of the Oxford Union, the University’s debating club. It was good practice for the combative Belloc; he breathed controversy the whole of his life. When a boy, he was given the nickname “Old Thunder” and it stuck like truth till his death at 83. He was an enthusiastic and argumentative Catholic in a blandly Anglican country. When he went before his examination board for an Oxford fellowship, he placed on the table between him and his questioners a gilt statue of the Virgin Mary. Nobody was surprised they didn’t offer him the position.

Belloc earned his living writing books and churning out newspaper columns. The pretended impartiality of modern journalism was, to him, nothing but veiled hypocrisy. Everything Belloc wrote bore the firm impress of his belief and it burns through the pages of Characters of the Reformation. The theme of the book, that the Reformation would never had succeeded anywhere else if its progress had been arrested in England, drives his narrative. One by one he marches forward the good guys and the bad ones, the guilty and the innocent—from Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Pope Clement VII down to Cardinal Richelieu, Rene Descartes and William of Orange. He recounts their stories with unblushing partisanship, and pronounces either guilt or innocence. His insights are sharp and cut deep: Henry, he says, “…always a great liar…was passionate for having his own way—which is almost the opposite of having strength of will.” Guilty! Thomas Cromwell, the architect of Henry’s Reformation, was “an adventurer of high talent and no scruples.” Guilty! If Pope Clement VII “had a stronger and more direct mind...the English schism would have arrived with less loss of honor and more moral authority to Rome.” Not quite so guilty. Cardinal Richelieu, 100 years after Henry’s death, bears the principal blame for the balance of Protestant and Catholic in Europe. Guilty! The most interesting of the 23 character portraits Belloc paints in this book, though, is of Saint Sir Thomas More. More, he says, is venerated for the wrong reasons. Belloc insists More is a saint in spite of everything, his private opinions included. He writes as an unabashed Catholic, punching lackluster Catholics and scheming Protestants with equal relish. He takes for granted the reader is on his side. While warming to his discussion of Thomas More, Belloc says “What I may call the conventional portrait of the man, the one which both Catholics and Protestants accept (for he is quite as much admired in the other camp as in ours)…” He analyzes with bare elbows, and I revel in his words and wit. You will too, even if you're not interested in the topic. His exuberance in a lively argument entices us to follow. The book was written in 1936, and a copy like mine, a paperback from the mid-50’s, can be picked up from Amazon for under three dollars; it was republished this year by Tan Books and can be purchased new from Barnes and Noble for $12.00. Your local library probably has it; there it’s free! While you’re looking, peruse whatever you can of his other books (he was more prolific than Saint Augustine, and was a much more entertaining poet). Belloc's topics range widely and on none of them was he neutral.


QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”—Hilaire Belloc

“God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.”—St Augustine of Hippo

“Man wishes to be happy even when he lives so as to make happiness impossible.”—St Augustine of Hippo

“The self-admirer should not glorify himself nor be so conceited that he elevates himself above his companions. Neither should he belittle himself and become inferior to his own peers. If he follows this guide, he will be free and people will see him as one who truly knows himself.”—Rhazes

“Let us understand each other. I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies; from an army whose business it has been to seek the adversary and to beat him when he was found; I presume that I have been called here to pursue the same system.”—Major General John Pope, from his opening statement to his new command

“Captain, my religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me. That is the way all men should live, and then all would be equally brave."—General Stonewall Jackson

“Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?”—Charlie MaCarthy

A Theology of Speech--Free and Fettered

Walking the Labyrinth—August 21, 2009—Today, Western Christians observe the feast of St Pius the Tenth, the 257th Pope. Though he died in 1914, he was one of the most influential popes of the 20th century, the first pope to be canonized in four hundred years. He came from a poor Italian family and his family continued poor after his election to the Papal throne; one of his brothers died as the postal clerk of their home village. Throughout his life he was a champion of the poor. He loved the Church’s rites and did much to restore the obscured glory of her worship—most impressively the restoration of Gregorian chant; as a theologian he ensconced the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas as normative for the Church. He had a love of grim humor and developed the reputation of a stubborn old man. Others eulogize John XXIII and Pope John Paul II—St Pius X is my kind of pope. Today Eastern Christians remember St Bassa and her sons Theognis, Agapios, and Pistis. Bassa, who lived in northern Greece, was martyred about 390. She was married to a pagan priest, who didn’t take her conversion, or those of his three sons, well. Her angry (and no doubt embarrassed) husband denounced her to the authorities—this at a time when Christianity was being persecuted throughout the Roman world (saints don’t always have good timing!)—and the four were imprisoned. When her sons refused to revert to their pagan upbringing, St Bassa was forced to watch as they were beheaded. When she still refused to deny her faith, the local politician (just upholding community standards), ordered her drowned. She was rowed out some distance from land and tossed into the sea, but (according to a medieval chronicle written much later) an angel rescued her and miraculously took her to the island of Alonnisos. There she was promptly arrested and her head was cut off. Not all angels, evidently, are equally competent! Tomorrow, Muslims around the world begin their month-long observance of Ramadan, a kind of Islamic Lent. “Forty days and forty nights,” begins the old Lenten hymn, calling to mind the Christian Fast. Ramadan has this difference—Muslims fast from sun-up to sundown: but they party from dusk till dawn! John Hampton Randolph, a Louisiana sugar-cane planter, spent ten years building what he considered the “finest home on the river” for his wife. Most people who see it today agree. Nottoway Plantation House is 53,000 square feet, with 64 rooms and 365 windows. On August 21, 1841, Randolph patented the “Venetian Blind,” wooden slats on a series of cords he devised, enabling the slats to be raised or lowered, opened or closed. He fitted them into the 365 windows of Nottoway but his bride preferred curtains, so down they came. Still, Randolph liked his idea and worked with the English company that fabricated his originals to popularize the blinds. Randolph attributed his idea to cloth window shades he saw when visiting Venice. Nobody knows what became of the 365 sets of Venetian blinds that once graced the windows of the South’s largest plantation. Ninety-nine years later, August 21, 1940, Leon Trotsky died, one day after an agent of the Stalin’s Secret Police buried a mountaineer’s pick-axe into the back of his head. Trotsky plotted to take Lenin’s place as leader of the Soviet Union after the latter’s death, but lost out to Joseph Stalin, who plotted even harder. When the dust settled, Stalin decided Russia wasn’t big enough for the two of them so Trotsky was exiled and eventually ended up living outside Mexico City. His incessant criticism of Stalin continued from afar until “Uncle Joe” decided he'd been criticized enough. In May, 1940, four assassins entered Trotsky’s home and attempted to kill him. While they killed or wounded almost everybody else in the place, they missed their target. The second attempt was more successful, though Trotsky survived long enough to interrogate his assassin. Ironically, Trotsky was dying before he was assassinated. Doctors told him early in February that he was suffering from what they believed was a brain tumor. He wrote a Last Will and Testament (see the engaging quote below) and, at the time of his death, was planning to commit suicide. Today the Trotsky compound outside Mexico City is a museum and the old Marxist’s ashes are buried in the garden. His granddaughter heads the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. If you think we need more lawyers, this is a red letter day for you. On August 21, 1878, one hundred lawyers met at the fabled Grand Union Hotel—then the world's largest hotel—at the Saratoga Springs Spa in New York to draw up a charter for a national organization of lawyers. They chose a name (the American Bar Association) and wrote a charter (100 lawyers agreeing to all the words of a document in a single day?) which lists among their goals “the advancement of the science of jurisprudence, the promotion of the administration of justice and a uniformity of legislation throughout the country...." Today the ABA has more than 410,000 members and employs over 110 full-time lobbyists in Washington DC. Shakespeare had a suggestion about lawyers, but John Adams, no mean lawyer himself, said “I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, two useless men are called a law firm, and three or more become a Congress.” Mount St Helen’s erupted throughout the first part of August, 1831, and the skies across America turned gray-green. People had to use candles to read during daylight hours. At the time, almost no one in the country knew the reason, but one man took the darkness as a long-awaited sign from heaven. Nat Turner was a slave in Southampton, Virginia, though his owner had virtually given him his freedom. He was a Baptist preacher of some eloquence and influence over both Africans and whites in the area and for some months had been asking God for a sign. The gray-green sky, he determined, was it. Ten days later, 55 white and 56 black residents of Southampton County were dead and Nat Turner was in hiding. He had led about 100 black men and women on a two day anti-slavery revolt, charging them to “kill all the whites,” orders he said he had received directly from God. Unfortunately for his followers, several hundred local militia and groups of wandering vigilantes took up the cry “kill all the blacks” and Southampton County was awash with blood, not black or white, but all of it red. On August 21, 1945, Patricia Ellen Russo, a pretty blond baby, was born in Brooklyn. Her mother was a professional roller skater and her father was a firefighter. Guided by her mother, she began a modeling career when she was four years old. When she was six, Patty appeared in her first movie, Two Guys and a Gal under her mother’s maiden name of McCormack. In 1956, she portrayed Rhoda Penmark, the eight-year-old sociopath and fledgling serial killer, in The Bad Seed –the movie that turned an irritating piano tune into a piece of horror music and changed the image of blonds for a generation of boys. The ancient Romans celebrated the feast of the Consualia on August 21st. Consus was the “Protector of the Harvest.” By Senatorial decree, on this day all horses, mules and asses were exempted from labor, and were led through the streets adorned with garlands and flowers. The Romans reckoned today as ante diem XII Kalendas Septem. This is the 233rd day of 2009, 132 days are yet to come. Today is New Year’s Eve for Zoroastrians, so don’t forget to send a card.

