The Babe lying in a manger, the lowing cattle and wooly sheep, the rustic shepherds, the radiant Mother and the protective father—it’s the Christmas scene of countless cards and nativity displays—the stock icon of the season.
We know the story behind the Christmas card—the journey of the Holy Family to Bethlehem, the Virgin “great with child” and the inn with no vacancies. Over the centuries, that story has been so embellished it’s sometimes hard to tell fact from fancy.
The common elements of the familiar story, though, have something more to tell us. The quaint manger, the huddled livestock and awestruck shepherds point beyond themselves to something we don’t think much about if we can avoid it, because it’s scary. The Christmas story is set, not just in Bethlehem, but in the midst of poverty. It’s a story of the poor, told to the poor and with special meaning for the poor. Scripture testifies that our Lord lived a life of poverty but St Paul is explicit about it: “…for your sake He became poor.” The Creator of the stars of night chose to be poor and if we overlook the meaning of that choice, we overlook much of why we celebrate this feast.
Nowadays, words like “poverty” and “the poor” have mostly a political and sociological meaning. They roll easily off the tongues of politicians, who use them to garner votes or media attention. But when the Lord Christ chose to be born in a cave rather than a palace, it wasn’t to make a political point: His message and the “meaning” of the cave in Bethlehem was—is—an eternal one.
In Jesus, God reveals Who He is. What does a phrase like that mean? We can’t know God, and to imagine we can is to make more of ourselves than we are. To compare ourselves to God, even using the old analogy of God as the ocean and ourselves as a drop of water in it is to make far too much of the drop. The Gospel story in a nutshell is, in the words of St Cyril of Alexandria, “the Creator of Heaven and earth wore diapers for our sakes.” God became one of us, a human being. In doing so, He showed us Who God is, something we otherwise could never have known. What the Christmas story tells us is that, in the most fundamental ways, we’ve got it all backwards. The world is hard at work, chugging along, but in the wrong direction and with the wrong purpose. St Thomas Aquinas says, left to ourselves, four things drive you and me: an unquenchable desire for power, money, pleasure or fame (the “or” isn’t meant to be exclusive).
Gospel poverty isn’t romantic but realistic. Jesus was poor—that means, in the eyes of the powerful, the rich, the famous, the wise, in the eyes of all who “matter,” He was weak and unimportant, not worth noticing. The poor are invisible—and I speak as one who overlooks them. In choosing to be weak and unimportant, the Lord was telling us something very basic about God. The powerful, the wealthy, the famous—these are accustomed to attention, to getting their own way. Whenever you and I get a taste of power or wealth or attention, we relish it. Our fallen souls sing. The Lord Jesus wants to free us from the delusion that those snares are worth singing about. God comes in quietness, in humility, in poverty, because that’s Who He is. He isn’t the Great and Powerful Oz, but the One Who takes up a human life, lives it perfectly, and lays it down willingly so that all other human beings—every man and woman, boy and girl—can follow Him. “Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me,” He says, “for I am meek and lowly of Heart—any you shall find rest for your souls.”
This is the message of peace the angels sang to the shepherds that first Christmas night. It’s the promise of peace—a scary promise to be sure, because we’ve all been convinced of something different—but it’s a promise that I hope finds an echo in our lives—and it will, if we’re willing to embrace the poverty of God and make it our own.
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Friday, December 24, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Compromising the Gospel
Some of the things Jesus said to His disciples, if taken literally, would so upset the way the world works we wouldn’t recognize it. They would overthrow the way we've set up everything. So we have to find a way to acknowledge what He says while allowing ourselves not to take His words too seriously.
“If someone says bad things about you, say only good of them. Don’t return evil for evil.”
“If someone slaps you, let them slap you again without slapping back.”
“If someone steals from you, give them even more of what you own.”
“Don’t look on one another with lust or see each other as objects of self-gratification. Treat everyone as you would like them to treat you.”
“Forgive those who do you wrong, not once, but over and over again; forgive them so many times you lose count. This is how our Father in Heaven forgives you. As you are forgiven, forgive.”
We all know better than this. A life lived according to these principles would be unstable; nothing you owned would be secure, people would take advantage of you all the time, you’d probably end up getting killed. That’s what happened to the One Who said these and other impossible-to-follow things.
So we compromise His words and teachings. We learn to be Selective Christians. “We” here is inclusive—I’m not sitting on a throne, speaking down, but on a stool, talking to my friends. I’m a picture perfect example of a Gospel compromiser. Because I am, the world of selfishness and sorrow lives around me. Because I water down the Gospel in my everyday life—in everyday ways—the Gospel doesn’t have the power it is meant to have for me and those around me. The world around us, even in its fallen state where the Law of the Survival of the Fittest is ever at work, is a world of resplendent beauty. Even death and decay can’t hide the glory of its Creator. You and I, though, can hide some of its remaining goodness. The more you and I live by the Laws of the Fallen World, the more those Laws hold us in their power.
But you and I have a chance, every day, dozens of times a day, to overturn the Laws of the Fall. We can, every now and then, share in the New Life, by saying a gentle word to those who speak unkindly to us or harshly of us. When we forgive wrongs which really hurt us, with a Gospel forgiveness that seeks nothing for itself and wants to hold no advantage over another, the Gospel is set free and grace abounds—not just for the forgiver and the forgiven, but for all those around. The Russian St Seraphim said, “Save your own soul, live the Gospel words, and ten thousand souls around you will be saved.” That grand old Christian curmudgeon, G K Chesterton, said the same in ways we can relate to best: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
The next time you get a chance (you won’t have to wait long!), do Jesus a favor. Don’t compromise His words. And let me know what happens.
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“If someone says bad things about you, say only good of them. Don’t return evil for evil.”
“If someone slaps you, let them slap you again without slapping back.”
“If someone steals from you, give them even more of what you own.”
“Don’t look on one another with lust or see each other as objects of self-gratification. Treat everyone as you would like them to treat you.”
“Forgive those who do you wrong, not once, but over and over again; forgive them so many times you lose count. This is how our Father in Heaven forgives you. As you are forgiven, forgive.”
We all know better than this. A life lived according to these principles would be unstable; nothing you owned would be secure, people would take advantage of you all the time, you’d probably end up getting killed. That’s what happened to the One Who said these and other impossible-to-follow things.
So we compromise His words and teachings. We learn to be Selective Christians. “We” here is inclusive—I’m not sitting on a throne, speaking down, but on a stool, talking to my friends. I’m a picture perfect example of a Gospel compromiser. Because I am, the world of selfishness and sorrow lives around me. Because I water down the Gospel in my everyday life—in everyday ways—the Gospel doesn’t have the power it is meant to have for me and those around me. The world around us, even in its fallen state where the Law of the Survival of the Fittest is ever at work, is a world of resplendent beauty. Even death and decay can’t hide the glory of its Creator. You and I, though, can hide some of its remaining goodness. The more you and I live by the Laws of the Fallen World, the more those Laws hold us in their power.
But you and I have a chance, every day, dozens of times a day, to overturn the Laws of the Fall. We can, every now and then, share in the New Life, by saying a gentle word to those who speak unkindly to us or harshly of us. When we forgive wrongs which really hurt us, with a Gospel forgiveness that seeks nothing for itself and wants to hold no advantage over another, the Gospel is set free and grace abounds—not just for the forgiver and the forgiven, but for all those around. The Russian St Seraphim said, “Save your own soul, live the Gospel words, and ten thousand souls around you will be saved.” That grand old Christian curmudgeon, G K Chesterton, said the same in ways we can relate to best: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
The next time you get a chance (you won’t have to wait long!), do Jesus a favor. Don’t compromise His words. And let me know what happens.
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Saturday, October 16, 2010
A Divine Bioluminescence
Fireflies are an unmingled delight. I know their crepuscular bioluminescence is intended to attract both mates and prey, but I still find them utterly delightful. When I was a young boy, I would sit with my grandfather on the family homestead and we’d spend the hour or so before summer suppertimes watching the fireflies blink on and off in the evening shade. I remember wanting to catch some in a jar and the old man telling me they’d “lose their light and die” if I did. Now I sit on the porch of my little homestead and watch the fireflies again and discover my delight in them is still as fresh. Now I know they won’t die in the jar from sorrow because they “lose their light” but because they suffocate; now I know they don’t sprinkle the dusk with their illuminations for sheer joy but as a survival mechanism, but every time I see the stab of light in the evening’s darkness, something in me lights up, too. The little beetle is indeed bioluminescent by nature, but his brief night-time flash says more than he knows.
The firefly shines so he can be seen. He’s invisible, otherwise—I certainly wouldn’t know he was there if he didn’t make a show out of himself. My delight in him is the unexpected flash of light he gives in the midst of darkness. It’s not enough to see him for more than a second, just enough to say he’s there; a light shining in the darkness.
It’s probably scandalous, or at least a bit unwise, to write this, but the firefly shines with something of a Divine Light.
Not merely because he recalls the Scriptural statement that the Light shined in darkness (which failed to understand What it was seeing), but even more compelling, the firefly is invisible for those many, many seconds when he’s not shining his light. So too with God. The wondrous moments of illumination which periodically dot our lives with signs of God’s presence are separated by long periods when God seems invisible, inaccessible, hid from our eyes. It’s easy to understand why people so often lay aside belief. This isn’t a “modern” crisis; it’s been the case with all of us since the beginning. That’s why the little glow, that instantaneous flash of light—here, then gone!—delights. Between flashes, life can seem a drudgery, one problem or disappointment after another, but then, for those who know to look, there’s a flash, and then, there, another! Faith enables us to see there is meaning in the light that shines in our darkness. When we realize the darkness can’t overcome it, that the flashes of light persist, then, as the old Quaker hymn says, “How can I keep from singing?”
Perhaps, from time to time, as we delight in the Light, you and I can flash too, and briefly illumine the darkness for others.
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Don't keep yourself from singing.
The firefly shines so he can be seen. He’s invisible, otherwise—I certainly wouldn’t know he was there if he didn’t make a show out of himself. My delight in him is the unexpected flash of light he gives in the midst of darkness. It’s not enough to see him for more than a second, just enough to say he’s there; a light shining in the darkness.
It’s probably scandalous, or at least a bit unwise, to write this, but the firefly shines with something of a Divine Light.
Not merely because he recalls the Scriptural statement that the Light shined in darkness (which failed to understand What it was seeing), but even more compelling, the firefly is invisible for those many, many seconds when he’s not shining his light. So too with God. The wondrous moments of illumination which periodically dot our lives with signs of God’s presence are separated by long periods when God seems invisible, inaccessible, hid from our eyes. It’s easy to understand why people so often lay aside belief. This isn’t a “modern” crisis; it’s been the case with all of us since the beginning. That’s why the little glow, that instantaneous flash of light—here, then gone!—delights. Between flashes, life can seem a drudgery, one problem or disappointment after another, but then, for those who know to look, there’s a flash, and then, there, another! Faith enables us to see there is meaning in the light that shines in our darkness. When we realize the darkness can’t overcome it, that the flashes of light persist, then, as the old Quaker hymn says, “How can I keep from singing?”
Perhaps, from time to time, as we delight in the Light, you and I can flash too, and briefly illumine the darkness for others.
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Don't keep yourself from singing.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Imperfect Freedom
Today is Friday, September 17th, the 260th day of the year. There are 105 days remaining in 2010, and, as the street sign in front of the Pawn Shop on Highway 46 outside New Braunfels warns “Only 98 Days Left To Get Your Christmas Loan!” The German abbess, hymnographer and later canonized saint, Hildegard of Bingen, died in her convent at Rupertsberg on this day in 1179. The “Sybil of the Rhine” wrote over a hundred Sequence Hymns for Mass, honoring the Blessed Virgin and saints, and composed antiphonal chants for the daily office. The presidio of San Francisco was founded on September 17, 1776. The comandante of the presidio made a speech, a Mass was sung, a salute of musketry fired, and canon fire from the Spanish ship the San Carlos anchored nearby echoed around the bay. The new colony of San Francisco was made up of 170 colonists (only 29 were women), 20 soldiers, 3 vaqueros, 3 slaves, some Indian interpreters, 695 horses and mules and 355 cattle. When the San Carlos sailed from the bay to return to Mexico, the comandante wrote in his diary: “This is a sorry lot of colonists. I doubt a sign of our presence here will remain in twenty years time.” After four months of wrangling, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia put their names to our present Constitution on September 17, 1789. Of the 55 delegates who attended, 39 signed the document. Four angrily left prior to the signing so they wouldn’t have to, three present refused to sign (one, George Mason, refused because there was no Bill of Rights, something later amended), and nine men who approved the Constitution had to return to their homes early (they lived in other States—it wasn’t because their wives told them to be home by a certain time). You may remember Benjamin Franklin’s remarks that day as the last men in the room waited to sign. Watching the scene, he spoke to those around him. He nodded towards the president’s chair (George Washington presided at the Convention) and noted the depiction of the sun carved into it. “During the past four months of this convention," he said, “I have often looked at that carving. I was never able to tell if showed a sunrise or sunset. Now, at last, I know. I am happy to say it is a rising sun, the beginning of a new day." Let us hope so. The jury may still be out…On the old Roman calendar, today is ante diem VI Ides Septembri; it’s the 9th of Tishrei, 5771 on the Hebrew calendar; and the date on the Coptic calendar today is Tout 7, 1727, the feast of St Dioscouros. September is also National Check for Headlice Month. I've never done that before so I'll have to ask for help...
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This weekend, at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California, the most elegantly written of Sophocles’ plays, Electra, is being performed. As much as I am becoming acclimatized to the sweltering summer heat of the Great State of Texas, I wish I was there to watch it, coastal breezes, marble colonnades and all. Tickets are $48; seniors and students get in for $38. I’d pay the combined price to be there…Melissa, surely you won’t miss this! Go for me!
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Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, was born in Ribemont-sur-Ancre, Picardy, about 100 miles north of Paris, on September 17, 1743. Though of an old aristocratic family, he was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the French revolution. Eventually he fell afoul of it, and ended up in prison, awaiting his rendezvous with Madame Guillotine. He was the Aristocrat Betrayed by an Omelet.
The marquis, before the heady (pardon me, I couldn’t help it) days of the French Revolution, was a famous mathematician and a member of the Parisian intellectual elite, a friend of Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. When the revolution he had so long predicted finally broke out, he was one who railed for the end of the Ancien Regime and demanded the head of Louis XVI. But when they cut off the king’s head, the marquis began to have second thoughts—among them, if they’ll kill the king, who won’t these peasants kill? He criticized the king’s execution to friends, but in the days of the Terror, few friends proved true and when his words reached the Tuileries Palace, Citizen Robespierre issued a warrant for the marquis’ arrest. He went into hiding, and lived in the garret of a friend’s house in a part of Paris far from political excitements. For eight months he never left the attic. Finally, deciding he was “old news,” he ventured forth one afternoon for a walk in a nearby park. Passing a restaurant, he went in to have lunch and ordered an omelet. When the proprietor asked how many eggs he wanted, the famished marquis replied “A dozen, at least!” That was about ten more eggs than most of his customers usually requested, and the restaurateur decided he must have a bona-fide aristocrat in his tavern. While the marquis fell on his omelet, agents of the revolution arrived, having been summoned by the suspicious proprietor. They hauled the marquis away; Robespierre signed his death warrant, and the marquis cheated Madame Guillotine only by draining a vial of poison the night before the tumbrels came. So the next time you order an omelet, remember Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, the Aristocrat Betrayed by an Omelet, and ask yourself how many eggs do you really want in it?
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This week saw continuing violence in Islamic countries focusing on a Pentecostal minister’s plans to burn 200 copies of the Koran. In Kashmir, a Church of England sponsored school was one of three Christian centers attacked by over 6,500 Muslims this past Tuesday. The Tyndale-Briscoe School has educated both Christian and Muslim students since its founding in 1880, but at present the school has only Muslim students, though the faculty and staff are made up of both Christians and Muslims. This being the case, Mr Ma Kaul, the school principal, told a reporter from Asia News that all religion classes at the Tyndale School currently center on Islam. He also told him that boxes of newly-printed Korans, intended for the more than 500 students presently enrolled at the school, had been stored in the school warehouse. All were destroyed during the attack. Since the library also was vandalized, all the copies of the Koran in the library were burned as well. Oops!
On the same day, St Francis School in Mendhar was attacked and vandalized and some of its ancillary buildings were burned by a crowd of more than 3,000 angrier-than-usual Muslims. Ironically, the St Francis School is owned and operated by Muslims, for Muslims. When the school was founded it chose the name St Francis because Christian schools in the region usually attract more and better students. As with the case of the Tyndale School, one of the buildings burned in the attack on St Francis was the library. In an interview with the Asia News, the librarian said the stacks contained “several dozen” copies of the Koran which were burned along with all the other books in the building. Uh-oh.
Several Christian churches in the region were also attacked this week; an Anglican church, two Catholic churches and a Lutheran church, which had a grenade tossed into the sanctuary as police pushed away the crowd. Father Amir Yaqub, the pastor of Holy Name Catholic Church in Nowshera, Pakistan, said: “Christians in the vicinity have fled the area.”
In response to the violence, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said “these incidents had nothing to do with the Church or Christianity. We Muslims never act this same way towards other religions." Curiouser and curiouser. Only Lewis Carroll could do justice to all this…“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/ Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…” Hmmm, suddenly those lines make sense!
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Of course, the big ecclesiastical news this week is the visit of the Pontifex Maximus to England, where he and the Archbishop of Canterbury (looking more than a bit like one of the always-slightly-distracted professors at Hogwarts Academy) “exchanged fraternal greetings,” according to the spokesman of Lambeth Palace. Less visible but more interesting was an article in the Church Times by the Rev. Ms. Rachel Mann, “priest-in-charge” of St Nicholas Church in Burnage, a neighborhood of Manchester. The Rev Ms Mann is concerned that Christians often misjudge, and hence, miss the opportunity to benefit from “a much-maligned form of music,” heavy metal. This music “demonstrates the liberative ‘theology of darkness,’ allowing its fans to be more relaxed and fun by acknowledging the worst in human nature.” Christians “are too serious” about these subjects, she insists: “many churchgoers may be concerned about metal lyrics praising Satan and mocking Christianity,” but they’re missing the point. If Christians dismiss Heavy Metal, as “crass and satanic, hardly fit for intelligent debate,” they miss the opportunity for “theological reflection” on its content. The Rev Ms Mann says heavy metal songs, “characterized by distorted guitar sounds, intense beats and muscular vocals, are unafraid to deal with death, violence and destruction. Metal’s refusal to repress the bleak and violent truths of human nature liberates its fans to be more relaxed and fun people. They put many Christians to shame.” The Church Times didn’t say whether the Rev Ms Mann was scheduled to share her insights with the Pope.
