Second Terrace

dream or sacrifice?

 

Twenty years ago, a little boy in Germany dreamed about becoming a jet plane pilot, and this dream became the theme of his life.

But about a few weeks ago, this same young man, now 27, deliberately crashed his Germanwings Airbus 320 into a mountainside in the French Alps, killing himself and murdering 149 other people.

At the time of this writing (at the end of March 2015), there is only a lot of guesswork about Lubitz’ motive for his horrendous act. But the general theme is that the young man was depressed, and committed this mass murder as an “acting out” of his emotional problems.

As someone who has helped, over the years, more than a few adults and children with a clinical diagnosis of depression, I take offense at the sloppy, unprofessional suggestion that depression caused this deliberate plane crash.

It is true that depression raises the risk of suicide, but never does it -- by itself -- cause homicide. If homicide occurs, it is because something else was going on as well. And in the case of Lubitz, there is more than just a hint of causal factors other than depression. Notes have been found in his apartment from his physicians that raised concerns about his ability to work. His girlfriend ended a romantic relationship with him soon before the fateful day of his deliberate crash.

Also, in his past, is a record of his receiving an injection of an anti-psychotic medication: note here especially that this was an "injection," which should raise not a few flags. That fact alone is a sign of a condition that goes beyond depression or “emotional problems.” Such medication is given for clinically severe disruptions in thought-organization, or reality-testing, or both.

But even the presence of a more severe psychiatric disorder is not enough. Many, many people with psychotic problems (like schizophrenia) are able to work and enjoy family life successfully if the problem is managed well (with the necessary help of professionals).

So depression cannot be blamed. And neither can schizophrenia (because at the end of March, I suspect this will be the main identified culprit in the media news cycle in April).

Of all the passions, depression (or, rather, “despondency”) is not the one that murders. Rather, it is -- obviously -- anger that most often lurks in homicide’s background.

It is also self-centeredness (or ego-centricity). I doubt if Lubitz was angry at the people he killed on that French mountainside. He probably did not know a single one of his passengers. His anger, rather, was directed at his circumstances -- perhaps at his girlfriend for ending the affair, or at Lufthansa for demanding work performance, or at his colleagues at work for not giving him his due, or at his physicians for threatening to keep him from flying. 

Actually, this anger at the physicians might turn out to be the most significant, because someone was threatening to block this young man from attaining his dream.

Lubitz was angry with probably a number of people and circumstances -- so blame anger, first and foremost. The reason why he killed those 149 passengers in particular, though, was not because of direct anger at them: it was due to self-centeredness, or what the Fathers call “self-esteem.” Lubitz was so wrapped up in himself that he lost all sense of pity. He had sunk into his worldwide ego so much that he was able, with satanic strength, to completely disregard the pitiful screaming on the other side of the door, and to ignore the useless bangings of the axe wielded by the pilot who was trying, heroically, to get in.

Whatever the motivation, and if it ever turns up in plain sight (which it almost certainly will not), the fact remains that the motive will be nothing new, and will not be interesting. The script for anger and ego-centricity is as ancient and trite as the rebellion of Lucifer. The more passionate an individual becomes, the more utterly predictable he is, and thus uninteresting and completely uncreative. Only saints are free, after all: Orthodoxy recognizes Satan as the one most imprisoned, along with everyone else who yields their soul to ego, anger and pride (the idea that the devil is the king of hell is reprehensible).

There will certainly be a post-mortem psychiatric diagnosis given to Andreas Lubitz, but it will not explain his horrible decision and blasphemous act. If a diagnosis is waived around as an explanation, then it will become a disgusting excuse, and Lufthansa and whatever media signs on to this lazy explanation really ought to send every single one of my former patients a note of apology ...

… because not a single  one of my severely-depressed clients ever got close to thinking of destroying other people.

Our modern culture is producing more despondency and more anger, and maybe more Lubitz’s. Despite the record number of prescriptions handed out for these emotional conditions, the frequency of real, clinical disorder is increasing. 

This tells me that our “way of life” in today’s society is not helping young people mature. It is not helping adults find balance and wisdom. It is not helping our seniors make peace with the past and prepare for eternity. Our “way of life” is entertaining everyone, but in the meantime it is killing their soul.

