Second Terrace

Trouble and terror, and peace (rev.)

Troubled. I heard, a few days ago, someone opine (like the desert murmurers who wanted poultry on the spit) that the weeping icons were simply doused by the priest, late at night, with surreptitious oil -- which contradicts my own experience of having watched the tears form on the iconic surfaces (even condensing on the interior of the glass case).

I am usually a skeptic, too, but I like to think that I'm a consistent skeptic. I am skeptical about all perceptions of phenomena. I am always asking, "Did he get it right? Did I make the right inference? Is she factual, or is her statement part of a contrived narrative that she wants taken seriously? Does our consumerist worldview cohere with reality?"

I think of the Michael Daisey balamuta (and kudos to Ira Glass and Co. for their last episode on TAL), and I wonder: "Isn't our anti-religious skepticism itself worthy of skeptical disfavor?" Would Dawkins and friends survive their own brand of sardonic critique, if boomeranged against their own distempered views?

Wonder what Hitchens thinks now.

But then I realize that I go too far. Skepticism really was never the problem. The maintenance of a comforting, anesthetic and luxurious "reality" is. This is perhaps the reason why David Bentley Hart complains that anti-religious critique is so vapid nowadays, compared with the more well-bred but far more robust skepticisms of earlier atheists and agnostics.

Nowadays, atheism and the rejection of miracles are more the characters that emerge from cartoons. But, to be fair, so many statements emanating from the opposition are just as pixelated. I find that there is a troubling atheism, lurking on the fringes of consciousness, in much of conventional conservatism. God is packaged in a set of propositions (or worse, identified with a set of histrionics), and put in a closet or inserted into a self-appointed psychological "identity."

He is not allowed to spook. Not, certainly, permitted to be terrible.

The problem of so much Christianity is a phobia of real theology. Even a revulsion at the mysterium tremens. The numinous is, by definition, not pleasant. Beautiful, yes, but not nice.

Better to watch TV and engage in telephone reviews of the day (and its characters) and to protect oneself from the fearful ministry of the Sacred ... better to be a materialist than to admit the Creator: He is always interrupting and offending sensibilities.

He is, after all, the stumbling "scandalon," the rejected cornerstone.

In all likelihood, the thought that "this is just another fake in a series of fakes" was used to fend off more complicated thoughts. Less polite thoughts. Thoughts that shake cartoonish worldviews. Thoughts that crush nice political and economic fortune card wishes.

Or, most likely, "I'd rather not meet God outside my comfort zone."

Recently, I fielded an abrupt question from a guest in my homiletics class. We were about to jump into our usual weekly session of "Shotgun Questions" (some of which are, admittedly, unanswerable). I did not know this at the time, but she had already gotten steamed up about a difficult point at breakfast:

"Does God punish us?" she asked, after suggesting that I should be the one, this time, to face the firing squad.

And just to make sure I didn't take the query so easily, she added: "Because I only think that God is a loving God."

I will spare you the details of the ensuing dialectic. In sum, she had no room for Hell in her universe, and God was "permitted" only niceness, not Glory (neither was there much of a place for Infinity, or Beauty that exceeded the shoebox dioramas of the bourgeoisie).

Her last point was a pirhouette of peroration: "I cannot believe in a God Who would do such a thing" -- "things," that is, like allowing for bad consequences.

I confess to no small portion of incompetence at convivial dialectic, and I was already a tad annoyed. The shotgun question segment, by now, had been "shot," one might say, if one were in a punishing mood. I much preferred the "feast of reason and the flow of soul" from my regular students.

So I didn't take much time at all, in my response, at constructing the better answers (i.e., Job's ignorance of the satanic gamble; free will; Creation messed up by Original Sin, or by the fall of Lucifer and Co. -- all of which I readily believe).

I shortcutted my way to the "acu" of "rem acu tetigisti": "Let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that God does punish, and that there is a wrath that one wouldn't want to fall into the hands of."

"Would you love Him anyways?"

I really don't think my tetigisti gambit worked. The guest was finished, but looked simply bothered.

I continue on in my internal dialectic. 

That is the thing, the real thing. The "res" of the matter. Much as my students might otherwise aver, I ask hard questions that I suffer first.

And here's the one that my guest thought I only meant as a riposte: "Would I love a God into Whose angry hands I should fear falling into?"

We have bent over backwards in Orthodoxy to avoid this question ... perhaps to appear un-fundamentalist. But the question remains: if He is the God of consuming fire, the uncreated Light, the energy of the Holy Trinity that at the Last Day will transform all in a, one must say, rather painful transformation, then oughtn't I love Him anyways?

... no, strike that, all the more?

Which is belief after all. After Plotinus, if one believes at all in a Higher Power, then one must believe in One.

And after Jesus, one must believe in the Holy Trinity.

And the Orthodox Church is the Trinity's only Prophet.

Our God, thus, is scary.

Love, yes, but scary love.

Wild, mysterious, creepy, head-achy (if that is a word, which it's not) love. A perception of Personal Divinity that crushes conventionality and precludes all self-assurance. It is a Tri-Personed Love that induces a vertigo of meek repentance. It forces one to be small, and forces the small to look up at Greatness.

