Two Roads

Walking the Labyrinth, June 26, 2009—Today the old Latin calendar celebrates the Feast of St Mary Magdalene Fontaine and her Companions. These four pious nuns were guillotined in 1794, victims of the French Revolution, for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the new government. On the old, old Latin calendar (the one predating the first Christmas), this latter part of June was under the patronage of the goddess Juno, the protectress of marriage (who, if mythology is to be believed, didn’t do such a good job protecting her own). The Romans considered this the most auspicious time of year to be married, hence our lingering notion of “June brides.” It is the 177th day of the year, and 188 days remain in 2009. According to the town rolls of Hamelin, Germany, today in 1284 the Pied Piper led 130 children out of the city, none of them ever to return. It seems the old Grimm Fairy Tale is actually grounded in history. A stained glass window in the town, dating from about 1300, depicts the odd event, and the town roll dated 1294 cryptically says, “It is ten years since our children left.” One hundred and ninety-nine years later, in 1483, Richard III seized the throne of England following the mysterious deaths of the two young princes in the Tower of London (this seems to be a bad day for children). In Lima, Peru, the conquistador Francisco Pizarro was murdered at a dinner party this night in 1541, when 20 armed men burst into the hall and took turns stabbing him. The other guests left; dessert was canceled. Finally, in 1817, the United States Patent Office issued the first American patent for a bicycle. For those who keep up with such things, the United States Congress has declared this “Carpenter Ant Awareness Week” (now you know why we send them to Washington); today is also Take Your Dog to Work Day in some States. Pearl S Buck, the author of The Good Earth, was born this day in 1894 (according to her biography, she wrote more than 80 other books, but I can’t name any of the rest of them), so too, in 1904, was László Löwenstein (we know him better as Peter Lorre). Along with the perhaps-still-hungry Pizarro, the Roman Emperor Julian (called “the Apostate”—that’s what happens when your enemies end up writing history) died on this day in 363 AD, killed in a battle with the Persians. One thousand and six hundred years later, to the day, President John F Kennedy spoke to a crowd in communist-surrounded West Berlin and said “Ich bin ein Berliner"—a phrase which has been variously translated.

IT’S EASY TO BE outraged. In fact, sometimes it’s hard not to be. I did my weekly fulminating when I read the words of a womanpriest in a national Episcopalian magazine assuring her readers that God was pleased whenever a woman exercised her right to abort her child. If my teeth were better, I would have gnashed them. Instead, I wrote a sharp satirical piece proposing liturgical rites for the blessing of abortion clinics and “Prayers for an Easy Termination,” but my little production will remain (pardon me) “unbirthed.” Outrage and anger are easy, and the road they lead down is broad and wide; once we get accustomed to that walk, our steps aren’t easily retraced. You’ve known people who are on it. Complaints are their daily fare; whining is one of the few things they’ll share with others. Whenever anything good is said about someone, they quickly remind us everyone’s motives are mixed. Good news evokes the cynical response “how long do you think that will last?” Anger seethes and bubbles in some of us like witch’s brew in a cauldron, and it’s poison to the human soul. Those Seven Deadly Sins (and Anger is one of the leaders of the list incidentally; poor old Lust is just a straggler) are deadly not because they make God mad at us, but because they shrivel us up. They transform our souls into petrified prunes, and when they’re finished with us, even we don’t like ourselves.

That’s not the path God wants us on. That road is narrow, strewn with obstacles, a labyrinth the end of which is not clearly visible. But God put us on it so we could bring ourselves to walk upright like men and women, not slither like slugs or wander like moles. Aristotle said the proper “end” of man is happiness (he meant “woman” too, but in those days everybody didn’t have to be explicitly told their gender, ethnic group, and ‘faith community’ was included for them to be able to understand that). By happy he didn’t mean “winning the lottery” happy or happy as in “He was happy when he learned his ex-wife was being audited.” The Philosopher understood that genuine happiness isn’t the result of something that happens to us. “The Kingdom of God is within you.” There’s a wonderful old Spanish phrase, from the days of medieval pilgrimage, which is apt for a modern-day pilgrim on today’s labyrinthine path: “If God isn’t with you on the first step of your journey, you won’t find him by walking all the way to Jerusalem.” Happiness comes from doing your job, whatever it is, well; from doing something good for someone else when you know they’ll never find out about it; from looking for beauty—if you seek, you will always find it. The world God has given us is stuft’d full of beauty, and He’s given us the eyes to see it and the ears to hear it. It’s not that it’s not all around us; it’s that we make ourselves blind and deaf to it, with self-centeredness and anger and jealousy and—but you know the rest of the list of Seven.

So don’t rush through the steps of your labyrinth. Enjoy the journey, savor the pace. The scenery along the way is there just for you.


FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, comes a mirthful little volume titled Misreadings by Umberto Eco, author of the very long novel, The Name of the Rose. Misreadings is a collection of fifteen small pieces of fun. Eco was hired, in 1959, to write a monthly column for Il Verro, an Italian literary magazine. He began submitting parodies of the ponderous contents of the magazine to the magazine itself. It says something of the editors that they published them all. One is a set of internal critiques, supposedly from a publishing company, on why they’re rejecting certain books as unsuitable, including the Bible (“I must say the first few hundred pages of this manuscript really hooked me…sex (lots of it), murders, massacres and so on…but as I kept reading, I realized this is actually an anthology, involving several writers…I’d suggest getting the rights to just the first few chapters, but using a different title. How about Red Sea Desperadoes?”), Homer’s Odyssey (“…remember in his first book, how the Achilles-Patroclus story, with its not-so-latent homosexuality got us into trouble?”), and a dozen or so others, including refusal letters to Cervantes and Dante. Another piece is an account of Columbus discovering America, accompanied by modern-day news media and their attendant host of experts, in this case including Leonardo da Vinci, who gets short-shrift from the reporters when he becomes too technical.

Any of the selections can be read in ten or fifteen minutes. The satire is rich, at times thick, written to mock scholarship which labors on the ephemeral and a society which concerns itself with the trivial. But I read it with such pleasure partly because the satire and mockery isn’t bitter or angry or malicious. Eco’s Misreadings holds up a mirror and lets us see ourselves; he helps us see how silly we can sometimes be when we make more of things than they are. I’m going to put this book on the bookshelf in my bedroom, so I can pick it up frequently for a refreshing sip.


Quotes from the Principals:

Julian the Apostate—“So long as you are a slave to the opinions of the many you have not yet approached freedom.”

Pearl S Buck—“The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.” And one more from her, because it seems so wonderfully apt. Remember, her parents were missionaries to China. “We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't let them into our country.”

John F Kennedy, in Berlin—“All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’ ”

Peter Lorre—“Don’t you think we should drive a stake through his heart, just in case?” (to Vincent Price at Bela Lugosi's funeral)