A Theology of Speech--Free and Fettered

Walking the Labyrinth—August 21, 2009—Today, Western Christians observe the feast of St Pius the Tenth, the 257th Pope. Though he died in 1914, he was one of the most influential popes of the 20th century, the first pope to be canonized in four hundred years. He came from a poor Italian family and his family continued poor after his election to the Papal throne; one of his brothers died as the postal clerk of their home village. Throughout his life he was a champion of the poor. He loved the Church’s rites and did much to restore the obscured glory of her worship—most impressively the restoration of Gregorian chant; as a theologian he ensconced the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas as normative for the Church. He had a love of grim humor and developed the reputation of a stubborn old man. Others eulogize John XXIII and Pope John Paul II—St Pius X is my kind of pope. Today Eastern Christians remember St Bassa and her sons Theognis, Agapios, and Pistis. Bassa, who lived in northern Greece, was martyred about 390. She was married to a pagan priest, who didn’t take her conversion, or those of his three sons, well. Her angry (and no doubt embarrassed) husband denounced her to the authorities—this at a time when Christianity was being persecuted throughout the Roman world (saints don’t always have good timing!)—and the four were imprisoned. When her sons refused to revert to their pagan upbringing, St Bassa was forced to watch as they were beheaded. When she still refused to deny her faith, the local politician (just upholding community standards), ordered her drowned. She was rowed out some distance from land and tossed into the sea, but (according to a medieval chronicle written much later) an angel rescued her and miraculously took her to the island of Alonnisos. There she was promptly arrested and her head was cut off. Not all angels, evidently, are equally competent! Tomorrow, Muslims around the world begin their month-long observance of Ramadan, a kind of Islamic Lent. “Forty days and forty nights,” begins the old Lenten hymn, calling to mind the Christian Fast. Ramadan has this difference—Muslims fast from sun-up to sundown: but they party from dusk till dawn! John Hampton Randolph, a Louisiana sugar-cane planter, spent ten years building what he considered the “finest home on the river” for his wife. Most people who see it today agree. Nottoway Plantation House is 53,000 square feet, with 64 rooms and 365 windows. On August 21, 1841, Randolph patented the “Venetian Blind,” wooden slats on a series of cords he devised, enabling the slats to be raised or lowered, opened or closed. He fitted them into the 365 windows of Nottoway but his bride preferred curtains, so down they came. Still, Randolph liked his idea and worked with the English company that fabricated his originals to popularize the blinds. Randolph attributed his idea to cloth window shades he saw when visiting Venice. Nobody knows what became of the 365 sets of Venetian blinds that once graced the windows of the South’s largest plantation. Ninety-nine years later, August 21, 1940, Leon Trotsky died, one day after an agent of the Stalin’s Secret Police buried a mountaineer’s pick-axe into the back of his head. Trotsky plotted to take Lenin’s place as leader of the Soviet Union after the latter’s death, but lost out to Joseph Stalin, who plotted even harder. When the dust settled, Stalin decided Russia wasn’t big enough for the two of them so Trotsky was exiled and eventually ended up living outside Mexico City. His incessant criticism of Stalin continued from afar until “Uncle Joe” decided he'd been criticized enough. In May, 1940, four assassins entered Trotsky’s home and attempted to kill him. While they killed or wounded almost everybody else in the place, they missed their target. The second attempt was more successful, though Trotsky survived long enough to interrogate his assassin. Ironically, Trotsky was dying before he was assassinated. Doctors told him early in February that he was suffering from what they believed was a brain tumor. He wrote a Last Will and Testament (see the engaging quote below) and, at the time of his death, was planning to commit suicide. Today the Trotsky compound outside Mexico City is a museum and the old Marxist’s ashes are buried in the garden. His granddaughter heads the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. If you think we need more lawyers, this is a red letter day for you. On August 21, 1878, one hundred lawyers met at the fabled Grand Union Hotel—then the world's largest hotel—at the Saratoga Springs Spa in New York to draw up a charter for a national organization of lawyers. They chose a name (the American Bar Association) and wrote a charter (100 lawyers agreeing to all the words of a document in a single day?) which lists among their goals “the advancement of the science of jurisprudence, the promotion of the administration of justice and a uniformity of legislation throughout the country...." Today the ABA has more than 410,000 members and employs over 110 full-time lobbyists in Washington DC. Shakespeare had a suggestion about lawyers, but John Adams, no mean lawyer himself, said “I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, two useless men are called a law firm, and three or more become a Congress.” Mount St Helen’s erupted throughout the first part of August, 1831, and the skies across America turned gray-green. People had to use candles to read during daylight hours. At the time, almost no one in the country knew the reason, but one man took the darkness as a long-awaited sign from heaven. Nat Turner was a slave in Southampton, Virginia, though his owner had virtually given him his freedom. He was a Baptist preacher of some eloquence and influence over both Africans and whites in the area and for some months had been asking God for a sign. The gray-green sky, he determined, was it. Ten days later, 55 white and 56 black residents of Southampton County were dead and Nat Turner was in hiding. He had led about 100 black men and women on a two day anti-slavery revolt, charging them to “kill all the whites,” orders he said he had received directly from God. Unfortunately for his followers, several hundred local militia and groups of wandering vigilantes took up the cry “kill all the blacks” and Southampton County was awash with blood, not black or white, but all of it red. On August 21, 1945, Patricia Ellen Russo, a pretty blond baby, was born in Brooklyn. Her mother was a professional roller skater and her father was a firefighter. Guided by her mother, she began a modeling career when she was four years old. When she was six, Patty appeared in her first movie, Two Guys and a Gal under her mother’s maiden name of McCormack. In 1956, she portrayed Rhoda Penmark, the eight-year-old sociopath and fledgling serial killer, in The Bad Seed –the movie that turned an irritating piano tune into a piece of horror music and changed the image of blonds for a generation of boys. The ancient Romans celebrated the feast of the Consualia on August 21st. Consus was the “Protector of the Harvest.” By Senatorial decree, on this day all horses, mules and asses were exempted from labor, and were led through the streets adorned with garlands and flowers. The Romans reckoned today as ante diem XII Kalendas Septem. This is the 233rd day of 2009, 132 days are yet to come. Today is New Year’s Eve for Zoroastrians, so don’t forget to send a card.

“IF LIBERTY MEANS ANYTHING,” said George Orwell, “it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” When I first read this quote, decades ago, I wasn’t aware of having anything I wanted to say that I thought people wouldn’t especially want to hear, but it sounded good so I wrote it down. Only later in life did I discover how true it was, and that when I came to realize there were times I couldn't, and sometimes shouldn't say what I wanted. Oftimes, it’s better for us—and others—to curtail our right to free speech: we don’t always have to say everything we want to, or can. Our words can cut and wound as much as bind and heal. The exercise of liberty, we discover as we grow, is more often a matter of restraint than license.

George Orwell wasn’t a theologian; in fact, though he was baptized, confirmed, married and buried according to the rites of the Church of England, most literary scholars believe he was probably an agnostic and perhaps an atheist. But his above-quoted statement about liberty is, at its root, religious. It is essential, in his thinking, for us to be free. Freedom means being free to speak, and, as his words make plain, free to criticize. That freedom enables, and at times requires, us to say what we think about the words and actions of others—and, as importantly, for them to do the same us-ward. Why is this important? Not so the free speech of comedians with limited vocabularies and small repertoires will be protected—though that’s a necessary side-result—but so an unfettered discussion can go on about who we are and what we’re doing with ourselves. Freedom to speak is freedom to think and freedom to engage one another. Underlying this, like a massive stone bridge, is the bedrock belief that by engaging one another in discussion, we can arrive together at notions of what is right and wrong, good and evil, true and false. In a world where "it may be true for you but that doesn't mean it's true for me" is regarded as expressing legitimate thought, I understand many people are uncomfortable with the belief that there is right and wrong and true and false. In a world where politics and media and even religion and science answer questions only after they've reviewed their polling numbers, we can't be too surprised if many people believe that everything is relative (something Einstein didn't believe). If numbers impress, though, here's something to consider: most people, for most of the time people have been thinking, have believed it is possible for us to distinguish right from wrong and truth from falsehood. For those who believe such is the case, the freedom to think and so to speak are necessary parts of the process.

There's a movie being marketed right now-I don't know or care to know the name of it-for which I saw a few seconds promo on television. If I understood it correctly, the premise for this film is that some (Jewish?) gangsters (from Brooklyn?) are parachuted into Germany during World War Two and shoot up or blow up an incredible number of Nazis. How convenient, how anemic and how typical. The most acceptable villains are Nazis--even the Germans are morally obligated to root against 'em. We thrash cardboard enemies instead of engaging real issues. Look at the current debate on "health care." The only thing both "sides" have in common is that they each want the other side to lose. The President and his allies aren't honest about many of the real problems plaguing the system because if they were, they might "lose." Their opponents raise false or misleading issues because if they don't, the President will "win." Both sides play a national shell game and regardless of which side "wins," what gets lost is the truth.

God gave us the ability and created us with the freedom to think and understand and so to speak and create. As you walk your path through the labyrinth it has pleased God to drop you into, you have an obligation to speak for truth and right and the Good and the Beautiful. "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done," runs the General Confession in the old Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. A walker of the labyrinth isn't close-lipped about the Things that Matter. There's little virtue in screaming and no one's heart or mind is changed by shouting, but if we engage each other in a search for truth, we will gradually begin to uncover it. It's been all around us, "hidden," as they say, "in plain sight."

FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, I plucked The Culture and Customs of Egypt, by Molefi Kete Asante. This isn’t a great book or even a good one, but it’s one of the most recent books written about “modern” Egypt (it was published in 2002 and repeatedly refers to the events of “9/11”), a topic I wanted to do some reading on. The book is interesting in unintended ways. Primarily, the author is insistent that his readers understand they cannot grasp anything about Egypt unless they first acknowledge that the country is through and through, an Islamic nation. That sounded reasonable when he mentions it in the book’s preface. He then reiterates it a few pages into the first chapter and goes on reminding his readers of the fact every 5 or 6 pages throughout the whole text. Even I got—after a couple of chapters—that he was trying to make a point. Let me digress just a moment to say that it’s my rule, before reading any non-fiction book, to see who the author is and learn a bit about his background, so I can understand the point of view and beliefs he brings to his work. I didn’t do that with this book. I saw his name, leafed through the book (I checked it out from the library) and compared it with the other 2 or 3 books they had about modern Egypt and decided this one was best. I assumed the author was an Egyptian. I discovered differently only when—about half-way through the book—I got sufficiently irritated by its preachiness (an unremitting “Egypt for the Egyptians” message that never lets up, whether discussing Egypt’s geography, economy, television, fine arts or cuisine) that I looked up the author on the internet. It turns out Dr Asante isn’t Egyptian but the head of African American studies at Temple University. Now I grasped the essentials of the book. It was less about Egypt than it was what Dr Asante wants me to believe and acknowledge about Egypt. Still, I did get some information I wanted, though through a sieve. One of the most fun things I learned was that the Aswan High Dam, built by Nasser in the 50’s and 60’s, the most monumental project in modern Egyptian history, produced all sort of unforeseen consequences. The flooding of the Nile, the annual renewal of Egypt, enabled the founding of the civilization of ancient Egypt. The Nile brings the rich silt of Africa and deposits it along the riverbanks of Egypt. But since the dam was completed, the silting has been much reduced. The ancient Nubian people, who lived along the less-fertile southern Nile, were displaced by the building of the dam. Dr Asante grudgingly lets us know that the Arabs of northern Egypt little regard the older Coptic people and Nubians—both racial descendants of pharaonic Egypt—and so the government had no qualms about simply moving them out into the desert to make way for the soon-to-be formed Lake Nasser. It turns out, though, that the shoreline of the new lake is the property of the displaced Nubians and the rich silts are now principally lining the shores of the lake. The once-impoverished Nubians are becoming the prosperous farmers and fishers of Egypt and the farmland of northern Egypt is slowly losing its fabled fertility. A crisis is brewing in Egypt.

My advice? Don’t bother with Dr Asante’s book. Read this one instead: A Short History of Modern Egypt by Dr Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot. Dr Marsot was born in Cairo and is the first Egyptian woman to earn a doctorate from Oxford. She lives in Cairo, a retired university professor. Cambridge University Press published her book a few years back, and while it’s not at my local library, I bought a copy on Amazon for less than $2.00. I haven't finished reading it yet, but it's by far the better of the two .


QUOTATIONS FROM THE PRINCIPALS:

“For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.” –Leon Trotsky (I imagine he must have monopolized most dinner-table conversations)

“I was born poor, I have lived poor, I wish to die poor."—St Pius X

“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.”—Joseph Stalin

“Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.”—Joseph Stalin

“Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.”—Nat Turner

“A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England.”—George Orwell

Uncivil Discourse

Walking the Labyrinth—August 14, 2009—Eastern Christians today celebrate the martyrdom of St Markellos, Bishop of Apamea in central Syria. The bishop was an eloquent preacher and after hearing one of his sermons about the evils of paganism, some of his overenthusiastic flock went down the street from the bishop’s church and torched the local Temple of Zeus. When a mob of irate pagans learned the conflagration was ignited through Bishop Markellos' incendiary sermonizing, they marched down the same street, pulled the bishop from his throne, dragged him to their burning temple and tossed him into the flames. This was on August 14, 389. Markellos' martyrdom elevated him to sainthood, but none of the succeeding bishops of Apamea sought to make reputations for themselves as firey preachers. All through the night of August 13-14, 1814, Francis Scott Key and two friends watched the bombardment of Fort McHenry from the deck of the British warship HMS Tonnant, anchored outside Chesapeake Bay. After a continual, 25 hour bombardment, the British gave up the assault. As dawn broke, Key and his friends marveled at the sight of the American flag waving above the fort. Well they should have. When the commander of the garrison, Major George Armistead, learned of the impending British assault, he hired Mary Young Pickersgill, a well-known Baltimore seamstress, to sew a flag “so large that the British will have no difficulty seeing it from a distance." She did. With the help of her daughter, two nieces, and two African servants, they made a flag thirty feet high and forty-two feet long. Each stripe was two feet wide and each of the fifteen stars measured twenty-six inches across. The result was a flag which could be seen several miles from the fort. Later that year, Key published the “Star-Spangled Banner,” inspired by Mary’s nimble sewing and Armistead’s stalwart defense. The flag is now on display at the Smithsonian; it is still big. One hundred and sixteen years ago, the city of Paris became the first European metropolis to issue drivers’ licenses to owners of automobiles. Drivers had to register their names, residences and next-of-kin (in case the horseless carriages “combusted”—like a certain Syrian bishop we know), and pass a test proving they knew how to “operate the carriage so as to leave others unharmed and unthreatened.” One might wish the last phrase was incorporated into the California Driver's Handbook today. Henry Sweet matriculated at Balliol College in Oxford, England on August 14, 1869. He devoted himself to the study of Old English and Old Norse, and published his first book of Anglo-Saxon medieval texts while still an undergraduate. The vanished tongue of the Anglo-Saxons would remain a passion for the rest of his life, and he published texts and grammars of the language till his death in 1912. But Sweet is most remembered as the real-life model George Bernard Shaw used for the character of Dr Henry Higgins, eventually immortalized by Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. He wrote several groundwork studies on phonetics and was often introduced as “the man who taught Europe phonetics” on the lecture circuit. Like Higgins, he was blunt and had a reputation—particularly among fellow teachers of phonetics—of being hard to get along with. He long-wanted, but never obtained, a professorship at Oxford, despite the many academic honors awarded him through his lifetime. One of the Masters of Balliol explained it plainly: “He was an irascible young man and is an irascible man now in his middle years. There is no doubt he will be an irascible old man, and nobody likes irascible old men.” On August 14, 1945, five days after Nagasaki was devastated by an atomic bomb, Emperor Hirohito said in a radio broadcast “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage” and announced Japan’s surrender, ending World War II. That morning, after President Truman read the news to America, Alfred Eisenstaedt went out into Times Square intending to make photographs of people as they learned the news. He spotted a sailor “running along the street grabbing and kissing any and every woman in sight, whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, young, didn't make a difference . . . Then suddenly I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse." The picture made him famous; it was printed on a full page in the next edition of Life Magazine. The nurse was Edith Cullen Shain, but the sailor has never been identified. Ninety-nine years before, to the day, Henry David Thoreau was jailed as a tax resister. Thoreau, the author of Walden Pond, (almost as popular with American high school students as Melville’s Moby Dick), believed the Mexican War was unjust and being fought at the behest of American slaveholders. The only practical way he could see to oppose it was to refuse to pay his $1 poll tax—this was before the days of federal income taxes, Medicare taxes, Social Security taxes, state income taxes, state and city sales taxes, property taxes, federal and state excise taxes, transfer taxes and our soon-to-be-introduced Value Added Tax. Thoreau hoped a stay in jail would bring attention to his protest against the War, but his friends and relatives paid his overdue taxes (he hadn’t paid for several years) and all the attendant fines before he’d languished more than 12 hours. He reluctantly accepted his freedom after a single night in jail when the jailer refused to let him remain. The evening of his imprisonment, Thoreau was visited by his close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson asked him, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is, what are you doing out there?” On August 14, 1880, the great Cathedral in Cologne, Germany was completed. Work had begun on the Cathedral of St Peter and St Mary on August 14, 1248. For a variety of reasons the work was abandoned in 1473 and not begun again until 1842. During the intervening four centuries, a large crane, perched atop an uncompleted bell-tower, sat unused. The crane was visible from all parts of the city and is depicted in many paintings and even a few photographs of the cathedral until work was taken up again. This is the 226th day of the year, 139 days remain till we welcome 2010. The Romans reckoned this day as ante diem XIX Kal. Sept.; in 1957, Debbie Reynolds topped America’s music charts with her song Tammy. By order of the United States Congress this is “National Kool Aid Day”; today is the first day of Mae West Week.

MOST OF THE WEEK, if you turn to the news—print or broadcast—you’ve read about or heard played the excitable Town Hall Meetings, angry people shouting at politicians come home for a vacation. Depending on your political disposition, these people are either hirelings or patriots. That’s where most of the media attention is focused—who are these people and why are they being so rude to our elected officials? I’m not so interested in who they are—time will tell—as in what they’re doing. Videos of some of these events show politicians who seem genuinely hurt by the public voice of disdain and distrust they’re encountering. Senator Claire Macaskill asked an angry crowd “Don’t you trust me?” She got a resounding “no!” back. It reminded me of the wisdom of the old political adage “don’t ask a question unless you know what the answer will be first.” She was crest-fallen. One politician after another this week faced crowds which gave truth to the polls that members of Congress today are less popular than George Bush is with 9/11 Conspiracy theorists. Political pundits, so used to playing coy with the politicians who are their guest stars, are scratching their heads and lamenting the deterioration of public discourse in America. That’s because nobody learns American history anymore. Angry confrontations of political figures is nothing new; we could truly say it's one of the oldest of American traditions. If this was early 18th century America, politicians would be less worried about somebody shouting at them than they would about a bunch of people appearing with a barrel of hot tar and a big bag of feathers. John Edwards or Larry Craig wouldn’t be wringing their hands and hoping to get absolution from Oprah, they’d be afraid an outraged crowd would break into their house, bust it up and steal their stuff.

On May 22, 1856, a Congressman from South Carolina, Preston Brooks, entered the senate chamber just as the day’s business was concluded. He approached the desk of Senator Charles Sumner and calmly told him he objected to a speech Sumner had delivered two days earlier. The speech had been a vicious personal attack on Brooks’ uncle, an aging Senator, and against the entire slave-holding South. Brooks took his cane and beat Sumner with it until he broke it over the Senator’s back and head. It took Sumner three years to recover. Brooks survived an expulsion vote from the House; over the next few months he received hundreds of gifts—canes—from Southern admirers.

Throughout the 1960’s, 70’sand 80’s American politicians, left, right and middle, faced angry demonstrators: Johnson was a warmonger, Nixon was a crook, Carter was soft on communism, Reagan was a fascist. But these weren't the first American Presidents to hear the shouting. George Washington was hooted down as a pawn of the British, John Adams was pilloried as "King John the First," and Thomas Jefferson was ridiculed as a man "who loves some certain of his Monticello slaves overmuch." Politics in America has been a tough business since the Mayflower bumped into these shores. The were many British glad to see those ships full of malcontents head west to the New World.