One of the delights of life is the unexpected juxtaposition of events or ideas somehow related and yet unsimilar. When I came across the article by the Rev Ms Mann, I was just finishing a small book by Dom Jacques Hourlier, a monk of Solesmes Abbey, titled Reflections on the Spirituality of Gregorian Chant. It’s worthwhile if not great reading, offering thoughts on the spirituality of music in general and the chant in particular. When I read the article in the Church Times, though, it was the related yet contrasting truths of these two pieces that struck me.
Ms Mann is quite correct to point out that there is a “theology” to her avowed music. It’s true not just of Heavy Metal. Gregorian chant is infused with theology, as is Country Western music, the cantatas of Bach, the sitar music of India and the rhythmic pounding of Polynesian drums. All breathe their own “theologies,” world-views, and spiritualities. Music impacts the soul, sometimes in obvious, sometimes in subtle ways. Dom Hourlier observes, “A military march will not affect the soul the same as a lullaby.” He goes on, “Music involves a message. Its spiritual value, therefore, depends on the kind of message it carries.”
I admit I haven’t ever willingly listened to a piece of heavy metal music—or country western music for that matter. Neither have I nailed my hand to a counter to see whether I’d like it or not. I know the answer without having the experience.
Both Dom Hourlier and the Rev Ms Mann agree that music influences our souls. Ms Mann is right to believe there is a spirituality, a theology, of Heavy Metal. She is wrong to believe that dark theology is “liberative,” at least in the sense people of faith believe in “liberation.” For the heavy metalist, and for most other people regardless of their musical proclivities, freedom means “I can do whatever I want.” The liberation Ms Mann speaks of is the freedom to experience and “celebrate” all aspects of life, including the dark, cobwebby recesses of the psyche. This is the place we stuff our demons, fears, angers and hatreds. The worldling, the sensualist, the carnal man in each of us wants to join in the celebration: “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we”…well, you know. Ms Mann is telling us “come on in, the water’s fine!”
It isn’t. It’s the same old, dirty stinking water we jump into every time. Adam and Eve jumped in first; every one of us (except One and probably His mother) has jumped in, too. We’ve laughed and played and convinced ourselves it is fine, we are free, there’s nothing to worry about. But when we “liberate” ourselves, and set the demons free, we discover too late they don’t go away. They want to hang around, and pretty soon, they’re playing the music we find ourselves dancing to. We find out the “liberation” we lust after isn’t free; it comes at a cost.
The old Book of Common Prayer has a most instructive phrase in one of its prayers; it’s almost an aside to God. In the “Collect for Peace” from the Office of Morning Prayer, it reads “O God, Who art the author of peace and lover of concord…whose service is perfect freedom…”
Perfect freedom. That means complete, unrestricted, absolute freedom. Not merely freedom from my boss or my tedious in-laws, but freedom from all fear, from every pain, from lingering sorrow, and from death—not just the fear of death, but death itself. This is the Gospel-promised freedom, the knowing of which “will set us free.” But it too, comes at a cost. The cost is giving up slavery to myself—my whims, my desires, my lusts, my self-centeredness. When nothing holds us, then we are truly free.
So we settle for Imperfect freedom. The illusion of freedom. Telling ourselves we’re free because being free would change things too much—because we don’t even know how to be free. The Lord says “If you would be perfect, pick up your cross every day and follow Me.” Those of us stumbling along the Labyrinth can’t always see very far ahead; we’re sometimes afraid—because we’re not yet fully free—but the longer we follow, even in darkness, the more sure our footing becomes. We understand in bits and pieces how imperfectly we follow and how much (and how desperately) we cling to our “imperfect freedom.” Don’t be concerned. Keep walking. Looking forward, you don’t see how increasingly firm is the footprint you leave behind.
And remember, some good music helps.
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This weekend, at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California, the most elegantly written of Sophocles’ plays, Electra, is being performed. As much as I am becoming acclimatized to the sweltering summer heat of the Great State of Texas, I wish I was there to watch it, coastal breezes, marble colonnades and all. Tickets are $48; seniors and students get in for $38. I’d pay the combined price to be there…Melissa, surely you won’t miss this! Go for me!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, was born in Ribemont-sur-Ancre, Picardy, about 100 miles north of Paris, on September 17, 1743. Though of an old aristocratic family, he was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the French revolution. Eventually he fell afoul of it, and ended up in prison, awaiting his rendezvous with Madame Guillotine. He was the Aristocrat Betrayed by an Omelet.
The marquis, before the heady (pardon me, I couldn’t help it) days of the French Revolution, was a famous mathematician and a member of the Parisian intellectual elite, a friend of Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. When the revolution he had so long predicted finally broke out, he was one who railed for the end of the Ancien Regime and demanded the head of Louis XVI. But when they cut off the king’s head, the marquis began to have second thoughts—among them, if they’ll kill the king, who won’t these peasants kill? He criticized the king’s execution to friends, but in the days of the Terror, few friends proved true and when his words reached the Tuileries Palace, Citizen Robespierre issued a warrant for the marquis’ arrest. He went into hiding, and lived in the garret of a friend’s house in a part of Paris far from political excitements. For eight months he never left the attic. Finally, deciding he was “old news,” he ventured forth one afternoon for a walk in a nearby park. Passing a restaurant, he went in to have lunch and ordered an omelet. When the proprietor asked how many eggs he wanted, the famished marquis replied “A dozen, at least!” That was about ten more eggs than most of his customers usually requested, and the restaurateur decided he must have a bona-fide aristocrat in his tavern. While the marquis fell on his omelet, agents of the revolution arrived, having been summoned by the suspicious proprietor. They hauled the marquis away; Robespierre signed his death warrant, and the marquis cheated Madame Guillotine only by draining a vial of poison the night before the tumbrels came. So the next time you order an omelet, remember Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, the Aristocrat Betrayed by an Omelet, and ask yourself how many eggs do you really want in it?
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This week saw continuing violence in Islamic countries focusing on a Pentecostal minister’s plans to burn 200 copies of the Koran. In Kashmir, a Church of England sponsored school was one of three Christian centers attacked by over 6,500 Muslims this past Tuesday. The Tyndale-Briscoe School has educated both Christian and Muslim students since its founding in 1880, but at present the school has only Muslim students, though the faculty and staff are made up of both Christians and Muslims. This being the case, Mr Ma Kaul, the school principal, told a reporter from Asia News that all religion classes at the Tyndale School currently center on Islam. He also told him that boxes of newly-printed Korans, intended for the more than 500 students presently enrolled at the school, had been stored in the school warehouse. All were destroyed during the attack. Since the library also was vandalized, all the copies of the Koran in the library were burned as well. Oops!
On the same day, St Francis School in Mendhar was attacked and vandalized and some of its ancillary buildings were burned by a crowd of more than 3,000 angrier-than-usual Muslims. Ironically, the St Francis School is owned and operated by Muslims, for Muslims. When the school was founded it chose the name St Francis because Christian schools in the region usually attract more and better students. As with the case of the Tyndale School, one of the buildings burned in the attack on St Francis was the library. In an interview with the Asia News, the librarian said the stacks contained “several dozen” copies of the Koran which were burned along with all the other books in the building. Uh-oh.
Several Christian churches in the region were also attacked this week; an Anglican church, two Catholic churches and a Lutheran church, which had a grenade tossed into the sanctuary as police pushed away the crowd. Father Amir Yaqub, the pastor of Holy Name Catholic Church in Nowshera, Pakistan, said: “Christians in the vicinity have fled the area.”
In response to the violence, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said “these incidents had nothing to do with the Church or Christianity. We Muslims never act this same way towards other religions." Curiouser and curiouser. Only Lewis Carroll could do justice to all this…“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/ Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…” Hmmm, suddenly those lines make sense!
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Of course, the big ecclesiastical news this week is the visit of the Pontifex Maximus to England, where he and the Archbishop of Canterbury (looking more than a bit like one of the always-slightly-distracted professors at Hogwarts Academy) “exchanged fraternal greetings,” according to the spokesman of Lambeth Palace. Less visible but more interesting was an article in the Church Times by the Rev. Ms. Rachel Mann, “priest-in-charge” of St Nicholas Church in Burnage, a neighborhood of Manchester. The Rev Ms Mann is concerned that Christians often misjudge, and hence, miss the opportunity to benefit from “a much-maligned form of music,” heavy metal. This music “demonstrates the liberative ‘theology of darkness,’ allowing its fans to be more relaxed and fun by acknowledging the worst in human nature.” Christians “are too serious” about these subjects, she insists: “many churchgoers may be concerned about metal lyrics praising Satan and mocking Christianity,” but they’re missing the point. If Christians dismiss Heavy Metal, as “crass and satanic, hardly fit for intelligent debate,” they miss the opportunity for “theological reflection” on its content. The Rev Ms Mann says heavy metal songs, “characterized by distorted guitar sounds, intense beats and muscular vocals, are unafraid to deal with death, violence and destruction. Metal’s refusal to repress the bleak and violent truths of human nature liberates its fans to be more relaxed and fun people. They put many Christians to shame.” The Church Times didn’t say whether the Rev Ms Mann was scheduled to share her insights with the Pope.
One of the delights of life is the unexpected juxtaposition of events or ideas somehow related and yet unsimilar. When I came across the article by the Rev Ms Mann, I was just finishing a small book by Dom Jacques Hourlier, a monk of Solesmes Abbey, titled Reflections on the Spirituality of Gregorian Chant. It’s worthwhile if not great reading, offering thoughts on the spirituality of music in general and the chant in particular. When I read the article in the Church Times, though, it was the related yet contrasting truths of these two pieces that struck me.
Ms Mann is quite correct to point out that there is a “theology” to her avowed music. It’s true not just of Heavy Metal. Gregorian chant is infused with theology, as is Country Western music, the cantatas of Bach, the sitar music of India and the rhythmic pounding of Polynesian drums. All breathe their own “theologies,” world-views, and spiritualities. Music impacts the soul, sometimes in obvious, sometimes in subtle ways. Dom Hourlier observes, “A military march will not affect the soul the same as a lullaby.” He goes on, “Music involves a message. Its spiritual value, therefore, depends on the kind of message it carries.”
I admit I haven’t ever willingly listened to a piece of heavy metal music—or country western music for that matter. Neither have I nailed my hand to a counter to see whether I’d like it or not. I know the answer without having the experience.
Both Dom Hourlier and the Rev Ms Mann agree that music influences our souls. Ms Mann is right to believe there is a spirituality, a theology, of Heavy Metal. She is wrong to believe that dark theology is “liberative,” at least in the sense people of faith believe in “liberation.” For the heavy metalist, and for most other people regardless of their musical proclivities, freedom means “I can do whatever I want.” The liberation Ms Mann speaks of is the freedom to experience and “celebrate” all aspects of life, including the dark, cobwebby recesses of the psyche. This is the place we stuff our demons, fears, angers and hatreds. The worldling, the sensualist, the carnal man in each of us wants to join in the celebration: “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we”…well, you know. Ms Mann is telling us “come on in, the water’s fine!”
It isn’t. It’s the same old, dirty stinking water we jump into every time. Adam and Eve jumped in first; every one of us (except One and probably His mother) has jumped in, too. We’ve laughed and played and convinced ourselves it is fine, we are free, there’s nothing to worry about. But when we “liberate” ourselves, and set the demons free, we discover too late they don’t go away. They want to hang around, and pretty soon, they’re playing the music we find ourselves dancing to. We find out the “liberation” we lust after isn’t free; it comes at a cost.
The old Book of Common Prayer has a most instructive phrase in one of its prayers; it’s almost an aside to God. In the “Collect for Peace” from the Office of Morning Prayer, it reads “O God, Who art the author of peace and lover of concord…whose service is perfect freedom…”
Perfect freedom. That means complete, unrestricted, absolute freedom. Not merely freedom from my boss or my tedious in-laws, but freedom from all fear, from every pain, from lingering sorrow, and from death—not just the fear of death, but death itself. This is the Gospel-promised freedom, the knowing of which “will set us free.” But it too, comes at a cost. The cost is giving up slavery to myself—my whims, my desires, my lusts, my self-centeredness. When nothing holds us, then we are truly free.
So we settle for Imperfect freedom. The illusion of freedom. Telling ourselves we’re free because being free would change things too much—because we don’t even know how to be free. The Lord says “If you would be perfect, pick up your cross every day and follow Me.” Those of us stumbling along the Labyrinth can’t always see very far ahead; we’re sometimes afraid—because we’re not yet fully free—but the longer we follow, even in darkness, the more sure our footing becomes. We understand in bits and pieces how imperfectly we follow and how much (and how desperately) we cling to our “imperfect freedom.” Don’t be concerned. Keep walking. Looking forward, you don’t see how increasingly firm is the footprint you leave behind.
And remember, some good music helps.
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Monday, August 23, 2010
A View of Mount Shuksan
Many years ago, too many for me to put an accurate number to, a few friends and I hiked up into not-always-easy to navigate trails and footpaths of the Cascades National Park in upstate Washington. Fortunately for me, my companions were familiar with the trails and requirements, so my principal contribution was to serve as a beast of burden for some of the supplies we carried in with us. They were old hands. I remember climbing for what was probably no more than half an hour up a steep and pointy-rocked path, though at the time I would have sworn we’d been forging a new and dangerous trail for several hours. We stopped (finally!) atop a little flat. The small clearing was circled by big, thick pines; it was decidedly chilly. As my experienced friends rummaged through our packs for the ingredients for lunch, I wandered to the edge of the clearing and pushed my way through branches and branches until the trees gave way. A small lake stretched before me, reaching a thick cover of pines on the other side. Towering 9,000 feet above the lake and me rose Mount Shuksan. Thick snow wrapped its peaks and covered its crags. The lake, clear as polished glass, reflected the sky and mountain and snows and mists which enveloped it. I couldn’t move. To this day, considering the many wonders my eyes have seen, it remains The Mountain. It was too much—too much beauty, too much majesty for me to take in. There was no sound, just the lake, the mists, the mountain and me. As much as I felt it was too much—maybe even felt the beauty hurt my eyes—I couldn’t turn away. It seemed as if this vision had been placed there just for me. I looked and looked, knowing I could never remember it as it was.
At some point I heard my name being called. An excited convert, I stumbled back to the clearing. “You’ve got to see this, it’s unbelievable! You’ve never seen anything like it in your life!”
“What? What is it?”
“Come and see.”
I lead the group, who abandoned our still-preparing meal, through the brush and dramatically held aside some branches. “Look!”
They crowded past me. “What?”
Wordless, I swept an arm across the vista. There were a few frowns and indulgent smiles. “Yeah, that’s Mount Shuksan. Quite a view, huh?” I remember little else of the conversation but soon I was alone and they’d returned to the cook-fire. But I couldn’t walk away. A curtain of heaven had been pulled back and I’d been given this glimpse. I lingered.
Eventually, I did leave, though. We ate lunch, cleaned up, headed on. Our trek kept the full view of the mountain, its skirt of trees, white coating of frost and looming mist in view for—I don’t know how long. Everybody else was talking and joking, and I joined in—but never forgetting the presence of the mountain. I cast a hundred glances and looks its way as we hiked on. After a while, the mists shrouded it and I’ve never seen it again. But it’s always close. As I write this account (too long for anyone but me, ashamed I can’t do it justice) it’s as if I’m standing before that placid lake again, my neck craning to glimpse the mountain’s hidden heights.
We catch glimpses. Though we live in the midst, in the continual presence of beauty, now and then something seizes us, and it’s as if we’ve been wearing blinders till then. Those who know me know I’m stony-hearted and usually inured to the wonders of nature. We're each inured in our own way, but it simply doesn't matter. Ignore them as we might, the world can barely contain all the beauties it holds; they burst forth all around us. I myself find beauty in the turn of a musical phrase—Vivaldi’s Magnificat and the Kyrie in Bach’s Mass in B Minor never fail to blur my vision with what in others would be tears; I used to coerce friends to take me to the Huntington Library in Los Angeles so I could look, over and over again, at a 15th century book of Cicero, each letter carefully written on vellum with unbelievable precision and beauty. Look at the familiar lines in the face of someone you love, the curl of a strand of a child’s hair, a cat drinking milk.
There is ugliness, too, and aplenty. Pain and fear and uncertainty more than abound. On the scales, I’m too ignorant to know which side tips deeper. In the century just passed, the most technologically advanced thus far, we’ve slaughtered more of each other than in all centuries past. None of us completes our course unscathed, and most of us pretty badly. But we catch glimpses.
Abba Evagrios, one of the Fathers of the Egyptian Desert sixteen hundred years ago, told his disciples, “Without temptations, no one will be saved.”
Temptations, trials, adversaries, troubles, pains, sorrows, griefs—they assail us, they hurt us, at times they seem to overwhelm us. The things that shake you may not shake me, but each of us gets profoundly shaken, and, on occasion, shaken to the core, where your secret despair and mine hides.
“Without temptations, no one will be saved.” In this fallen world, where evil in its many guises continually lurks, God hasn’t left us comfortless. He’s given us a world of Bach’s Kyrie and a child’s crooked smile, Cicero’s essays, the shimmering leaves of an aspen and a view of Mount Shuksan. These are glimpses, the ones on which we build our lives. We can carry the sorrow and despair, so easy to find and surrender to, or we can ferret out beauty, look for it, chase it and then cling to it and cherish it and build it into our lives with a rugged and graceful insistence. If we do, when the time comes to open your eyes after death closes them, the glimpses will have been just that—glimpses of a Vista that will draw you ever forward, into a Vision you can never exhaust.
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Here's one glimpse worth taking, courtesy of Aaron Copeland, Ansel Adams-and the Creator of Heaven and Earth:
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Now and again I get a whole batch of emails that tell me people are reading—and if not thinking about, at least responding to—my jottings. A couple of weeks back, my little essay “The Sting of Freedom,” sent 31 people to their keyboards to respond. Two complained I was a running-dog lackey of the Obamaite status quo and “weak on Islamo-fascism.” A few others chose to lecture me on the geography of the building site and the fact the building “isn’t a mosque.” The majority of those who wrote thought I was the smartest thing to come down the pike since Aristotle. That gives me more pause than anything else!
