Agatho's Stone

Walking the Labyrinth—July 24, 2009—The calendar of saints lists seventy-six saints today, but the story surrounding St Hermogius of Tuy bears recounting. St Hermogius was a nobleman of pious inclinations living in tenth century Spain. Uninterested in his family’s chivalric background and their long history of fighting the Moors in his homeland, Hermogius founded a monastery, which he unwisely situated in the middle of the war zone. To no one’s surprise, (except, evidently, Abbot Hermogius) the Moors, led by the Emir Abd al Rahman, raided the monastery and took the confused abbot prisoner. When he learned his captive was a nobleman the emir demanded a ransom from the abbot’s family. Hermogius’ uncle bartered with the emir and, in exchange for the abbot’s release, sent his one of his own sons, Pelayo, to take the abbot’s place until the ransom could be raised. Hermogius was freed and retired to a place far from the lines of battle. He was later made a bishop and died peacefully, twenty years after all the excitement, in 942. But what about Pelayo? For three years his father tried to raise the ransom money but was unable to do so. Finally, the emir called Pelayo before him and gave him two choices: convert to Islam or die (one source claims Pelayo was given another option. He was, evidently, a handsome young man and the emir had an eye for handsome young men, so he offered him a third choice…). Pelayo refused to convert. The emir, in what has to be one of the more unusual forms of martyrdom ever inflicted, had the young man loaded onto a catapult and flung over the city walls. Found still breathing, Pelayo was dispatched with swords. None of the chroniclers say, but family gatherings afterwards must have been tense when both St Hermogius and his brother showed up. The Rock of Gibraltar was seized by the British on this day in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession. Historians count it as the eleventh (and last successful) Siege of the Rock. The author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, was born on July 24, 1805, in a village northeast of Paris. As the novelist's fame grew, so did personal attacks on him, particularly attacks on his mixed racial background. To one member of the Fourth Estate, who referred to Dumas as a mulatto in every public mention he made of him, Dumas finally responded in a brief note: “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends." America’s most famous aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, was born this day in 1898. On her sixth birthday, Amelia convinced her uncle to build a ramp off the top of the family toolshed. She found a wooden box and, climbing in, propelled herself down the ramp and off the roof. Amelia's first flight was short but she never forgot it. She emerged from the broken shards of her first airborne vehicle with a bleeding lip, a torn dress and “a sense of exhilaration.” She shouted to her open-mouthed sister, “Pidge, I was flying!” A year after Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight in 1927, Amelia duplicated his achievement and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Ten years later, in an attempt to fly around the globe, she disappeared over the Pacific. Amelia didn’t break the “glass ceilings” of her day. She flew her airplane right through and far above them. July 24 was doubly important to Richard Milhous Nixon. In 1959, he held a running, five-hour debate with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in front of a display of a modern American kitchen in Moscow. They debated dishwashers and nuclear weapons. At times the words got heated. After disputing Nixon’s claim that most Americans could afford the appliances on display in the kitchen, the premier remarked: “I do not think that this exhibit and what you say is strictly accurate. I hope I have not insulted you.” Laughing, the Vice-President replied: “I have been insulted by experts.” Seventy-two million Americans watched the tape of the “Kitchen Debate” the next day on television. Time Magazine declared it an overwhelming victory for Nixon and his popularity skyrocketed. Fifteen years later, to the day, his popularity at an all-time low, President Nixon received word that the Supreme Court ordered the White House Watergate Tapes to be released. Ten days after that, he resigned the presidency. Today is the 205th day of the year, 160 days remain in 2009. According to the old Roman calendar, it is the ninth day before the kalends of August (a. d. IX ante Kal. Aug.) and the second day of the Neptunalia, a feast celebrating the Roman god of waters, kept in the hottest part of the Italian summer. In 1965, Herman’s Hermits topped the music charts today with “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am,” which was not a musical tribute to the man who separated the Church in England from Roman Catholicism. While we may not celebrate Neptunalia, we as a people do have our American celebrations. Today is national Drive-Thru Day.

THE STORY IS TOLD THAT AGATHO, an Egyptian monk who lived in the desert 1600 years ago, carried a stone in his mouth for three years, “until he learned silence.” This immediately calls to mind Demosthenes, the Greek orator who stuffed his mouth with stones, but for the opposite reason: he was trying to perfect his enunciation. The stone taught Agatho silence; it trained Demosthenes how to speak. While it’s hard to imagine anyone today putting a rock in their mouth (remember Audrey Hepburn as Eliza in My Fair Lady; when Professor Higgins, following Demosthenes, plopped some pebbles in Eliza’s mouth, she swallowed them!), we can at least understand Demosthenes’ motivation: he wanted to be a better public speaker. But what did Agatho have in mind? He wanted to be silent—and not just now and then—but, as the ancient monastic text says of him, he wanted to “learn” silence. He was cultivating it. For Agatho, silence had some special meaning and importance. Mark Twain joked about one aspect of silence: “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” So saying, he was expressing an idea that stretched back to the ancient world, even before Agatho. Cato the Elder, that stern as nails old Roman, said: “The first virtue is to restrain the tongue; he approaches nearest to gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right.” From Cato to Dale Carnegie, it’s been good for business to know “the customer is always right” and keep quiet when necessary. Agatho’s rock, though, points to a different lesson. His rock didn’t just keep him from talking, it taught him silence.