At the end of things, we'd rather there not be a Ladder to Heaven, but as it were, there is.

Its existence is surer than our own, at least in the terms of our consciousness.

We wish that it were not so, for the other entities are troubling, they who try to pull off the ones who miss their rungs. It is, surely, the most unpleasant icon I place on the analogion in the year.

But how odd it is this year, that soon after I fear the Ladder of St. John Climakos, with all the nightmares of dizzying heights and monstrosities of gravity, fighting assiduously against any ascent, that we should soon kiss (on April 2nd) the less frightful, now more comforting, lightful, peaceful, kabod-weighted glory of the Son, Whose daughter is His Mother, gleaming tears in her embrace.

The Lord's beauty is peace, but it is a peace that transcends, and we cannot define it.

My worldview -- that cynosure of self-definition and false self-assurance -- needs torn open, like the veil in the Temple on Good Friday. My separate peace was a false peace.

Pain is the cost of the real one.

This is the meaning of the peace that passes understanding.

I will remember this, as I kiss the icon and breathe in the myrrh of Heaven: I shall hear the higher trumps, and embrace the terrible peace.

A guide for the valley and the green pastures

Part one: the way downstairs

Lent is a time of necessary extremities. 

It is not a different occasion, either good or bad, like a beach vacation in the sun, or an emergency hospital stay in the critical darkness.

It is an abrupt, importunate unveiling of life as it is, really.

We are always walking in the Valley of the Shadow of Death: in Lent, one hopes, we feel it in the heart at night, and in the interstitial moments of hunger in the day. 

It is not good to run away from this. We all have black, lugubrious doors in our basements that we keep locked and barred shut, but we know where they lead. We lounge, on the upper floors, in various philosophical luxuries and pleasure domes of sedation and well-rehearsed behavioral patterns of disregard.

But always, the nocturnal and  subterranean rattling, clinking and the bumping, the inexorable sighs.

Lent militates against disregard.

But there are green pastures for the courageous and cool waters for the meek.

The valley gets deeper year by year: the weight of omission and commission, of things voluntary and involuntary, actions and thoughts, declamations, denunciations, subtle slanders and false witnesses, misrepresentations and sub-political spins, misinformings, blasphemies and apostasies ...

These are all getting quite normal indeed, and the valley gets dug deeper.

Human nature ever and more poignantly regrets its unnaturality ...

... while the celebrities celebrate (and advertise) their soporific peccadilloes (but you do not hear their sighing).

The valley road is bedecked and festooned by marquees and carny-barkers: neon and phosphorescence hold back the shadows lurking, seeping, lunging opportunistically at REM moments, when the nous is caught in the television-web of its own devising.

The utter embarassment of the valley is that we have met the fool of Proverbs, and he is us.

We know, shamefully, with the fig-leaf sort of shame, just who the lost lamb is in the storm, just who is the lost coin, the prodigal, the prostitute, the persecutor, the man robbed and stripped and beaten by thieves on the interstate to Jericho.

We know.

Casualties, collateral damage, of the Valley of Shadow.

The world in worldliness is a giant refugee camp losing, losing its past, and watching impotently as the powers and principalities negotiate its future away, into incorporeal sighs.

We know the Valley and its big black door.

Lent makes you wake up and take heed. It draws you down the basement steps and turn off the radio of disregard.

Hear them, the regrets of time.

But

"I fear no evil, for Thou art with me."

Just against abortion

In this whole morass of complaint and denunciation about sex, it seems that conflation is the game afoot.

Conflation is "unity in confusion" -- that is, bringing two terms together in a union where meaning is diminished, if not completely effaced.

Here is one example. One well-known ecclesial community insists on conflating contraception and abortion under the single term "birth control."

They also conflate the morality for which a Christian is responsible with the ethics that any citizen must follow. In turn, they conflate ethical behavior with public policy, and wrap that conflation in the flag of the "public square."

Abortion is the destruction of a pre-born human. Contraception is the prevention of fertilization -- the obstruction of the sperm from penetrating the egg.

An abortion can be accomplished by dilation and curettage (as most of us in the old anti-abortion movement know pictorially). It can also be accomplished by the introduction of certain abortifacient drugs, like RU486.

In either case a human is destroyed, whether in fetal or zygote form.

However, this destruction does not happen when a condom is used (in the best of circumstances). A membrane stands in the way of fertilization and mechanically frustrates the sperm from its appointed task. A spermicide accomplishes the same objective, with the destruction of sperm before fertilization (but not the embryo or a zygote). A birth control pill prevents the release of an egg from the ovary into the fallopian tube.

This is an important distinction, because it should be plain that the two terms, “abortion” and “contraception,” should not be nested in the same category.

Such a category that contains both terms is bound to cause trouble, and some of that trouble is unnecessary.

It is interesting that contraception is accomplished, also, when non-mechanical means are employed. Like coitus interruptis. Like other acts of non-intercourse sexual activity (this must be said in an age when adolescents and former Presidents engage in so much linguistic perversity about this topic).