It is obvious that our Church had better not adopt the “way of life” patterns of modernity, since these egocentric patterns have produced such miserable failure.

Rather, the society of Orthodox spirituality is a culture of ego-sacrifice: and that is the single, most important reason why modern America (and modern Europe, including Greece and Russia, and the modern world in general) has become violently allergic to Orthodoxy. (Consider the incursion of corporate-thinking and entertainment/celebrity-cult into American pop-religion as nothing but a histamine reaction.)

The Body of Christ leads us in the way of ego-sacrifice, in a culture that has never been more ego-centric. The world tells us to follow our dreams, identify our perfect career, with a beautiful house framed by glamour and celebrity. The Body of Christ tells us to be willing to give up our lesser dreams, and to walk in the light of Christ instead. God’s Will for us is not a career or a dream: His Will for us is deification.

American individualism has been a toxic disaster all around. Hope, though, remains in Orthodox personhood, the way of the Cross and transfiguration, the way of Resurrection peace.

On one extreme side is this recent instance of Andreas Lubitz who inexorably pursued his individual dream of a flight career: but who should have also sensed his developing psychosis and voluntarily surrendered his wings, so that he would not endanger innocent lives. That is what the Church would have told him. That is what the Holy Spirit was trying to tell him.

But on the other side, in the Body of Christ, in Orthodoxy, we are called to surrender ourselves and give up our rights and our selfish concentration on our own needs and wants, and to instead seek happiness in Christ and in the fellowship of others. We know that only in the direction of a person (your spouse, your friend, your fellow Christians, your children and especially your Lord) can you truly transcend yourself. We know that happiness comes only to the point that you become transparent to the beauty of the infinite Trinity.

So -- against all modernity and selfishness -- be holy, happy and peaceful in the personal light of Christ. Get out of yourself in ego-sacrifice. Worship the Father in spirit and in truth.

After all, we Christians do not crash, egocentrically, into the mountain of reality. 

We ascend it.

Mimeograph

A church lady, at an oxymoronous event called "the coffee social," chided me for not being up to date.

"Are you on Facebook, Father?"

"No, I'm not," and she looked stern, because she was ready to offer me a prize that had something, but not exactly, to do with Friendship.

"But Father What's-His-Name is on Facebook sitting on a motorcycle in his cassock and everything."

"That's okay."

She expected me to go on with a long rationale, not getting the punchline that rationales are not needed for not having to determine the correct canonical posture for straddling an 883 in ecclesial dress.

"You could be on Farm Town, you know, I was just at So-and-So's [a mutual friend] Farm the other day and we chatted for hours."

The word "Farm" woke me up, the faux agrarian that I am. The word "chat" provoked a post-beer dull headache. And the real meaning of the word "at" made me wince, and resolve to be charitable.

"I guess I'm not up to date on these things," I stipulated – and that was me saying this, the first in his class who did the concatenation command in old DOS … the fellowship grad in his department who assured the psych Chair that "we'll never need more than 40 megs on a hard drive."

I sounded, I'm sure, like my dad's old mimeograph to her, if she knew what a mimeograph was. I mentioned this, hoping to insinuate a nuance of history into the conversation. She said she had dim memories of getting purple-printed pages in elementary school that smelt funny. I wanted to tell her "No, that's ditto, not mimeo," but I resisted – for once – the chance at doggerel.

"You probably don't even Tweet." Her disdain was peeking out from under her suburban charm.

No. I shook my head like Charlie Brown in the discouraged pumpkin patch. She probably thought my sadness was due to a wan self-discovery of obsolescence and artifacture. My melancholy was real, but it was for her and her generation.

All this chatting and texting and cyber-talking leads to over-familiarity, which the Spiritual Fathers sternly warn us against. Because, if you must know, over-familiarity always ends in disappointment, if not outright betrayal.

She's found Orthodoxy on websites (probably not this one) where one can virtually (not virtuously – that is a different thing altogether) "go to Church." She's "done" Orthodoxy on podcasts and social networking sites, on desktop and Ebook and PDA and iPhone (did I get the gnomic capitalization convention right?).