“IF LIBERTY MEANS ANYTHING,” said George Orwell, “it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” When I first read this quote, decades ago, I wasn’t aware of having anything I wanted to say that I thought people wouldn’t especially want to hear, but it sounded good so I wrote it down. Only later in life did I discover how true it was, and that when I came to realize there were times I couldn't, and sometimes shouldn't say what I wanted. Oftimes, it’s better for us—and others—to curtail our right to free speech: we don’t always have to say everything we want to, or can. Our words can cut and wound as much as bind and heal. The exercise of liberty, we discover as we grow, is more often a matter of restraint than license.

George Orwell wasn’t a theologian; in fact, though he was baptized, confirmed, married and buried according to the rites of the Church of England, most literary scholars believe he was probably an agnostic and perhaps an atheist. But his above-quoted statement about liberty is, at its root, religious. It is essential, in his thinking, for us to be free. Freedom means being free to speak, and, as his words make plain, free to criticize. That freedom enables, and at times requires, us to say what we think about the words and actions of others—and, as importantly, for them to do the same us-ward. Why is this important? Not so the free speech of comedians with limited vocabularies and small repertoires will be protected—though that’s a necessary side-result—but so an unfettered discussion can go on about who we are and what we’re doing with ourselves. Freedom to speak is freedom to think and freedom to engage one another. Underlying this, like a massive stone bridge, is the bedrock belief that by engaging one another in discussion, we can arrive together at notions of what is right and wrong, good and evil, true and false. In a world where "it may be true for you but that doesn't mean it's true for me" is regarded as expressing legitimate thought, I understand many people are uncomfortable with the belief that there is right and wrong and true and false. In a world where politics and media and even religion and science answer questions only after they've reviewed their polling numbers, we can't be too surprised if many people believe that everything is relative (something Einstein didn't believe). If numbers impress, though, here's something to consider: most people, for most of the time people have been thinking, have believed it is possible for us to distinguish right from wrong and truth from falsehood. For those who believe such is the case, the freedom to think and so to speak are necessary parts of the process.

There's a movie being marketed right now-I don't know or care to know the name of it-for which I saw a few seconds promo on television. If I understood it correctly, the premise for this film is that some (Jewish?) gangsters (from Brooklyn?) are parachuted into Germany during World War Two and shoot up or blow up an incredible number of Nazis. How convenient, how anemic and how typical. The most acceptable villains are Nazis--even the Germans are morally obligated to root against 'em. We thrash cardboard enemies instead of engaging real issues. Look at the current debate on "health care." The only thing both "sides" have in common is that they each want the other side to lose. The President and his allies aren't honest about many of the real problems plaguing the system because if they were, they might "lose." Their opponents raise false or misleading issues because if they don't, the President will "win." Both sides play a national shell game and regardless of which side "wins," what gets lost is the truth.