As I said in the blurb, I don’t know, or care, about the motivations of the builders of the building. I can’t, won’t presume, have no interest in judging their hearts (which I’m incompetent to do anyway), but I can pass judgment on their actions. Some think the “non-mosque” a grand gesture of religious tolerance (wouldn’t a mosque be an even better one, then, and right on the spot?), others think that, regardless of the builders' intentions, it’s insensitive and poorly thought out after the national trauma we endured that Day. Those who bothered to read beyond their preconceptions (even those who think I invented sliced bread) will see my essay was about one thing: Freedom. Freedom has costs and they're constant. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in good or bad taste to build the building. What does matter is that we see, “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” this: freedom isn’t something anyone grants—it’s something we inherently possess because we're made in the image of God. For that freedom to "have" meaning, to carry it, it intrinsically bears the possibility that things that are sacred can be mocked, ridiculed and attacked. Is the building a slap in the face? To a great number of people it is. I don’t know the builders, or the intentions of their hearts—none of us do (regardless of whatever claims the builders make or intentions we choose to attribute to them). I think all of us could agree to this: the proposed building intends to send a message. Its placing is not a coincidence. Only time will tell what the message is. But the real import is this: we are free and freedom runs deep—whether we like where it leads or not.
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At some point I heard my name being called. An excited convert, I stumbled back to the clearing. “You’ve got to see this, it’s unbelievable! You’ve never seen anything like it in your life!”
“What? What is it?”
“Come and see.”
I lead the group, who abandoned our still-preparing meal, through the brush and dramatically held aside some branches. “Look!”
They crowded past me. “What?”
Wordless, I swept an arm across the vista. There were a few frowns and indulgent smiles. “Yeah, that’s Mount Shuksan. Quite a view, huh?” I remember little else of the conversation but soon I was alone and they’d returned to the cook-fire. But I couldn’t walk away. A curtain of heaven had been pulled back and I’d been given this glimpse. I lingered.
Eventually, I did leave, though. We ate lunch, cleaned up, headed on. Our trek kept the full view of the mountain, its skirt of trees, white coating of frost and looming mist in view for—I don’t know how long. Everybody else was talking and joking, and I joined in—but never forgetting the presence of the mountain. I cast a hundred glances and looks its way as we hiked on. After a while, the mists shrouded it and I’ve never seen it again. But it’s always close. As I write this account (too long for anyone but me, ashamed I can’t do it justice) it’s as if I’m standing before that placid lake again, my neck craning to glimpse the mountain’s hidden heights.
We catch glimpses. Though we live in the midst, in the continual presence of beauty, now and then something seizes us, and it’s as if we’ve been wearing blinders till then. Those who know me know I’m stony-hearted and usually inured to the wonders of nature. We're each inured in our own way, but it simply doesn't matter. Ignore them as we might, the world can barely contain all the beauties it holds; they burst forth all around us. I myself find beauty in the turn of a musical phrase—Vivaldi’s Magnificat and the Kyrie in Bach’s Mass in B Minor never fail to blur my vision with what in others would be tears; I used to coerce friends to take me to the Huntington Library in Los Angeles so I could look, over and over again, at a 15th century book of Cicero, each letter carefully written on vellum with unbelievable precision and beauty. Look at the familiar lines in the face of someone you love, the curl of a strand of a child’s hair, a cat drinking milk.
There is ugliness, too, and aplenty. Pain and fear and uncertainty more than abound. On the scales, I’m too ignorant to know which side tips deeper. In the century just passed, the most technologically advanced thus far, we’ve slaughtered more of each other than in all centuries past. None of us completes our course unscathed, and most of us pretty badly. But we catch glimpses.
Abba Evagrios, one of the Fathers of the Egyptian Desert sixteen hundred years ago, told his disciples, “Without temptations, no one will be saved.”
Temptations, trials, adversaries, troubles, pains, sorrows, griefs—they assail us, they hurt us, at times they seem to overwhelm us. The things that shake you may not shake me, but each of us gets profoundly shaken, and, on occasion, shaken to the core, where your secret despair and mine hides.
“Without temptations, no one will be saved.” In this fallen world, where evil in its many guises continually lurks, God hasn’t left us comfortless. He’s given us a world of Bach’s Kyrie and a child’s crooked smile, Cicero’s essays, the shimmering leaves of an aspen and a view of Mount Shuksan. These are glimpses, the ones on which we build our lives. We can carry the sorrow and despair, so easy to find and surrender to, or we can ferret out beauty, look for it, chase it and then cling to it and cherish it and build it into our lives with a rugged and graceful insistence. If we do, when the time comes to open your eyes after death closes them, the glimpses will have been just that—glimpses of a Vista that will draw you ever forward, into a Vision you can never exhaust.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Here's one glimpse worth taking, courtesy of Aaron Copeland, Ansel Adams-and the Creator of Heaven and Earth:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Now and again I get a whole batch of emails that tell me people are reading—and if not thinking about, at least responding to—my jottings. A couple of weeks back, my little essay “The Sting of Freedom,” sent 31 people to their keyboards to respond. Two complained I was a running-dog lackey of the Obamaite status quo and “weak on Islamo-fascism.” A few others chose to lecture me on the geography of the building site and the fact the building “isn’t a mosque.” The majority of those who wrote thought I was the smartest thing to come down the pike since Aristotle. That gives me more pause than anything else!
As I said in the blurb, I don’t know, or care, about the motivations of the builders of the building. I can’t, won’t presume, have no interest in judging their hearts (which I’m incompetent to do anyway), but I can pass judgment on their actions. Some think the “non-mosque” a grand gesture of religious tolerance (wouldn’t a mosque be an even better one, then, and right on the spot?), others think that, regardless of the builders' intentions, it’s insensitive and poorly thought out after the national trauma we endured that Day. Those who bothered to read beyond their preconceptions (even those who think I invented sliced bread) will see my essay was about one thing: Freedom. Freedom has costs and they're constant. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in good or bad taste to build the building. What does matter is that we see, “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” this: freedom isn’t something anyone grants—it’s something we inherently possess because we're made in the image of God. For that freedom to "have" meaning, to carry it, it intrinsically bears the possibility that things that are sacred can be mocked, ridiculed and attacked. Is the building a slap in the face? To a great number of people it is. I don’t know the builders, or the intentions of their hearts—none of us do (regardless of whatever claims the builders make or intentions we choose to attribute to them). I think all of us could agree to this: the proposed building intends to send a message. Its placing is not a coincidence. Only time will tell what the message is. But the real import is this: we are free and freedom runs deep—whether we like where it leads or not.
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Friday, August 13, 2010
Mirrors of the Soul
Today is the Friday the 13th of August, the 225th day of the year. There are 140 days remaining until we welcome 2011. This is a bad day for triskaidekaphobians—those who have a fear of the number 13—but there are others suffering even more today: paraskevidekatriaphobians are a psychological subset of triskaidekaphobians. Those unfortunates among us specifically fear the date of Friday the 13th; they can take solace in the fact that there are no more such days this year. The next one isn’t until May, 2011. If there are triskaidekaphobians, you know there are also triskaidekaphilians—those who embrace the day. The most famous group of triskaidekaphilians was the Thirteen Club. They were a group of 13 well-to-do New Yorkers who met at the fashionable Hotel Brighton for dinner every Friday the 13th from 1881 until the 1920s. They always gathered in Room 13 for a 13 course dinner. To enter the room members had to pass under a ladder at 8.13 on the appointed night. The first meeting was widely covered in New York newspapers, which promised to inform their readers of any tragedies which befell the participants. There were none—at least, not at the time. Over the years, five United States presidents, including Chester A Arthur and Theodore Roosevelt attended the dinners.
The Thirteen Club no longer exists, but if you’re looking to do more than hide out today, you might want to consider The First Annual Banana Festival, opening this afternoon in Sacramento, California. There will be banana poetry, a banana-split eating contest, a Sacramento Chefs’ Banana Bake-Off, the “Yellow As A Banana” Car Show and the crowning of Mister and Miss Banana, culminating the event. If you have meatier tastes, today also begins the Second Annual Mountain High BBQ & Music Festival, set in the hills of western North Carolina, outside Franklin. This event is for those who’ve dedicated their lives to barbecued meat and bluegrass music. It’s 48 hours of non-stop bluegrass, provided by the Rye Hollar Boys, the Frog Town Four, and the Mercy Mountain Boys. It’s also 48 hours of barbecuin’ (and eatin’) briskets, half-chickens, pork ribs and whole pigs. There’s a $2,000 prize for the best brisket, and a $1,000 prize for the best “whole cooked pig.” There will be a special concert tonight at the London parish church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Beginning at 7.30, the highly-regarded London Octave will perform Bach’s “Flute Concerto in A,” Handel’s “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba,” Pachelbel’s, “Canon” and Vivaldi’s “Flute Concerto ‘Tempesta di Mare’.” Refreshments will follow in the undercroft of the church, but it’s safe to say that “whole cooked pig” will not grace the evening’s menu.
Today is the feast, kept by Christians both Eastern and Western, of St Hippolytus, a priest in Rome, martyred in the 3rd century. Coptic Christians today celebrate the death of Pope St Timotheos II, the 26th Archbishop of Alexandria (the Copts call their archbishops “popes” too, which, after all, means “father”—“papa”) in 477. On the Jewish calendar today is the 3rd of Elul, 5770; for the ancient Romans this is the Ides of August, Idus Augusti—but that’s not all. The Romans had a whole cluster of gods to whom the August Ides were sacred. This is the day of Hercules the Victor, of Vertumnus, god of the changing seasons (no doubt the Romans were ready for the cool breezes of fall—if it would help, I might erect a small altar to him myself!), but most importantly this is the feast of Dianae in Aventino, a holiday for all the slaves in Rome. This is also the third day of the Muslim fast of Ramadan and the fourth day of “Elvis Week.”
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Aside from the fact that Bambi premiered on this date back in 1942 (August 13th wasn’t on a Friday that year), the births and deaths history records on this day would lead to a fascinating round-table discussion were the people brought together: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the famous French chemist who came up with the completely false “phlogiston” theory which dominated the science of his day, William Caxton, the first one to print books in English after Herr Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type press (the first printed book in Englisshe was The Historye of Troye—which was not a history book at all but an adventure novel; his second was a book on how to play—and win—at chess). Sharing this day with Lavoisier and Caxton is Annie Oakley, the famous markswoman and star attraction at the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. And the story about Annie and Kaiser Wilhelm II turns out to be true: when she was touring with Buffalo Bill in Europe through 1890-91, the Kaiser repeatedly attended the Wild West Show and was impressed at her skill with the .22 caliber. He asked her to shoot the ashes off his cigarette at 90 paces—which she did. Twenty years later, when the world was at war largely at the instigation of the same Kaiser, some American journalists suggested that she could have prevented the whole thing if she’d just aimed a little more to the left! On August 13, 1899, Alfred Hitchcock was born and nobody has been able to take a shower since without remembering him—or at least—Janet Leigh, slowly slipping to her porcelain death, blood swirling down the drain.
Many have no doubt that the association of Friday the 13th with Truly Unfortunate Circumstances is tied to the mysterious and medieval Knights Templar. On Friday the 13th, 1307, officers of the King of France, Philip IV (“the Fair”—meaning “handsome,” not “even-handed”) burst into the monasteries of the Templar Knights throughout the kingdom and arrested all members of the Order. The warrior-monks faced a multiplicity of charges, from idolatry to homosexuality to witchcraft to financial fraud— in other words, the King “threw the book at them.” The Order was rich—in property, money and possessions—and King Philip owed them a lot of money, which he couldn’t pay back. After Friday the 13th, he didn’t have to. The crown confiscated the property, money and possessions of the Order. The Templars were imprisoned and tortured until they confessed to a multitude of sins. The Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, was burned in Paris by the command of the king and with the consent of the pope (who had absolved the Templars of guilt after an investigation, but under pressure from the king—who was not going to give the money back—the pope later went along with the condemnations). As he burned, the Grand Master cried out, “God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Disaster will soon fall on those who have condemned us.” The pope died before the end of the month, the king was killed a few months later in a hunting accident. There may be a moral here, but I think it depends on who you talk to as to what it is!
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“Mirror, mirror on the wall; who is fairest of them all?” the evil Queen Grimhilde asks her magic mirror in the tale of Snow White. Grimhilde asks, knowing the answer—expecting it and depending on it. None of us are evil queens, nor do we have magic mirrors to flatter us, but we don’t really need them. Most of us, to one degree or another, flatter ourselves when we gaze into the glass. To watch us you wouldn’t think it—we look and inspect ourselves close up and at a distance, we pluck a hair here and dab ourselves with some gel to make ourselves just right. Lest you think I’m admonishing the fair sex, the most devoted fan of the mirror I’ve ever known is a man who spends 45 minutes a day—every day, his wife teases—primping before he heads out to the office. Grimhilde would envy him his mirror time.
Yes, we do it to look good. I’m sure my mirror-loving acquaintance tells himself in the dog-eat-dog world of finance, you’ve got to look your best to do your best. If it’s not true, it certainly is one of those maxims that sounds true.
I don’t spend a lot of time “reflecting” about mirrors (sorry, it was irresistible), but a few mornings back I was reading more of the theological poetry of St Ephrem the Syrian. He didn’t write about mirrors (that I know of), but he did write a long series of hymns titled On Paradise. Queen Grimhilde intruded herself on me when I read one of his lines:
“Woe they didn’t even know to dread
Has come on them unawares…”
Ephrem is singing about those who come to the gates of Paradise unprepared.
“When they see they have lost all,
That their riches do not endure
Their carnal achievements and hopes
Exist no more in that blessed Land;
When their beauty of face and form
Their strength and worldly power
Have vanished
Abandoning them and fleeing,
Only then do they turn an eye of inspection
On themselves.
“Then are they filled with dread and dismay.
For the first time they see themselves
As the Lord of Paradise sees them.
Then are they choked with remorse
As a voice cries to them:
‘Your possessions were a passing dream
All you trusted in is darkness…’ ”
St Ephrem’s song of judgment is meant not as a condemnation but a warning. His song is of hope. He doesn’t claim, Buddha-like, the world is an illusion. It’s bluntly real, he says. The problem is we don’t want to see it as it is. I want to hear “I’m the fairest of them all.” I want the world to be about what I think it should be about: ME!
So I build a world of self-delusion, telling myself and all those who’ll listen that the world is about _______ (fill in the blank yourself—money, power, fame, pleasure, success, “winning,” whatever—it turns out it’s not even about knowledge, or “learning a lesson”). We fool ourselves to such a degree, Ephrem warns, that “woe they didn’t even know to dread has come upon them unawares.” We say things like “a God of love would never send somebody to hell for _____”, blind to the truth that God sends nobody to hell. Hell is full of those who insist on being there. No place else is good enough for them but somewhere they (think they) call the shots. “My way or the highway,” may work for wayward teen-agers, but if that’s our fixed attitude, God will let us have it “our way” in the end. We get what we want.
St Ephrem says of the unhappy souls on that Dreadful Day “for the first time, they see themselves as the Lord of Paradise sees them…” and they’re filled with despair. Those who walk their labyrinths have the same causes for despair. We’re little different. Walking the labyrinth in faith, though, has formed in us a different hope. Queen Grimhilda looks in the mirror to see what she wants and expects—her own reflection. When the Day comes for us, we will see, not our own faces reflected, but that of Another, One Who we'll recognize then as having been with us, loving us, all along.
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The Thirteen Club no longer exists, but if you’re looking to do more than hide out today, you might want to consider The First Annual Banana Festival, opening this afternoon in Sacramento, California. There will be banana poetry, a banana-split eating contest, a Sacramento Chefs’ Banana Bake-Off, the “Yellow As A Banana” Car Show and the crowning of Mister and Miss Banana, culminating the event. If you have meatier tastes, today also begins the Second Annual Mountain High BBQ & Music Festival, set in the hills of western North Carolina, outside Franklin. This event is for those who’ve dedicated their lives to barbecued meat and bluegrass music. It’s 48 hours of non-stop bluegrass, provided by the Rye Hollar Boys, the Frog Town Four, and the Mercy Mountain Boys. It’s also 48 hours of barbecuin’ (and eatin’) briskets, half-chickens, pork ribs and whole pigs. There’s a $2,000 prize for the best brisket, and a $1,000 prize for the best “whole cooked pig.” There will be a special concert tonight at the London parish church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Beginning at 7.30, the highly-regarded London Octave will perform Bach’s “Flute Concerto in A,” Handel’s “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba,” Pachelbel’s, “Canon” and Vivaldi’s “Flute Concerto ‘Tempesta di Mare’.” Refreshments will follow in the undercroft of the church, but it’s safe to say that “whole cooked pig” will not grace the evening’s menu.
Today is the feast, kept by Christians both Eastern and Western, of St Hippolytus, a priest in Rome, martyred in the 3rd century. Coptic Christians today celebrate the death of Pope St Timotheos II, the 26th Archbishop of Alexandria (the Copts call their archbishops “popes” too, which, after all, means “father”—“papa”) in 477. On the Jewish calendar today is the 3rd of Elul, 5770; for the ancient Romans this is the Ides of August, Idus Augusti—but that’s not all. The Romans had a whole cluster of gods to whom the August Ides were sacred. This is the day of Hercules the Victor, of Vertumnus, god of the changing seasons (no doubt the Romans were ready for the cool breezes of fall—if it would help, I might erect a small altar to him myself!), but most importantly this is the feast of Dianae in Aventino, a holiday for all the slaves in Rome. This is also the third day of the Muslim fast of Ramadan and the fourth day of “Elvis Week.”
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Aside from the fact that Bambi premiered on this date back in 1942 (August 13th wasn’t on a Friday that year), the births and deaths history records on this day would lead to a fascinating round-table discussion were the people brought together: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the famous French chemist who came up with the completely false “phlogiston” theory which dominated the science of his day, William Caxton, the first one to print books in English after Herr Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type press (the first printed book in Englisshe was The Historye of Troye—which was not a history book at all but an adventure novel; his second was a book on how to play—and win—at chess). Sharing this day with Lavoisier and Caxton is Annie Oakley, the famous markswoman and star attraction at the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. And the story about Annie and Kaiser Wilhelm II turns out to be true: when she was touring with Buffalo Bill in Europe through 1890-91, the Kaiser repeatedly attended the Wild West Show and was impressed at her skill with the .22 caliber. He asked her to shoot the ashes off his cigarette at 90 paces—which she did. Twenty years later, when the world was at war largely at the instigation of the same Kaiser, some American journalists suggested that she could have prevented the whole thing if she’d just aimed a little more to the left! On August 13, 1899, Alfred Hitchcock was born and nobody has been able to take a shower since without remembering him—or at least—Janet Leigh, slowly slipping to her porcelain death, blood swirling down the drain.