So much activity. Her and her household's schedules are frightening in frenetic scope and Saran Wrap depth. I wondered whether the home was held together with such plastic that clings.

I couldn't manage it. I could not read or think with all the chatting and practices and associations and shows and games. I could not think in paragraphs, or a sentence, with all the talking about what other people are doing while they themselves are wondering what I'm doing while I'm pecking and swiping with thumbs on a touch-sensitive screen.

What are you doing? Typing? What are you saying while you chat? What are you thinking, while touching the wares at Chico's and Brookstone's? What do you mean, behind the screen?

Nothing, of course, is the answer – but nothing while the background music is at full.

She and her Facebook Friends, usually frenetic, are bored. Full of information, but unable to hoist belief against the anxious and despondent tide of the 4 am abyss. I suspect that she prays as behavior, and cannot very often get herself away from being aware of herself trying to pray. Not praying in knowledge, when you are quite unaware that you are in the act of praying, and aware only that you are praying to Whom.

I wonder.

This is what I wish, on this blog that is more like a mimeograph.

Here is my Christmas wish from Chesterton, in a piece from the Illustrated London News on October 20, 1924:

The whole object of real art, of real romance – and, above all, of real religion – is to prevent people from losing the humility and gratitude which are thankful for daylight and daily bread; to prevent them from regarding daily life as dull or domestic life as narrow; to teach them to fell in the sunlight the song of Apollo and in the bread the epic of the plough. What is now needed most is intensive imagination. I mean the power to turn our imaginations inwards, on the things we already have, and to make those things live. It is not merely seeking new experiences, which rapidly become old experiences. It is really learning how to experience our experiences. It is learning how to enjoy our enjoyments.

Memory lane

Trust me. I'm working on a much more serious post. One that has references to Plutarch and Mary Douglas, the clean/unclean dichotomy and purification.

But in my casting about for discussions on demonology and the devil, I found this old piece of vinyl, which, in turn, led me to this dubious site.

Being a Dantean, I generally give a lot of allowances for anyone who says "Purgatorio" instead of "Purgatory."

The page "Divine Vinyl," to which my link directs you directly, is quite the walk down memory lane for many of us (i.e., those of us who remember vinyl).

I am appalled by how many of the groups listed I remember. Some I have heard as "special music" on Sunday nights or Revival episodes. Some, I remember possessing the actual disc.

Now, for the creepiest of them all, I nominate the one below. I never had this particular album, but I remember one of her other discs in the family record-cabinent. I don't know where it is now. It might be stacked in the basement, sandwiched between Chicago and the Imperials.

Without further ado, here is my nomination for the hands-down-creepiest-eschatological-vinyl-discussion-of-the-afterlife-and-one-of-the-many-reasons-why-I-rejoice-that-I-am-no-longer-a-premillennial-chiliast-heretic award, the first award ever given by Second Terrace:

You ready for this?

The runner-up:

Things I Don't Understand About the Oscars, part deux

More things I don't understand about the Oscars:

The last list is better understood if applied to Washington/Wall Street. 

There are red carpet dresses and addresses for sure.

There are, regrettably, even more numerous Bill Mahers and Sean Penns: more, certainly, in powerhouses than in HollyBollyJollywood, if that could be imagined.

There are a host of rich people who want, really want, to be cool oppressed people. They like the cachet and groove of self-conscious self-marginalization. They don't want to be poor or discommoded for real, mind you. Of course the gay crowd and the uber-feminists are these, obviously. But so are many Republicans, whose rhetoric has descended from the lecterns of Burke and Reagan to the grim couch of Beavis and Butthead.

There are piles of ironic solipsism spotting the field of commercial-politik (please note I have conflated these two worlds: they have been glued into the same Tower -- especially in these last few months of frenzy and bail-outs). Politics, philosophy, sociology and culture only follow spiritual realities. But on CNN, MSNBC, Fox and the used-to-be-big-three, there is no other world that the DC/Wall-Street infinite mirror.