How does all this ruckus sound in the labyrinth? It's noise. Noise from the left and noise from the right, it's all noise: it may make frustrated and angry people think they feel better for a day or two, it may temporarily disturb the cozy slumber of a few politicians, but shouting changes neither the hearts nor the minds of the people being shouted at, nor does it truly relieve the hearts and minds of the shouters. If the country ever changes for the better, it will be when Americans enter into reasoned discourse. When we listen and try to understand what others are afraid of, what they hope for, what they aspire to. The labyrinth teaches us first to listen, then to reflect, and last of all to speak. That would bring genuine hope and change. But it's hoping for a change which will never come. It can't. Because each of us, from the President of the United States to the local dog-catcher, is afraid. We can't tell each other the truth because we so rarely tell it to ourselves. We tell ourselves the truth in broken bits and pieces because that's how we are. Every great religion, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, all acknowledge the truth of St Paul's cry: "I know what I'm supposed to do, but I don't do it!" Political systems always fall short of their aspirations, it doesn't matter who is in charge, and that's because it's always us--one of us, a batch of us, or, as we try to convince ourselves here, all of us--who are in charge. If I become perfect, there's always--you--and you're not.

So what are we labyrinthine plodders to do? Do we chuck it all with a "a plague on both your houses?" Not if you've taken more than a single step on your way. One of the things you discover the first time you walk an actual labyrinth is how narrow its curves and walkways are. You can't avoid other people who are walking it. Your spiritual journey is continually interrupted by others--almost, we might say, by design. No politics on this planet can satisfy the heart that beats in any of us. Those who imagine themselves thus satisfied will discover--too late!--that they've set their sights too low. The magnificent ocean vista they've been admiring is merely a wall-painting. "No man is an island." Nor do we wish to be--but we walk the labyrinth, broken as we are, knowing Washington and Sacramento--and even the Texan's Austin--are merely steps on a journey that take us Elsewhere.


FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, a book I actually added to the pile for the occasion. When I saw last week that today was the anniversary of Thoreau’s jailing, I pulled my old Signet paperback edition of Thoreau from the shelf and put a bookmark in his essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau wrote the essay after his jailing, but it summarizes the thoughts which caused him to go there in the first place. I haven’t read the essay for many years, but remember, even back in high school, when I (was forced first to) read it, how challenging it is. Thoreau cuts straight to the bone in the essay’s first sentence: “I heartily accept the motto, — ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.” He is one with Tom Paine, a revolutionary to the core, though unlike Paine, he has no truck with the pike or the guillotine. In Thoreau’s view, everything the State involves itself in becomes tainted because the power of the State is ultimately based, not on reason or truth but compulsion. The State can take away a person’s possessions and even their life; but the one thing the State cannot compel, he insists, is the conscience. “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? …we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right…Law never made men a whit more just…” These were dangerous words when they were written and they remain as dangerous today. America has a strong tradition of law and its place in defining our society. That tradition stretches back to the field of Runnymede and the Magna Carta. But we have another tradition, equally ancient, running deep in the American marrow, calling us to “do justice,” in words ringing through the Testaments. Thoreau gives most eloquent voice to this tradition. If you want to stretch taut the strings of your mind and heart, find a copy of this old essay and read it. But be careful: it’s not for the sunshine patriot or curious antiquarian. You will chaff at the headlines in every day’s paper. A Signet paperback copy of Thoreau can be had for less than a dollar on Amazon.

QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“Then, in that hour of deliverance, my heart spoke. Does not such a country, and such defenders of their country, deserve a song?”—Francis Scott Key

“Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will follow it.”—Henry David Thoreau

“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.”—Henry David Thoreau

“Whatever insults my State insults me.”— Preston Brooks

“The age of chivalry has gone; the age of humanity has come.”—Charles Sumner

“Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur.”— Alfred Eisenstaedt

“I discovered freedom for the first time in England.”— Emperor Hirohito

Salty Words

Walking the Labyrinth—August 7, 2009—Mary Magdalene is believed by some to be the wife of Jesus. The foremost proponents of this article of faith, though, are ones who know—and almost certainly believe—little else about Mary Magdalene or her purported Husband. Members of the Russian Orthodox Church—and other Christians who continue to use the old Julian calendar—celebrate the feast of St Mary Magdalene today—and venerate her as “The Holy Myrrh-Bearer and Equal-to-the-Apostles Mary of Magdala.” So, laying the gobbledygook of the Da Vinci Code in the same trash heap as claims that the pyramids have an extraterrestrial origin because the Egyptians were too stupid to have built them or that Kentucky Fried Chicken is clandestinely controlled owned by the Ku Klux Klan which is using the profits to develop a new “secret recipe” to make black Americans incapable of reproduction (there are websites devoted to both these theories), what’s the real juicy story about Mary Magdalene? That the first Easter morning, Jesus chose to reveal Himself to her first of all. Women in the ancient world weren’t allowed to serve as witnesses. Their testimony wasn’t accepted as having any legal or societal value. The risen Jesus chose her as His first witness and sent her as a witness to His disciples, who were all still in hiding, afraid for their lives. The Gospel story is far more compelling than the anemic fiction that she was Jesus’ girlfriend. Russian icons of St Mary Magdalene graphically display her role on the first Easter Day. She is always depicted holding a red Easter egg on which is inscribed in Cyrillic letters the words “Christ is risen.” The Roman Emperor Marcus Ulpius Nerva Traianus, commonly known as Trajan, died today of a stroke, in AD 117. During his nineteen year rule, the empire reached its widest geographical limits, and enjoyed peace and prosperity. The historian Edward Gibbon called Trajan one of the Five Good Emperors—not bad considering there were 170 of them! After his death, the Senate instituted a prayer for every succeeding emperor: felicior Augusto, melior Traiano, meaning “May he be luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan.” The next time you go through a revolving door, thank Theophilus Van Kannel. On this day, in 1877, he patented the “Van Kannel Revolving Storm Door.” Although the world’s first revolving door was installed at Rector’s, a restaurant on Times Square in Manhattan, Van Kannel originally tried to market his doors to homeowners. He also invented and owned the Witching Waves attraction at Coney Island and for some years it was the Witching Waves rather than the revolving door that made Van Kannel a wealthy man. In 1620, Katharina Kepler, admittedly a feisty old woman, was arrested for witchcraft. Her son, Johannes, yes, the famous astronomer, directed her defense. Though it took more than two years, he finally won her case. The first potatoes were planted in Hawaii on August 7, 1820, by a newly-arrived group of Congregationalist missionaries. They introduced New England cuisine—potatoes, apples, salted cod, corned beef, butter, and cheese—to the Hawaiians, believing this, and the replacement of hula skirts with hoop skirts, would lead the natives to eternity. They’re still eating poi. Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born today in 1876. Forty one years later, at the height of World War I, she was convicted of spying for the Germans and executed by a French firing squad. Earlier in her life, while living in Indonesia, she studied dancing, Hindu mysticism and the arts of the Oriental courtesan. She changed her name to Mata Hari (“the eye of the Sun”), moved to Paris and hired an agent. She achieved overnight success in the theater and became mistress to some of Europe’s most powerful businessmen, military officers and politicians. Wilhelm, the Crown Prince of Germany, was enamored of her and paid for her lavish lifestyle from his own pocket. During the early days of the First World War, she was questioned by British intelligence officers and told them she was a French spy. The French denied it—and they were probably telling the truth. Most of her biographers think she claimed to be a spy because it sounded exotic and would add to her mystique. If that was her intention, she succeeded. French intelligence officials began watching her and built a case—now regarded as flimsy—claiming she was a German double agent. She was executed in a deserted army camp outside Paris at dawn, on October 15, 1917. The popular press of the day reported that, just as the soldiers were about to fire, she flung open her full-length coat to reveal her naked body and cried, “Harlot, yes, traitor, never!” Eyewitnesses dispute the account, but all agree her last act was to blow a kiss to her executioners. In 1957, Oliver Hardy (he was the fat one) died of cancer at his home in North Hollywood. Together with his good friend, Stan Laurel, Hardy (born Norvell) made twenty-three full length films over twenty years. His Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is at 1500 Vine Street, just at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Napoleon Bonaparte famously said with enough ribbon, he could conquer Europe. General George Washington was more sparing. During the American Revolution the General created the Badge of Military Merit, a military order for soldiers who exhibited, “not only instances of unusual gallantry in battle, but also extraordinary fidelity…” Unlike European military medals, however, which were only awarded to high-ranking officers, Washington wanted to create an award for common soldiers. The Badge was designed by Washington himself. It was, he wrote, to be a “figure of a Heart in Purple Cloth or Silk, edged with narrow lace or binding.” During the entire course of the Revolution, he awarded only three of them. The recipients were Sergeant William Brown of the 5th Connecticut Regiment, Sergeant Elijah Churchill of the 2nd Continental Light Dragoons and Sergeant Daniel Bissell of the 2nd Connecticut Regiment. After the War, the General discontinued the order. It was re-introduced on George Washington’s birthday in 1932 by the War Department with a new name: the Order of the Purple Heart, given to soldiers wounded in combat. In Oxford, on August 7, 1970, Tarawood Antigone, a brown Burmese cat, gave birth to 19 kittens. It was, and still is, the largest number of cats born to a single litter. The father was a half-Siamese whose whereabouts remain unknown. The old Roman calendar reckons today as ante diem VII Idus Augusti. This is the 219th day of the year; 146 days remain. Today is the last day of both Intimate Apparel Week (surely a popular day in the hallowed halls of Congress) and the United Nations’ Worldwide Breastfeeding Week. More disturbingly, tomorrow ends National Clown Week (no DC asides from me here—I wouldn’t know how to stop).

ALL THE FOCUS ON SILENCE with Agatho’s Stone elicited an curious letter from a friend this week on the “other side” of silence. Liz, who maintains a website of those suffering chronic pain, sent me an excerpt from a letter she had from a woman who believes she ought to speak only when her words meet Scriptural requirements—i.e., her words must always benefit someone. My initial response is why there aren’t more people like this living in California, but I know it’s a selfish thought. Liz’ correspondent quoted a verse from the New Testament, which the King James translators rendered: “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.” As I pondered this odd preoccupation with a single Bible verse, I couldn’t help but connect it to Agatho’s silence. Agatho’s stone was to help him “learn” silence, but the books of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers attribute quite a few words to Agatho, wise and sometimes bold. His silence didn’t shut him up. His stone taught him there were times for silence and times for speech. His speech was powerful because he didn’t open his mouth to give utterance to his every passing thought. His silence taught him how to speak—and what to say.

Aristotle defines man as the animal who speaks. We speak, other animals don’t (regardless of how much it may sound like your dog is trying to). Since we all talk, even Liz’ friend, it’s what we have to say that matters. “Speech is the mirror of the soul,” said Publius Syrus 2100 years ago in Rome. “As a man speaks, so he is.” The consummate politician, Monsieur Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, a cynic if ever one lived, takes a contrary view: “Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.” Subtle, very French. With Bartlett’s Quotations in hand, we could amass an army of quotations about the use (and misuse) of speech, but I think this unlikely joining of Publius and Talleyrand is just what we need to consider how we speak as we walk the labyrinth, and what to suggest about Liz’ sincere and very serious friend.