Many have no doubt that the association of Friday the 13th with Truly Unfortunate Circumstances is tied to the mysterious and medieval Knights Templar. On Friday the 13th, 1307, officers of the King of France, Philip IV (“the Fair”—meaning “handsome,” not “even-handed”) burst into the monasteries of the Templar Knights throughout the kingdom and arrested all members of the Order. The warrior-monks faced a multiplicity of charges, from idolatry to homosexuality to witchcraft to financial fraud— in other words, the King “threw the book at them.” The Order was rich—in property, money and possessions—and King Philip owed them a lot of money, which he couldn’t pay back. After Friday the 13th, he didn’t have to. The crown confiscated the property, money and possessions of the Order. The Templars were imprisoned and tortured until they confessed to a multitude of sins. The Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, was burned in Paris by the command of the king and with the consent of the pope (who had absolved the Templars of guilt after an investigation, but under pressure from the king—who was not going to give the money back—the pope later went along with the condemnations). As he burned, the Grand Master cried out, “God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Disaster will soon fall on those who have condemned us.” The pope died before the end of the month, the king was killed a few months later in a hunting accident. There may be a moral here, but I think it depends on who you talk to as to what it is!
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“Mirror, mirror on the wall; who is fairest of them all?” the evil Queen Grimhilde asks her magic mirror in the tale of Snow White. Grimhilde asks, knowing the answer—expecting it and depending on it. None of us are evil queens, nor do we have magic mirrors to flatter us, but we don’t really need them. Most of us, to one degree or another, flatter ourselves when we gaze into the glass. To watch us you wouldn’t think it—we look and inspect ourselves close up and at a distance, we pluck a hair here and dab ourselves with some gel to make ourselves just right. Lest you think I’m admonishing the fair sex, the most devoted fan of the mirror I’ve ever known is a man who spends 45 minutes a day—every day, his wife teases—primping before he heads out to the office. Grimhilde would envy him his mirror time.
Yes, we do it to look good. I’m sure my mirror-loving acquaintance tells himself in the dog-eat-dog world of finance, you’ve got to look your best to do your best. If it’s not true, it certainly is one of those maxims that sounds true.
I don’t spend a lot of time “reflecting” about mirrors (sorry, it was irresistible), but a few mornings back I was reading more of the theological poetry of St Ephrem the Syrian. He didn’t write about mirrors (that I know of), but he did write a long series of hymns titled On Paradise. Queen Grimhilde intruded herself on me when I read one of his lines:
“Woe they didn’t even know to dread
Has come on them unawares…”
Ephrem is singing about those who come to the gates of Paradise unprepared.
“When they see they have lost all,
That their riches do not endure
Their carnal achievements and hopes
Exist no more in that blessed Land;
When their beauty of face and form
Their strength and worldly power
Have vanished
Abandoning them and fleeing,
Only then do they turn an eye of inspection
On themselves.
“Then are they filled with dread and dismay.
For the first time they see themselves
As the Lord of Paradise sees them.
Then are they choked with remorse
As a voice cries to them:
‘Your possessions were a passing dream
All you trusted in is darkness…’ ”
St Ephrem’s song of judgment is meant not as a condemnation but a warning. His song is of hope. He doesn’t claim, Buddha-like, the world is an illusion. It’s bluntly real, he says. The problem is we don’t want to see it as it is. I want to hear “I’m the fairest of them all.” I want the world to be about what I think it should be about: ME!
So I build a world of self-delusion, telling myself and all those who’ll listen that the world is about _______ (fill in the blank yourself—money, power, fame, pleasure, success, “winning,” whatever—it turns out it’s not even about knowledge, or “learning a lesson”). We fool ourselves to such a degree, Ephrem warns, that “woe they didn’t even know to dread has come upon them unawares.” We say things like “a God of love would never send somebody to hell for _____”, blind to the truth that God sends nobody to hell. Hell is full of those who insist on being there. No place else is good enough for them but somewhere they (think they) call the shots. “My way or the highway,” may work for wayward teen-agers, but if that’s our fixed attitude, God will let us have it “our way” in the end. We get what we want.
St Ephrem says of the unhappy souls on that Dreadful Day “for the first time, they see themselves as the Lord of Paradise sees them…” and they’re filled with despair. Those who walk their labyrinths have the same causes for despair. We’re little different. Walking the labyrinth in faith, though, has formed in us a different hope. Queen Grimhilda looks in the mirror to see what she wants and expects—her own reflection. When the Day comes for us, we will see, not our own faces reflected, but that of Another, One Who we'll recognize then as having been with us, loving us, all along.
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Friday, August 06, 2010
The Sting of Freedom
Today is the 218th day of the year; 147 days remain in 2010. Tonight at 7 PM, the World’s Largest Gathering of Redheads will assemble at the Dublin Festival in Dublin, Ohio. Among other things, the Gathering will choose the “world’s reddest hair” and clump everyone together for the “world’s largest photo” of redheads. Thirty-five hundred of them are expected. It’s all part of Dublin Fest, the world’s “second largest” Irish festival, and will include chances to attend an Irish Wake, taste some medieval Irish mead, and sit at a 200 year-old loom and weave some Irish linen. Or, you can participate in the “Dubcrawl,” slowly making your way through the Irish pubs in the city (the Dubcrawl begins Friday night and ends “sometime Sunday”)—sure it is and this will be popular with the local constabulary. In Sitka, Alaska, the Sitka Seafood Festival opens tonight with a Giant Salmon Bake (no mention of how large the Giant Salmon is). Among the weekend’s activates will be tours of the local canneries and the opportunity to can your own tin of salmon as a souvenir. If salmon-canning or pub-crawling don’t quite move you, consider the “Technomony Conference.” Technomony? What’s that, you ask? Here’s from the conference brochure: “Techonomy is technology and economy. It is organized activities related to the invention, development, production, distribution and consumption of technology-enhanced goods and services that a society uses to address the problem of scarcity and to enhance the quality of life.” With that piece of descriptive techno-prose you won’t be surprised to hear the principal speaker is Bill Gates, nor that it’s meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Lake Tahoe. All in all, I think I’d rather look over the redheads…
Today most Christians worldwide are celebrating the feast of the Transfiguration, when, on Mount Tabor, Jesus was “transfigured” before His disciples. “The fashion of His countenance was altered, and His raiment was white and glistering,” says the account in the King James Bible. Since I first heard the word “glistering” many, many years ago, I’ve loved it, almost as much as the old word “throughly” (latter changed to the more pedestrian “thoroughly” by the same sort of people who now write brochures on “technomony” conferences). The fifty-first psalm, the great Psalm of Lent, has the evocative line “wash me thoroughly from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin.” Nowadays we hear in its place “let my wrongdoing be washed away, and make me clean from evil.” Similarly banal, one of the most popular Bible translations today changes “glistering” to “dazzling white,” which simply makes one wonder what detergent the Lord Jesus used at the laundromat. O tempora! O mores!
Since we’ve reverted to Latin, I should mention that, on the ancient Roman calendar, today is reckoned as ante diem VIII Idus Augusti; it’s the 26th of Av, 5770 on the Jewish calendar; and Coptic Christians keep today as the 30th of Abib, the feast of the Martyrdom of St Mercurius (the Copts celebrate the Transfiguration on August 19th). On Bourbon Street in New Orleans, today is “Nun Day.” On August 6, 1727, French Ursuline nuns first arrived at New Orleans, which is as good a reason for a party as any. People there will be observing the arrival of the pious Ursulines until the early hours of tomorrow.
If you happen to be the pope, today is a day you want to pass quietly. Five popes have entered eternity on August 6th, from Pope St Sixtus II, who was decapitated on this day in 258 by order of the Emperor Valerian, to Pope Paul VI, who died in his bed at Castel Gandolfo in 1978. In 523, Pope St Hormisdas died—the only pope who was father of a pope (at least, that we know of!), in 768, Pope Constantine II (well, actually, he was an anti-pope, but we’ll have to take that up another time) died in prison (many anti-popes came to a bad end), and on August 6th, 1458, Pope Callixtus III just died. We derive our word “nepotism” from his reign. Nepos is the Latin for “nephew,” and Callistus appointed several relatives, and two nephews, to high ecclesiastical positions. He was, after all, a Borgia! The old Catholic Encyclopedia tersely concludes its article about Callistus, “He left, at his death, a rather remarkable sum of money.”
Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway-Shakespeare (not really), died today in 1623. She out-lived the Bard by seven years. Their marriage—which lasted 34—is one of the favorite guessing-games of Shakespeare’s biographers. In his will, Shakespeare famously left his wife only one thing: his “second-best bed.” She was older than he; when they married, she was 26 and he 18—and they had to obtain a special church license to marry in a hurry. The reason is no mystery—six months later their daughter Susanna was baptized. Historians, poring over dusty church record books of the day, have uncovered another marriage license, also issued to William Shakespeare, the day before his hurriedly-obtained one. But this one doesn't mention Anne Hathaway. This license was issued to William Shakespeare and Anne Whateley in a village four miles distant from where Anne Hathaway and her young fiancé were soon to tie the nuptial knot. Books have been written on these few facts, full of guesses and speculations. Was the Bard enamored of another and forced into a loveless marriage because of a youthful indiscretion? Are “Hathaway” and “Whateley” close enough to be confused by an old clergyman, who mistakenly entered the wrong name into the register (I can testify old clergymen are easily confused) or did Shakespeare simply like girls named “Anne”? We’ll never know—but that “second-best bed” is a phrase as haunting (and, pardon me, pregnant) as any in the Bard’s plays.
Today is the birthday of “Old Sparky,” the electric chair. It was first used (or-uh-“mis-used” since it malfunctioned with quite gruesome results) to dispatch William Kemmler in New York's Auburn Prison on August 6, 1890. George Westinghouse (yes, that Westinghouse) later remarked “It would have been more humane had they used an axe!” The rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse and the production of the Electric Chair is detailed in a fascinating book, Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death. Today ends National Clown Week, first inaugurated in 1971 by President Richard M Nixon at the behest of Congress. Any remark on my part here would simply be supererogatory…
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The plans are made; the contractors have the blueprints and all the deeds and permits are in hand. A mosque is going to be built next to Ground Zero, as the site of the fallen Twin Towers in New York City has been called since that ghastly, horrible day nine years ago. It’s an outrage to the memory of the victims. It’s an insult to the firefighters and policemen who died so that others could live. Whatever the motivations of those who are doggedly pursuing this project, they can’t help but be aware of how many people, not just in New York City, but across the country, feel this is a collective slap in the face. That may very well be the intent. Whether it is or not, it stings.
I’m an old conservative—so old and outdated, they don’t even make conservatives like me anymore, and the political party to which I most relate never quite even formed; it died out with people like Patrick Henry. It was about one thing: freedom. Henry and his ilk opposed the new-fangled Constitution of Washington and Franklin and Adams, saying that it put the power of the State—the government—at the disposal of those who would use it to coerce others into political and financial servitude. They called themselves the “anti-federalists” and, like so many who are simply “anti” this or that (even “anti-popes”!), they eventually disappeared. A few crusty guys like me have read themselves into anti-federalism, but our day is past. The Brave New World we are creating will have less and less room for genuine freedom, even as we congratulate ourselves on how free we are.
One of the reasons, an old curmudgeon like me reasons anyway, that we so happily surrender our freedom is we have only a scant idea of what freedom is. The founders of the country, federalists and anti-federalists alike, believed in arguing. They believed that when people disagreed, they should argue out the question as best they could, trying to find an answer if there was one. That’s not an American trait, it’s a human one. It doesn’t go back to Jefferson and Adams (who were able practitioners of the art), but Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. It’s built into our civilization. Unfortunately, we don’t argue anymore—we shout instead. Slogans right and left have replaced discourse—and where discourse is lacking, so too are the fruits of freedom.
The mosque is an outrage, and it’s meet and right for people to say so. But more sacred to the slowly-vanishing American character than the memories of the dead should be the gift of freedom. The mosque should go up, not because we love the dead less, but because we love freedom more.
Freedom doesn’t trace its roots to the shaded groves of ancient Athens but to the Garden God planted east of Eden. We don’t get our notion of “inalienable rights” from the Declaration of Independence but (unpopular as the thought may be today) from the tattered old scrolls of the Bible. We’re free not because somebody says so but because God made us so.
The people who are opposed to the mosque are opposed because they love America and what they believe it is and can be. The people who want to build the mosque are building it (for whatever other reasons) because they love Islam. I don’t care what it means for Islam, but I care very much for what it means for freedom. It seems to say that we do cherish freedom—we recognize the freedom somebody has to insult us and the freedom we have to answer back, even-if you’ll pardon my burr-under-the saddle Christianity coming to the fore—if that answer is to turn the other cheek and invite further insult.
Regardless of the palaver on the so-called “right,” America is not a Christian nation. No government in the world can ever be, or, trappings aside, ever has been. Discourse breaks down; governments collide; wars happen. St Thomas and Christian tradition make allowance for the concept of “just war,” but everybody will admit that if people are killing each other, charity is not the chief operating principle. Jesus’ Kingdom is not of this world. “If it were,” He said to Pilate, “My servants would fight.” Whatever the intentions of those who crossed the Atlantic long ago to set up a New Zion, we have something different now: a country among all the other countries of the world, and so one with presidents and their tax-collectors and policemen with guns. But the glimmer of freedom cherished so long ago in Philadelphia and Boston and Williamsburg isn’t snuffed out. It can’t be. It’s was breathed into us in Eden.
They’ll build the mosque, not because it should be there, not because it’s in good taste, not even because they have the “right,” but because they have the freedom to do it. That freedom was bought yet once more by the men and women who died in that Terrible Place.
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Today most Christians worldwide are celebrating the feast of the Transfiguration, when, on Mount Tabor, Jesus was “transfigured” before His disciples. “The fashion of His countenance was altered, and His raiment was white and glistering,” says the account in the King James Bible. Since I first heard the word “glistering” many, many years ago, I’ve loved it, almost as much as the old word “throughly” (latter changed to the more pedestrian “thoroughly” by the same sort of people who now write brochures on “technomony” conferences). The fifty-first psalm, the great Psalm of Lent, has the evocative line “wash me thoroughly from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin.” Nowadays we hear in its place “let my wrongdoing be washed away, and make me clean from evil.” Similarly banal, one of the most popular Bible translations today changes “glistering” to “dazzling white,” which simply makes one wonder what detergent the Lord Jesus used at the laundromat. O tempora! O mores!
Since we’ve reverted to Latin, I should mention that, on the ancient Roman calendar, today is reckoned as ante diem VIII Idus Augusti; it’s the 26th of Av, 5770 on the Jewish calendar; and Coptic Christians keep today as the 30th of Abib, the feast of the Martyrdom of St Mercurius (the Copts celebrate the Transfiguration on August 19th). On Bourbon Street in New Orleans, today is “Nun Day.” On August 6, 1727, French Ursuline nuns first arrived at New Orleans, which is as good a reason for a party as any. People there will be observing the arrival of the pious Ursulines until the early hours of tomorrow.
If you happen to be the pope, today is a day you want to pass quietly. Five popes have entered eternity on August 6th, from Pope St Sixtus II, who was decapitated on this day in 258 by order of the Emperor Valerian, to Pope Paul VI, who died in his bed at Castel Gandolfo in 1978. In 523, Pope St Hormisdas died—the only pope who was father of a pope (at least, that we know of!), in 768, Pope Constantine II (well, actually, he was an anti-pope, but we’ll have to take that up another time) died in prison (many anti-popes came to a bad end), and on August 6th, 1458, Pope Callixtus III just died. We derive our word “nepotism” from his reign. Nepos is the Latin for “nephew,” and Callistus appointed several relatives, and two nephews, to high ecclesiastical positions. He was, after all, a Borgia! The old Catholic Encyclopedia tersely concludes its article about Callistus, “He left, at his death, a rather remarkable sum of money.”
Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway-Shakespeare (not really), died today in 1623. She out-lived the Bard by seven years. Their marriage—which lasted 34—is one of the favorite guessing-games of Shakespeare’s biographers. In his will, Shakespeare famously left his wife only one thing: his “second-best bed.” She was older than he; when they married, she was 26 and he 18—and they had to obtain a special church license to marry in a hurry. The reason is no mystery—six months later their daughter Susanna was baptized. Historians, poring over dusty church record books of the day, have uncovered another marriage license, also issued to William Shakespeare, the day before his hurriedly-obtained one. But this one doesn't mention Anne Hathaway. This license was issued to William Shakespeare and Anne Whateley in a village four miles distant from where Anne Hathaway and her young fiancé were soon to tie the nuptial knot. Books have been written on these few facts, full of guesses and speculations. Was the Bard enamored of another and forced into a loveless marriage because of a youthful indiscretion? Are “Hathaway” and “Whateley” close enough to be confused by an old clergyman, who mistakenly entered the wrong name into the register (I can testify old clergymen are easily confused) or did Shakespeare simply like girls named “Anne”? We’ll never know—but that “second-best bed” is a phrase as haunting (and, pardon me, pregnant) as any in the Bard’s plays.
Today is the birthday of “Old Sparky,” the electric chair. It was first used (or-uh-“mis-used” since it malfunctioned with quite gruesome results) to dispatch William Kemmler in New York's Auburn Prison on August 6, 1890. George Westinghouse (yes, that Westinghouse) later remarked “It would have been more humane had they used an axe!” The rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse and the production of the Electric Chair is detailed in a fascinating book, Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death. Today ends National Clown Week, first inaugurated in 1971 by President Richard M Nixon at the behest of Congress. Any remark on my part here would simply be supererogatory…
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The plans are made; the contractors have the blueprints and all the deeds and permits are in hand. A mosque is going to be built next to Ground Zero, as the site of the fallen Twin Towers in New York City has been called since that ghastly, horrible day nine years ago. It’s an outrage to the memory of the victims. It’s an insult to the firefighters and policemen who died so that others could live. Whatever the motivations of those who are doggedly pursuing this project, they can’t help but be aware of how many people, not just in New York City, but across the country, feel this is a collective slap in the face. That may very well be the intent. Whether it is or not, it stings.
