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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