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.”

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