I’m an old conservative—so old and outdated, they don’t even make conservatives like me anymore, and the political party to which I most relate never quite even formed; it died out with people like Patrick Henry. It was about one thing: freedom. Henry and his ilk opposed the new-fangled Constitution of Washington and Franklin and Adams, saying that it put the power of the State—the government—at the disposal of those who would use it to coerce others into political and financial servitude. They called themselves the “anti-federalists” and, like so many who are simply “anti” this or that (even “anti-popes”!), they eventually disappeared. A few crusty guys like me have read themselves into anti-federalism, but our day is past. The Brave New World we are creating will have less and less room for genuine freedom, even as we congratulate ourselves on how free we are.
One of the reasons, an old curmudgeon like me reasons anyway, that we so happily surrender our freedom is we have only a scant idea of what freedom is. The founders of the country, federalists and anti-federalists alike, believed in arguing. They believed that when people disagreed, they should argue out the question as best they could, trying to find an answer if there was one. That’s not an American trait, it’s a human one. It doesn’t go back to Jefferson and Adams (who were able practitioners of the art), but Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. It’s built into our civilization. Unfortunately, we don’t argue anymore—we shout instead. Slogans right and left have replaced discourse—and where discourse is lacking, so too are the fruits of freedom.
The mosque is an outrage, and it’s meet and right for people to say so. But more sacred to the slowly-vanishing American character than the memories of the dead should be the gift of freedom. The mosque should go up, not because we love the dead less, but because we love freedom more.
Freedom doesn’t trace its roots to the shaded groves of ancient Athens but to the Garden God planted east of Eden. We don’t get our notion of “inalienable rights” from the Declaration of Independence but (unpopular as the thought may be today) from the tattered old scrolls of the Bible. We’re free not because somebody says so but because God made us so.
The people who are opposed to the mosque are opposed because they love America and what they believe it is and can be. The people who want to build the mosque are building it (for whatever other reasons) because they love Islam. I don’t care what it means for Islam, but I care very much for what it means for freedom. It seems to say that we do cherish freedom—we recognize the freedom somebody has to insult us and the freedom we have to answer back, even-if you’ll pardon my burr-under-the saddle Christianity coming to the fore—if that answer is to turn the other cheek and invite further insult.
Regardless of the palaver on the so-called “right,” America is not a Christian nation. No government in the world can ever be, or, trappings aside, ever has been. Discourse breaks down; governments collide; wars happen. St Thomas and Christian tradition make allowance for the concept of “just war,” but everybody will admit that if people are killing each other, charity is not the chief operating principle. Jesus’ Kingdom is not of this world. “If it were,” He said to Pilate, “My servants would fight.” Whatever the intentions of those who crossed the Atlantic long ago to set up a New Zion, we have something different now: a country among all the other countries of the world, and so one with presidents and their tax-collectors and policemen with guns. But the glimmer of freedom cherished so long ago in Philadelphia and Boston and Williamsburg isn’t snuffed out. It can’t be. It’s was breathed into us in Eden.
They’ll build the mosque, not because it should be there, not because it’s in good taste, not even because they have the “right,” but because they have the freedom to do it. That freedom was bought yet once more by the men and women who died in that Terrible Place.
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Friday, July 30, 2010
A Convenient God
Today is July 30th, the 211th day of 2010; 154 days remain in the year. If your travels take you to Indiana today you might want to stop in Berne for an hour or two and join in the festivities of “Berne Swiss Days,” with yodeling competitions, polka bands and a “stein-toss” contest. If your tastes run to a more literary vein and you’re in Mystic, Connecticut (I was ordained to the diaconate in Mystic long, long ago), there is a marathon reading of Moby Dick beginning this afternoon and continuing until the whole book is read aloud. The reading is supposed to go on until sometime around midnight of August 1, the day and hour the book’s author was born. The text will be recited aboard the Charles W Morgan, the last wooden whaling ship in the world, permanently docked at the Mystic seaport. An actor portraying Herman Melville will read the first and last chapters of the book, otherwise those attending will be asked to take turns. A big WHITE birthday cake (I’ll let you guess what the WHITE birthday cake is in the shape of) will be served at midnight, shipboard. At 2.30 this afternoon, there will be more macabre gathering in the parking lot of the former Red Fox Restaurant, when members of the “Where’s Jimmy?” Club hold their 9th annual celebration. More on that later.
Among those on the long list of saints whose feasts are kept today, St Calimerius of Milan is often overlooked. His feast is observed only in Milan, Italy, where he served as bishop late in the second century. During persecutions under the Emperor Commodus, about 190, he was dropped, headfirst, down a deep, dry well. Orthodox Christians today celebrate the feast of St Leonid of Ust'nedumsk, a seventeenth century monk whose labors included the draining of swamps. According to the Coptic calendar, today is the 23rd of Abib and the feast of St Marina, “the young virgin whose inner strength proved her mightier than that of many young men,” according to the hymn written in her honor, and also the feast of St Longinus, the Roman soldier whose spear pierced the side of Christ at His Crucifixion (this wasn’t why he is recognized as a saint). On the Jewish calendar today is the 19th of Av, they year is 5770. For the ancient Romans, today was “ante diem II kalendas augusti.” For citizens of the United States it is, and has been since 2008, National Cheesecake Day, brought to you by the men and women who now sit in the seats once occupied by Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and John C Calhoun. Is this a great county or what?
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I doubt they were incited by the story of St Calimerius, but today commemorates the first of the three most famous Defenestrations in history. On July 30, 1419, a group of angry citizens in Prague forced their way into the Town Hall and defenestrated a city judge, the mayor and all thirteen members of the city council. The defenestration (from the Latin de: out of, with a downward motion implied; fenestra: window) proved fatal to each and every one; a look at the picture above right will show you why. Sixty-five years later, seven city councilmen were defenestrated by a group of citizens angry about what they claimed was unfairly administered taxes and one hundred and forty years after that, two imperial regents, appointed to govern the city by Emperor Rudolf II, were similarly defenestrated, a current chronicle noted “according to custom.” On March 10, 1948, Jan Masaryk, was found on the sidewalk outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a bathroom window seven stories above was discovered open. His death was ruled a suicide, but as Masaryk was an agent of the unpopular communist government, rumors immediately spread that he was defenestrated. Is it by accident that congressional office buildings in Washington, DC, rarely have more than two stories?
Today is Mozart’s birthday. Not Johann Chrysostomos Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but that of his sister, Maria Anna Wulburgia Ignatia Mozart (nicknamed “Nannerl” by her family). She was born July 30, 1751, five years before her famous brother. When she was six, her father began teaching her the harpsichord, and before long she had mastered both that and the piano. At nine, she’d published a book of harpsichord compositions and was regarded as a local prodigy. Two years later, Maria Anna and her young brother Wolfgang played a concert before Maximilian III in Munich and filled the concert halls of the city for three weeks. In those days, Maria was regarded as a wunderkind and given top billing over her brother. For five years, the brother-sister act traveled the courts of Europe, winning accolades in Paris and Vienna under the protective eye of their father. They performed for the “crowned heads of Europe,” playing a concert before the King and Queen of France in January of 1764 and two months later they amazed King George III in London, who said they were “living proof of the existence of God.” The Mozarts remained in England more than a year and a half, and performed several times at the request of the king. When the family returned to the continent, Maria became seriously ill and her father was told she would die. She was given Last Rites, but after six months hovering close to death, she recovered. During her recuperation, her father took young Wolfgang Amadeus and continued their concert schedule without her. Early in 1768, she played again with her brother before the French court at Versailles, but now her brother was the more celebrated of the two. Later that year, when Mozart was invited to play before Pope Clement XVI on Easter Day, his sister was left home in Salzburg. She had played her last concert. Her father informed her it was time for her to marry instead and shortly thereafter he chose her future husband from among a group of suitors he’d interviewed. Though she continued play privately and even to write music (which her brother highly praised) her father deemed this was inappropriate for a married woman and some biographers say he destroyed her compositions to prove his point. After the death of her husband, long after the deaths of her famous brother and overbearing father, she returned to a musical career, teaching piano to the children of Salzburg’s minor nobility. And unlike any of the rest of her family, Maria died very rich. None of her children had any interest in music.
Thirty-five years ago this afternoon, at 2.30, Jimmy Hoffa was seen for the last time—at least, by anybody who’s willing to talk about it. He was sitting in a car outside one of his favorite eateries, Harris Machus’ posh Red Fox Restaurant in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills. Nobody knows for sure whether Hoffa was sent to “sleep with the fishes,” but a federal judge ruled on July 30, 1985 (ten years to the day after his disappearance), that the Teamster boss was permanently sleeping somewhere. After Hoffa’s disappearance, Machus worried his up-scale restaurant, with its English fox-hunt theme and expensive cusine—rack of lamb a la Leopold, veal scaloppine a la Française—were specialties of the house, would go under because of the bad publicity. He needn’t have worried. The high-end crowds doubled in size, it took weeks for reservations to be honored. All the right people in the Detroit area, it seemed, wanted to eat at the place Jimmy Hoffa might have had his last meal. Twenty years after Jimmy Hoffa went on his Last Ride, Machus sold his restaurant and retired to Florida. “It’s where Jimmy himself might have retired,” Machus said, “but he loved our Boston scrod too much. He should’ve planned to eat somewhere else that afternoon.”
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I have a friend in Santa Barbara, a sometime reader of these posts, who is an atheist. Like many atheists, he doesn’t hesitate to share the reasons for his disbelief; unlike some, he acknowledges his inability to understand everything. More than being an atheist (which he most certainly is), I’ve told him more than once, he’s looking for what he believes to be the truth. Ultimately, someone who’s looking for “the truth” will find themselves walking away from atheism. They’ll also, though, walk away from a host of other “-isms.” To be an atheist is to have a belief as firmly entrenched as that of the most ardent Muslim or snake-handling Pentecostalist. Atheism is not lack of belief in God, it’s a “positive” statement and belief, an intellectual assurance that there IS no God. Most people who don’t believe in God aren’t atheists—I reckon there aren’t really too any like my friend who lives in the cooling shades and gentle breezes of Santa Barbara (where, though you may not believe in God, it’s hard not to believe in Heaven!). Most people simply don’t care; they don’t see the relevance of God—or if I can be blunt—they don’t see the relevance of faith as lived in the lives of those who profess faith.
Christian, Muslim or Jew, many “religious” people (and let me hasten to say “religion” is not a bad word in my vocabulary, as is commonplace nowadays) have little notion of the inner content, the underlying principles of their religion. Lutherans, Shiites and Hasidic Jews have decidedly different doctrines and there are many things to keep them apart. But there are things about which they can agree—and I don’t mean that it’s better to feed the hungry than to let them starve (though that may be a point worth considering). The beginning, the foundation and underlying principle of each of these three religions is the insistence on God—something they don’t share, say, with Buddhism, which finds the notion of “God” unnecessary and irrelevant. But it’s more than an insistence on belief in God. Each of these religions insists on the complete “otherness” of God. God is not like us. He’s not one of us to the “nth” degree—not just smart but super-smart, not just good but really, really good, not just like a kindly uncle but more an always jolly, ever-indulgent Santa Claus. God is Holy, Separate, Different. In ancient times, when a scribe would write the word “God” in a manuscript, he would use distinctive letters to mark it apart from the surrounding text. They would wash their hands before writing God’s name. In times past, Christians would bow their heads whenever the name of Jesus was said, in church and out. If you go to a church supply store today, you’ll see Jesus’ name printed on Frisbees and “God” used as a marketing logo.
Small wonder there are atheists.
We’ve created God in our own image. Dummied Him down, fattened Him up and made Him a good ole beer-drinkin’ buddy, who winks when we “sin.” Today’s worship is no longer an “entering into His courts” “laying aside all earthly things,” but more an Amway meeting. We don’t approach Him with awe (a word which has almost lost its meaning) to offer Him our worship; we expect to be entertained and made to feel good about ourselves. Such a god, regardless of who believes in him, Christian, Jew or Muslim, isn’t worth believing in, is certainly undeserving or worship and if this is what “religion” is offering, regardless of how much this may pack ‘em in the pews and fill up the collection plates, it will shrivel the souls of its adherents.
St Ephrem the Syrian, the theological poet of 1600 years ago, said that God was unknowable in Himself, completely different and wholly removed from His creation. We don’t even have the ability to describe Him, because He can’t be encompassed in words. We know about God, Ephrem says, only because God has revealed Himself to us.
“Nature and Scripture bear witness to the Creator;
Nature, as we live in its midst,
Scripture, as we ponder its words.”
If the Lord hadn’t shown Himself glimpses of Himself, St Ephrem says, we’d be completely ignorant of Him. As it is, our minds can only grasp Him through symbols and words that hint at Who He Is.
“Scripture refers to His ‘ears’
To promise us He hears us;
To His ‘eyes’
To let us know He sees.
For our sakes He puts on such names and words
Though they nowhere describe His true Being
He clothes Himself with words of human language
Because otherwise, we would be blind.”
This is a God to worship, Who guides us, otherwise blind, down the labyrinthine paths we walk. We don’t know what He will do with us, but make no mistake: each halting step brings us nearer to a burning Fire—of Self-giving Love. If we lived as if that were true, there would be no atheists, agnostics or even believers. We would all be, in that happy phrase of St Thomas Aquinas, “friends of God.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Among those on the long list of saints whose feasts are kept today, St Calimerius of Milan is often overlooked. His feast is observed only in Milan, Italy, where he served as bishop late in the second century. During persecutions under the Emperor Commodus, about 190, he was dropped, headfirst, down a deep, dry well. Orthodox Christians today celebrate the feast of St Leonid of Ust'nedumsk, a seventeenth century monk whose labors included the draining of swamps. According to the Coptic calendar, today is the 23rd of Abib and the feast of St Marina, “the young virgin whose inner strength proved her mightier than that of many young men,” according to the hymn written in her honor, and also the feast of St Longinus, the Roman soldier whose spear pierced the side of Christ at His Crucifixion (this wasn’t why he is recognized as a saint). On the Jewish calendar today is the 19th of Av, they year is 5770. For the ancient Romans, today was “ante diem II kalendas augusti.” For citizens of the United States it is, and has been since 2008, National Cheesecake Day, brought to you by the men and women who now sit in the seats once occupied by Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and John C Calhoun. Is this a great county or what?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I doubt they were incited by the story of St Calimerius, but today commemorates the first of the three most famous Defenestrations in history. On July 30, 1419, a group of angry citizens in Prague forced their way into the Town Hall and defenestrated a city judge, the mayor and all thirteen members of the city council. The defenestration (from the Latin de: out of, with a downward motion implied; fenestra: window) proved fatal to each and every one; a look at the picture above right will show you why. Sixty-five years later, seven city councilmen were defenestrated by a group of citizens angry about what they claimed was unfairly administered taxes and one hundred and forty years after that, two imperial regents, appointed to govern the city by Emperor Rudolf II, were similarly defenestrated, a current chronicle noted “according to custom.” On March 10, 1948, Jan Masaryk, was found on the sidewalk outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a bathroom window seven stories above was discovered open. His death was ruled a suicide, but as Masaryk was an agent of the unpopular communist government, rumors immediately spread that he was defenestrated. Is it by accident that congressional office buildings in Washington, DC, rarely have more than two stories?
Today is Mozart’s birthday. Not Johann Chrysostomos Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but that of his sister, Maria Anna Wulburgia Ignatia Mozart (nicknamed “Nannerl” by her family). She was born July 30, 1751, five years before her famous brother. When she was six, her father began teaching her the harpsichord, and before long she had mastered both that and the piano. At nine, she’d published a book of harpsichord compositions and was regarded as a local prodigy. Two years later, Maria Anna and her young brother Wolfgang played a concert before Maximilian III in Munich and filled the concert halls of the city for three weeks. In those days, Maria was regarded as a wunderkind and given top billing over her brother. For five years, the brother-sister act traveled the courts of Europe, winning accolades in Paris and Vienna under the protective eye of their father. They performed for the “crowned heads of Europe,” playing a concert before the King and Queen of France in January of 1764 and two months later they amazed King George III in London, who said they were “living proof of the existence of God.” The Mozarts remained in England more than a year and a half, and performed several times at the request of the king. When the family returned to the continent, Maria became seriously ill and her father was told she would die. She was given Last Rites, but after six months hovering close to death, she recovered. During her recuperation, her father took young Wolfgang Amadeus and continued their concert schedule without her. Early in 1768, she played again with her brother before the French court at Versailles, but now her brother was the more celebrated of the two. Later that year, when Mozart was invited to play before Pope Clement XVI on Easter Day, his sister was left home in Salzburg. She had played her last concert. Her father informed her it was time for her to marry instead and shortly thereafter he chose her future husband from among a group of suitors he’d interviewed. Though she continued play privately and even to write music (which her brother highly praised) her father deemed this was inappropriate for a married woman and some biographers say he destroyed her compositions to prove his point. After the death of her husband, long after the deaths of her famous brother and overbearing father, she returned to a musical career, teaching piano to the children of Salzburg’s minor nobility. And unlike any of the rest of her family, Maria died very rich. None of her children had any interest in music.
Thirty-five years ago this afternoon, at 2.30, Jimmy Hoffa was seen for the last time—at least, by anybody who’s willing to talk about it. He was sitting in a car outside one of his favorite eateries, Harris Machus’ posh Red Fox Restaurant in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills. Nobody knows for sure whether Hoffa was sent to “sleep with the fishes,” but a federal judge ruled on July 30, 1985 (ten years to the day after his disappearance), that the Teamster boss was permanently sleeping somewhere. After Hoffa’s disappearance, Machus worried his up-scale restaurant, with its English fox-hunt theme and expensive cusine—rack of lamb a la Leopold, veal scaloppine a la Française—were specialties of the house, would go under because of the bad publicity. He needn’t have worried. The high-end crowds doubled in size, it took weeks for reservations to be honored. All the right people in the Detroit area, it seemed, wanted to eat at the place Jimmy Hoffa might have had his last meal. Twenty years after Jimmy Hoffa went on his Last Ride, Machus sold his restaurant and retired to Florida. “It’s where Jimmy himself might have retired,” Machus said, “but he loved our Boston scrod too much. He should’ve planned to eat somewhere else that afternoon.”