There is, of course, the importance of sex, exotic sex, transgressive sex, transgendered sex, forget-gender sex, and especially, stick-it-to-the-church sex. Sex is sacrament, especially sex that is oppressed. Salvation, in today's AC market culture, is the liberation of the repressed.

There is the importance of music and (f)art as liturgical act in time of economic trouble. Transgressive art is especially redolent of religious intention. Look at the usual abstract, expressionistic and transgressive grim freneticism ... open your eyes and read into it augury and haruspication, the reading of tea leaves and Aztec heart surgery. You'll find the best of AC liturgy and mystique right there, in spades.

There is, at the end, a lot of modern importance. And that is all the trouble.

Things I don't understand about the Oscars

Things I don't understand about the Oscars:

1) the importance of dresses on the red carpet ... some are pretty, many are not ... there is no more meaning than that.

2) the importance of hats (the priest Hoffman), the nonchalance of faux royalty (the pitt-jolies, or the jolie-pitts, I can't tell), the Hollywood humor of Hollywood inside jokes.

3) the importance of Sean Penn.

4) the importance of gays as oppressed class and saved by personal lord and savior Oscar -- the only god Bill Maher doesn't hate

5) the importance of Bill Maher

6) the importance of sex, exotic sex, transgressive sex, transgendered sex, forget-gender sex, and especially, stick-it-to-the-church sex

7) the importance of musicals as liturgical act in time of economic depression (almost like a moleben): what crime of mankind could have possibly deserved a sequence that went from the lovely Somewhere and Maria to All that Jazz, At Last, and whatever was scatologized by High School Musical? Whoever invented the medley should be sent to Gitmo quick before it closes.

8) the importance of the curious Hollywood belief that ironic solipsism is a religious act of cleansing from sin. Perhaps that is so in Oscar's Mass, but not in the real world.

9) the importance of the Oscars: doesn't anyone "get" the ultimate Hollywood inside joke? That this is a movie about a movie about a movie? That Hamlet's thespians have become powers and principalities?

heh. omg.

10) modern importance

Prudery, Inc.

Recently, it was brought to my attention that my latest crankiness about an American Journal of Public Health article suggests at least a mild, and backward, prudery on my part.

I am not sorry for this, neither am I proud. Forlorn is more the word.

I will continue sounding prudish and moralistic. I will even risk sounding pietistic (though I am sure Yannaras errs in his estimations), not because I am offended by sin or phobic about it, but because I believe without a doubt that it kills and passion destroys. It is time to be more moralistic, not less.

In the same way, I will continue sounding exclusivistic and insensitive, and very much too dogmatic for the tastes of most gnostic ecumenicists. I do not do this to protect my worldview, which is completely unimportant and ultimately irrelevant.

I am exclusive about Orthodox Christianity because I know, and am persuaded, that any consciousness leading away from the Nicene theoria of the Holy Trinity must lead to insanity, and metaphysical anguish.

I will not, nor can I, apologize for my old-fashioned and revivalistic concern about my own people and for you, dear reader: I want you saved.

It is all because Heaven is by definition a public place. The other place is quite private, as it is the very definition of privation and despair. It is possible there to pretend disbelief forever, and to refuse the Grace that will have become, in that place, corrosive fire.

Here is a passage from the beautiful, priestly heart of +Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), that might give a clue to the wisdom of prudery today:

If contemporary pastors dare to take upon themselves the responsibility before God of admitting them to Communion, then it is in view of the general corruption of Christian morals and the Christian way of life, which has made the struggle with sin incomparably harder for the sons of the Church than it was before, when there was a general zeal for salvation, when people stimulated each other to moral struggles and were ashamed of their sins before each other. Now society's attitude to sins and virtues is exactly the opposite, and so it is already necessary somewhat to soften the requirements of the book of penances, but only within certain limits, lest the priest should also burn in the same flames as the sinners he had unlawfully admitted to Communion.

(from Confession: a series of lectures on the mystery of repentance, 1983)

I read this with fear and trembling, but as priests generally do, we will take the risk of offering Communion when we are all unworthy. That is a much greater danger.

Compared to this mortal danger, being called a prude is nothing. Nothing at all.

