The fool's take on faith, politics, art, dreams and the human condition
I walked
Into the past
To tidy it up—
In search of explanations.
It looked and smelled
Like a living grave
Of the misremembered,
Looted and squirming.
I looked for a path
And peace,
For youth and home,
But found them shattered—
Caked with lies
And warm debris,
Lost dogs,
The stuff of dreams,
Of whores and kings—
Scattered and sad.
I saw and heard
The jewels
Of Tutankhamen clinking
In the teeth
Of laughing children.
I am in Bangalore. In a mere half hour the clocks will strike midnight, punctuating the year 2019 with a big, fat, inky period. Excelsior!
Actually, the whole truth is I’m watching—on a computer screen in a provincial American town—a “live stream” of a New Year’s Eve celebration there; a video camera is panning to and fro across a shopping arterial clogged with gregarious, selfie-taking revelers. A bilingual blue traffic sign indicates we are on or near “Church Street.” Hundreds of men, and only men, file past, and we occasionally lock eyes. The women, one presumes, were not invited. Perhaps they are at home with the children. So, it is a night for the boys.
They are dressed in the popular casual garb of the West. American brands—Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, Aeropostale, Gap—are ubiquitous. T-shirts, checkered flannel, striped track suits, hooded sweatshirts, black leather jackets, camouflaged parkas; the gamut is on display. Duos and trios saunter and slink (yes, slink) past the camera, pausing to photograph each other or the crowd with practiced smiles as whistling policemen in wide-brimmed colonial hats usher them along with friendly nudges from bamboo poles. Many are holding with one hand a cell phone and coiffing a head of black curls with the other. One dons a set of plastic red devil horns. Another has the flag of India painted on his cheek.
I’m flabbergasted—the men, more often than not mustachioed or bearded (but carefully trimmed), hold hands or walk with their hands placed on the shoulders of the man before them. How lovely. This kind of intimacy amongst friends is absolutely taboo in America, where any intimation of homosexuality is a mortal threat to one’s masculinity. Hardly a hand here is buried in a pocket—these people touch each other. And the affection is genuine and beautiful. And unique. And yet, by all other visual accounts, these men aspire to be Western (“No Rules, No Limits” reads one passing red t-shirt), to be like us—materialists, consumers, inevitably atomized and suspicious of each other. How I want to shout through the screen, “Stop! Beware!”
Tonight, however, is no time for melancholy. I am transfixed by faces. The “peace sign” is omnipresent, casually posed across the chest or waved high for effect. “We are young, and all is well,” they seem to be saying. Every man, more-or-less indistinguishable in dress from his American cousin, exudes a kind of sincere cool long rejected by the ironic, pallid urbanite stateside. I long to take their hands and join the parade, to ride the obnoxious squeaks of pink toy trumpets and a chorus of whooping partygoers above the din. Here, perhaps, is real brotherhood (or—it must be considered—real misogyny, given the total exclusion of the fair sex).
It is almost midnight now. Some begin to jump in place, their arms high. Victory! More phones emerge. Perhaps they are texting their wives and mistresses. One bewildered man is hoisted by friends into the air and passed over the heads of laughing strangers. Another, like a child, mounts the shoulders of an acquaintance and pumps his fists. A policeman, resting on his stick, smiles with a pinch of envy.
May we, in the age of the Ministry of Loneliness, be so fervent in our own aspirations for human fraternity, lest we repeat the mistakes of our great-grandfathers.
Image: euronews. (31 December 2019). Happy New Year India! Bangalore welcomes in 2020 with celebrations [Video file]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/hzJuQIpCjVo
Polls and pundits tell us, “no one is watching,” “Americans are fed-up,” “this doesn’t feel like a momentous occasion.” And indeed it doesn’t. The U.S. House of Representatives has impeached the president, almost twenty-one years to the day of President Clinton’s undoing by the same legislative body. And the 76ers lost their first home game of the season.