Publius, Talleyrand, certainly Aristotle and Agatho all would agree speech has power. How we speak, what we say, can reflect our hard-to-see souls or hide them. In the Book of Genesis, at the very beginning of the Bible, we see something else very basic about words. God speaks and His words create. “Dixitque Deus ‘Fiat lux’ et facta est lux.” “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light." (When God speaks, all my instincts tell me He speaks in Latin.) Words are creative and when you and I speak, we create something. We can’t say “Fiat currus” and have an automobile appear, but without words, there would be no such things as automobiles. How did you feel the last time someone you love told you they loved you? How did you feel when someone you respected called you stupid? This is the power of speech. Words create and destroy, they wound and heal.

Most obviously, though, words communicate. They allow us to speak and listen to each other (your dog, through her whines and barks and the odd sounds she makes when she wakes you up at 2 AM, is communicating something, but because she can’t speak, you have to guess—and we don’t always guess aright!). Words express love and hate; passion and indifference. With them, we join God as creators. Speech is a gift, a sharing of the divine. There are times when we tread softly and silently along our labyrinthine path; but there are times we cry or laugh, times we speak to encourage, times we reach out because we don’t want to be alone. Sometimes we speak because the beauty that overwhelms us must be shared. Silence opens us to God; words open us to each other. Our walk through the twisting curves of the labyrinth makes plain we are made for both.

St Paul said something more about speech: “Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt…” Not bland, maybe a little spicy, and most emphatically alive.


FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, I plucked Kwaidan, loaned by my pal Melissa and recommended as “some of the scariest stuff you’ll ever read.” In Japanese, Kwaidan means “weird tales” and that they are. The book is a collection of strange stories collected from 1000 years of Japanese story-telling by Lafcadio Hearn, an old favorite of mine. Hearn lived in New Orleans after the Civil War and wrote about the jazz of Jellyroll Morton, the birth of Creole restaurants and the demise of the steamboats. Then, unexpectedly, he chucked everything in 1890 and moved to Japan, where he remained for the rest of his life. He published Kwaidan in 1905, his own translations—with some notes to help his English readers—of tales of ghosts, goblins and spirits which intrude into the lives of the Japanese peasant and feudal warlord alike. It’s not the scariest book I ever read—that honor belongs to a book on 20th century American politics—but it is a book that allows its reader to step back into the soul of a vanished world. It’s much more like reading an unexpurgated version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales than it is a Stephen King horror book—but since I’ve never read one of King’s novels, it’s a one-sided comparison. The tales depict a world where people not only believe in tree spirits and flesh-eating goblins, they live in expectation of encountering them. There are beautiful fifteen-year old girls just about to marry whose sudden death reveals a mystery (most of the young women who die in these tales are fifteen—I don’t know what significance that holds); samurai who break their vows and suffer supernatural consequences; a stock character in many of these stories is a wandering Zen priest, who sometimes steps in to make things right, and sometimes, like the Pharisee in the parable, passes trouble by on the far side of the road. There’s an surprising story about a cruel samurai who outwits the ghost of a man he unjustly executed; another about a ghost who summons a blind bard to sing to the dead in a graveyard. In all seventeen stories in just 240 pages—if you pick up the book (you can buy a new copy on Amazon for about $5.00), plan to spend a few evenings venturing back to medieval Japan. Buy some good green tea to go with it.



QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“I am a woman who enjoys herself very much; sometimes I lose, sometimes I win.”—Mata Hari

“Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.”—Johannes Kepler

“You are dunces. Do with me what you want. Even if you were to pull one vein after another out of my body, however, I would have nothing to admit.”—Katharina Kepler, when shown the instruments she could have been (but was not) tortured with

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”—President George Washington

“My door possesses numerous advantages over a hinged-door structure: it is perfectly noiseless, effectually prevents the entrance of wind, snow, rain or dust and it cannot be blown open by the wind . . . there is no possibility of collision, and yet persons can pass both in and out at the same time."— Theophilus Van Kannel (this is the only quote I could find; admittedly it’s hard to be moved by these words but remember, this man also invented a ride in an amusement park)

“Regimes may fall and fail, but I do not."—Talleyand

“Treason is a matter of dates."--Talleyrand

“I don't know much, but I know a little about a lot of things.”— Oliver Hardy

Making Silence

Walking the Labyrinth—July 31, 2009—Today the calendar of the Roman Catholic Church celebrates the feast of St Ignatius Loyola, while the Eastern Christian calendar venerates St Eudocimus of Cappadocia. Both were soldiers; Ignatius was a 16th century Spanish knight and Eudocimus rose through the ranks to become the military governor of Cappadocia (eastern Turkey). St Eudocimus became renowned for his acts of private charity, many of which were discovered only after his death. St Ignatius founded the once-feared Society of Jesus—the Jesuits. In their heyday, they cornered the popular market on mysterious codes and secret handshakes much as the Templars do nowadays with people whose knowledge of history comes from the backs of cereal boxes. (The Jesuits haven’t completely disappeared from the fringes of imagination—there are at least two websites online as I write that claim Shakespeare was a Jesuit [shakespeareunmasked.com], or, at the very least, a secret Papist. As proof, the authors offer the anti-Catholic, anti-Jesuit dialogues in the Bard’s plays. Only a Jesuit, they reason, would be duplicitous enough to deflect questions about his crypto-Catholicism by attacking Catholicism!) Surely this is a record: today in 768, a monk named Philip was dragged from his monastery by one of the political factions in the city of Rome and forced to undergo the ceremonies which made him Pope. But Philip didn’t want to be Pope. After the excitement of the day quieted and the crowds went home, he laid aside the papal vestments, wrote out his resignation, and returned to his hermitage. Nothing more is known about him; we have a record of only that one day in his life. The author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, the English satirist and pamphleteer Daniel Defoe, was pilloried today in 1703. Defoe wrote an anti-Tory, populist pamphlet, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, for which he was sentenced for three days in the stocks at London’s Charing Cross (now Trafalgar Square). So popular was Defoe with the crowds however, that instead of throwing the customary tomatoes and rotten vegetables at him, the platform was surrounded by friends who pelted him with flowers and drank to his health. On July 31, 1875, the seventeenth President of the United States, Andrew Johnson, died of a stroke. He was the first President to succeed an assassinated predecessor (Abraham Lincoln) and the first President to be impeached. Those two facts are what most people know about him, but in his lifetime, Johnson was well-known for something else: his fondness for a stiff drink. On the morning he was to be sworn in as Vice President, Johnson stopped outside the Senate Chamber where the ceremony was to take place. He called for a “tumbler” of whiskey, which he promptly downed. He said he had a hangover from the night before and called for another. After drinking a third tumbler, he entered the chamber, where he was met by President Lincoln and the erstwhile Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin. While Hamlin gave his final address to the assembly, Johnson showed more and more signs of agitation. He stumbled through the words of his oath of office and proceeded to deliver a long, rambling, sometimes incoherent speech about his humble origins. Americans can take heart from this. The incoherent speeches and resolutions we hear coming out of Congress today have a precedent that goes back more than one hundred and fifty years! On this day in 1921, in the small town (pop. 300) of Sterling, Connecticut, at about one o’clock in the afternoon, it began to rain. Along with raindrops, though, the skies dropped frogs. By two thirty, the town was smothered with millions of small frogs measuring from half an inch to an inch and a half in length. The streets and fields were covered with hopping, squirming, belching frogs. The people of Sterling were beside themselves; nobody worried so much at the time why it had rained frogs as they did what they were going to do with all of them. But if Nature provided a conundrum, she also provided a solution. While the townspeople tossed the frogs out from their yards by the shovel-full, ducks from Moosup Lake (which borders the town) and the Mossup River descended on the town and roamed the streets, feasting on the new arrivals. After two days of duck-gluttony, not a ribbet was heard. Twenty-eight years after the Rain of Frogs in Sterling, Mother Nature again reminded us who was in charge. At a State League baseball game in Lakeland, Florida, on the afternoon of July 31, 1949, the second baseman, shortstop, and third baseman of the visiting team were all killed by a single lightning bolt, which struck the backstop, then shot around the infield “as though completing a double play,” the local newspaper somewhat insensitively observed. The game was delayed two weeks, but the home team still won. In the annals of the Royal Navy, today is known as “Black Tot Day.” By order of the Admiralty, the final “rum ration” was issued on this day in 1970. Since 1655, the call “Up Spirits” drew British seamen on deck to receive their daily ration of a shot (or “tot”) of rum. In 1740, the ration was a half-pint of rum, to which was added sugar and lime, to combat scurvy. The officer in charge of mixing and dispensing the rum was called the purser. Over time this led to calling the officer “pusser” and the rum “pussers.” The name stuck and “Pusser’s” has long been one of the most popular brands of English rum. Today is the 212th day of the year, 153 remain. On the ancient Roman calendar, today is the pridie Kal. Aug. The old Celtic calendar celebrates today as Lughnasadh, one of the four principal holidays of the year. Lughnasadh marked the beginning of the harvest season, the ripening of first fruits, and was traditionally a time of community gatherings, market festivals, horse races and reunions with family and friends. Among the Celts it was the favored time for “handfastings”—trial marriages that would generally last a year and a day. St Patrick put a stop to that.

LAST WEEK, I WROTE about Agatho’s Stone and the “learning” of silence. This week, I’ve had some discussions about silence with a few friends who read about Agatho that offer thoughts worth sharing. My good friend Jean, in Virginia Beach, said “I’m not a talker; living alone, I have plenty of silence. Still, I try to listen for that ‘small voice,’ for God and His plans…” and Alan, my atheistic pal from Santa Barbara (how can you be an atheist and live in the hills over Santa Barbara?) wrote: “I wish more Christians would be quiet. What they have to say is often poorly thought-out. Mostly it’s just stupid or insulting. Can’t you get all of them to use those rocks?” Paul, a young man I prepared for Confirmation long ago who’s now not quite so young and is considerably more thoughtful, has written me a couple of notes this week. He says, “We aren’t monks who’ve made vows to keep silence. How can we be silent and be part of society? I could understand how this could help in a Trappist monastery but I find it hard to see the usefulness of silence to me.” Jean spends a lot of time in silence just because of her living situation; Alan wants people to keep their half-baked religious notions to themselves; and Paul sees the potential value of silence but finds it difficult, if not impossible, to see a place for it in our daily lives. Our situations are all different, but the need each of us has for silence is the same. Remember why Agatho put the stone in his mouth. It was to “learn” silence. Agatho lived in the desert. He didn’t have much of a chance to talk to anybody in the first place. His point was not “I don’t want to talk” or “Here in the desert there’s nobody to talk to anyway.” It wasn’t even that Agatho thought he didn’t have anything to say worth hearing. He was cultivating silence, cherishing it, growing it.

