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
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