And – here’s the main point – like the deliberate scheduling of sexual relations while consulting fertility cycles.

Yes, "natural family planning" is just as contraceptive as the use of condoms or birth control pills.

Saying otherwise requires a casuistic intellectual program that evades the simplicity of moral demand with Pharisaical panache.

Conflating contraception with abortion unnecessarily weakens the fight against abortion.

I have heard, in the last few weeks, a Republican primary candidate reflect on the issue of contraception, especially since Roman Catholic bishops were threatened, seemingly, with being forced to furnish contraceptives to employees of Catholic hospitals and other institutions.

I should say here that I oppose any coercion that would force someone to act against their moral practice. I say this not because I am a libertarian, because I am certainly not that. And I am not consistent either -- at least, not in a superficial manner. I would support the forcing of Jehovah's Witness parents to give proper medical treatment to their dying children. I support the government's interest in taking the side of Terry Schiavo's parents (who wanted to prolong her life) against her legal husband (who was already co-habitating with another woman).

Neither the Jehovah's Witness nor Ms. Schiavo's husband represented a motive to protect life. The preservation of life -- the true "pro-life" position -- should have been preferred (it wasn't).

Thus, no Roman Catholic should be forced to pay for any abortion. Nor should they be forced to pay for any contraception (even though I disagree with some of their scruples against contraception).

Santorum (who is the Republican mentioned above) opined recently that the historic opposition to contraception was due to the possibility that contraception leads to promiscuity.

This, I think, is one of the main reasons why contraception is conflated with abortion, and why it is so consistently opposed. There are a raft of articles (both in print and on the web) and books that bewail contraception for contributing to the fall of civilization and the decline of morals.

I do not disagree. Indeed, contraception probably does “help” promiscuity. If fertilization and pregnancy exist as mere deterrents to sex (much like capital punishment may be said to be a deterrent to crime), then the modern wide availability of contraception certainly opens the way to deterrent-free sex.

It is true that such sexual behavior is a hallmark of modernity. Sex is unnaturally removed from its natural setting in marriage and is isolated within a frame of temporal eros (at best) and (more probably) simultaneous lust and/or masturbation.

One of the tragic difficulties of this entire melancholy conversation about “birth control” is that it must be done in the grievous context of sex ripped out of the home, and thrust out into the front yard. Sex is whole, and its meaning is intact, only when it persists under the veil of mystery and play, and within the order of marriage.

But now, sex has become a clinicalized hybrid of sport and therapy. Even Christians have gotten into the pseudo-science game of technique and orgasmic quest, with “Christian sex therapy” as a possible choice in the “helping industry.” More children are born to young mothers outside of wedlock (if that is a meaningful word). More couples engage in cohabitation. More one-night stands are part of the first-date curriculum. More transgressive behaviors are attempted for the cause of experiencing greater intensities. Sexual orientation is hypothetized and objectively defined (in isolated extrapolation), but only exists as a predictable disordered intensification on anyone’s continuum.

Theos-free eros has displaced agape, and has produced only a myriad of idiosyncratic sexual dervishes, whirling down ever-constricted vortices toward a zero-point of goetic philautia.

I am not disgusted here. I am worried by this state of things. There is a difference, so predicate your response on that important distinction.

(But enough of that sermonic excursus – suffice to say that the intensity of such disorder and transgression should always incite some sort of prophecy.)

Prior to the wide availability of contraception (especially the pill), women were obliged to risk pregnancy at every fertile intercourse. If a pregnancy was not wanted, one of two things happened. The first was mandated by a Church: sex was simply avoided.

But this avoidance -- called "natural family planning" -- seems, too, to violate the Scriptural maxim of St. Paul, who directed married couples to fast from intercourse only upon mutual agreement, and only for the ascetical purposes of prayer. While it remains to be seen what St. Paul actually thought of "procreation-only" sex, it must be said that St. Paul does not, in this Scriptural discussion, encourage the cessation of sex for purposes of birth control.

Frankly, I do not think that sex is reserved only for procreation. I know that many voices in Tradition say so, and I do not complain about anyone who takes this strict position. I do say that sex belongs in marriage: it is debatable whether sexual arousal has any place outside of marriage. It certainly plays a part in all romance: it should be, in a nicer world, rooted in the romance of courtship.

But it cannot be denied that the deprivation of contraception lays a disproportionate burden on women. This is a sad historic fact that bothers everyone of good will. Some, unfortunately, repress the reality of the fact. 

In an age of bad medicine and little contraception, the frequency of women dying in childbirth was much higher than it is today. There have been no males who have died either from childbirth or pregnancy. I know that in the prayers of the Church we pay attention to that differential: but there ought to be some acknowledgment of this fact in conversations about public policty.

And in any age (and probably moreso before widely-available contraception), transgressive husbands avoided childbirth by taking their wares elsewhere: so I suppose that male adultery, too, is a form of contraception (or "un-natural family planning").