A miffed corporate executive protests sand-headedness

A priest friend of mine sent out, via e-mail, a link to the Golden Compass, Rotten Tomato post.

You may recall that in that longish philippic, the children's author, Mr. Pullman, was informed that he was a liar, and that his books were full of lies.

You may also recall that readers were not instructed to burn his books or to demonstrate in front of theaters playing his movie.

And yet, soon after my friend sent out the post, he received a bracing reply. It was from a corporate executive who pulls down a six-figure salary and who takes pride in being educated and having educated offspring at the best of state universities.

I cannot quote the response to my friend (and to me, the malefactor who was responsible for the executive's anxiety in the first place). It was written in the quasi-English tribal corporate-speak that Orwell predicted so accurately. After suffering a few moments from the linguistic violence of the message, I was able to prize out this summary:

First, neither my friend nor should any priest presume to suggest that something should not be read, viewed or experienced.

Second, any critique of popular culture or daily life by a priest constitutes censorship. This is because we priests should stay confined in the cultus, and should never intrude upon the agora, the marketplace or the public square.

Third, censorship is bad because it deprives the adult, youth or child of full exposure to the social elements. Any attempt to shelter the young (or the immature in faith) is just "sticking your head in the sand."

This "sticking of one's head in the sand" must be a horrible thing. The executive lashed my friend for trying to handicap his parishioners from being able to respond to "other ideas." He/she (I'll use the androgynous slash to protect the guilty) schoolmarmishly informed the priest that he will meet other people who have beliefs that differ from his own (my friend is senior to me, and being in his sixties probably realized that there are other such people at least a year ago, if not earlier).

If one had his head in the sand, then he will not be able to ... well, what will he not be able to do? Have his head outside the sand, I suppose? Will he be unable to talk intelligently, to converse about important things?

I wonder how the vice-president-of-poobah-something-pom-pom-tiddly-tum defines the condition of having one's head in the sand, or -- as I like to put it -- "sand-headedness"? I am assuming, without much evidence, that Poobah cares about the business of definition at all, but we'll let that go.

It seems that our non-liberally-arted executive is concerned that the bleak condition of sand-headedness comes from not keeping up with box office hits, the best-seller list, and kiddie-lit that ticks off old-fashioned people. Poobah listed in the e-mail message three "works" that define non-sand-headedness: Philip Pullman's "Dark Materials" (I am vastly entertained by the drooling irony of the trilogy title); Harry Potter (of course, and I'm scared to even bring him up again); and that Great Book of the Western World that Mortimer Adler Failed to Include in His Canon, The DaVinci Code.

My friend's interlocutor then closed the cyber-missive, which was mostly a soapbox encomium for the virtue of exposing oneself to new ideas, with this surprising (and comically self-incriminating) conclusion: "Besides, Father, these books are just fiction anyways."

What? I was led to believe from the argument that we were supposed to read these books so that we could lift our heads of the sand and be exposed to new ideas, the beliefs of "others." Now, I am told in the send-off, that I shouldn't be so mean and nasty about these books because, after all, they're just fiction?

I'm going to dismiss that non sequitur, and pretend it didn't happen. Hopefully, Poobah had an off day, or maybe his/her forgotten single core curriculum course in the liberal arts had relegated logic to the Church's corner on obsolescence.

I won't even mention the possibility that a hermetically isolated child -- i.e., one who doesn't attend a state school, who doesn't watch TV, DVDs, play Wii, manage a MySpace soft-porn site but who reads Austen, Virgil, Euclid and Shakespeare -- might be even better equipped to deal with "other beliefs." How have we allowed ourselves to be so utterly convinced that secular exposure is so necessary for our children's healthy development? Was there some subliminal message sneakily broadcast during Hazel and My Favorite Martian that said something like "Watch us and be cool ... join us or be square/nerd/fundamentalist/sand-headed"?

What remains clear is an unexpected corollary to the executive's wish to not have his/her head in the sand.

What remains clear, and scary, is that this powerful (and well-paid) product of our university system cannot tolerate a religious critique of popular culture. It is clear also (and this is the uber-creepy part) that ignorance is now defined as a lack of popular knowledge (especially popular evolutionary science), not -- as it used to be -- a paucity of real ideas.

