Baguettes

Last time we looked briefly at a particularly Italian issue in the quest for European identity. But what about France? Is such an issue even possible there? After all, Franco-German rapprochement is the cornerstone of L’Union européenne, and if any country has been central in defining what it means to be European, it’s been France. France, after all, can be considered as having given birth to modern Europe, or at least to the idea of modern Europe, after the 1789 Revolution with its cries of “Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood.” It’s had the firmest notions of itself as a country, and those are notions that have been challenged in the last few decades as immigration recasts the entire notion — potentially — of what it means to be French.

And so, France is undergoing a national debate: what does it mean to be French? What is the proper place and significance of its national symbols? Where do immigrants fit into this matrix, of a people that have long been defined more by ethnicity than anything else?

It’s a question, like the religion issue I wrote about a couple of days ago, that has vexed us here in the United States as well. Like in France, serious debate has taken place about what the proper proficiency in English, for example, should be before someone is admitted into this country, to what extent assimilation is desirable and necessary, if this is a process the government should help along or hinder. How, people wonder here, can immigrants ever be a part of the United States if they won’t learn the goddamn language?

That is, of course, ultimately the same question the French are dealing with, the meaning of American-ness, of the intangible parts that define a community, and how membership should be restricted, if at all. Some want to turn everyone away, others want to welcome all comers. It really all sounds startling familiar:

The discussions are to take place during hundreds of locally organized town-hall meetings involving education, union and cultural officials and ordinary people concerned about the state of French identity. Among the questions Besson has suggested for the debates: Should France implement “integration contracts,” which would set minimal levels of language and cultural knowledge for citizenship; and should students be required to sing the national anthem “La Marseillaise” at least once a year?

Some fear that these types of questions — even the debates themselves — invite assumptions that generations of immigrants have already undermined France’s identity and may provoke nationalist sentiments long championed by Le Pen. “When you put immigration and national identity side by side, it creates the notion that immigration poses a threat to national identity — which can inspire racism,” Mouloud Aounit, president of the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, told the daily l’Humanité on Nov. 2. “But this debate also reveals an identity crisis of a part of French society … and the failure of its model of integration, which doesn’t allow people to do just that.”

Substitute “The Marseillaise” with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Le Pen” with “Limbaugh,” and “l’Humanité” with “The New York Times” and its pretty much the same thing. And in France as well as the United States, none of these questions are easily answered. For all its multi-ethnic origins, the United States considers itself as much a nation-state as any other country. We speak of our national culture, our national history, our national identity, and even of, well, our nation, which means our common birth. The struggle to make sense of that in the midst of the early twenty-first century is necessarily difficult. We live in a time of diffusion.

Communities are real and vital things. God made us for community. They have ontological purpose, and John Paul even proposed they may have a particular eschatology to them as well, a part of Memory and Identity I won’t begin to pretend to understand. But communities are both defined by us and themselves define us, a give-and-take process in which the interaction of individuals gives rise to something so contradictory but still in its essentials good: the community from which people derive their self-identification, find purpose in the world, opportunities to love and to serve and to give, a place for the ego to be displaced, if just for a time.

When the community is something as primal as your country, though, the issues seem to get much larger. Yeah, I’m a Yankees fan. I’m a comic book fan. I’m a Trekkie. But none of those are as fundamentally defining as American. So a challenge to what makes up American-ness stirs no small amount of passion. I daresay the only thing that can bridge the gap between the self-definition of French or American and the striving of others to join that community is in recognizing that the community isn’t indelible, isn’t eternal, and in the end has less weight for us than the call to love our neighbors and serve the widow and orphan.

If that seemed like a pat ending, it’s because I have to get ready for work right now.