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I have a friend in Santa Barbara, a sometime reader of these posts, who is an atheist. Like many atheists, he doesn’t hesitate to share the reasons for his disbelief; unlike some, he acknowledges his inability to understand everything. More than being an atheist (which he most certainly is), I’ve told him more than once, he’s looking for what he believes to be the truth. Ultimately, someone who’s looking for “the truth” will find themselves walking away from atheism. They’ll also, though, walk away from a host of other “-isms.” To be an atheist is to have a belief as firmly entrenched as that of the most ardent Muslim or snake-handling Pentecostalist. Atheism is not lack of belief in God, it’s a “positive” statement and belief, an intellectual assurance that there IS no God. Most people who don’t believe in God aren’t atheists—I reckon there aren’t really too any like my friend who lives in the cooling shades and gentle breezes of Santa Barbara (where, though you may not believe in God, it’s hard not to believe in Heaven!). Most people simply don’t care; they don’t see the relevance of God—or if I can be blunt—they don’t see the relevance of faith as lived in the lives of those who profess faith.
Christian, Muslim or Jew, many “religious” people (and let me hasten to say “religion” is not a bad word in my vocabulary, as is commonplace nowadays) have little notion of the inner content, the underlying principles of their religion. Lutherans, Shiites and Hasidic Jews have decidedly different doctrines and there are many things to keep them apart. But there are things about which they can agree—and I don’t mean that it’s better to feed the hungry than to let them starve (though that may be a point worth considering). The beginning, the foundation and underlying principle of each of these three religions is the insistence on God—something they don’t share, say, with Buddhism, which finds the notion of “God” unnecessary and irrelevant. But it’s more than an insistence on belief in God. Each of these religions insists on the complete “otherness” of God. God is not like us. He’s not one of us to the “nth” degree—not just smart but super-smart, not just good but really, really good, not just like a kindly uncle but more an always jolly, ever-indulgent Santa Claus. God is Holy, Separate, Different. In ancient times, when a scribe would write the word “God” in a manuscript, he would use distinctive letters to mark it apart from the surrounding text. They would wash their hands before writing God’s name. In times past, Christians would bow their heads whenever the name of Jesus was said, in church and out. If you go to a church supply store today, you’ll see Jesus’ name printed on Frisbees and “God” used as a marketing logo.
Small wonder there are atheists.
We’ve created God in our own image. Dummied Him down, fattened Him up and made Him a good ole beer-drinkin’ buddy, who winks when we “sin.” Today’s worship is no longer an “entering into His courts” “laying aside all earthly things,” but more an Amway meeting. We don’t approach Him with awe (a word which has almost lost its meaning) to offer Him our worship; we expect to be entertained and made to feel good about ourselves. Such a god, regardless of who believes in him, Christian, Jew or Muslim, isn’t worth believing in, is certainly undeserving or worship and if this is what “religion” is offering, regardless of how much this may pack ‘em in the pews and fill up the collection plates, it will shrivel the souls of its adherents.
St Ephrem the Syrian, the theological poet of 1600 years ago, said that God was unknowable in Himself, completely different and wholly removed from His creation. We don’t even have the ability to describe Him, because He can’t be encompassed in words. We know about God, Ephrem says, only because God has revealed Himself to us.
“Nature and Scripture bear witness to the Creator;
Nature, as we live in its midst,
Scripture, as we ponder its words.”
If the Lord hadn’t shown Himself glimpses of Himself, St Ephrem says, we’d be completely ignorant of Him. As it is, our minds can only grasp Him through symbols and words that hint at Who He Is.
“Scripture refers to His ‘ears’
To promise us He hears us;
To His ‘eyes’
To let us know He sees.
For our sakes He puts on such names and words
Though they nowhere describe His true Being
He clothes Himself with words of human language
Because otherwise, we would be blind.”
This is a God to worship, Who guides us, otherwise blind, down the labyrinthine paths we walk. We don’t know what He will do with us, but make no mistake: each halting step brings us nearer to a burning Fire—of Self-giving Love. If we lived as if that were true, there would be no atheists, agnostics or even believers. We would all be, in that happy phrase of St Thomas Aquinas, “friends of God.”
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Friday, July 23, 2010
Goat-Stealing
Today is July 23, the 204th day of the year; there are 161 days still to go in 2010, and 60 of those are summer days. Supposedly the “dog days” of summer last from mid-July until the beginning of September (the ancient Romans called the hot, sultry part of the late summer the dies caniculares based on the notion that the Dog Star, Sirius, was somehow responsible for their climatologically-induced suffering; they offered Sirius the annual sacrifice of an unweaned, brown puppy to ease the heat). If the Texas heat thus far this season is any indication, though, there may be few little brown dogs left come Labor Day.
The calendar of the Western Church today puts forward two great saints for veneration: St Brigit of Sweden, a medieval mystic who was herself the mother of a saint, and St Apollinarius of Ravenna, a Syrian who ended up bishop of a big Italian city. Eastern Christians celebrate the feast of St Hannah, mother of the Prophet Samuel. The Coptic calendar for the 16th of Abib (that’s today) commemorates the discovery of the relics of St George, the Great Martyr (of dragon-slaying fame) and the death of St John the Evangelist (the Copts call his Gospel “the Golden gospel”). The Jewish calendar reckons today as the 12th of Av, 5770, and, when they weren’t sacrificing small dogs to stave off the heat, the Romans celebrated July 23 (ante diem IX kalendas augusti) as the “Neptunalia,” to honor the god of oceans and rivers during the parched time of the year. Beginning in 1971 and continuing since despite whatever opposition and criticism they’ve had to face, the Congress of the United States has ordained this day to be National Ice Cream Cone Day.
Though today’s date is crowded with events both portentous and memorable (Sir Harry “Hotspur” Percy, President Ulysses S Grant and novelist Raymond Chandler all passed to eternity on this day), the dog days focused my attention on what happened in St Louis, Missouri, 106 years ago this afternoon. That day, the World’s Fair (formally known as the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition) opened, sprawling over a 1,200 acre site with more than 1,500 buildings. Among them were the immense Italianate Festival Hall, the Palace of Education modeled after a Greek temple and the Egyptian-themed Palace of Mines and Metallurgy. John Philip Sousa opened the Exposition with a concert that sweltering July morning, and a congratulatory telegraph was read to the crowds from President Theodore Roosevelt. But hidden among the Palace of Machinery and the Venetian-inspired Palace of Electricity were ice cream stands, and there, a handful of vendors helped assure the otherwise-forgotten Exposition an abiding place in history. In Ernest Manwi’s waffle stand that afternoon, the Ice Cream Cone was born. It could have been Nick Kabbaz and his brother Albert, Syrian immigrants both of whom worked in Hamwi’s booth, rather than Hamwi, who developed the notion. Nick says it was his idea, and he told Hamwi about it the day the Fair opened. Abe Doumar, also a Syrian vendor at the Fair, claimed that he was the first to wrap a waffle around a ball of ice cream. Abes’ nephew, also named Albert (we’re getting close to needing a chart here, but I don’t know how to do one up), later wrote a book to substantiate the Doumar claim, called The Saga of the Ice Cream Cone. You can’t find a copy on Amazon, but the Smithsonian Institution does have a copy in its archives. David Avayou, a Turkish ice cream salesman, also had a concession stand at the Fair. You won’t be surprised to learn he claimed to have come up with the idea first. “Long before the fair,” he wrote later, “I wanted to make an edible cone for ice cream, having seen metal ice cream cones in France. It took me three weeks and hundreds of pounds of flour and eggs, but I finally got it right.” Charles Menches and his brother Frank sold ice cream at the Fair, too. They don’t claim to have come up with the idea—Charles says a woman he knew was at the fair and wanted to find a “dainty” way to eat some of his ice cream. She bought a fresh waffle from a nearby vendor (could it have been one of Doumar’s waffles? we’ll probably never know) wrapped it into a cone and had Charles fill it with ice cream. Though the Menches brothers aren’t officially credited in the books as the originators of the First Cone, they went on to make a fortune from a candy factory they built in Akron. They made a concoction of caramel-coated peanuts and popcorn they first called “Gee Whiz.” Later they changed the name to “Cracker Jacks.” Whether it was Hamwi, the Kabbaz twins (who later opened the St Louis Ice Cream Cone Company), Abe Doumar, Avayou or the unknown lady friend of the Cracker Jack kings, everybody who’s anybody acknowledges that on the afternoon of July 23rd, 1904, lightning struck someone at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition and World’s Fair at St Louis and the ice cream cone was born. Popes and emperors may come and go, Presidents and Constitutions may rise and fall, but the crunchy ice cream cone might well outlive our American Republic.
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Walking the Labyrinth—Somebody’s been stealing the goats off my parent’s ranch. That may sound like the opening line of an improbable joke, but there are goats missing and more than a few (now even I’m starting to think of punchlines!). There are some large clusters of Live Oaks right on the fence line running alongside a road and clear imprints of truck tires pulling right up to the fence. Sherlock Holmes isn’t needed to figure out this caper. The local sheriff’s office told my mother when she called to report the thefts “Yeah, it’s happening a lot right now. Price of goats is up, so somebody’s taking advantage.” He’s right about that. Goats have almost doubled what they bring at auction in the past year. When she asked the local representative of Law and Order what could be done, his reply was succinct. “Well, shoot ‘em” (I’m pretty sure he meant the goat-rustlers, not the goats). I’m also pretty sure this lawman had no idea who he was talking to. Giving my almost 80 year-old mother carte blanche to fire off the somewhat impressive collection of weaponry at the ranch may devolve into many more official visits to the property than if the Sheriff had bothered to come and commiserate with her in the first place—to say nothing of goats shot dead in the middle of the night!
The situation will have to be addressed—it is a goat ranch, after all—but I can’t escape the potential humor (or the potential deadliness) of the situation. As usual, my mind goes off in its own direction. I found myself meditating, not on how to frustrate the rustlers, but on the role of goats in Holy Scripture, particularly the parable of the sheep and the goats found in the Gospel of Matthew. It’s about the Last Judgment (St Matthew 25. 31-46): “…when the Son of man shall come in His glory…before Him shall be gathered all the nations: and He shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats: the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left.” Things continue downhill for the goats for the rest of the parable, culminating in the final verse: “these [the unhappy goats] shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous [the smiling sheep] into eternal life.”
One of the unmentioned commemorations this day marks is the gathering of the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 AD, called by the Emperor Justinian in the imperial city of Constantinople. One hundred and sixty-five bishops, drawn from across the Mediterranean world, condemned “Origenism,” the writings of a third-century Christian teacher. In particular, they condemned his teachings on the soul and what was called Universal Salvation. Origen, it seems, taught that nobody was going to hell, God would save everybody in the end. He evidently taught (or at least, theorized) that whatever the temporary discomfiture of the goats, eventually they’d be reunited with the sheep (who might be a bit surprised at the new arrivals into bliss). Nobody will know for sure, because the original records of the Council have been misplaced.
The question of hell has long been debated by theologians, professional and otherwise. Though there are many permutations of the argument, succinctly stated it runs: how can a God of love construct a creation which incorporates eternal suffering for any of His creatures? There are many issues to consider, i.e., He is a God of both Justice and Mercy, He gives every human being free will to choose the good or the evil, or simply, “it says so in the Bible.” On the other hand, a very good and dear friend of mine, Merlin Liversidge, used to say, “The idea of subjecting someone—even Adolf Hitler who I fought against in WWII—to an eternity of suffering seems unworthy of an all-loving, all-knowing God.”
It seems to me the first thing to consider in any theological argument (and the thing to continually acknowledge as we go along), is that the question is too deep for us. When we talk about God, we’re guessing. We have things like Scripture, the teaching of faith which has preceded us and our (very limited) reason to guide our discussions, but there is much more we don’t know about the mystery of God than we do. The most important verse in the whole of Scripture, and the most abused, is “God is love” (first letter of St John, 4.16). Any theological consideration which doesn’t continually set that before its face will wander off-base. The problem is that theology is done with words. We use words (because we have nothing else) to describe Something Infinitely Beyond words. “Love” is itself a word so misused and twisted we would have a hard time agreeing what that means in our own situation, much less in Eternity.
We’re not gonna solve the question of the eternity of hell and the sufferings of the damned on these pages, though we may very well turn to consider certain aspects of the question from time to time. What interests me today is simply the question of misplaced goats. When I have listened to the arguments of those who press for the eternal damnation of the goats (Calvinist, Catholic or anything in between) one thing always raises its head. “If there isn’t a hell, why bother to be good? Why not eat, drink and be merry if I’m not going to have to answer for it in the end?” Some of the sheep, at least, want to make sure those goats get what’s coming to them. “We’ve paid our dues here, now it’s their turn!” It is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a pathetic argument, but one I’ve heard many (not just lay people) make time and again. “Why do all this if I don’t have to?”
I think any person, Protestant, Catholic, Jew or Muslim (with maybe many a thoughtful agnostic and a brace of atheists throw in), would agree that the unending joys of Heaven aren’t a reward for good behavior, but the gift of an all-loving Lord. Somehow, in the mystery of God, Heaven is not a reward nor is hell a place of exacting penalties. St John is right, more right than we can or will ever know. God is Love, and if that’s so, hell is part of His mystery of love. Here, seeing through this glass so darkly, we don’t know the particulars. And my old friend Merlin was right, too. God is bigger than our most grandiose conceptions. What seems to us an impossible conundrum, exists as such only for us. Somehow, whatever the fate of the wayward goats, they are encompassed eternally in Love.
Now if I can only figure out how to lock up all those guns at the ranch…
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The calendar of the Western Church today puts forward two great saints for veneration: St Brigit of Sweden, a medieval mystic who was herself the mother of a saint, and St Apollinarius of Ravenna, a Syrian who ended up bishop of a big Italian city. Eastern Christians celebrate the feast of St Hannah, mother of the Prophet Samuel. The Coptic calendar for the 16th of Abib (that’s today) commemorates the discovery of the relics of St George, the Great Martyr (of dragon-slaying fame) and the death of St John the Evangelist (the Copts call his Gospel “the Golden gospel”). The Jewish calendar reckons today as the 12th of Av, 5770, and, when they weren’t sacrificing small dogs to stave off the heat, the Romans celebrated July 23 (ante diem IX kalendas augusti) as the “Neptunalia,” to honor the god of oceans and rivers during the parched time of the year. Beginning in 1971 and continuing since despite whatever opposition and criticism they’ve had to face, the Congress of the United States has ordained this day to be National Ice Cream Cone Day.
Though today’s date is crowded with events both portentous and memorable (Sir Harry “Hotspur” Percy, President Ulysses S Grant and novelist Raymond Chandler all passed to eternity on this day), the dog days focused my attention on what happened in St Louis, Missouri, 106 years ago this afternoon. That day, the World’s Fair (formally known as the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition) opened, sprawling over a 1,200 acre site with more than 1,500 buildings. Among them were the immense Italianate Festival Hall, the Palace of Education modeled after a Greek temple and the Egyptian-themed Palace of Mines and Metallurgy. John Philip Sousa opened the Exposition with a concert that sweltering July morning, and a congratulatory telegraph was read to the crowds from President Theodore Roosevelt. But hidden among the Palace of Machinery and the Venetian-inspired Palace of Electricity were ice cream stands, and there, a handful of vendors helped assure the otherwise-forgotten Exposition an abiding place in history. In Ernest Manwi’s waffle stand that afternoon, the Ice Cream Cone was born. It could have been Nick Kabbaz and his brother Albert, Syrian immigrants both of whom worked in Hamwi’s booth, rather than Hamwi, who developed the notion. Nick says it was his idea, and he told Hamwi about it the day the Fair opened. Abe Doumar, also a Syrian vendor at the Fair, claimed that he was the first to wrap a waffle around a ball of ice cream. Abes’ nephew, also named Albert (we’re getting close to needing a chart here, but I don’t know how to do one up), later wrote a book to substantiate the Doumar claim, called The Saga of the Ice Cream Cone. You can’t find a copy on Amazon, but the Smithsonian Institution does have a copy in its archives. David Avayou, a Turkish ice cream salesman, also had a concession stand at the Fair. You won’t be surprised to learn he claimed to have come up with the idea first. “Long before the fair,” he wrote later, “I wanted to make an edible cone for ice cream, having seen metal ice cream cones in France. It took me three weeks and hundreds of pounds of flour and eggs, but I finally got it right.” Charles Menches and his brother Frank sold ice cream at the Fair, too. They don’t claim to have come up with the idea—Charles says a woman he knew was at the fair and wanted to find a “dainty” way to eat some of his ice cream. She bought a fresh waffle from a nearby vendor (could it have been one of Doumar’s waffles? we’ll probably never know) wrapped it into a cone and had Charles fill it with ice cream. Though the Menches brothers aren’t officially credited in the books as the originators of the First Cone, they went on to make a fortune from a candy factory they built in Akron. They made a concoction of caramel-coated peanuts and popcorn they first called “Gee Whiz.” Later they changed the name to “Cracker Jacks.” Whether it was Hamwi, the Kabbaz twins (who later opened the St Louis Ice Cream Cone Company), Abe Doumar, Avayou or the unknown lady friend of the Cracker Jack kings, everybody who’s anybody acknowledges that on the afternoon of July 23rd, 1904, lightning struck someone at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition and World’s Fair at St Louis and the ice cream cone was born. Popes and emperors may come and go, Presidents and Constitutions may rise and fall, but the crunchy ice cream cone might well outlive our American Republic.
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Walking the Labyrinth—Somebody’s been stealing the goats off my parent’s ranch. That may sound like the opening line of an improbable joke, but there are goats missing and more than a few (now even I’m starting to think of punchlines!). There are some large clusters of Live Oaks right on the fence line running alongside a road and clear imprints of truck tires pulling right up to the fence. Sherlock Holmes isn’t needed to figure out this caper. The local sheriff’s office told my mother when she called to report the thefts “Yeah, it’s happening a lot right now. Price of goats is up, so somebody’s taking advantage.” He’s right about that. Goats have almost doubled what they bring at auction in the past year. When she asked the local representative of Law and Order what could be done, his reply was succinct. “Well, shoot ‘em” (I’m pretty sure he meant the goat-rustlers, not the goats). I’m also pretty sure this lawman had no idea who he was talking to. Giving my almost 80 year-old mother carte blanche to fire off the somewhat impressive collection of weaponry at the ranch may devolve into many more official visits to the property than if the Sheriff had bothered to come and commiserate with her in the first place—to say nothing of goats shot dead in the middle of the night!