Let us consider, now, an unlikely possibility. Let us suppose that contraceptives were not available at all. The first noticeable difference in this hypothetical world is that the number of abortions would have sky-rocketed. To say otherwise is a near absurdity. There are two reasons for this increase of infanticide. One is that most human beings live outside the contours of the Christian community, whether Orthodox, Roman, evangelical or mainline protestant. Thus, most human beings give no consent to the old interdictions of the church against certain transgressions. There may be some yet who harbor very latent notions about Natural Law, but these notions are becoming more latent under the hegemony of consumerist globalization.

And, let us be honest here about the second reason: the Christian community has not been all that effective in inculcating the interdictions of Holy Tradition. Thus, there will be more “Christian” abortions (as have happened indeed).

But it is the second noticeable difference that I want to consider mainly. Christian families who are more obedient to traditional dogmas will be larger. “More than two” will become more the rule than the exception. The “quivers” will be fuller. Certain less noble agenda will have been accomplished: some demographic objectives – that is, the preservation of a certain dominant status – will have been realized merely by the presence of more preferred children (if only the native Americans, four centuries ago, would have had their own Buchanan sounding the alarm, as in “The End of Red America”).

But this dream, as nice as it might be, neglects some cultural realities. A Christian “quiver-full” society is impossible in an industrialized consumerist society.

Give me a distributist, home-guild economy and a justice-based culture (free of race-based bigotry), and I’ll join you in a contraceptive-free agenda. Give me a welfare program that protects marriage and fatherhood, too. Give me, too, a respect for labor that recognizes the possibility that the working poor work a lot harder than the rich.

Why does this have anything to do with sex?

Because sex is meaningful only in marriage – a marriage that is free to grow into eternity … a marriage that is sustained by feasting, sacrament, prayer and fasting and forgiveness … a marriage painted, over time, into an icon of Christ and His Church.

Such a marriage is more likely in a true Christian culture -- a culture that has not been found wanting: rather, in GK's words, it has not been tried. In such a culture, conceptions need little rationalistic planning (to coin an Oakshottian phrase). And before you accuse me of being irresponsibly eschatological, bear in mind my sort of Orthodox eschatology has nothing to do with LaHaye (and neither does my regard for sexual technology).

Marriage is not made meaningful by sex – which seems to be the idiotic notion of the time.

Rather, sex is made meaningful by marriage. And marriage is being attacked not by politics (another idiotic notion) – but by the more profound movements of a stupefied culture and bestial economy.

If Christian marriage were free of the caustic environment of this advertising age – an age so given to soliloquy, hyper-comfort and rebellion against the Apostles – then fertility would need no artificial controls.

But as it is, fertility needs prayed on, and obeyed on.

Sex that is understood within the design of prayer and fasting, childlike wonder, duty and devotion, eternal chastity, play and nuptial celebration, a shy winsomeness and freedom and kenosis -- that sort of sex needs no legislation against contraception.

Faithful obedience and contraception are not mutually exclusive.

It would be better if the Roman Catholic (and Orthodox and evangelical) public position would be simply "anti-abortion." Not advertised or identified as "pro-life," because that term has been confused almost hopelessly. The "pro-life" term is weakened (in the bombast of many) by a simultaneous rejection of other liberal, anti-libertarian motions: like universal healthcare, racial justice and equality, environmental protection and safety nets for the poor.

The anti-abortion agenda is inherently “liberal” in that it asks the state to curtail individual choice: just as the state is asked by liberals to demand offerings for universal safety nets and national parks.

It is also “conservative” in that it asks individuals to respect the vestiges of Holy Tradition. They can call these vestiges “Natural Law” if they want to.

What I ask of people who call themselves conservative in this hot mess of sexualized political so-called “debate” is that they first stop being right-wing (or left wing) in their outlook, and simply embrace a disciplined and Christian rule of conversation …

… a conversation that will be, simultaneously, conservative and liberal. 

The Last Judgment: the Finding of Mary

“One of the elders used to say: In the beginning when we got together we used to talk about something that was good for our souls … But now we get together and spend our time criticizing … And we drag one another down into the abyss.” -- The Paradise of the Fathers (vol. II, p. 210)

An old Baptist preacher liked to preach about heaven, but soon before he passed away he described a troubling dream that was not very pleasant. He dreamed that he had died and was standing before the Pearly Gates. People from his congregation were standing with him, and they were all waiting for the Gates to open wide so they might go in.

After waiting for a while, the preacher called out: “Excuse me -- aren’t you going to let us in?” Silence. The preacher tried to list some reasons why the Gate should be open. “We preached the Gospel. We held Church on Sundays and Wednesdays. We had Bible Studies. We sent money to missions and held clothing drives for the poor. We stayed true to the Faith.” Silence.

Again, he spoke up. “We’re all here, Lord.”

Then, a Voice rumbled from behind the Gates: “No, you’re not.”

The preacher looked around and counted heads. It looked like everyone was there and accounted for. “I think we’re all here. The whole membership is accounted for. Everyone listed in our books -- we’re all here, Lord, I’m sure we didn’t miss anyone.”

The Voice now so deep shook the floor. “Where is Mary? Where is Little Mary?”