When a colleague insists for three-plus years that he’s going to introduce himself to the attractive new brunette in HR and repeatedly doesn’t, news of the event when it finally does transpire could be, understandably, underwhelming. The novelty of the idea has waned considerably. Said colleague has, in the interim, proven to be annoyingly clingy and a real cad. Your attention is already divided between myriad things of the utmost urgency and importance: the leftover cake in the break room, the hundreds of unread emails in the Amazonian sprawl of your inbox, the lower-back pain.
And Christmas. The Democrats have impeached a president mere inches from Christmas. This week is, undoubtedly, for many Christians and non-Christians alike, the most harried and heartburn-inducing of the year. For others it is the most anticipated and joyous. Adventus! In any case the season is not ripe for mass hypnosis by our governing and media elites. The people (remember them?) are kinda distracted.
So some of us await the arrival of a (ahem, the) king, and some are actively engaged in disposing another. It’s a moment of profound chiaroscuro, the powerless (a child) pitched against the powerful (the law and its players). Herod, Caesar, Trump, Pelosi—the names change but “the song remains the same.” Power is the essence of worldliness, and its games are played across time and distance. The birth of Christ, however, transcends them. We celebrate a helpless infant not to, of course, spite an enemy or score points, but to remind ourselves of our humanity and our common finitude.
And yet this child is so much more to us. Because of him we know of our infinitude, as well. Because of him we know victory in this life is not to be found on Capitol Hill but in defeat, so we might, as Matthew Schmitz wrote in First Things, “enjoy triumph in the next.” For “heaven and earth will pass away.” Because of him we know we are imperfect and are forgiven for being so, and in forgiving—even our enemies—we are made, like Christ, more perfect. Because of him we know death’s dominion is not total, that it is but a door, through which our relationship with Christ really begins. We know love is not a quality of mass organization, policy or election, but the very substance of God—good, indestructible God.
Because of this child we know our bodily existence is precious, but not ultimate. Yes, God was made flesh, warm blubbery flesh. But it was a kind of loving condescension. He descended unto us to demonstrate the truth of the cosmos: that eternal life is possible. Don’t become so attached to this one. Matter will perish. Our parents will perish. You will perish. Rome, the Eternal City, will perish. The Bill of Rights, these fancy clothes, record collections, cars, mansions, molecules, your résumé, every tweet; matter will perish. Earth will pass away. But in spirit, in Christ—should we choose—life will continue.
“It is sublimely simple,” notes Malcolm Muggeridge of Christ’s ministry in our wretched world, “a transcendental soap-opera going on century after century and touching innumerable hearts. […] With the Incarnation came the Man, and the addition of a new spiritual dimension to the cosmic scene.” So what of the big, red headline in this morning’s paper? Psshaw. The drama unfolding in Washington, D.C. is but a flea circus, a sideshow to the main attraction unfolding in the hearts of millions of good people this Christmas. Let’s rejoice! A king is born.
“The universe provides a stage,” Muggeridge says. “Jesus is the play.” This I want to see.
Image: Bosch, Hieronymus. Adoration of the Magi. 1510.
My brother and his wife welcomed into their lives a baby girl mere days before Thanksgiving. If ever there was an occasion to give thanks, this was it. I wrote this poem—in a parking lot, hundreds of miles away, on the eve of her birth—for the little soul whose presence has already blessed our family with so much light, and for myself, as a reminder: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (New International Version, Matt. 6.21).
Winter’s tree with branches bare,
Retracting from a splendor,
Into slumber and thin air—
The coup complete by mid-November.
Night and shadow victors both,
Their reign is but a pregnant pause
In God’s eternal will to growth,
Take spring, his gift, and love, his cause.
Hoarding life until high time
To shudder, sanctify, give birth—
Begins again to pantomime
The fearless jig that spins the earth,
And welcomes in from out the cold
A foil for a calloused heart,
Delivered into crease and fold,
Conjoining what was once apart.