The situation will have to be addressed—it is a goat ranch, after all—but I can’t escape the potential humor (or the potential deadliness) of the situation. As usual, my mind goes off in its own direction. I found myself meditating, not on how to frustrate the rustlers, but on the role of goats in Holy Scripture, particularly the parable of the sheep and the goats found in the Gospel of Matthew. It’s about the Last Judgment (St Matthew 25. 31-46): “…when the Son of man shall come in His glory…before Him shall be gathered all the nations: and He shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats: the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left.” Things continue downhill for the goats for the rest of the parable, culminating in the final verse: “these [the unhappy goats] shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous [the smiling sheep] into eternal life.”
One of the unmentioned commemorations this day marks is the gathering of the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 AD, called by the Emperor Justinian in the imperial city of Constantinople. One hundred and sixty-five bishops, drawn from across the Mediterranean world, condemned “Origenism,” the writings of a third-century Christian teacher. In particular, they condemned his teachings on the soul and what was called Universal Salvation. Origen, it seems, taught that nobody was going to hell, God would save everybody in the end. He evidently taught (or at least, theorized) that whatever the temporary discomfiture of the goats, eventually they’d be reunited with the sheep (who might be a bit surprised at the new arrivals into bliss). Nobody will know for sure, because the original records of the Council have been misplaced.
The question of hell has long been debated by theologians, professional and otherwise. Though there are many permutations of the argument, succinctly stated it runs: how can a God of love construct a creation which incorporates eternal suffering for any of His creatures? There are many issues to consider, i.e., He is a God of both Justice and Mercy, He gives every human being free will to choose the good or the evil, or simply, “it says so in the Bible.” On the other hand, a very good and dear friend of mine, Merlin Liversidge, used to say, “The idea of subjecting someone—even Adolf Hitler who I fought against in WWII—to an eternity of suffering seems unworthy of an all-loving, all-knowing God.”
It seems to me the first thing to consider in any theological argument (and the thing to continually acknowledge as we go along), is that the question is too deep for us. When we talk about God, we’re guessing. We have things like Scripture, the teaching of faith which has preceded us and our (very limited) reason to guide our discussions, but there is much more we don’t know about the mystery of God than we do. The most important verse in the whole of Scripture, and the most abused, is “God is love” (first letter of St John, 4.16). Any theological consideration which doesn’t continually set that before its face will wander off-base. The problem is that theology is done with words. We use words (because we have nothing else) to describe Something Infinitely Beyond words. “Love” is itself a word so misused and twisted we would have a hard time agreeing what that means in our own situation, much less in Eternity.
We’re not gonna solve the question of the eternity of hell and the sufferings of the damned on these pages, though we may very well turn to consider certain aspects of the question from time to time. What interests me today is simply the question of misplaced goats. When I have listened to the arguments of those who press for the eternal damnation of the goats (Calvinist, Catholic or anything in between) one thing always raises its head. “If there isn’t a hell, why bother to be good? Why not eat, drink and be merry if I’m not going to have to answer for it in the end?” Some of the sheep, at least, want to make sure those goats get what’s coming to them. “We’ve paid our dues here, now it’s their turn!” It is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a pathetic argument, but one I’ve heard many (not just lay people) make time and again. “Why do all this if I don’t have to?”
I think any person, Protestant, Catholic, Jew or Muslim (with maybe many a thoughtful agnostic and a brace of atheists throw in), would agree that the unending joys of Heaven aren’t a reward for good behavior, but the gift of an all-loving Lord. Somehow, in the mystery of God, Heaven is not a reward nor is hell a place of exacting penalties. St John is right, more right than we can or will ever know. God is Love, and if that’s so, hell is part of His mystery of love. Here, seeing through this glass so darkly, we don’t know the particulars. And my old friend Merlin was right, too. God is bigger than our most grandiose conceptions. What seems to us an impossible conundrum, exists as such only for us. Somehow, whatever the fate of the wayward goats, they are encompassed eternally in Love.
Now if I can only figure out how to lock up all those guns at the ranch…
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Friday, July 16, 2010
"The More Things Change..."
Today is July 16, the 197th day of the year; 168 days remain in 2010. July 16 marks the beginning of the Muslim era. On this night in 622 AD (or, if you are a Muslim, 1 AH), Muhammed ibn Abdullah, warned of an assassination plot, secretly fled from his home to what is now called the city of Medina. Muhammed’s flight from potential martyrdom (nowadays euphemistically called his “emigration”) has been counted as the beginning of the New Age by Muslims ever since. “AH” stands for the Latin anno hegirae, “in the year of the hijra." By Muslim reckoning, then, the year is 1431 AH. On the Church's calendar today is the feast of Blessed Mary Magdalene Françoise de Justamond, a French Cistercian nun who, in 1794, was guillotined for refusing to deny her faith during the Days of the Terror in Paris. Russian Christians celebrate today solemnly, commemorating the murder of Tzar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their five children by their Bolshevik captors in the basement of a house in Ekatrinberg, Russia. The Russian Church venerates them as “the Royal Martyrs” who are said to have died for their faith. On the Coptic Christian calendar, this is the 9th of Abib, the year is 1726, and it’s the feast of St Celadion, the 9th Pope of Alexandria. According to the Hebrew calendar, it's the 5th of Av, 5770. The United States Congress, which lives to please its constituency, has declared July not only National Hot Dog Month and and National Relish Month, but boldly named July National Ice Cream Month as well. Is it any wonder the old American Book of Common Prayer exhorts us to pray that God “wouldest be pleased to direct and prosper all their consultations”? In Canada National Rabbit Week concludes today; and for those who plan ahead, there are only 162 Shopping Days Left till Christmas.
July 16th is a bad day for Russian royalty. As already noted, Tsar Nicholas and his family were shot and bayoneted in the early hours of July 16th on the orders of Lenin (who till his death denied issuing the order; it wasn’t until after the collapse of the Soviet empire that Lenin's handwritten instructions were made public). But long before that, on this day back in 1605, the young Tsar Fyodor II Borisovich Godunov was imprisoned by his enemies in the imperial palace (Fyodor was the son of the Boris Godunov, about whom Mussorgsky wrote his famous opera, if you’re the highbrow sort; if not, you’ll be familiar with the name only because of the nefarious Boris Badonov of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” fame). Four days later a group of thugs broke into the royal apartments and strangled both the boy and his mother. The story was put out that the pair died of food poisoning. However, the nobles who orchestrated the whole thing were stupid enough to put the bodies on public display before the funeral, and the rope burns and abrasions around their necks were visible to everyone. His death inaugurated the period known in Russian history as the “Time of Troubles” (the Smutnoye Vremya), a time of civil wars, imperial imposters and economic chaos. The ascent of the Romanov Dynasty in the person of Mikhail Romanov, crowned in 1613, ended the Smutnoye Vremya. Peter III was crowned Tsar on January 5, 1762 and strangled to death on the afternoon of July 16. As a boy, the young Peter loved all things military. He was enthralled by the military successes of the Prussian Emperor Frederick the Great and on his coronation announced he would “turn Russia into Prussia.” To the discomfiture of the Orthodox clergy, he ordered them to shave their beards, adopt the attire of Protestant clergymen and remove icons from the churches. To drive the point home, he built a Lutheran chapel in the palace. The new Tsar alienated the clergy and pious. He ordered the army, then conducting a war with Prussia, to return home and abandon all the territorial gains they’d made in the war. The Tsar ordered new uniforms and equipment for the army based on Prussian models. Peter loved the sound of cannon-fire and would on occasion order all the canon surrounding the Kremlin to fire, one after another, all night long. When the whim struck, he would call out the imperial soldiers in stationed in Moscow to get up in the middle of the night and parade back and forth in front of him on the grounds of the Kremlin for hours. The new Tsar alienated the military. Peter took as his mistress Elizabeth Vorontzova, niece of the Chancellor of the Russian Court. The French ambassador wrote in his diary that Elizabeth “has a dull mind. Her pockmarked face has nothing to recommend it ad all her make-up does little to improve matters. In all respects she reminds one of the lowest class of serving wench. She swears like a trooper, squints, stinks and spits when she talks.” The emperor declared her “Grand Mistress of the Court.” The new Tsar alienated his nobles and most dangerously, his wife, who history would come to call Catherine the Great. Catherine gave every appearance of meek acquiescence but befriended the insulted clergy, the indignant generals and the outraged nobles. One afternoon when Peter went out to lead the troops in maneuvers, she had him quietly taken into custody and locked in the rooms of a royal hunting lodge. Beginning to see a pattern here? On July 16th, unidentified persons with ropes entered the lodge and later the Tsar’s body was discovered, showing all the signs of strangulation. Catherine was happily proclaimed empress by the clergy, the army and the nobles. But Catherine knew her history: Peter’s body was never put on public display.
On July 16th, 1453, King Henry VI forbad kissing throughout his realm. The Black Plague was ravaging the Netherlands, and there was much fear it would cross the Channel. Though the notion of “germs” was unknown, a group of royal physicians convinced the king that invisible “specks,” which passed from person to person at times of intimate contact, were the cause of the plague. While stopping short of outlawing acts of procreation (which one speculates might have proved ineffectual anyway), it was decided that a royal proclamation against kissing would be sufficient. Regardless of how we may snicker, there was no outbreak of the plague in England that year. So put that in your pipe.
On July 16, 1935, the first parking meters in the world were installed on the downtown streets of Oklahoma City. Ten years later, to the day, the world’s first atomic bomb was exploded in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Call it a coincidence if you want.
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Walking the Labyrinth—Odi et amo, “I love and I hate,” wrote the Roman poet Catullus two thousand years ago. Though he was writing about something very different, I know how he feels every time I sit down in front of my computer. Old friends know I viewed computers with a mixture of distain and distrust for more than a decade. Twice people gave me computers as gifts in the 1990’s—I “regifted” both, one never even having been removed from its box. I viewed them as expensive, time-consuming and overly complex typewriters. I had pencils. They fit in my pocket, didn’t need manuals or require on-call technicians.
Historians regard Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press as one of the most significant events in history. As a lover of the printed word, I agree (for what that’s worth). It seems obvious to me, though, that Gutenberg’s revolution pales in comparison with the computer revolution of the past two decades. We are in the process of seeing a new world created around us and we don’t know where we’re headed with it, or where it’s taking us. The conservative wiring in my brain (see? it’s already affected our view of ourselves!) tells me to be afraid, but when I can travel to Mongolia or view Bourbon Street live while sitting at my desk, I am amazed. I can examine—in unbelievable detail—a 6th century Byzantine manuscript locked in the vaults of the Vatican Library. I’ve done it. Seconds later I could be listening to the raspy voice of Johnny Cash sing the theme song to “The Rebel,” a TV show I watched when I was a kid. I’ve done this too, but I’ll leave it to you to guess which of the two web pages I spent almost three hours of my life on. Odi et amo. The possibilities frighten and entice me.
It may be—I have a sense almost certainly it will be—centuries before we grasp what we have wrought. But there are a few things a walker in the Labyrinth can know right now. In spite of the fact that you can buy fabric that enables you to make a shirt or blouse “wearable computer,” we, us, our souls—remain unchanged through the millennia. We don’t like to hear that. Look at what we’ve done! We can circle the globe in hours. We’ve been to the moon and back repeatedly. I can talk to someone in Africa after pressing a few buttons on my cell phone, which now fits in the pocket of my t-shirt. But when they answer in Africa, what are we going to talk about? When you look at the horned moon white in the black night sky, do you see only real estate? No doubt, some of us do. But there beats in the breast of every computer geek a heart longing for Mystery. Life must be more than balance of trade agreements and electro-cardiogram readings. Our hearts are restless for more than computerized shirts.
As wonderful as it is to view up close a 1500 year old parchment on my laptop, it’s the words that matter. Pressed into a clay tablet, carved in stone, quilled onto papyrus, written on foolscap, printed in a book or read on a Kindle, it’s the words that matter. After Gutenberg and Gates we’re still in search of who we are and why we’re here. That hasn’t changed because we haven’t changed. The greed and generosity, the envy and self-sacrifice, the hatred and love around since Eden surround us still. We continue the same. Technology may terrorize us or bless us or—most likely—it will do both. After all, it’s made in our image.
We’re made in the image of Another. The labyrinth of your life is laid out to take you to Him, every step molding you into who He created you to be. Our labyrinths twist and turn in unguessed and sometimes unwelcome ways. We don’t know what’s around the bend. We do know, we can grasp with certainty this truth: our lives, our sorrows and joys, sufferings and delights have meaning. More meaning than you and I can imagine. Through our insignificance (“what? do you know who I am?”), in spite of our pettiness and failings, He Who made us in His own image is redeeming and recreating the world. Next to that truth, our greatest technologies are toys.
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A note to those who’ve written (some repeatedly) asking me for my thoughts on the Pope’s Anglicanorum Coetibus: I appreciate your patience. I’m not being coy, just ruminant. Months back I spent a few days writing on this, but on review it seemed premature. There’s still much to learn before anything definitive can be said, but since nothing I say is definitive anyway, that’s not an issue. It’s become plain to me is that the most important things to be addressed are not the “hows” or even the “whys” but the presumptions that run in front of these questions. I’m now writing, but I won’t be publishing what I write on Labyrinthus, it’s not the proper forum. If you’re interested, please let me know. As always, I’m more than happy to hear other people’s thoughts. I may not always agree, but that’s how I learn. On such an important topic, I hope that there’s more praying than talking going on, but my emails suggest otherwise.
July 16th is a bad day for Russian royalty. As already noted, Tsar Nicholas and his family were shot and bayoneted in the early hours of July 16th on the orders of Lenin (who till his death denied issuing the order; it wasn’t until after the collapse of the Soviet empire that Lenin's handwritten instructions were made public). But long before that, on this day back in 1605, the young Tsar Fyodor II Borisovich Godunov was imprisoned by his enemies in the imperial palace (Fyodor was the son of the Boris Godunov, about whom Mussorgsky wrote his famous opera, if you’re the highbrow sort; if not, you’ll be familiar with the name only because of the nefarious Boris Badonov of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” fame). Four days later a group of thugs broke into the royal apartments and strangled both the boy and his mother. The story was put out that the pair died of food poisoning. However, the nobles who orchestrated the whole thing were stupid enough to put the bodies on public display before the funeral, and the rope burns and abrasions around their necks were visible to everyone. His death inaugurated the period known in Russian history as the “Time of Troubles” (the Smutnoye Vremya), a time of civil wars, imperial imposters and economic chaos. The ascent of the Romanov Dynasty in the person of Mikhail Romanov, crowned in 1613, ended the Smutnoye Vremya. Peter III was crowned Tsar on January 5, 1762 and strangled to death on the afternoon of July 16. As a boy, the young Peter loved all things military. He was enthralled by the military successes of the Prussian Emperor Frederick the Great and on his coronation announced he would “turn Russia into Prussia.” To the discomfiture of the Orthodox clergy, he ordered them to shave their beards, adopt the attire of Protestant clergymen and remove icons from the churches. To drive the point home, he built a Lutheran chapel in the palace. The new Tsar alienated the clergy and pious. He ordered the army, then conducting a war with Prussia, to return home and abandon all the territorial gains they’d made in the war. The Tsar ordered new uniforms and equipment for the army based on Prussian models. Peter loved the sound of cannon-fire and would on occasion order all the canon surrounding the Kremlin to fire, one after another, all night long. When the whim struck, he would call out the imperial soldiers in stationed in Moscow to get up in the middle of the night and parade back and forth in front of him on the grounds of the Kremlin for hours. The new Tsar alienated the military. Peter took as his mistress Elizabeth Vorontzova, niece of the Chancellor of the Russian Court. The French ambassador wrote in his diary that Elizabeth “has a dull mind. Her pockmarked face has nothing to recommend it ad all her make-up does little to improve matters. In all respects she reminds one of the lowest class of serving wench. She swears like a trooper, squints, stinks and spits when she talks.” The emperor declared her “Grand Mistress of the Court.” The new Tsar alienated his nobles and most dangerously, his wife, who history would come to call Catherine the Great. Catherine gave every appearance of meek acquiescence but befriended the insulted clergy, the indignant generals and the outraged nobles. One afternoon when Peter went out to lead the troops in maneuvers, she had him quietly taken into custody and locked in the rooms of a royal hunting lodge. Beginning to see a pattern here? On July 16th, unidentified persons with ropes entered the lodge and later the Tsar’s body was discovered, showing all the signs of strangulation. Catherine was happily proclaimed empress by the clergy, the army and the nobles. But Catherine knew her history: Peter’s body was never put on public display.
On July 16th, 1453, King Henry VI forbad kissing throughout his realm. The Black Plague was ravaging the Netherlands, and there was much fear it would cross the Channel. Though the notion of “germs” was unknown, a group of royal physicians convinced the king that invisible “specks,” which passed from person to person at times of intimate contact, were the cause of the plague. While stopping short of outlawing acts of procreation (which one speculates might have proved ineffectual anyway), it was decided that a royal proclamation against kissing would be sufficient. Regardless of how we may snicker, there was no outbreak of the plague in England that year. So put that in your pipe.
On July 16, 1935, the first parking meters in the world were installed on the downtown streets of Oklahoma City. Ten years later, to the day, the world’s first atomic bomb was exploded in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Call it a coincidence if you want.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Walking the Labyrinth—Odi et amo, “I love and I hate,” wrote the Roman poet Catullus two thousand years ago. Though he was writing about something very different, I know how he feels every time I sit down in front of my computer. Old friends know I viewed computers with a mixture of distain and distrust for more than a decade. Twice people gave me computers as gifts in the 1990’s—I “regifted” both, one never even having been removed from its box. I viewed them as expensive, time-consuming and overly complex typewriters. I had pencils. They fit in my pocket, didn’t need manuals or require on-call technicians.
Historians regard Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press as one of the most significant events in history. As a lover of the printed word, I agree (for what that’s worth). It seems obvious to me, though, that Gutenberg’s revolution pales in comparison with the computer revolution of the past two decades. We are in the process of seeing a new world created around us and we don’t know where we’re headed with it, or where it’s taking us. The conservative wiring in my brain (see? it’s already affected our view of ourselves!) tells me to be afraid, but when I can travel to Mongolia or view Bourbon Street live while sitting at my desk, I am amazed. I can examine—in unbelievable detail—a 6th century Byzantine manuscript locked in the vaults of the Vatican Library. I’ve done it. Seconds later I could be listening to the raspy voice of Johnny Cash sing the theme song to “The Rebel,” a TV show I watched when I was a kid. I’ve done this too, but I’ll leave it to you to guess which of the two web pages I spent almost three hours of my life on. Odi et amo. The possibilities frighten and entice me.