Little Mary wasn’t on the books, the preacher thought. Little Mary was too quiet, too shy, too hidden to ever make much of a difference. Little Mary was too shabby -- her clothes were old and out of style. She never spoke up and left before the services were over. Little Mary was just an old frail woman who came to church once in a while and didn’t know anyone else in the Church.

And that’s why no one knew where she was.

“We don’t know where Mary is, Lord. She’s not with us.”

“Go find her.”

“I guess I’ll go back downstairs and look for her.”

“No,” said the Voice, “Not just you. All of you.”

So the entire congregation left the Pearly Gates and climbed back down to the world of trouble, just to find Little lost Mary. They looked for her in Church, but she wasn’t there because she was talked about and criticized. They looked for her in her house, but she wasn’t there because the power had been turned off and the roof was leaking in the rain. They looked for her on the sidewalk, but she wasn’t there because her legs were bad and she could stand and walk anymore. They looked for her in the nursing homes and the hospitals, but she wasn’t there because she could not afford the doctor bills. They looked for her in the shelters and the soup kitchens, because they knew, by now, she was hungry and cold.

She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere.

Weary and forlorn, they climbed back up the stairs.

“We can’t find her Lord,” the preacher said with a crack in his quivering voice.

“We lost her.”

Silence.

“Well,” the Voice said, a lot more quietly, “I did not.”

The Gates cracked open a little ways, just enough to let through a young beautiful lass, shining in the Light. She was so beautiful, so bright that the preacher could barely look at her without his heart breaking, for the sheer loveliness and deep majesty.

She walked up to the preacher and his congregation. “I’ve been looking for you,” Little Mary said. “I’m so glad I found you!” And like a glad little girl, she turned to the Pearly Gate and said, “Lord, we’re all here!”

“But Mary,” said the Voice, “You were hungry and they gave you no food. You were thirsty and they gave you nothing to drink. You were a stranger, and you were not taken in. You needed clothing, and you were left in rags. Inasmuch as they failed you, they have failed Me.”

“Lord,” said she, “Today, they are the hungry ones, and thirsty, and estranged and cold. I will not fail them. Inasmuch as I love these my friends, how much more do I love You?”

A different third hour

It was nine o'clock and they thought we were drunk,
the only conventional explanation for
the difference.

I was a rustic fisherman, with nimble fingers tying knots
and cursing the luck of barren nights ...
now I am a theologian
with inexorable rhetoric.
I sing the new song
that preserves difference
but surmounts distance
in a Word. 

I was a wealth-protecting publican, really a tax-collector
who knew how to calculate funds and derivatives to pad my accounts
while the houses of brothers withered in the hot wind
of occupation ...
now I am the almoner who gives to all the poor,
builds hospitals for all the sick and hurt,
I drain all accounts and cancel every interest,
less than zero.

I was a swordsman, an insurrectionist,
a shouter on the barricades, a revolutionary,
hand me your newest gun in every generation ...
now I am a pacifist
and a forgiver of all past insults and injuries,
I drain all history and the chains of vendetta,
my anger is quenched
on a single tear of grace. 

I was a modern, speaking in the lesser tongues
of thrill
and loved my feelings and bourgeois comforts
of chips and beers and points at games
and politicians who made me mad ...
now I attend a church of empty pews,
listening to the true new song,
getting metaphysical,
Trinitarian,
for once,

and speaking the word, finally,
of love. 

Two ways

There are two ways to fly,
perhaps not
mutually exclusive.

One is to fall
and simply miss the ground,

though this is hard to do
deliberately.

The other is to forgive

which is embracing the ground
actually
and reversing the fall. 

Judge and divide, left and right

Who made Me a judge or divider over you?

That is a quote from St. Luke 12.13. It isn’t preached much because it is dangerous. It irritates both wings, the right and the left. And it is my business to make sure of this irritation.

This statement is plucked out of an obscure story mentioned only once in the Gospels. It has no parallel in the other Synoptics. The only reason why it gets noticed is that it prefaces the Parable of the Rich Fool – and in this, it is like a second-rate opening act that warms up the crowd before the real band comes on stage.

The story consists of just a mention of a man who wanted Jesus to settle a fraternal dispute over the division of estate. Obviously, the dead paterfamilias had not made his will very clear. Or maybe the executor wasn’t doing his job.

Or – what I think is likely – the plaintiff had gotten impressed with all this revolutionary talk of Jesus, and thought he could leverage eschatology for a present-day fiscal advantage. There was a convention from Tradition at that time that favored the elder brother over his younger sibling, and that advantage was significant -- perhaps to the extent of a two to one ratio. Maybe this supplicant had correctly recognized a Leader here Who was critiquing the status quo – especially the economic status quo. Moreover, he was hearing this revolutionary Teacher describe a new and generous pattern of giving.

So why not press his suit with this Rabbi? He was only going to get a third from his father’s legacy: his older brother was going to get two thirds. Surely in the “Kingdom” – whatever that was – things should be distributed more fairly?

I’ve heard this sort of thing before. “Jesus tells us to love each other, so make him be nice to me and do what I want.”