To be free and out of doors—
Under wings, above the floors
Of faux linoleum and lint,
Knee-high in wild sage and mint,
Carousing memories impress
upon—a rausch, resplendent eveningness
Uncanny umbers, graven greens
I see but don’t know what they mean.
To eat this planet with an eye
As day and night entwine in sky,
How hours drift like vagabonds
From me to sweeter echelons,
For soon the beasts nocturnal ride
Insisting I return inside,
At once content and mourning changes
Comes the end and rearranges.
I was summer, holding fast—
The fool of youth—I could not last,
For here we grovel before Death
Awaiting the next baby’s breath
To break the spell of dreamless slumber,
Woe to she who holds us under
Rock and root—I smell the sun—
Oh, welcome light! Our prize, hard won.
Image: Monet, Claude. Path Under the Rose Arches. 1918-24.
By tolling bells and pointed spires,
Cities born by my desires,
Slender towers, glades and gleams—
I’ve been here once before in dreams,
Where every cornice conjures scenes
Of peasants, mystics, in-betweens,
In steeples old abominations
Shadow new transfigurations
Rising from a misty bog
Into heavens eyes agog,
From earth and wood to heights divine,
My vision’s lure is by design—
To house a people and its keep,
My heart is building while I sleep.
What is the opposite of an encomium? No, that’s not a (lame) joke. Whatever it is, this (below) is it. For as Remy Wilkins asserts in Theopolis, “blunting the sword of your mouth benefits only the enemies of the kingdom,” and I intend to cut them down.
I’ve long detested the holier-than-thou, ad hominem attack style of author Tim Egan, perhaps because—at my weakest—there’s a whiff of it in my writing, too. The (alleged) hypocrite is his perennial target—read his biweekly opinion pieces in The New York Times—and perhaps I subconsciously fear/wish he’ll one day train his proverbial guns on me. Or perhaps because we are alums of the same university and share a hometown I see him as a kind of traitor, as a wayward brother. At any rate, we share little else. His politics mirror the predictable salad of leftist causes—vitriol for the traditional, skepticism of any virtue that challenges the religions of environmentalism and multiculturalism, and innumerable other -isms and anti-isms. He lives in Seattle.
Egan, promoting a new book, returned home this week to discuss it, and, though I couldn’t secure tickets to the event, I wrote an op-ed of my own—hence the brevity—hoping the local paper would publish it. They didn’t, so here it is.
Tim Egan is not alone in thinking “the Catholic Church is sick with sex.” The well-documented sacerdotal problem with pedophilia, systemic seminarian abuse, scandals and cover-ups; you catch the drift. It disgusts.
But his solution? More sex. “Celibacy should be optional,” he writes in a New York Times op-ed published last year. His logic? That’ll mitigate the temptations of perverts rife in the ranks of the cloth. What Egan doesn’t understand is that celibacy is to the priesthood what marriage is to the laity: a commitment to love of the highest order, only with Christ the bridegroom.
Deny yourself, He preached. It’s an order anathema to those of a culture of decadence and “self care” (“treat yourself,” “take it easy,” “just do it”) because it is a tall order. “To be priest” means to empty yourself of worldliness so that you can be filled with Christ, with the eternal, with Truth. Celibacy, then, says writer Patricia Snow, is a promise, “to live, in advance, the nuptial realities of heaven.”
Fidelity to God and His Kingdom—it was once a noble aim. And a costly one; preferable even, but realized by so few. An honor, in other words. A triumph over our enduring fallibility. Egan’s take, however, in reducing such a calling to an act of cheap grace, makes a mockery of human aspiration, and reveals the author’s search for “a faith” to be nothing more than the vicissitude of a muckraking dilettante.
In his new book he asks, “How can you believe in a savior whose message was peace and passive humility, when the professional promoters of that message were complicit in so much systematic horror?” That’s easy. Because He is the savior even of the most embryonic and ignorant seeker: the man who, in his quest for eternity, sees only his reflection at the center of history. The man who, consumed by darkness, confounds the morning with the light of Christ.