Years and years ago, I knew a woman who couldn’t endure silence. If there were people in the room and no one was talking, she would fidget and squirm and start sputtering “ums” and “wells” until some inane sentence would form and she would release it. Silence scared her. Agatho understood that silence had value. When I’m not speaking, I can listen. I can listen to others (that may be scary), I can listen to myself (that may be scarier) and, if I practice, I can even listen to God (that is the scariest of all). But all three of these “listenings” take practice and require that we “learn silence.”

Walking your labyrinth is meant to be a sort of Agatho’s stone. One of the basic lessons of the labyrinth is that you walk it yourself. Companions on the Way are gifts, and Scripture speaks true when it records “It is not good for man to be alone.” But at the most basic level, we are. All “Oprah-like” wisdom to the contrary, we are finite. God made us with limits and boundaries we cannot cross. Part of growing—growing up, growing old, growing in grace—is coming to terms with our limits, and learning to be thankful for and rejoice in them. Yes, we need to “never give up, never!” as Churchill insisted. Knowing our limits doesn’t mean we don’t try to push them, to continue to grow. Wisdom, though, is realizing we can’t be everything. God set your feet on the labyrinth of your life and told you to find your way home. To do that, you have to pay attention. We must learn to listen, to develop “ears that can hear.” When we’ve learned the silence that enables us to listen to others, we’ll find out we’re beginning to learn the silence that allows us to listen to ourselves. The third silence enables us to begin to hear the rare and purposeful whisperings of the “still, small voice” meant for us and for our salvation. It’s a Voice that leads us Home; a Voice that’s been beckoning us, we will someday come to understand, all along. We haven’t been able to hear it much because we’ve been doing all the talking. When Agatho realized it, he put a rock in his mouth. Maybe you can find a small pebble and see what happens.


OF YOUR CHARITY, please remember Robert Williams, my great and good friend, who died Thursday, July 23rd. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine et lux perpetua luceat ei.


FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, thanks to Melissa Berry (through whom I’m reliving some of my old days in academe), I have rediscovered a book I would almost certainly not have picked up again. While studying at the University lo, those decades ago, I started to read John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. Started, but never finished; never came close. When Melissa asked me about it recently (they’re reading it in her post-graduate class), I went and found me a copy. Mine, published by Little, Brown & Company in 1981, is beautifully illustrated with photographs, some by Ruskin, and many sketches and watercolors, all by Ruskin. But it is the text you fall into. Here and there, like the waters of Venice, his technical notes go over the head of an aficionado of architecture ancient and modern. But Ruskin’s descriptions and more especially his commentaries, based on architectural biases as immutable as the laws of the Medes and the Persians, are bold and thoughtful. He may not be right in all his judgments on Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance art and architecture, but he knows what he likes, what he thinks is good and uplifting, and he knows what is crass and debased. He gathered his materials for the book during a three-year stay in Venice from 1849-1852, and published it in England in 1853. During those three years, Ruskin documented Venice as he found it, using a camera, sketch book and watercolors. He climbed ladders up the sides of sometimes unstable walls, measured columns and windows while hanging from balconies, climbed into attics and under old bridges to record the architectures he found—and separate the wheat from the chaff. Ruskin decided Gothic architecture was the architecture of Heaven, and Renaissance work was—not. A feature of the book which delights the reader willing to float with Ruskin down the canals of Venice (not speed-read through for a thesis) is the author’s digressions on the Meaning of It All. Venice, the brightest of cities, celebrated it glory with the brightest of architecture and art—the Byzantine and Gothic—recognizing (as quoth Browning, dear Melissa) that God is in His Heaven. When double-dealing and impiety came to rule Venice in the counting-houses on the Rialto and the Palace of the Doge, it found the old pieties—civil and religious—too constraining and abandoned them for the re-born pagan paintings and buildings of the Renaissance. The art and architecture a people produce, Ruskin provocatively insists, reveals its soul. The Venice of the Renaissance, he dogmatically states, misplaced its soul and it shows. I had great fun reading this and yesterday decided I’m going to read it again this week, just for fun and see what more I can glean. I wonder, were Ruskin to come to Los Angeles and putter through our buildings and artstuffs, what he would deduce about our souls?


QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest.”—Alexandre Dumas

“It is rare that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.”—Alexandre Dumas (I just quote ‘em, I don’t write ‘em!—GW)

“There are two kinds of stones, one of which rolls.”—Amelia Earhart

“I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.”—President Richard M Nixon

“Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people.”—President Richard M Nixon

“When you are skinning your people, you should leave some skin on to heal, so that you can skin them again.”—Premier Nikita Khrushchev