It may be—I have a sense almost certainly it will be—centuries before we grasp what we have wrought. But there are a few things a walker in the Labyrinth can know right now. In spite of the fact that you can buy fabric that enables you to make a shirt or blouse “wearable computer,” we, us, our souls—remain unchanged through the millennia. We don’t like to hear that. Look at what we’ve done! We can circle the globe in hours. We’ve been to the moon and back repeatedly. I can talk to someone in Africa after pressing a few buttons on my cell phone, which now fits in the pocket of my t-shirt. But when they answer in Africa, what are we going to talk about? When you look at the horned moon white in the black night sky, do you see only real estate? No doubt, some of us do. But there beats in the breast of every computer geek a heart longing for Mystery. Life must be more than balance of trade agreements and electro-cardiogram readings. Our hearts are restless for more than computerized shirts.
As wonderful as it is to view up close a 1500 year old parchment on my laptop, it’s the words that matter. Pressed into a clay tablet, carved in stone, quilled onto papyrus, written on foolscap, printed in a book or read on a Kindle, it’s the words that matter. After Gutenberg and Gates we’re still in search of who we are and why we’re here. That hasn’t changed because we haven’t changed. The greed and generosity, the envy and self-sacrifice, the hatred and love around since Eden surround us still. We continue the same. Technology may terrorize us or bless us or—most likely—it will do both. After all, it’s made in our image.
We’re made in the image of Another. The labyrinth of your life is laid out to take you to Him, every step molding you into who He created you to be. Our labyrinths twist and turn in unguessed and sometimes unwelcome ways. We don’t know what’s around the bend. We do know, we can grasp with certainty this truth: our lives, our sorrows and joys, sufferings and delights have meaning. More meaning than you and I can imagine. Through our insignificance (“what? do you know who I am?”), in spite of our pettiness and failings, He Who made us in His own image is redeeming and recreating the world. Next to that truth, our greatest technologies are toys.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A note to those who’ve written (some repeatedly) asking me for my thoughts on the Pope’s Anglicanorum Coetibus: I appreciate your patience. I’m not being coy, just ruminant. Months back I spent a few days writing on this, but on review it seemed premature. There’s still much to learn before anything definitive can be said, but since nothing I say is definitive anyway, that’s not an issue. It’s become plain to me is that the most important things to be addressed are not the “hows” or even the “whys” but the presumptions that run in front of these questions. I’m now writing, but I won’t be publishing what I write on Labyrinthus, it’s not the proper forum. If you’re interested, please let me know. As always, I’m more than happy to hear other people’s thoughts. I may not always agree, but that’s how I learn. On such an important topic, I hope that there’s more praying than talking going on, but my emails suggest otherwise.
Friday, July 09, 2010
The Joy of Singing
Today is July 9, the 190th day of the year; 175 days remain in 2010. It’s the feast of St Cyril of Crete, a fourth-century bishop, St Everild of Everingham, a Saxon noblewoman who forsook the world and became a nun (much to her parent’s dismay), and St Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury. It is to him that we owe the division of the Bible into the chapters with which we are familiar (which isn’t why he was declared a saint). He quarreled with King John (“evil Prince John” of “Robin Hood” fame) and was of the group that eventually forced the unhappy King to sign the Magna Carta on the field at Runnymede (that wasn’t why, either). Eastern Orthodox Christians celebrate the feasts of St David of Thessalonica and the Venerable Serapion of Kozha Lake. On the Coptic calendar today is the 2nd of Abib and the year is 1726, while the ancient Romans called this ante diem VII Idus Julius (the seventh day before the ides of July). If any of them were still around to count, this would be the Roman year 2763. On their calendar, today was a minor Roman feast, the Caprotinia, a holiday for the slave girls of Rome. It's the 27th of Tammuz according to Hebrew reckoning. July is Tour de France Month in that Gallic country, while in the United States it’s both National Hot Dog and National Horseradish Month. Today begins National Nudist Recreation Weekend (there is a website listing activities with a minimal dress code) and July 9th, in several States of the Union (Texas demurring), is Sugar Cookie Day.
July 9th isn’t one of the more monumentous days of the calendar. No popes were crowned or emperors deposed, no battles of consequence were fought or treaties signed, no immortal symphonies were composed nor were any of the world's great books published on this day. But for a couple of people in ages past, it was a day to recall or reckon with.
Anne of Cleves was the daughter of a little-known German prince, born in 1515 near Dusseldorf. She was an unexceptional child. At twelve, she was betrothed to the future Duke of Lorraine and her future seemed set. Before the marriage took place, however, Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour, died (of natural causes, her head still attached) and the uxorious Henry set his men a-looking across the Christian world for Wife Number Four. Soon the king’s attention was directed to Dusseldorf, where Anne was waiting for the Duke of Lorraine to come and sweep her off her feet. Instead, spurred on by accounts of her beauty, Henry sent the world-famous portrait painter Hans Holbein to Dusseldorf castle. He painted the picture you see up right. When Henry saw it, marriage negotiations began and, by November of 1539, a marriage treaty had been signed. Anne and her entourage arrived in England on New Year’s Eve and the next day Henry anxiously went to see her. Afterward, with some irritation, he told his courtiers he’d been misled about her looks. Could he get out of the marriage? His principal advisor, Thomas Cromwell, reminded him treaties were signed and warned the king’s reputation among the crowns of Europe would suffer if he simply sent her home (Cromwell was the foremost advocate of the marriage and was not unconcerned about his own fate if the king was unhappy). So, laying aside his disappointment, the wedding took place on January 6, 1540. That evening, in the royal bedchamber, Henry’s conjugal duties went unfulfilled. A nervous Cromwell was waiting outside the room the next morning and asked the king, “How liked you the Queen?” Henry looked at him darkly and said, “I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse.” He ordered Cromwell and his Archbishop of Canterbury (who’d just performed the marriage) to work out a divorce. It took six months, but it was done. On July 9, 1540, Parliament issued a decree of nullity. Anne (who knew how Henry’s previous marriages ended) acquiesced and even wrote a letter supporting the King, asking that the marriage be annulled. Henry was so pleased he gave her several manor houses and a settlement of 3,000 pounds a year, making her the richest woman in England. Three weeks after the parliamentary decree, Thomas Cromwell’s head was “stricken from his shoulders” on the green outside the Tower of London for disappointing his king. Anne lived out her days in wealth and quietness and died peacefully in her bed in 1557, twenty years after Henry met his eternal fate. The young woman who could barely speak English may have been the smartest of the Six Wives.
Zachary Taylor, the 12th President of the United States, served one of the shortest terms in history. “Old Rough and Ready,” the hero of the Mexican War, attended ceremonies for the dedication of the Washington Monument on the Fourth of July in 1850. Dressed in a black, high-collar suit, the president suffered a sun stroke and was removed to the White House. When he regained consciousness, Taylor demanded several pitchers of iced milk. After drinking those, he called for more, asking also for “a large bowl of cherries.” By that evening he was very sick. His doctors prescribed several large doses of opium and quinine and bled him repeatedly, but in spite of these “attentions,” his condition worsened. The physicians told his wife early on July 9th there was no hope of survival. He died that morning shortly after 10 AM having been president for 491 days. Historians say his term was so short he had no discernible impact on the country. Maybe that's a lesson worth remembering!
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Walking the Labyrinth—I love early American music. As I write this, I’m listening to a beautifully-done recording of the Tudor Choir singing selections from their CD The Shapenote Album, a collection of tunes, songs and hymns from the 18th and early 19th centuries. The music is rich and boisterous, full of energy and powerful in delivering its message in the straightforward language of our forbearers. Music speaks to us on several levels at once, affecting us sometimes in unconscious ways. The final nights of Holy Week there is an ancient service called Tenebrae (Latin for “Shadows”). It’s a collection of eighteen Psalms interspersed with readings from Scripture. The Psalms are chanted with melodies many centuries old and the chanting weaves a strange magic on the participants. Chant a few Psalms and you can appreciate the music and get something of the words the music conveys. Chant eighteen Psalms in an hour or two and you will be transported by the music. The steady cadence of the music enables the words of the Psalms to caress the soul; God can speak words of consolation even when we don’t realize we’re listening. I imagine something very much like that happened to our ancestors when they enjoyed a “hymn-sing.”
St Ephrem was a deacon in Syria sixteen hundred years ago. You may have heard of him from the famous prayer attributed to him which is recited by Orthodox Christians daily throughout Lent, “O Lord and Master of My Life.” St Ephrem was a theologian of renown during his lifetime but as he wrote in Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke) his works have been closed to those who don’t know the language. Most interesting to me, though, is that Ephrem wrote his most profound theology as poetry. He wrote his theology not to be read in quiet candle-lit chambers but to be sung out loud!
Theology isn’t usually associated with poetry, but Ephrem thought it was the best medium for conveying profound truths. He understood something which theologians and believers of any faith sometimes forget when they talk about what they believe: God is not a doctrine and theology is not a theory. Ephrem believed we can only talk about God after we acknowledge we don’t know what we’re talking about. We use words to talk about God because we don’t have anything else. “God clothed Himself with language,” Ephrem sang, “so He could clothe us with Himself.” For centuries and more, religious language has been a weapon that has obscured truth as much as it has been a vehicle that expressed it.
Ephrem insists that we approach God with real humility. My old mentor, Fr Rogers, used to tell me humility was not trying to convince yourself you were worthless and bad (which, he said, no sane person ever really believes anyway). Humility, he said, is from the word humus, “earth.” The humble person is one whose feet are firmly set on the ground. Real humility is to know ourselves as best we can, and understand we can know God only in tiny bits and pieces, as best we can catch an occasional glimpse of He Who Is. If we know our vision is imperfect, Ephrem says, if we’re “clothed with humility,” we begin to be ready to talk—or, better yet—to sing about God. St Ephrem didn’t treat words about God as an intellectual exercise. Ephrem’s songs about God are as much addressed to God as about Him. He has no interest in God as a theory—for the Syrian saint, God Is Present Now, here, everywhere and always. An academic discussion about God, to Ephrem’s mind, is as ludicrous as one person carrying on a conversation about himself with himself.
St Ephrem was not indifferent to the necessity of dogma, but wanted it to reflect the reality of human limitations. We are fallen, easily-distracted, argumentative creatures contemplating the Infinite Sea of Charity. One of his hymns is entitled “Against Heresies.” After singing the dangers of the heresies of his day, St Ephrem concludes his work with a stanza of warning to himself and his hearers:
“As I have acknowledged Thee, O Lord
Do Thou acknowledge me.
Show Thy compassions on this sinner
Who believes in Thee.
Even as he sins, O Master
He knocks at Thy door.
Even though his steps are sluggish
Still, he travels Thy highway.”
I read this poem for the first time only a few weeks ago, but it seems to me a perfect song for a walker on any Labyrinth. We cling to our imperfect vision of God, confident not in what we know but Who we know. He’s the One Who guides our faltering steps—and we know where He’s taking us. Our steps may be sluggish and the scenery for each of us a bit different, but our Labyrinths take us along the King’s Highway. You might want to sing as you walk.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
July 9th isn’t one of the more monumentous days of the calendar. No popes were crowned or emperors deposed, no battles of consequence were fought or treaties signed, no immortal symphonies were composed nor were any of the world's great books published on this day. But for a couple of people in ages past, it was a day to recall or reckon with.
Anne of Cleves was the daughter of a little-known German prince, born in 1515 near Dusseldorf. She was an unexceptional child. At twelve, she was betrothed to the future Duke of Lorraine and her future seemed set. Before the marriage took place, however, Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour, died (of natural causes, her head still attached) and the uxorious Henry set his men a-looking across the Christian world for Wife Number Four. Soon the king’s attention was directed to Dusseldorf, where Anne was waiting for the Duke of Lorraine to come and sweep her off her feet. Instead, spurred on by accounts of her beauty, Henry sent the world-famous portrait painter Hans Holbein to Dusseldorf castle. He painted the picture you see up right. When Henry saw it, marriage negotiations began and, by November of 1539, a marriage treaty had been signed. Anne and her entourage arrived in England on New Year’s Eve and the next day Henry anxiously went to see her. Afterward, with some irritation, he told his courtiers he’d been misled about her looks. Could he get out of the marriage? His principal advisor, Thomas Cromwell, reminded him treaties were signed and warned the king’s reputation among the crowns of Europe would suffer if he simply sent her home (Cromwell was the foremost advocate of the marriage and was not unconcerned about his own fate if the king was unhappy). So, laying aside his disappointment, the wedding took place on January 6, 1540. That evening, in the royal bedchamber, Henry’s conjugal duties went unfulfilled. A nervous Cromwell was waiting outside the room the next morning and asked the king, “How liked you the Queen?” Henry looked at him darkly and said, “I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse.” He ordered Cromwell and his Archbishop of Canterbury (who’d just performed the marriage) to work out a divorce. It took six months, but it was done. On July 9, 1540, Parliament issued a decree of nullity. Anne (who knew how Henry’s previous marriages ended) acquiesced and even wrote a letter supporting the King, asking that the marriage be annulled. Henry was so pleased he gave her several manor houses and a settlement of 3,000 pounds a year, making her the richest woman in England. Three weeks after the parliamentary decree, Thomas Cromwell’s head was “stricken from his shoulders” on the green outside the Tower of London for disappointing his king. Anne lived out her days in wealth and quietness and died peacefully in her bed in 1557, twenty years after Henry met his eternal fate. The young woman who could barely speak English may have been the smartest of the Six Wives.
Zachary Taylor, the 12th President of the United States, served one of the shortest terms in history. “Old Rough and Ready,” the hero of the Mexican War, attended ceremonies for the dedication of the Washington Monument on the Fourth of July in 1850. Dressed in a black, high-collar suit, the president suffered a sun stroke and was removed to the White House. When he regained consciousness, Taylor demanded several pitchers of iced milk. After drinking those, he called for more, asking also for “a large bowl of cherries.” By that evening he was very sick. His doctors prescribed several large doses of opium and quinine and bled him repeatedly, but in spite of these “attentions,” his condition worsened. The physicians told his wife early on July 9th there was no hope of survival. He died that morning shortly after 10 AM having been president for 491 days. Historians say his term was so short he had no discernible impact on the country. Maybe that's a lesson worth remembering!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Walking the Labyrinth—I love early American music. As I write this, I’m listening to a beautifully-done recording of the Tudor Choir singing selections from their CD The Shapenote Album, a collection of tunes, songs and hymns from the 18th and early 19th centuries. The music is rich and boisterous, full of energy and powerful in delivering its message in the straightforward language of our forbearers. Music speaks to us on several levels at once, affecting us sometimes in unconscious ways. The final nights of Holy Week there is an ancient service called Tenebrae (Latin for “Shadows”). It’s a collection of eighteen Psalms interspersed with readings from Scripture. The Psalms are chanted with melodies many centuries old and the chanting weaves a strange magic on the participants. Chant a few Psalms and you can appreciate the music and get something of the words the music conveys. Chant eighteen Psalms in an hour or two and you will be transported by the music. The steady cadence of the music enables the words of the Psalms to caress the soul; God can speak words of consolation even when we don’t realize we’re listening. I imagine something very much like that happened to our ancestors when they enjoyed a “hymn-sing.”
St Ephrem was a deacon in Syria sixteen hundred years ago. You may have heard of him from the famous prayer attributed to him which is recited by Orthodox Christians daily throughout Lent, “O Lord and Master of My Life.” St Ephrem was a theologian of renown during his lifetime but as he wrote in Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke) his works have been closed to those who don’t know the language. Most interesting to me, though, is that Ephrem wrote his most profound theology as poetry. He wrote his theology not to be read in quiet candle-lit chambers but to be sung out loud!
Theology isn’t usually associated with poetry, but Ephrem thought it was the best medium for conveying profound truths. He understood something which theologians and believers of any faith sometimes forget when they talk about what they believe: God is not a doctrine and theology is not a theory. Ephrem believed we can only talk about God after we acknowledge we don’t know what we’re talking about. We use words to talk about God because we don’t have anything else. “God clothed Himself with language,” Ephrem sang, “so He could clothe us with Himself.” For centuries and more, religious language has been a weapon that has obscured truth as much as it has been a vehicle that expressed it.
Ephrem insists that we approach God with real humility. My old mentor, Fr Rogers, used to tell me humility was not trying to convince yourself you were worthless and bad (which, he said, no sane person ever really believes anyway). Humility, he said, is from the word humus, “earth.” The humble person is one whose feet are firmly set on the ground. Real humility is to know ourselves as best we can, and understand we can know God only in tiny bits and pieces, as best we can catch an occasional glimpse of He Who Is. If we know our vision is imperfect, Ephrem says, if we’re “clothed with humility,” we begin to be ready to talk—or, better yet—to sing about God. St Ephrem didn’t treat words about God as an intellectual exercise. Ephrem’s songs about God are as much addressed to God as about Him. He has no interest in God as a theory—for the Syrian saint, God Is Present Now, here, everywhere and always. An academic discussion about God, to Ephrem’s mind, is as ludicrous as one person carrying on a conversation about himself with himself.
St Ephrem was not indifferent to the necessity of dogma, but wanted it to reflect the reality of human limitations. We are fallen, easily-distracted, argumentative creatures contemplating the Infinite Sea of Charity. One of his hymns is entitled “Against Heresies.” After singing the dangers of the heresies of his day, St Ephrem concludes his work with a stanza of warning to himself and his hearers:
“As I have acknowledged Thee, O Lord
Do Thou acknowledge me.
Show Thy compassions on this sinner
Who believes in Thee.
Even as he sins, O Master
He knocks at Thy door.
Even though his steps are sluggish
Still, he travels Thy highway.”
I read this poem for the first time only a few weeks ago, but it seems to me a perfect song for a walker on any Labyrinth. We cling to our imperfect vision of God, confident not in what we know but Who we know. He’s the One Who guides our faltering steps—and we know where He’s taking us. Our steps may be sluggish and the scenery for each of us a bit different, but our Labyrinths take us along the King’s Highway. You might want to sing as you walk.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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