The Crucifixes of Italy

It’s an interesting angle, to be sure, to be an American and read this story, but there it is: the European Court of Human Rights has declared that the public display of the crucifix in Italian public schools violates religious and educational freedoms. This is a touchy issue in the United States, too, to be sure; we’ve struggled ourselves for some time know to understand what the proper balance is between public religion and personal rights; is freedom to be understood as freedom from offense? At what point does a private distaste by a minority honestly become something that the majority need not only respect but take as a guiding principle? Such occasions do exist, and they need to be thoughtfully worked through. But I’m not here primarily to discuss that borderland. Of much more interest to me is a remark by Italian education minister Mariastella Gelmini  that “it is not by eliminating the traditions of individual countries that a united Europe is built.”

Hmm.

A united Europe is not built by abandoning culture.

As much as a good chunk of the continent might wish it were otherwise, Europe is unassailably the place most intensely formed by Christian thought and belief. The cross appears on the national flags of the United Kingdom, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Slovakia, Georgia, Finland Switzerland, Northern Ireland, Greece, Malta, and, until 1945, Italy. Christian culture to permeates European architecture, informs European philosophy, and straddles European toponymy. Christianity is the principal that defines Europeperiod as a distinct grouping, as a world unto itself, and as Pope Benedict has said time and again, Europe without the faith isn’t really Europe. It’s frankly something else entirely.

This issue strikes at a major fault line in the quest to build a federal Europe, a real European Union: what, exactly, makes Europe? How is Europe to be defined? And, more to the point, how is Europe to be united? It’s striking that a largely post-Christian Europe is striving to build a union without a real positive sense of Europe’s identity. The continent isn’t defined by its empires. It’s not defined by its ethnicities. Its not defined by political and civic culture, like the United States is; in one union you’ve got monarchies like Spain and the UK alongside fiercely secular republics like France and Germany, and in between places like Italy that have never been able to divest themselves of their religion no matter how hard they’ve tried, and frankly no longer really see the point.

So: to remove or not to remove i crocefissi becomes an icon (haha) of a massive split in the understanding of what Europe is and what it’s supposed to be. Gelmini sums it up very honestly; if the price of Union is the neutering of Europe and its heritage, there’d be nothing European about it. As has been pointed out time and again here at Saint Superman and elsewhere, the driving force of politics is culture, and a culture steeped even in vaguely Christian notions of justice, charity, and sacrifice is better than one that worships at the Unassailable Altar of Me. Europe is in flux; does it embrace the good in its past or cast everything off, crucifixes and all, until the empty churches themselves are torn down?

Singing in the rain, remastered!

By George Lucas

How Did I Miss This?

Hey! My little comic got a fantastic writeup on Examiner.com!

The story seems destined to head into interesting territory as is progresses.   Again from the blog: “it’s about meaning and identity in the heart of conflict, the nature and significance of belief, and man’s place in the universe.”

The artwork is absolutely stop-you-in-your-tracks stunning, and the script – while a little more obscure than necessary- shows the sort of love for the written word that promises to ripen into a uniquely poetic prose.  On the whole, it looks pretty darn cool.  I can’t wait to see what happens next!

Storytelling

So, one of the things that’s been keeping me from you, oh faithful readers, is Stronghold, my webcomic. It’s required a lot of my attention, not just in the administrative aspect of things (as much as that’s a giant headache), but as I start to think more and more about story.

You see, today we went ahead and launched issue 3. This is the last bit of backlog we’re uploading; everything from issue 4 onward will be new material created specifically for the web version. The original issue, didn’t escape criticism; one crit I received a lot for the last two issues is that “the fight scene just went on forever.” Well, it’s true. It did. It did because that was my first full-length comic script and I had felt like writing a big fight scene, some big splashy entrance that would attract attention, and it got a tad out of hand. That’s on me. When we put that book together in 2006, the vision of what the comic, then called Sanctuary, would be was very different; the intention was for an ongoing serialized story. Part of that — most of that — was due to my love for those sort of epic sci-fi serials, particular Battlestar Galactica and Lost, in which individual episodes blend together to an extent, dominated as they are by the ongoing narrative. But quite a bit of it was laziness on my part.