He/she wanted complete freedom to expose oneself not to "ideas," but to an ever widening menu of entertainment and distraction.

Neither I nor my friend desire any shelter from the accurate, fully-disclosed discussion of ideas. Let's discuss Hume, Wilde, Heidegger, Darwin, Johnson, Freud, and Rousseau -- even in Junior High. Why not? But let's talk about them as ideas, not camouflaged as axioms in the soviet-style curricula now in vogue, or slipped in like a Mickey in the precincts of story.

I'll give our executive some credit. He/she managed to throw in a line from Aristotle that is found in every single anti-censorship script: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

The tragedy of that statement lies in the sad fact that our materially rich -- but philosophically impoverished -- correspondent cannot even entertain thoughts from a priest, much less be guided by them.

We don't really censor. In the deathworks, we're not even allowed to criticize.

Now that's censorship, and holding one's head in the sand.

Put not your trust in mortal princes, or discussion

Just a few quick observations about the Golden Compass hubbub (or, as the cognoscenti have it, TGC):

1. There are some who hope that that Philip Pullman is doing everyone a favor by setting up a "straw man" argument with his deicide narrative. The idea is that the author is not really harming "true" Christianity, but only the parts of it that went haywire. This great white hope even has a name: the "straw God" theory -- that is, kill off the little, instititutional Catholic/traditional/non-egalitarian god so that the real mysterious and cool post-modern god can take its place. Get rid of the OT god in other words, or that messy creator/demiurge character that destroyed all those nice canaanite cities just minding their own business and that wrote all those medieval rules against sin and persecuted La Boheme. Separate that god from the nice NT god. Make your own canon. Get rid of the Epistle of James. Kill off the "Yahweh" character, but say nothing about Jesus (the Archbishop of Canterbury, by the way, seems to be okay with this rather extra-Nicene position). I think this "straw god" argument has been waged before: it sounds a tad familiar. In any case, Pullman is affirmed for attacking not the "values" of Christianity, but its "institutions," and he does this by turning the narrative of salvation history "upside down" (as was done so auspiciously in the second century) where the villains become the heroes and vice versa. Are you Protestants really sure you want to sidle up to this Gnostic, simply because he is taking on the historic "institutional" church?
   
   
2. Speaking of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams recommends that Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy ought to be used for religious education in schools. Dr. Williams endorses Pullman's books as a healthy attack on "dogmatism." Is not Archbishop Rowan dogmatic in his episcopal task? Does he not tell people what to believe, to the point where they are believing rightly or wrongly? Or maybe he doesn't do this, and so he is at least consistent in his cheering on the anti-dogmatism of the Dark Materials world.
   
   
3. However, the Archbishop is endorsing only the resistance against Christian dogma. The secularism of Rousseau is an even sterner dogma that reigns supreme in Pullman's quasi-Miltonic kaka-cosmology, and one mustn't say a discouraging word about this at all. All resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated. Lambeth has joined the Borg.
   
   
4. One more thing about the Archbishop of Canterbury. Toward the end of his debate with Pullman in 2004, Dr. Williams utilizes a reference to us Orthodox to help him win common cause with Pullman against those "deplorable fundamentalists." Those deplored ones show up everywhere as everyone's punching bag. It's getting old. But more to the point -- yes we Orthodox are mystical: but why do we get drug into this liberal vs. fundamentalist debate, as if we'd fit on either side? Is there some lamentable dichotomy established somewhere, that opposes "mystical" and "dogmatic"? I think there is, and it is wrong, because the Orthodox Church is both mystical and empirical, dogmatic and personal, moralistic and sacramental. If Pullman couldn't stand the Roman Church, he couldn't survive Orthodoxy: his embrace of anti-Ignatian gnosticism is proof of that.
   