God gave us the ability and created us with the freedom to think and understand and so to speak and create. As you walk your path through the labyrinth it has pleased God to drop you into, you have an obligation to speak for truth and right and the Good and the Beautiful. "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done," runs the General Confession in the old Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. A walker of the labyrinth isn't close-lipped about the Things that Matter. There's little virtue in screaming and no one's heart or mind is changed by shouting, but if we engage each other in a search for truth, we will gradually begin to uncover it. It's been all around us, "hidden," as they say, "in plain sight."

FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, I plucked The Culture and Customs of Egypt, by Molefi Kete Asante. This isn’t a great book or even a good one, but it’s one of the most recent books written about “modern” Egypt (it was published in 2002 and repeatedly refers to the events of “9/11”), a topic I wanted to do some reading on. The book is interesting in unintended ways. Primarily, the author is insistent that his readers understand they cannot grasp anything about Egypt unless they first acknowledge that the country is through and through, an Islamic nation. That sounded reasonable when he mentions it in the book’s preface. He then reiterates it a few pages into the first chapter and goes on reminding his readers of the fact every 5 or 6 pages throughout the whole text. Even I got—after a couple of chapters—that he was trying to make a point. Let me digress just a moment to say that it’s my rule, before reading any non-fiction book, to see who the author is and learn a bit about his background, so I can understand the point of view and beliefs he brings to his work. I didn’t do that with this book. I saw his name, leafed through the book (I checked it out from the library) and compared it with the other 2 or 3 books they had about modern Egypt and decided this one was best. I assumed the author was an Egyptian. I discovered differently only when—about half-way through the book—I got sufficiently irritated by its preachiness (an unremitting “Egypt for the Egyptians” message that never lets up, whether discussing Egypt’s geography, economy, television, fine arts or cuisine) that I looked up the author on the internet. It turns out Dr Asante isn’t Egyptian but the head of African American studies at Temple University. Now I grasped the essentials of the book. It was less about Egypt than it was what Dr Asante wants me to believe and acknowledge about Egypt. Still, I did get some information I wanted, though through a sieve. One of the most fun things I learned was that the Aswan High Dam, built by Nasser in the 50’s and 60’s, the most monumental project in modern Egyptian history, produced all sort of unforeseen consequences. The flooding of the Nile, the annual renewal of Egypt, enabled the founding of the civilization of ancient Egypt. The Nile brings the rich silt of Africa and deposits it along the riverbanks of Egypt. But since the dam was completed, the silting has been much reduced. The ancient Nubian people, who lived along the less-fertile southern Nile, were displaced by the building of the dam. Dr Asante grudgingly lets us know that the Arabs of northern Egypt little regard the older Coptic people and Nubians—both racial descendants of pharaonic Egypt—and so the government had no qualms about simply moving them out into the desert to make way for the soon-to-be formed Lake Nasser. It turns out, though, that the shoreline of the new lake is the property of the displaced Nubians and the rich silts are now principally lining the shores of the lake. The once-impoverished Nubians are becoming the prosperous farmers and fishers of Egypt and the farmland of northern Egypt is slowly losing its fabled fertility. A crisis is brewing in Egypt.

My advice? Don’t bother with Dr Asante’s book. Read this one instead: A Short History of Modern Egypt by Dr Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot. Dr Marsot was born in Cairo and is the first Egyptian woman to earn a doctorate from Oxford. She lives in Cairo, a retired university professor. Cambridge University Press published her book a few years back, and while it’s not at my local library, I bought a copy on Amazon for less than $2.00. I haven't finished reading it yet, but it's by far the better of the two .


QUOTATIONS FROM THE PRINCIPALS:

“For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.” –Leon Trotsky (I imagine he must have monopolized most dinner-table conversations)

“I was born poor, I have lived poor, I wish to die poor."—St Pius X

“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.”—Joseph Stalin

“Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.”—Joseph Stalin

“Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.”—Nat Turner

“A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England.”—George Orwell