Paul is right. Most of us don’t live in Trappist monasteries. We can’t refuse to answer questions our boss asks because we’re cultivating silence. But we can learn the profound lessons Agatho himself learned by forming an intention of silence. We can choose to be silent at certain times. We can go for walks or retire to the woods by ourselves or sit on the beach. We can retreat for a few days to a quiet place—a monastery or vacation spot. We need silence. Today everyone is supposed to “be themselves” and “express their feelings,” but Alan the atheist is right: most of the ideas that pass for religion or spirituality that come out of the mouths of those “being themselves” are insipid and trite. A mantra I’ve heard times innumerable in southern California is “I’m not religious, but I’m a very spiritual person.” The sentences which follow this statement invariably show the speaker knows nothing of either religion or spirituality. True religion and genuine spirituality have several components but one most necessary to both is silence. We don’t learn silence by just shutting up. We have to search it out. We learn silence by being silent. We don’t have to do it with the desert fierceness of Agatho, that calling comes to few of us. But whether it’s putting up a fence on a south Texas ranch or turning off the computer and going for a walk every other day, the person who seeks to walk the Labyrinth knows there are some steps that have to be made in complete silence. We must learn to be alone, we must cultivate silence, to have things of value to say. In that pregnant silence, we will hear the Voice that’s been waiting to speak.


FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, I pulled an old book I’ve been meaning to re-read for years. It’s been there for more than a year, its position in the stack moved up and down in relation to others for reasons sometimes unexamined. Now, having read it again, I know what those reasons are. The book is The Conscience of a Conservative, written by the late Senator Barry Goldwater, with help from his friend L Brent Bozell, Jr., William F Buckley’s best friend and brother-in-law. The book is neither subtle in its message nor complex in its argument and is only about 125 pages. So why did it sit, unread, in my stack of books for the last 14 months? Simple and straightforward, the book is distressing. You can read the whole of it in an evening, but if you pick it up, it’s unlikely you will. You’ll be stopping too often to think about what Goldwater said 45 years ago, and how insightful his words are today. The longest chapter in the book “The Soviet Menace,” might seem irrelevant now, but its insights remain valid: “What about the Russian people? We are repeatedly told that the Russian man-on-the-street is woefully ignorant of the American way…is it relevant? As long as the Russian people do not control their government, it makes little difference if they think well of us or ill. It is high time that our leaders stopped treating the Russian people and the Soviet government as one and the same thing.” What would happen if those principles were applied in 2009 to Iran? At its heart the book reminds us that the basic principles on which our country was founded were radical then and they remain so today. They call us to practice freedom. Goldwater warns that the tendency of human beings over the centuries has been to surrender freedom for something else. He pointedly quotes the famous words of Franklin and gives them a startling conclusion: “ ‘What have you given us?’ a woman asked Ben Franklin towards the close of the Constitutional Convention. ‘A Republic’ he said, 'if you can keep it…’ We have not kept it,” Goldwater concludes. In ten chapters the short book reviews some of the areas that most concerned its author, detailing simply but effectively the practical consequences of government programs on the country. But most important, The Conscience of a Conservative reminds us that, regardless of the promises of politicians to justify their reelections by promising us more and more, we lose far more than we receive. In the end, that’s what makes this book important: it recalls its readers to a genuine and ancient hope. The state and, let me add, most of our society, sees men and women in economic and political terms. Those things are useful, but not the end-all of existence. “Conservatism,” Goldwater says at the beginning of his book, “looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy.” As I read I couldn’t help but reflect that we have not only failed to advance that principle in the years since it was first written, but have receded far from it. Freedom isn’t something we’re given by the state or society. We have it from our Creator. But we must each of us make it our own. With unsubtle books like this, we can regain that vision it’s so easy to lose.


QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.”—St Ignatius Loyola

"Few souls understand what God would accomplish in them if they were to abandon themselves unreservedly to Him and if they were to allow His grace to mold them accordingly."—St Ignatius Loyola

“Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The Devil always builds a chapel there; And 'twill be found, upon examination, The latter has the largest congregation.”—Daniel Defoe

“Nature has left this tincture in the blood: all men would be tyrants if they could.”—Daniel Defoe

“Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.”—President Andrew Johnson

“It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.”—President Andrew Johnson

AND FINALLY, remembering Black Tot Day, one more from Daniel Defoe:
“Any Englishman will fairly drink as much as will maintain two whole families of the Dutch.”

Agatho's Stone

Walking the Labyrinth—July 24, 2009—The calendar of saints lists seventy-six saints today, but the story surrounding St Hermogius of Tuy bears recounting. St Hermogius was a nobleman of pious inclinations living in tenth century Spain. Uninterested in his family’s chivalric background and their long history of fighting the Moors in his homeland, Hermogius founded a monastery, which he unwisely situated in the middle of the war zone. To no one’s surprise, (except, evidently, Abbot Hermogius) the Moors, led by the Emir Abd al Rahman, raided the monastery and took the confused abbot prisoner. When he learned his captive was a nobleman the emir demanded a ransom from the abbot’s family. Hermogius’ uncle bartered with the emir and, in exchange for the abbot’s release, sent his one of his own sons, Pelayo, to take the abbot’s place until the ransom could be raised. Hermogius was freed and retired to a place far from the lines of battle. He was later made a bishop and died peacefully, twenty years after all the excitement, in 942. But what about Pelayo? For three years his father tried to raise the ransom money but was unable to do so. Finally, the emir called Pelayo before him and gave him two choices: convert to Islam or die (one source claims Pelayo was given another option. He was, evidently, a handsome young man and the emir had an eye for handsome young men, so he offered him a third choice…). Pelayo refused to convert. The emir, in what has to be one of the more unusual forms of martyrdom ever inflicted, had the young man loaded onto a catapult and flung over the city walls. Found still breathing, Pelayo was dispatched with swords. None of the chroniclers say, but family gatherings afterwards must have been tense when both St Hermogius and his brother showed up. The Rock of Gibraltar was seized by the British on this day in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession. Historians count it as the eleventh (and last successful) Siege of the Rock. The author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, was born on July 24, 1805, in a village northeast of Paris. As the novelist's fame grew, so did personal attacks on him, particularly attacks on his mixed racial background. To one member of the Fourth Estate, who referred to Dumas as a mulatto in every public mention he made of him, Dumas finally responded in a brief note: “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends." America’s most famous aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, was born this day in 1898. On her sixth birthday, Amelia convinced her uncle to build a ramp off the top of the family toolshed. She found a wooden box and, climbing in, propelled herself down the ramp and off the roof. Amelia's first flight was short but she never forgot it. She emerged from the broken shards of her first airborne vehicle with a bleeding lip, a torn dress and “a sense of exhilaration.” She shouted to her open-mouthed sister, “Pidge, I was flying!” A year after Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight in 1927, Amelia duplicated his achievement and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Ten years later, in an attempt to fly around the globe, she disappeared over the Pacific. Amelia didn’t break the “glass ceilings” of her day. She flew her airplane right through and far above them. July 24 was doubly important to Richard Milhous Nixon. In 1959, he held a running, five-hour debate with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in front of a display of a modern American kitchen in Moscow. They debated dishwashers and nuclear weapons. At times the words got heated. After disputing Nixon’s claim that most Americans could afford the appliances on display in the kitchen, the premier remarked: “I do not think that this exhibit and what you say is strictly accurate. I hope I have not insulted you.” Laughing, the Vice-President replied: “I have been insulted by experts.” Seventy-two million Americans watched the tape of the “Kitchen Debate” the next day on television. Time Magazine declared it an overwhelming victory for Nixon and his popularity skyrocketed. Fifteen years later, to the day, his popularity at an all-time low, President Nixon received word that the Supreme Court ordered the White House Watergate Tapes to be released. Ten days after that, he resigned the presidency. Today is the 205th day of the year, 160 days remain in 2009. According to the old Roman calendar, it is the ninth day before the kalends of August (a. d. IX ante Kal. Aug.) and the second day of the Neptunalia, a feast celebrating the Roman god of waters, kept in the hottest part of the Italian summer. In 1965, Herman’s Hermits topped the music charts today with “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am,” which was not a musical tribute to the man who separated the Church in England from Roman Catholicism. While we may not celebrate Neptunalia, we as a people do have our American celebrations. Today is national Drive-Thru Day.

THE STORY IS TOLD THAT AGATHO, an Egyptian monk who lived in the desert 1600 years ago, carried a stone in his mouth for three years, “until he learned silence.” This immediately calls to mind Demosthenes, the Greek orator who stuffed his mouth with stones, but for the opposite reason: he was trying to perfect his enunciation. The stone taught Agatho silence; it trained Demosthenes how to speak. While it’s hard to imagine anyone today putting a rock in their mouth (remember Audrey Hepburn as Eliza in My Fair Lady; when Professor Higgins, following Demosthenes, plopped some pebbles in Eliza’s mouth, she swallowed them!), we can at least understand Demosthenes’ motivation: he wanted to be a better public speaker. But what did Agatho have in mind? He wanted to be silent—and not just now and then—but, as the ancient monastic text says of him, he wanted to “learn” silence. He was cultivating it. For Agatho, silence had some special meaning and importance. Mark Twain joked about one aspect of silence: “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” So saying, he was expressing an idea that stretched back to the ancient world, even before Agatho. Cato the Elder, that stern as nails old Roman, said: “The first virtue is to restrain the tongue; he approaches nearest to gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right.” From Cato to Dale Carnegie, it’s been good for business to know “the customer is always right” and keep quiet when necessary. Agatho’s rock, though, points to a different lesson. His rock didn’t just keep him from talking, it taught him silence.

Years and years ago, I knew a woman who couldn’t endure silence. If there were people in the room and no one was talking, she would fidget and squirm and start sputtering “ums” and “wells” until some inane sentence would form and she would release it. Silence scared her. Agatho understood that silence had value. When I’m not speaking, I can listen. I can listen to others (that may be scary), I can listen to myself (that may be scarier) and, if I practice, I can even listen to God (that is the scariest of all). But all three of these “listenings” take practice and require that we “learn silence.”

