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