   
5. Some evangelicals -- who really want to be accepted by the literati -- do intellectual contortioning worthy of La Cirque du Soleil by claiming to find the good amongst the bad, the happy in the sad: Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware, while finding his anti-Christian position troubling, "also uncover spiritual themes within the books, which, like shafts of light, break through an otherwise gloomy universe—despite Pullman’s best efforts to keep them out. In the end, the authors argue that Pullman offers an unwitting tribute to the God he intended to discredit." Hey guys, I can find shafts of light in Nietzsche and even in Mao: but it would take more than what I see to suggest an "unwitting tribute" by them to the God they, too, intended to discredit. That's wishful thinking. Sometimes we need to be courageous enough to stand up and say, "Maybe Pullman wrote well and spelled his words correctly and printed decent grammar. Maybe he told an exciting story. But what he sells really stinks inside, so we'll give the whole package, as pretty as it is, a wide berth."
   
   
6. Finally, I read in several places that reading Pullman, or watching his movie, is okay just as long as the kids have someone to discuss it with. Why is this suggestion so universal? Why do we put so much trust in the power of discussion? The very depth of art, and its magnetic appeal to the consciousness, and art's ability to penetrate through the attention and to descend deeper into the heart should indicate that a slipshod discussion with mom or dad or the priest or the Sunday School teacher or the ACRY/GOYA/OCF/YL/YFC/YWAM advisor is going to have a greatly diminished impact. Would I take my daughters to see "Midnight Cowboy" or "Last Tango in Paris," just as long as I discuss it with them? No? Because the immorality is that extreme? What's worse -- a nauseating spectacle of fornication, where the human soul corrodes into stupid bestiality? Or, a pretty fairy tale, with all kinds of carnival toys, that ends up not with a Castle of Happily Ever After, but with the death of a character named "Yahweh"? Sure, guys, I'll discuss the movie. We'll discuss and discuss, but we'll give the movie a miss. Call me close-minded. I have found that permeability of an open mind is not such a good thing.

Announcement: Convention December 27-30

The Meowist Language Association announces that its 2007 Convention will be held December 27-30.

Expect the usual exceptional offering of general sessions, special sessions, and theoretical sessions, constructivist and deconstructivist sessions, Paul de Man sessions, feminist and post-feminist sessions, queer theory and pre-queer theory sessions, and, new this year, even "Christian" special interest sessions (e.g., CCL). Also, assistance for non-tenure-track and unemployed faculty members is available.

Along with all of that, there will be a special presentation of the Feline Unpatriarchal Bestowal of Artistic Recognition, otherwise known, affectionately, as the Modern Art Cats' Trophy. Serrano is a front runner for the nod, but Manzoni and Basquiat are lobbying for the coveted award, despite some minor limitations at present.

In the interest of public relations, and avoiding some pre-convention ambiguity experienced in previous years, it has been decided to not publicize the list of the hundreds of subjects presented, which can range anywhere from romance literature (sic) to Shakespeare (whether he wants talked about by us or not).

The Convention will be held in the world-renown Gobbler Motel and Supper Club in Wisconsin -- the same place that housed the planning and kickoff of the hyper-modern movement -- well, "postmodern" for the intellectuals, kitsch for the pedestrians.

Please reserve your room quickly at this first-class, 5-star establishment. Don't miss this opportunity to stay in purple-carpeted rooms (floor and walls). Be sure to check out the very room where video games were invented.

Diabological reading from Kirk

Few things are better, on a cold dank October grey day towards November, than to pull out a spooky book by the gloomy window, expecting the scrape of holly on the pane and Heathcliff’s vindictive pallor.

I don’t enjoy Wuthering Heights or any of the Brontes' stuff: too much atmosphere and soap opera, too little story. I know I should do the literary thing and prefer those volumes, but I’m drawn more to simpler and more Christian tales like those of Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Harry Potter (yes, Christian).

And then there’s Russell Kirk. His Ancestral Shadows is something one should immediately procure for this month’s non-professional reading. There are stories in this volume, handily bound and introduced by Vigan Guroian, that will spritz you with frissons of frabjous joy (for that spookiness of the jabberwocky is the rollercoaster scare-happiness that reacquaints us all with the exhilaration of being real men and women, for once).