Walking your labyrinth is meant to be a sort of Agatho’s stone. One of the basic lessons of the labyrinth is that you walk it yourself. Companions on the Way are gifts, and Scripture speaks true when it records “It is not good for man to be alone.” But at the most basic level, we are. All “Oprah-like” wisdom to the contrary, we are finite. God made us with limits and boundaries we cannot cross. Part of growing—growing up, growing old, growing in grace—is coming to terms with our limits, and learning to be thankful for and rejoice in them. Yes, we need to “never give up, never!” as Churchill insisted. Knowing our limits doesn’t mean we don’t try to push them, to continue to grow. Wisdom, though, is realizing we can’t be everything. God set your feet on the labyrinth of your life and told you to find your way home. To do that, you have to pay attention. We must learn to listen, to develop “ears that can hear.” When we’ve learned the silence that enables us to listen to others, we’ll find out we’re beginning to learn the silence that allows us to listen to ourselves. The third silence enables us to begin to hear the rare and purposeful whisperings of the “still, small voice” meant for us and for our salvation. It’s a Voice that leads us Home; a Voice that’s been beckoning us, we will someday come to understand, all along. We haven’t been able to hear it much because we’ve been doing all the talking. When Agatho realized it, he put a rock in his mouth. Maybe you can find a small pebble and see what happens.


OF YOUR CHARITY, please remember Robert Williams, my great and good friend, who died Thursday, July 23rd. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine et lux perpetua luceat ei.


FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, thanks to Melissa Berry (through whom I’m reliving some of my old days in academe), I have rediscovered a book I would almost certainly not have picked up again. While studying at the University lo, those decades ago, I started to read John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. Started, but never finished; never came close. When Melissa asked me about it recently (they’re reading it in her post-graduate class), I went and found me a copy. Mine, published by Little, Brown & Company in 1981, is beautifully illustrated with photographs, some by Ruskin, and many sketches and watercolors, all by Ruskin. But it is the text you fall into. Here and there, like the waters of Venice, his technical notes go over the head of an aficionado of architecture ancient and modern. But Ruskin’s descriptions and more especially his commentaries, based on architectural biases as immutable as the laws of the Medes and the Persians, are bold and thoughtful. He may not be right in all his judgments on Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance art and architecture, but he knows what he likes, what he thinks is good and uplifting, and he knows what is crass and debased. He gathered his materials for the book during a three-year stay in Venice from 1849-1852, and published it in England in 1853. During those three years, Ruskin documented Venice as he found it, using a camera, sketch book and watercolors. He climbed ladders up the sides of sometimes unstable walls, measured columns and windows while hanging from balconies, climbed into attics and under old bridges to record the architectures he found—and separate the wheat from the chaff. Ruskin decided Gothic architecture was the architecture of Heaven, and Renaissance work was—not. A feature of the book which delights the reader willing to float with Ruskin down the canals of Venice (not speed-read through for a thesis) is the author’s digressions on the Meaning of It All. Venice, the brightest of cities, celebrated it glory with the brightest of architecture and art—the Byzantine and Gothic—recognizing (as quoth Browning, dear Melissa) that God is in His Heaven. When double-dealing and impiety came to rule Venice in the counting-houses on the Rialto and the Palace of the Doge, it found the old pieties—civil and religious—too constraining and abandoned them for the re-born pagan paintings and buildings of the Renaissance. The art and architecture a people produce, Ruskin provocatively insists, reveals its soul. The Venice of the Renaissance, he dogmatically states, misplaced its soul and it shows. I had great fun reading this and yesterday decided I’m going to read it again this week, just for fun and see what more I can glean. I wonder, were Ruskin to come to Los Angeles and putter through our buildings and artstuffs, what he would deduce about our souls?


QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest.”—Alexandre Dumas

“It is rare that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.”—Alexandre Dumas (I just quote ‘em, I don’t write ‘em!—GW)

“There are two kinds of stones, one of which rolls.”—Amelia Earhart

“I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.”—President Richard M Nixon

“Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people.”—President Richard M Nixon

“When you are skinning your people, you should leave some skin on to heal, so that you can skin them again.”—Premier Nikita Khrushchev

Companions on the Journey

Walking the Labyrinth, July 17, 2009—Today, both Orthodox Churches of the East and the Latin Church of the West unite to celebrate the feast of St Alexis, the “Man of God.” He was the son of a noble Roman family who lived a life of prayer and fasting in the deserts of Syria. In 1918, in the hours after midnight, the family of Tsar Nicholas II was killed by the local militia of the Ekaterinburg Soviet. Since the forced abdication of the Tsar the previous March, he and his family had become pieces in a chess game (one hesitates to say pawns, but…) between the Bolsheviks and White Russians during the Russian Civil War. They were moved from place to place to keep them from the hands of Tsarist forces. On July 16, the town of Ekaterinburg echoed with the sounds of battle; forces of the White and Red armies clashed just outside the town. Fearing the Romanovs might be freed, the decision was made to kill them. The accounts of their death make gruesome but uninteresting reading. More intriguing is what happened afterward. The royal corpses were disposed of down abandoned wells and mineshafts, and various chemical attempts were made to destroy any trace of them, but these proved unsuccessful. Lenin, in Moscow, made loud and public declarations that he was shocked and had nothing to do with the deaths. When the White Russians captured Ekaterinburg the local Soviet officials claimed they weren’t responsible. Later a White Russian leader caustically remarked, “The Tsar was evidently killed by accident, no one knows by whom.” A scrutiny of secret Soviet State documents in 1990, however, uncovered a telegraph from Lenin to the Ekaterinburg Soviet ordering them to “kill them all.” On this day in 1861, the United States Congress authorized the first federal paper money (“greenbacks”—in $5, $10, and $20 notes); a month later, the same Congress imposed the first federal income tax on Americans. Things have been going in the same direction ever since. In 1836, Bishop William White, who had been consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1787, died. He was the first homeowner in Philadelphia to install an indoor “necessary room.” At a Brooklyn, New York printing shop, in 1901, Dr Willis Carrier installed the world’s first air conditioning system, allowing printers to control the temperature, humidity, ventilation and air quality of their shop. For the first two decades of the 20th Century, Carrier’s invention was used to cool machines, not people. Then, in 1925, it occurred to the owner of the Rivoli Theater on Broadway that the “Apparatus for Treating Air” (the air conditioner's first official name) might be equally used to cool off people, too. He hung a sign out saying, “It’s Cool Inside.” Skyrocketing ticket sales at the Rivoli forced his competitors to seek out Mr Carrier. In 1505 Martin Luther, the German from Eisleben, joined the monastic order of Augustinians. Twelve years later, he would want out in the worst way, and made quite a ruckus doing so. Disneyland, “the Happiest Place on Earth,” opened its gates for the first time in 1955. Walt Disney, Art Linkletter, Bob Cummings and Ronald Reagan (who received the “low billing” that day) hosted a television gala of the event. It was not a Happy Day at the earth’s Happiest Place. Disney had ordered 6,000 special invitations to be printed for the first day, but by noon over 28,000 people attempted to enter, most with counterfeit tickets. A strike by the plumbers’ union meant there was no water, including the “necessary rooms!” A heat wave pushed the thermometer in Anaheim that day to 110 degrees. The heat wave continued and Walt met with financiers to discuss the possibility of failure. Fortunately for children and bankers the world over, people did continue to come. In ancient Egypt, today was celebrated as the birthday of Isis (“She of the Throne”), goddess of motherhood and fertility, responsible for the seasonal rise of the Nile. The old Roman calendar counts today as the thirteenth day before the kalends of August (or as they would have written it: ad XIII Kal. Aug.) It is the 198th day of the year; 167 remain. The United States Congress (the same ones who brought you the Income Tax) have decreed July as National Horseradish Month and also National Blueberry Month, so choose. So important is the hot dog that the same body has recognized July as National Hot Dog Month and July 18 as National Hot Dog Day. Others, far wiser than I, have noted we get the government we deserve.

A CLOSE FRIEND of mine is dying. I am going to see him tomorrow, not for the last time, I hope, but to bid him Godspeed. Bob has been a rare companion on my walk through the labyrinth. A true friend, in my book of definitions, is one who loves you enough to tell you the truth, but privately. That Bob has done and I hope, so too, have I. My journey along the labyrinth has been a particularly rich one. I have known souls of great depth and incredible shallowness, men of wealth and homeless vagabonds, liars and poets, saints and scoundrels. All of them, one way or another, have enriched my journey (admittedly, my appreciation for some of them has grown only as my association with them has faded). But as I pause to jot down my weekly thoughts on the labyrinth, I can’t help but to remember those I’ve known and loved—or at least—known. One of the greatest gifts God gives us is those with whom we share our lives. Like ‘em or not, they are walking a labyrinth no less difficult, if obviously different, than our own. Sometimes, it takes a death to remind us how great are the gifts of life. Each of us must walk our path by ourselves, but God knows it’s not good for us to be alone.

This week—today, in fact—the Episcopal Church in the United States concludes its General Convention, which meets every three years. Given the choices Episcopalians have made at these get-togethers over the past few decades, it’s probably just as well they don’t meet more often. This time, they made a couple of decisions that surprised nobody who is in the least familiar with that religious body—they decided to remove any bars to the ordination of practicing homosexuals (that phrase always strikes me as funny—are they homosexuals who will keep trying till they get it right? if so, shouldn’t we at least occasionally use the phrase “accomplished homosexuals?”) and to authorize the insertion of rites for homosexual marriages into the next edition of the Book of Common Prayer. No surprises there. Much more interesting was the opening sermon of the Convention, preached by Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopals. She declared it was heretical to believe in “individual” salvation. The bishopess called this “the great Western heresy: that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God." Christians of every denomination from the Catholic Church to television evangelists have decried her remarks. Every error, though, is palatable because it contains a kernel of truth, regardless of what the kernel may be buried in. The truth is, we find salvation, to a very great degree, because of the others with us on our pilgrimage. Whatever our faith, or lack of it, we learned its essentials because of those around us. Our families and friends and teachers and pastors have helped each of us become what we are. So Ms Schori is right to this degree: none of us can be saved without the help of those around us. But she is wrong in this equally profound degree: God has made us as individuals, each bearing His image. How I walk along the labyrinth either mars or polishes the greatest gift God has given me: His image of Himself in me. And to the degree I deface the image, nobody around me has to wonder about the reality of hell: I carry hell wherever I go. And most happily, the opposite is also true. To the degree I burnish that image and make it shine, I make it possible for those around me to know, without an intellectual discourse, that Heaven, too is a reality. My friend Bob walked his labyrinth nobly and gracefully, and is now taking his last steps. To the eye which sees but does not understand, he can barely walk. But I know he is sprinting to the center of his labyrinth, knowing Who waits for him there.

FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, I confess to picking up a book out of sheer indulgence. I first read this book, Journey into Fear, back in 1970. I don’t know how many times—ten at least—I’ve read it since. The copy I now own is my third. Eric Ambler, the author, worked writing copy for a London advertising agency before World War II, writing short stories and a few novels on the side. Journey into Fear was the last, and best, he wrote before the war (many, me included, would simply say this was his best). It is pure escapism, a spy novel whose main character is not a spy, and is wonderfully peopled with Turkish spies and Italian sailors, a elderly German archaeologist and a pair of seedy flamenco dancers. Howard Graham, the protagonist, is an English engineer sent to Istanbul as a temporary consultant. The night before he is to return home, he enters his still-dark hotel room and is shot. He doesn’t know why and neither do we readers for some time. His dangerous escape from would-be assassins puts him aboard slow-moving tramp steamers and fast moving French trains each replete with hidden dangers. Ambler’s writing is tight and fast-paced, but the characters are well-drawn and fascinating, and it is the characters, wittingly and unwittingly, who drive the plot. I’ve read—and own—all eighteen of Ambler’s novels and a collection of his short stories called Waiting for Orders, and occasionally find myself drawn back to the bookshelf where they stand, lined at attention and ready for use. But this is the one I pick up most often when I go there. If you see it somewhere, pick it up, but I offer the invitation with this caveat—don’t plan to read anything else for the next day or two, because you will be otherwise occupied.

QUOTES OF THIS WEEK’S PRINCIPALS:

“I feel much better now that I am certain the pope is the Antichrist.”—Martin Luther

“All dressed up, with nowhere to go.”—Bishop William White

“I am not yet ready to be Tsar. I know nothing of the business of ruling.”—Tsar Nicholas II, on the day of his coronation.

“It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.”—Vladimir I Lenin, who ordered the Romanov’s slaughter

“We will not do less research and development work, and I will not discharge any of the people we have hired; I will work for nothing if I have to."—Dr Willis Carrier, when told by his bankers at the coming of the Depression he needed to fire workers tp keep up profits

“I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing – all this was started by a mouse.”—Walt Disney as he opened Disneyland

Mapping the Path

Walking the Labyrinth—July 10, 2009. In Moscow today (and every July 10th), at Dormition Cathedral, an ancient relic (how ancient? ah, that’s the rub) is put on display for veneration. The cathedral, the mother church of Tsarist Russia, was completed in 1479 and stands in the center of Cathedral Square at the Kremlin. In 1625, representatives from the Persian Shah arrived in Moscow with a gift for the Tsar, Michael Feodorovich, and the Patriarch of Moscow, Philaret. The Shah’s emissaries claimed their gift was the same robe the Roman soldiers stripped from Jesus at the Crucifixion. If the Shah’s story is to be believed, this relic is the seamless robe of Christ, woven of a single piece of cloth. In ancient Christian writing, Christ’s seamless robe was taken as a powerful symbol of the unity of the Church. As such, if this was indeed that garment, its value would be inestimable. Oddly enough, though, the Cathedral of the Dormition isn’t the only church in Russia with Christ’s one garment. Or at least, part of it. Pieces of it are enshrined at the cathedral in St Petersburg, the church attached to the Tsar’s Winter Palace, at Sophia Cathedral in Kiev, at the monastery in Ipatiev, and several other prominent Russian churches. If you happen to be at Dormition Cathedral on July 10 on any given year, you won’t see the seamless robe displayed, but only a venerable piece of it. Whatever the original garment was the Shah sent to the Tsar, it was promptly cut to pieces and parceled out! On the night of July 10, 1212, the newly-completed London Bridge fell down. The south part of the bridge caught fire and a bunch of people who ran onto it to put out the fire got trapped as the flames spread quickly around them(the bridge was lined with shops and residences). Happily most were rescued when the city’s boatmen clustered underneath the bridge and helped people into their boats and barges. Medieval Londoners turned near-tragedy on its head though; they rebuilt the bridge and made a children’s rhyme out of the night’s events. In 1509, the humorless John Calvin was born. Trained as a lawyer, he first published his massive work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, in 1536. It irrefutably proves that 25 year olds should not write theology books. In 1692, some of Calvin’s disciples, having come to the New World to escape religious persecution, hung Brigit Bishop from an oak tree outside Salem, Massachusetts, for being a witch. She was the first of 19 to die from July till September of that year in the famous Witch Trials. Her main offense seems to have been that she liked to wear bright-colored clothes and flirt with men. Today she’d have a television show or be a Senator’s “other woman”—and then have a television show. On July 10, 1884, the man who many regard as the world’s greatest chess player, Paul Morphy, died in his bathtub. Morphy came from a distinguished New Orleans family and as a young child he learned how to play chess by watching his elders play the game on Sunday evenings. One of those evenings, when he was four years old, he told his uncle he should have won the game he just lost. He proceeded to demonstrate this by resetting the board and going over the game move by move, then showing the opportunities his uncle had missed. By the time he was nine years old, he was regarded as the best chess player in New Orleans. He toured the world when he was 20, winning international acclaim. Morphy, weighed down with laurels from the Queen of England and proclaimed “Chess Champion of the World" by the President of the United States, returned to New Orleans in 1859 to open a law practice. It never prospered, he told friends, because almost everyone who came to his office wanted to talk about chess, not the law. After a long afternoon walk in the New Orleans heat, Morphy insisted on getting into a bathtub filled with cold water. His body went into shock and he died while still in the tub. His home, at 417 Royale Street in the French Quarter, is today the site of Brennan’s Restaurant, where “Bananas Foster” was created and continues to be served. In 1923, the city of Rostov in Russia was pounded by a hailstorm. The average weigh of the hailstones that pummeled the town was 2 pounds. According to the city archives, “23 people were killed and a very great number of cattle.” Two years later, the Scopes “Monkey Trial” (one of several “Trials of the Century” held in the 20th century) began in Dayton, Tennessee. John Scopes was convicted, but he later told reporters he couldn’t remember whether he’d taught evolution in his class or not. The whole thing, he said, had been staged to win publicity for both sides. The first full moon in July is called the Buck Moon or the Honey Moon; today is the 191st day of the year; 174 days remain in 2009.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON once wrote, “Every boy loves maps.” It’s certainly true in my case, but Stevenson would undoubtedly be accused of sexism if he penned those words today. Perhaps justly. A lot of us, male and female, love maps and the hidden promises they enfold. There was an old map shop I used to frequent in New Orleans, closed by the hurricane, which was one big open room laden with maps: maps on counters, maps in big, wide drawers, maps on the wall, maps in cases, no inch of the place—except the floor—but was covered with a map. There were gigantic maps on the ceiling and I got more than one crick in my neck looking up when in that store. My great prize from there was a reproduction of a map of the plantations of Louisiana along the Mississippi, originally done about 1855. It’s 7 feet tall and 32 inches wide, and gives the names and owners of each plantation from Belle Chasse to La Barre. There are maps like this I cherish, but I’ll confess something here. I can’t bring myself to throw maps away. Outdated road maps, tattered maps, AAA maps I’ve got three duplicates of, I always stop and think “What if somebody needs this someday?” I know what Stevenson was talking about. I doubt he could bring himself to toss out a map either.

Labyrinths are ancient, much older than Christianity. The first labyrinth to be dated was built 1,000 years before Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt. They’ve always been seen as sacred pathways, but with the coming of Christianity, they disappeared from the Mediterranean world. No doubt, they were seen as holdovers from the Old Ways. Then, about 1200 or so, give or take a century, labyrinths began to re-appear. On the floors of large parish churches and the pavements of the new Gothic cathedrals, these ancient patterns found a new meaning. They were seen and used as paths of pilgrimage. After the Muslims closed off Christian holy places to pilgrims and the wars we now call the Crusades were being waged, people began walking (often on their knees) these labyrinths as a way of making a pilgrimage. Often the central core, the heart of the labyrinth, was inscribed “Jerusalem” or had a picture of the holy city painted there. The labyrinth, with all its twists and turns, is both a journey and a map.

About half-a-dozen of those medieval labyrinths still survive in European cathedrals. Some new ones have been built. But even those of us who can’t walk the labyrinths 0f Chartres or Amiens can still benefit from them. Their very existence can teach us about our own lives and pilgrimages. Most obviously, they teach us we need maps. We need a guide to help us get to where we want to go. How much gasoline, do you think, have GPS systems saved? How many arguments have been averted when men, on whose stubborn ears the phrase “why don’t you stop and ask someone where we are?” once fell as on barren ground, now simply punch the family’s destination into the car’s GPS device? In the labyrinth of our lives each of us needs guidance, help along the way. We each have to walk the path God has set us on, but we can walk well or poorly, we can succeed or fail. Even though the path you're walking is yours alone, others have been walking paths like yours for countless years, stumbling where you've stumbled, dancing where you've danced, crying tears like yours, delighting in the same silvered moons you've wondered at. You've got to walk your labyrinth yourself, but you don't have to walk it alone. There are great men and women who've gone before you. Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest their stories of spiritual struggle and failure and growth. Find a friend to talk to about the deep things of your life, the things that make you who you are. The early Christians in Ireland and Wales called someone like this a "soul friend." Not necessarily a spiritual director, but a companion along the way. Your spiritual life isn't merely your "church life" or the stuff you do people might call "religious." It's who you are when you're measured at your deepest point; the part of yourself you meet the most rarely, the you you know the least.It's the you God put in the labyrinth and said "Get on with it. Start walking." So what map will you use as you travel? That depends on where you decide you want to walk. From one pilgrim to another I simply say: choose that map wisely.

FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, a pleasant surprise, Journey Back to Eden, by Mark Gruber, OSB. Fr Gruber is a Benedictine monk who spent a year in Egypt living among the Copts. He went to do a sociological study of them to complete his field work for his doctorate in anthropology. My good friend, Col. P J Hickey (ret), sent it to me as an Easter gift. I just read it this week, which shows you behind I am in my reading. But I’m glad I kept it on the bookstack. Fr Gruber went to Egypt "to study this ancient and indigenous people." The book tells the story of how he came to analyze their culture and ended up embracing their ways. Fr Gruber didn’t abandon his American Catholicism and become a pseudo-Egyptian; he did something much more profound. He eventually came to see himself, and his faith, through their eyes. Through the rich experiences he recounts in the book, he discovered the common, core faith he shared with his hosts. He lived in the desert monasteries of Egypt for a year and came to understand the fiery discipline of the ancient monks was not a throwback to times past, but a true way forward for people of faith. He contrasts the life of Christians in Egypt, where the Copts are a persecuted minority, to the life of Christians here in America, where even the monastic life is rich and fat by comparison. Here, we have evangelists who preach the good news that God wants us to be wealthy; there, the Coptic monks tell the people their persecuted status is God’s plan for the redemption of Egypt, Coptic and Muslim. This is the moving story of a man who went to Egypt to study anthropology and discovered his life as a Christian. I wasn’t expecting much from this book but in reading it made some happy discoveries of my own. Journey Back to Eden was published by Orbis Books in 2002.

Quotes from today’s principals:

“I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.”—John Calvin (this is as funny as Calvin gets)

“Scare. Terrify. Petrify your opponent."—Paul Morphy

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."--Clarence Darrow, Attorney for John Scopes

Schizophrenia--Spiritual and Otherwise

Walking the Labyrinth, July 3, 2009—Today, the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the Feast of the Holy Nobleborn Prince Gleb of Vladimir, one of the many sons of the Nobleborn Prince Andrei Bogoliubsky. The young prince Gleb, was from an early age devoted to reading books and attending church services, and was “much loved of the clergy of the city.” He died at nineteen in 1174. His church biography tells us no more, but modern historians say his death was under “mysterious circumstances.” Perhaps it had to do with that phrase “one of many sons.” In 1423, Louis XI, who ruled France from 1461 until 1483, was born. He was called “Louis the Prudent” by his court and “Louis the Spider” by everyone else. He loved plots and conspiracies but during his reign, France steered clear of wars and the monarchy consolidated the power which would one day blossom into the much-admired reigns of Louis’ successors. Basil Rathbone gave a delightful performance as The Spider King in the movie “If I Were King,” a fantasized account of the life of the medieval French poet-thief, Francois Villon. Louis also makes a “cameo” appearance in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Louis had an interest in science and once pardoned a man from the gallows if he would allow himself to be operated on for the removal of his gallstones, a problem which also plagued Louis. The man escaped the noose, but died under the surgeon’s knife. At two o’clock in the afternoon, on July 3, 1863, General George Pickett ordered more than 13,000 Confederate soldiers to attack the Union forces entrenched on Cemetery Ridge outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. More than half of them were shot down in the attempt. The survivors dragged themselves and their wounded comrades back across the bloody mile they’d just come, under the jeers and bullets of the Federal Army . The disaster of Pickett’s Charge brought to an end three days fighting at Gettysburg. Lee’s army limped back to Virginia, and though the War Between the States continued for almost two years more, the Confederate loss at Gettysburg and the surrender of the Confederate army at far-off Vicksburg the next day, marked the turning point of the war. Years later, when asked why his attack failed, Pickett is said to have quipped “I always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.” Although his family loudly insisted he was “born on the Fourth of July,” George M Cohan’s birth certificate lists July 3, 1878, as his birthday. His musicals dominated Broadway for twenty-five years, and during that time he wrote over 1500 best-selling songs (“Give My Regards to Broadway,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” “Over There,” “Mary Is a Grand Old Name”). He died of cancer in 1942, a few weeks after the just completed biography of his life, “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” starring James Cagney, was privately screened for him. Today is the 184th day of 2009; we have 181 more to go.

UNLESS YOU LIVE in a cave in Egypt (not an entirely unattractive thought), you know Michael Jackson died this past week. Several major stores in Los Angeles greeted shoppers over the past few days with large signs: “No Michael Jackson Items Left.” He has been eulogized by our new President and is undergoing a secular canonization in the press. His music doesn’t appeal to me, so I am not a fit judge of his talents, but if the number of his enthusiasts is a good indication, he was a man of much talent. I do know, regardless of the truths or untruths surrounding his personal life, he was plagued by many demons, inside and out, physical and mental and most certainly demons spiritual. Like so many who play leading roles in our society, he had both a public persona and a private character, and the divorce of the two led to a type of schizophrenia, a torn and damaged personality. A look at the news coverage over the past week shows the fascination our society has with both sides of Michael Jackson. But he is far from exceptional. A respected “family-values” governor crumbles right in front of television cameras as he reveals his love-sickness. A few months ago Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 for a speech he made to a group of bankers in Dubai, but one of them told reporters afterwards, “All we wanted to do was meet the man who soiled Monica Lewinsky’s dress.” We can’t seem to get enough of it. Is it too much of a leap from there to say that with these sort of leaders, our society is increasingly schizophrenic? The bulwarks of our society—political, educational, religious, financial, medical—are failing to hold up under pressure. There is much talent, much flash, much glamor, but little inner strength. More and more, we are becoming less and less.

Tomorrow, we celebrate the Fourth of July. What are we celebrating? Surely it’s more than a national remembering that the Declaration was signed in Philadelphia 233 years ago. We must be saying those events mean something today. Not just because our taxes are lower today than they were under King George, not because our liberties are now greater, the restrictions on us less, the government not as intrusive…well…um…on paper we have a right to the government we want, so look the situation at Los Angeles City Hall, the State House in Sacramento and the columned halls of Washington DC and ponder the “more perfect Union” we’ve formed. But before we vent our righteous indignation at those damned politicians, bear in mind the men and women in public office rarely do anything on their own. They are more followers than leaders, looking to polls rather than principles before making up their minds. That shouldn’t be surprising. The Founders of our country knew they would, and designed a government accordingly. Ours is not a direct democracy, where every vote ultimately matters. We have a representative democracy, a republic, where we choose people to do the governing for us. The Founders left us a government that would, by and large, reflect what we believe and do what we want. This is all by way of saying, the government we have embodies the society we’ve built. As society changes, so too does government. Every elected government official says what his constituents want to hear. Can you imagine Theodore Roosevelt, 100 years ago, or John F Kennedy, 50 years ago, supporting the infanticide, the broad sweep of abortions throughout America today? Democrats and Republicans alike support this horror, because they believe their constituents do. Euthanasia doesn’t have much support in Congress, because there’s little support or demand for killing off gramps right now. Wait another 25 years, when we’ve got an increasing number of octogenarians draining government revenues and see what the polls say then. We don’t have a government of principle but policy. Our public policies are schizophrenic because our society is schizophrenic.

But don’t write us off yet. Two thousand years ago, Cicero cried, “O tempora! O mores!” “Oh, the times! Oh, the manners!” feeling things couldn’t get much worse. Policies can change and so can societies. For them to change, we, the people, have to change. Our world can only grow in grace and wisdom, if we grow in grace and wisdom. Groaning and griping about bad politicians and pathetic leaders and stupid policies doesn’t take anybody off the road to ruin. It just makes the journey the more unpleasant for everybody. To walk a labyrinth is to walk a road of grace. We walk with the assurance that the journey will end happily, no matter our difficulties and failures along the way. One thing though, a word to the wise walker: don’t gripe and grumble down the path, bemoaning the state of things with grumbly—eloquent, but grumbly—Cicero. The time will come, when you will be called on to fight the good fight. When it comes, do your best. Fight to the finish. But don’t let the “iron enter into your soul,” as the Psalmist said. Don’t be twisted by the times or discouraged by the battle. When you and I come to the Center of our labyrinths, our walk will end. We’ll then be Otherwise Occupied. If I was to guess (and I’m a pretty good guesser), I would guess the true peace and genuine freedom we have waiting for us Elsewhere, will be in proportion to the peace and freedom we have found—and made, for ourselves and others—walking through the life we are living right now.

FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, a couple of fun things I wanted to share. First, not a book at all, but a printed menu! Fr Robert Sanchez, my old Romish friend, made a gift to me last Sunday of an antique menu from the Hollywood Brown Derby. It's not dated, but has “Thursday” printed at the bottom right corner. So, naturally, the first thing I did was to look at the dishes and how much they cost. Under “Brown Derby De Luxe Dinners” the Whole Broiled Live Lobster, with Drawn Butter, the Soup du Jour (Chicken Broth with Egg Noodles) and Derby Salad with French Dressing, Assorted Vegetables and Choice of Potatoes cost the Thursday diner $3.00. The front of the menu is decorated with caricatures of well-known Hollywood patrons of the establishment. I mentioned the menu to Dolores Davis, a friend who keeps tabs on me for our Writing Group, and a chef of renown. She loaned me an aging book titled The Brown Derby Cookbook, my most fun book this week. It was written by Leonard Lewis Levinson in 1949. While most of a cookbook is wasted on the likes of me, I did write down about six or seven recipes I want to remember, including Avocado Neptune Derby, Mexican Barbecued Lamb and one listing titled simply Brown Gravy (underneath the title, Dolores long ago penciled in “Very Good!”). Aside from the recipes, though, the book has a wonderful essay, “The Story of the Brown Derbies” giving an account, historical, mythological and culinary, of the eateries. The book also includes a “Glossary and Table” to help understand the Derby’s unique recipes, and a concluding section titled “How to Read a Menu.” The last of the Derbies (Los Feliz) closed when I was pastor of St Mary’s, right down the street. I used to treat ecclesiastical visitors to a meal there while it was still open. I wish I’d known about this book back in those halcyon days.

Quotes from the Principals:

“He who does not know how to lie, does not know how to reign.” King Louis XI

“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened… Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand and his sword in the other waits, looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet…”— William Faulkner on Pickett’s Charge, Intruder in the Dust

“Many a bum show has been saved by the flag.”—George M Cohan

Okay—one recipe:

Fresh Shrimp Saute Brown Derby Serves 3

4 oz butter; 1 lb raw shrimp, peeled, split and cleaned; 1/2 lb mushrooms,sliced; 1 bead garlic, chopped fine; 2 tbs finely chopped green onion; 1/2 tsp basil;
1/2 cup white wine; 1/2 cup Brown Gravy or chicken broth; 1 tsp celery salt; 1 tsp Worcestershire Sauce; 2 cups steamed rice

Heat butter in heavy skillet. Add shrimp and sauté on medium heat for 8 minutes. Add mushrooms, garlic, green onion and basil. Saute 2 minutes more. Add wine and reduce by two-thirds. Add brown gravy, celery salt and Worcestershire Sauce. Serve over steamed rice.

Gracias, Dolores!