Well, that is the leftward irritation. Jesus does not care about judging and dividing out of statist structures. He is too transcendent for any historicist taste. He will not endorse any revolution: in fact, He told His disciples, at a crucial moment, to put away their swords (and, it appears, the Church should have taken that for a normative command). The state (and all other pseudo-state organizing structures, like large corporations), cannot be turned into apostolates or vice-royalities: “Put not your trust in mortal princes,” someone once said somewhere.

That said, we shouldn’t be too dismissive of the Left, as the Right is wont. The Left is ever the fault of Christianity. If you don’t believe me, go ask horseman Nietzsche. He was the true aristocratic philosopher who correctly blamed Jesus for sapping the West of its strong darwinistic dynamic – you know, that king-of-the-hill ariston historiography where Beauty becomes esoteric (and rather arbitrarily set at that) and separated from the Good, and especially distinguished from Love.

It is Jesus’ fault, he said, that the slaves and the weak, the poor and marginalized, the halt and the lame, get all these second chances. We’d all be much more efficient without them: we'd be like the Greek heroes (nice lot, they are, can you imagine grabbing a cold one with Jason? Agamemnon?).

There is a reason, I’d like to tell the equine (and trench-prone) German savant, why Greek aristocrats of myth can only understand tragedy: the hero can only be aristocratic, and his nobility can only emerge in the cartharsis of the ugly gods snuffing out the singular, heroic flame.

Comedy, happy endings and eu-catastrophes are the proper stuff of the proletariat, especially the agrarian kind, the am ha-eretz.

Pull out your Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (I have mine right here from Jerry Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour Edition – you know, the one with the cheesy flame), and you won’t find a single nice thing Jesus said about the rich.

He always kept telling them to give everything away. It seems that the “camel and the needle” thing was meant to be taken seriously: and it might turn out that no, a rich man really cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven – his only hope is to divest himself and become poor (okay, maybe “poor in spirit,” but that should not be taken as an easier option).

He never said: “Oh, it’s okay, just be nice with your money.” He offended the right wing repeatedly, over and over as He turned the moneychangers’ tables over and made offensive remarks about “where thieves break in and steal, where moth and rust corrupt.”

It’s a good thing He didn’t say that after the Wall Street debacle of 2008. He’d have been sued for slander, libel, even insider trading (there is a stock advantage, I think, in knowing the future). Mr. D. Trump would have said, to the Son of Man, “You’re fired,” on the broadcast, I imagine, of “God Apprentice.”

Not to beat a dead horse, but Nietzsche is right to blame Christianity for insinuating a viral weakness into the Western narrative. Like soldiers who leave the front lines to take care of a wounded comrade, the Gospel has delayed and belabored the European ethos with a profitless care for those who may not – and probably won’t – contribute.

The Gospel makes every Western man an Atlas: and no man, God says, is allowed to shrug.

Christianity invented the humane aspirations of the Left.

That is ever the irritation of the Right.

Interestingly, Christianity did not invent the Right. The right wing has always been with us, like the poor … there has always been someone who hearkened to either “might makes right” or “my country right or wrong.” There have always been the bowers and scrapers and ring-kissers … and, on the other hand, always the sword and trebuchet-makers and the wannabe-dukes sending in their manor-men as battle-odds with the hope of getting their own castle, land, and that good old-fashioned droits de seigneur.

The Right is hard to nail down historically. It has, over the ages, endorsed the strong men of petty Greek city-states, the republic of Rome (think Cassius and Brutus here), the pro patria sentiments of Roman veteran-colonists, Frankish lords and to-their-manor-born progeny.

These sponsorships make sense of course, and they are all of a piece. But in the modern age things get complex. The old aristocracy used to get huffy at the up and coming merchant class, who wanted to redefine everything in terms of commodity and contract – including people. Oddly (only “oddly” for us moderns), the old right wing had established a lot of onerous regulation on commerce – and these regulations on industry and economy were characterized, then, as “conservative.”

The whole idea of interest-driven “laissez-faire” economy was, in turn, characterized as wildly liberal.

And rather “un-Christian,” too, since the Church in the West sought to conserve not only the more humane Guild system (which recognized the primacy of the person and his house in the economy), but more to our point, a marketplace that was not driven by usury, and derivatives of usury (i.e., where money itself becomes a commodity – a rather unseemly thing in the old-fashioned point of view).

Now, you have a Right Wing that claims to be patriotic, but espouses a radically secularized economy – and for the first time in history, this economic secularity must not be criticized, even in Christian circles, because Christianity (it is said -- by Christians!) has nothing to say about the economy.

That is liberal. Not Left, but exceedingly liberal, in a most rebellious manner.

What is liberality? “Liberal” can be a good term, as in "generosity" and "education." But in its negative sense, in historiography, “liberal” connotes the old collection of patterns that converge on one goal: the destruction of the moral tradition of the Church.

Today’s news reveals, every day, the advance of liberality. Gay marriage seems to be an inevitability, when only four years ago we were wincing at “civil unions.” Abortion is accepted by a majority of the population (if you can define “acceptance” by a weak assent to contrived survey questions). Anti-evolutionists get laughed at everywhere. Church attendance has been displaced by entertainment and soccer matches.