Moreover, there is that weird book of Kirk’s called, glumly, Old House of Fear. Lady Fortune has smiled on you: I had to read this little tome in the form of another library discard (culled from some horrible bureaucracy called “The Amphitheater Library,” which believed in vandalizing texts with arcane rubber stampings and that peculiar septuagenarian librarian pencil-scratching which periodically commented on the volume’s absence of circulation). It was sheathed in a bubonic mix of bread mold and Milk of Magnesia, and mottled with stylized maple leaves for some unknown mystical purpose. Thank God the cover lay unseen when the book was open, though its neighbors on my shelf have filed a number of aesthetic complaints.

You are fortunate in that you can order, online, a new paperback edition by Eerdmans. Don’t bother going to Borders and Barnes and Nobles. They ban such books, censoring them from popular regard.

Despite the sickening cover of my copy, the text remains Kirk’s, and on page 189 he proceeds to lecture us on diabology, or how men can grow down to be like demons.

On what G. K. meant when Father Brown said that good men can remain the same, but bad men must get worse

Both [the bad guys] must have been reared and educated well enough … They might have commenced, like others, full of humanitarian sentimentality. And then, perhaps, demon ideology, with its imperatives and its inexorable dogmas, its sobersided caricature of religion, had swept them on to horrors. Ideological fanaticism had made of Jackman [the main bad guy] the goat-man, mastered by lust: but not the lust for women’s bodies. Jackman’s was the libido dominandi, the tormented seeking after power that ceases not until death. And in the flame of that lust for power, Jackman and Royall would be burnt up, today or next week or next month: they were at the end of their devil’s bargain, and the fiend would claim his own.

Now, in this oppressive silent moment, the conviction came to Logan [the good guy] that these two artists of disintegration were more frightened than he … Because frightened, Jackman and Royall were the more dangerous; but also their brains were stagnant with dread.

Fear … is the normal condition of man, after all. Quiet ages and safe lands are the rare exceptions in history. Nowadays the tides of disorder were gnawing at whatever security and justice still stood in the world, quite as the swell round Carnglass [the island where the story takes place] sought to bring down that heap of gray stones to the mindless anonymity of the ocean. With growing speed, the brooding spectre of terror, almost palpable in Carnglass, was enveloping the world. This island was the microcosm of modern existence …

For all their effort to behave as if they were still masters of the island, a tautness almost hysterical had crept into Jackman and Royall, and their voices were strained. What for years they had dealt out to others, now waited for them; and they had forgotten the meaning of mercy. There was no justice to which they could appeal. By fear they had lived: and now the fear which they and their sort had carried throughout the world was claiming them also. Having murdered order, these two at last were cast into the outer darkness.

Underline two phrases here: “artists of disintegration,” and “having murdered order, these were cast into outer darkness.”

The pimply idiocy of modern scare literature is predicated on the simple fact that most of it isn’t about evil at all – at least, not diabolical evil. The “fear” in modern horror has only to do with grotesquerie, not what demonism really is. That’s the chief difference between Christian literature, and the ilk that surrounds it: the former calls the villain for what it is, the latter runs away from it, while, at the same time, eroticizing its effects for the entertainment of children.

"Erotic horror" is a rubric that covers offscourings like "Resident Evil" and "Saw" (a favorite of too many 12-year-olds), as you would expect. But the category also includes the awkward prancings of spandexed single-mother divas, and the leerings of airbrushed mannequins: these, too, fall under the pall of dehumanized erotics and horrors. After all, just what is the "Living Dead"?

Only Christian theology prized out in art and literature still remembers what evil is. I understand that there is much that is called Christian that is neither art nor literature, and certainly cannot be called theological. And it is just as likely that there is much that is good stuff that is Christian without looking that way, or even knowing that it is.

There must be evil talked about for art to be art, simply because evil is all around and must be dealt with on the journey home. That is the simple morale of the Odyssey. It is the heroism of Jesus Christ.

Finally, this last "diabological" thought: I am not at all afraid of haunted houses or spooky spaces ... but I am afraid of the real and grievous hauntings: minds possessed and homes defiled. Then, in those places, when my own bravery fails, I hold on to the Christological courage which the Cross becomes, which makes us more than conquerors.