Image: Jones, David. Crucifixion. A Child’s Rosary Book. 1924.
Moonfall in a crown of thorns—
A horrid death its chill forewarns,
Still merrily its minions grope
For irons and a length of rope,
And melt their hands on glowing coals,
Their gaze upon a place of skulls,
In want of night to hide the fear
Of innocence they’ve fettered here—
Humiliated, flogged with shame,
The brutes don’t even know His name
Or shudder when in pain He cries,
But not to curse or criticize—
“Forgive them, please” is what He said,
These servants of the living dead,
Beholden to His blood and dust,
To dust, for everlasting life, they must
Condemn the stranger, hang Him high—
Then truth will have eclipsed the lie.
Image: Caravaggio. The Flagellation of Christ (detail). 1610.
I am an age-old thing—
Behold! the hermit king.
Alone I dwell in humble lairs
My hours spent composing prayers,
Minute and monolithic works
Within which doubts and longings lurk.
To be a vessel of true love,
The tree that feeds and shades the dove,
In seeking mercy and His face
I fast and sing, repent, replace
My heart of stone with flame and flesh,
Tin armor for a porous mesh.
The better to become a sieve
And covet not how others live,
But wander solitary, die—
Inside and out a passerby.
Because she is from “back east” she says Angeles like Vangelis—pure barbarism. To pair it—say, in a couplet—with dungarees or manganese, the way of Golden Age starlets, is the way of class. To end it with “lace,” too, as the Mexicans do (on-hey-lace), softens the place undeservedly, drizzles too much honey over it. El-ey is sharp as salt.
She feigns offense at the slightest provocation, flaying the innocuous like the lingchi of Fou-Tchou-Le. Piece by piece the world is cut away until it is a cartoon, until strangers are mere string puppets. She giggles and the curtain falls.
She puts the clay bong to her lips and fills her face with sweet hot smoke. Silence, in a panic, fills the rest of her. She evicts both within seconds from a mouth made raw by lies. Changes tickle her skull, begin to crawl out her limbs. But the bodies about her remain autonomic, in stasis—meat.
Her sunglasses are too big—it’s the in look—and smugly reflective. Instead of eyes it seems the middle third of her head now hosts her table mates and blocky avatars of those to her left and right, miniaturized. All semblance of order and proportion is defiled by these plastic discs. Severed from the rest of the face even her smile is perverse, incomplete, like a gift without thanks. And in the dislocation she becomes but an accessory, part and parcel of the paraphernalia. Ashen, inanimate, vulgar.
Los Angeles is the caliphate of the sensuous, and has been ab aeterno, so the peccadilloes of les petits gens—cannabis, for instance—go largely unpoliced by its kings. It is an altered state, a new Enoch, unzipping your fly as it plunders your pockets and pooh-poohs a chorus of “No no no.” It traffics in consciousness, pinching here to patch there. And the young hoydens cheer and accurse their parents, who pay their rent.
She hates their prayers, the teak heirlooms, the slow-cooked Sundays, hates their very dreams. She is the new woman. Liberación! Free to lose her mind, free to seduce death, free to slap the hand of God and remake His house. She becomes a mold, protean, and the city is her substrate. It feeds her loose talk and looser men. Beyond its ramparts, in the noiseless void of the desert, she withers, unstimulated and unadulterated, and fills it with a monologic screed of negativity. Its stoic immensity offends her. It is too clean. The stillness is almost pornographic.
Here comes the bong, again, that phallic totem of escape. She orders a grilled cheese and rolls up a sleeve. Tattoos tumble out like dice. She is a chimney. The smoke, in fine American fashion, goes where it pleases. But our gal, its servant, remains seated. There is no escaping. She can only go deeper into it. Move the furniture around. Pull weeds. Dust His collection of rare books. The epiphanies come on like flies, and her sandwich goes cold. She won’t remember how she got home.
Image: Bujados, Manuel. La Esfera. 1927.
Impolitic 