And hyper-capitalism now flies under the flag of an odd coalition of the Right Wing, fundamentalist protestants and Mormons.

The ascendancy of hyper-capitalism is, weirdly, the culminating victory of liberalism.

It is customary for right wing analysts like Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, various Fox intellects (and I’m sure there are others) to lump liberalism and the Left together. This is an error, as many of these same right wing voices turn out to be patently liberal themselves. A good test for this is whether any of them would accept Christian controls on capital, the marketplace, the commodification of the environment (which is the real and only argument against pollution control) and any prophetic challenge to the redefinition of Man as Consumer.

It is always amazing to me that so many low-income households have been marshaled to vote against themselves in favor of large corporate interests, in extremely liberal directions, all in the name of – can you believe it? – "conservative Christianity."

I have blamed Christianity for the existence of the Left.

I will now blame the Left for the existence of Right Wing Christians.

The problem of the Left is that it left. It was schooled in its humanitarian, bleeding-heart ways by the Tradition of the Church. It learned of welfare and healthcare and justice in the Christian academy. The First True Revolution was Christ and His Body: but the Left went off one day, disaffected by the Christian narrative, and tried like the Prodigal Son to narrate its own story. Self-defined. Enlightened. A rationalism predicated on autonomy.

I have wondered why this happened, why the Left left. Was the creationism too onerous? Where the bishops and the priests too outré? Were the patriarchal rules too hard? Did the indictions against transgression hurt too many feelings? Dampen too much of that human spirit? Obstruct too much immediate self-gratification (otherwise defined as “happiness”)?

Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Danton, Napoleon, Marx, Shelley, Freud – Leftists all, did not like the moral confines of the Christian narrative. They happily cut out the offending pages of the Bible (some of them quite literally), for the express purpose of reducing the organizing power of the Church … with the disingenuous hope that they could isolate the humanitarian tradition and amputate it from its natural place in Christian Tradition.

The amputation died in all the subsequent, derivative (and devolved) revolutions … revolutions, I should say, that continue unabated. They happen so often that we cannot tell the difference from one regime to the next. Just so the marketplace is preserved, free from the toxin of Judgment.

In fine, the Left produced Right Wing Christianity when it demanded the extinction of Natural Law … when it extinguished Christian speech from civil institutions … when it ridiculed creationism and enshrined homosexual and transgressive practice as a civil right … when it colluded with the Corporate principalities to individualize the household, by defaming the paterfamilias and canceling the single-living-wage …

… and today, by prodding the State to force Christian institutions to provide contraceptives and abortifacients.

Right Wing Christians are the fault of the Left.

When the Left left, the Right took flight. In the Christian narrative, of all places. Where it most definitely does not belong.

I suppose the Left, one day, came like the truculent younger brother to Jesus, and said “Teacher, bid my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” And it was upset, like the younger brother, when the Son of God showed no interest in re-establishing power amongst the masses.

Of course, the older brother could not have felt better by Jesus. The primal heir was probably not there in the first place: the rich habitually pay attention to neither the Father nor the Son, fogged as they are by rusting treasures. The older brother and his rich friends would not have been entertained by the immediate Scriptural context: Satan falling like lightning … undocumented illegal immigrants being held up as the ideal of good neighborliness and divine mercy … women neglecting housework in favor of religion … generosity (without hope of repayment) established as a prime virtue … demons and exorcisms and the threat of re-possession … an esoteric wisdom that exceeds Solomon and all his freemasonry and Templar friends … and this same esoteric wisdom shouted out from the housetops and given to the proletariat (for Christ’s sake!) … the condemnation of commercial religiosity with its book sales and seminars and conventions at four-star resorts that serve “mint and rue and every herb” … and the identification of civil religion’s favorite pastime – the persecution of prophets in Wall Street (where else?).

Neither brother, younger or older, were satisfied with Jesus (maybe because they were not so hungry for righteousness in the first place); and they were pretty irritated, I’m sure, with the dismissive “Who made Me a judge or divider over you?”

For the Church will always criticize the immediate from its place in the transcendent. Always, and we will die for the privilege, whether persecuted by State or the State’s many Masters.

For no one, not even the Evil One is to be feared. No one except “him who, after he has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I tell you, fear him!” (Luke 12.5)

This is not a popular verse in today’s insipid religious speech, but it is, after all, the reason why Christ and His Church do not stoop to judge or divide.

Easter in Braddock

Handmade Portraits: The Public Art of Maya Hayuk from Etsy on Vimeo.

 

I am not usually a fan of the more modern idioms of visual art. It is difficult for me to translate the language of abstraction.

But I thank Ms. Maya Hayuk, a public artist of Ukrainian extraction. She has splashed the color and patterns of pysanky onto the shambling gray and brown pallet of Braddock, Pa., which is right next door to my little burg.

Braddock is a has-been town. The steel mill is still fired up, but no one is meant to live there anymore, except the people who have to. The town's mayor, John Fetterman (above), has made the news, nobly leading the charge to turn "has-been" into "will-be."

