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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Monday, August 23, 2010
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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…
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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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