We'll see. He's got my prayers and cooperation for sure. You have to like a guy who graduates from Harvard, sets up house in a gritty place, and does so with the panache of living in an old shop building and setting up two freight cars on the roof for extra work space.

Braddock has been on the news before. Levi Strauss, the jeans people, seemed to like it for a back drop for whatever idiom they were trying on last year.

My inimitably artistic niece just sent me the vimeo of Ms. Hayuk's work next door. I've seen it, driving by. There are also lots of other graphic presentations. Some of the great graffiti artworks are on display on the main drag. Even the Braddock sign is a graffiti-type mural -- surely a better thing than the bland stuff that gets festooned with unnaturally colored mulch and suburbanized plantings.

Because of her work, and the work of graffiti artists (who usually get excoriated by the folk at New Criterion), and because of the labor of Fetterman and his pals, Braddock has color, and occasionally escapes its black and white film noir melancholy. 

Which makes me wonder. Is this artwork a better sign ... a better image ... a better icon, if you will ... for the work of the good news?

I mean ... nothing else seems to be working well or honestly ... could it possibly be that we should see this missionary land more like Braddock than the city on the hill?

... and the substance of our madmen campaign more like the art of Easter in Braddock ... more, say, than a white clapboard church in the vale, that no longer exists?

My poor students

Pity my students, in my Homiletics II class.

Each class we start out with 3 or 4 student sermons. Then an oral critique, joined in by everyone.

Then, after a break to build up tension, we enter into a short period of "shotgun questions."

These are questions drawn blindly from an assortment of slips of paper, on which is printed a question (or a declarative statement, in which is nested an implicit question). Each seminarian is given 5 minutes to think and to answer (hence, "shotgun").

There is a maximum of 17.2 points that can be awarded.

This is a nod to my ancient days when I was competing in extemporaneous speaking in the old Pittsburgh Catholic Forensics League.

I do this because I am sure that catechesis and "theologizing" (to borrow a sodden and jargonish modern participle, beloved of ATS serminaries) should be done on the fly and on the feet (thus mixing metaphors).

Here are some of the "shotgun questions" with which I am arbitrarily (and patriarchally, mind you) inflicting upon my humble students.

I have heard each question in the most inescapable way ... on bus rides to bowling tournaments, pilgrimages ... at the pirohi table ... between chainsaw cuttings of brush out back ... on hikes at church camp.

These questions have all really happened.

Here goes:

1. Father, why do we say “Theotokos” instead of “Mother of God”?
2. Why doesn’t the Altar Boy ring the bells at the Altar anymore during the Canon of the Mass?
3. I thought we were a Russian (or Syrian) church. Why are there so many Greek words, like “Axios”?
4. If God is the Father, why do we worship Jesus the Son?
5. The Commandments tell us not to make any graven image. Why do we kiss the icons?
6. If we are supposed to worship only God, then why do we say at the end of Vespers, “Most Holy Theotokos save us”?
7. I think all clergy, even bishops, should be allowed to marry. If we had married clergy, we wouldn’t have ever had the sex abuse problem.
8. Why are our crosses different? Why do we make the sign of the cross different from our Roman Catholic friends?
9. My friends go to a church with exciting music that changes every Sunday. Why do we do the same thing over and over again in Liturgy?
10. Why can’t I worship God the way I want, no matter where I am? I can worship God just as well as home as in the Church.
11. Isn’t it judgmental to say that homosexuals are wrong?
12. What do you think about evolution?
13. Why can’t we all have Christmas on the same day?
14. I’d rather go to a Church where they have more exciting worship on Sunday morning.
15. Father, I don’t like the priest at my church -- isn’t there anything we can do to get rid of him?
16. How far I am allowed to “go” with my boyfriend/girlfriend?
17. My parents don’t like some people at church and they don’t want to go to church much. What should I do?
18. I think that all religions lead to God, so we should just get along.
19. How can the Trinity be Three Persons, but we say we worship One God?
20. I thought Jesus Christ was our only Saviour: why do we sing “Most holy Theotokos save us?” at the end of Vespers?
21. I lose concentration in my prayers, and sometimes forget where I am. What should I do? Start over?
22. My protestant friends tell me that all our customs like icons and incense and liturgy are man-made rules and regulations.
23. Is it okay to be rich?
24. Is it okay to give money to the poor? Because all the ones who ask me for money are irresponsible and lazy.
25. I know so-and-so who went to communion didn’t go to confession.
26. (in a grocery parking lot) I haven’t been to your church in twenty years, but I’m gonna get buried at your cemetery because I paid my dues.
27. Our church is getting smaller. Is God blessing the charismatics and Baptists? Their churches are so large.

Gifts of the wind and rain

The wind and rain swept in this unseasonable January evening,
and for a while, things looked normal, which is not the best
in a melancholic post industrial valley:

but in a place where stars shine through with difficulty
past the sodium glares and the headlights and stoplights
and police strobing flashes, where green, too, is bare

this evening, before night, at phos hilaron, the setting sun
this gleaming above the lights of man.