You see, writing stories is hard. Writing concise, thirty-page tales with beginnings, middles, and ends isn’t particularly easy when compared to endless To Be Continued’s and eternally-hanging plot threads that can be resolved at the writer’s leisure. That first story — issues 1 and 2 — were made, though, over three years ago, and in the intervening time, I’ve come to appreciate episodic storytelling, and to understand the weaknesses such a format would impose upon the comic: it would devolve into either endless fight scenes or a relationshippy soap opera, and while both of these are valid ways to tell a story, I think both of them are to an extent weaker. As I’ve spent the last few months doing the Great Deep Space Nine Run-Through, I’ve realized that there is a profound strength to the single episode story.

The writer in such stories is freer. It becomes possible to craft your tale around a specific theme instead of vague overtones. It lets you derive your drama from the tension created by thirty pages, and forces creativity. I think back on the best episodes of Deep Space Nine, and they’re the most self-contained. As much as the arc-driven episodes like the six-episode suite that opens season six can be brilliant, they never achieve the elegant simplicity of “The Visitor,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Children of Time,” or “Duet.” Each of them factors in in some way to the larger narrative, but each of them is best when considered separate. “Duet” doesn’t rely on the historical experience of Bajor and Cardassia, but you could tell that story about any war criminal. “The Visitor” is ultimately, for all its technobabble, about the unconquerable love of a son for his father. The power hangs there because it’s universal.

I’ve been paying a lot of attention to folk tales lately, too, from the classic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (which is oddly scholarly for a series of campfire tales for kids) to Italo Calvino’s Fiabe italiane, and the beautiful thing about them is that they’re short, concise, and entirely within themselves, and yet still pack some sort of emotional punch, even if it’s just a sudden, startled fright. They’re almost schools of storytelling in themselves; a status quo is established, subverted, and the consequences dealt with. A butcher likes to make sausage for his wife. When he accidentally kills a man in his shop, he disposes of the body by putting it in the grinder and then feeding his wife the sausage. So she’s merrily kicking along, full to the teeth with manslaughter sausage. And then, of course, the poor man’s ghost comes to torment the unfortunate wife, killing her for that consumption. It’s simple, really.

That’s the direction I want to take this series in. Not the horror angle, but in treating each issue as a single, coherent story. I’m honestly not sure if I’m up to the task, but I hope the exercise of writing helps make me a better writer. This issue takes the first tentative steps in that direction, and issue 4, “The Professional,” and issue 5, (tentatively “The Flower of Carnage”) will begin that process in earnest. Till then, issue 3 is a great story that draws the previous two issues to, I hope, a satisfying conclusion and completing our bloated introduction to our heroine.

Where The Heck I’ve Been

Where the hell have I been?

Well, I’ve gotten back into reading for one. My mind had gotten a tad lazy, so I’ve been pouring myself back into books. I’ve also been battling something of a bout of depression, so that’s been distracting me. It’s not really an excuse, to be frank; I’ve let this blog slide, and that has to stop.

Thing is, most of my writing energy has been going into work on a new short story called “Opal Honey of the Big Deep River.” I’m posting an excerpt for your edification. I would very much like any comments you might have on the matter.

“Opal Honey of the Big Deep River”

Opal Honey of the Big Deep River. Casey Stock liked the way it tasted.

The Big Deep River is the reason the town of Bolingbroke exists. Despite the name, it’s a minor river in coastal Virginia, draining into the Rappahannock. The first settlers on the Peninsula simply found it to be the biggest of the rivers and creeks in the area, and so named it appropriately. The Big Deep was navigable, which separated it from most of the little waterways that cut across the countryside, and that combined with flat terrain and fertile soil made the site good for putting down; goods could be easily carted to Tappahannock or taken by boat to Fredericksburg, and Harry Bolingbroke’s little farm, fence posts hammered down in 1828, became a big farm, and then a hamlet, and then a village. The settlers came from as far north as Herlihy, Pennsylvania and as far west as Richmond. Casey Stock came from Lodi, New Jersey a century-and-a-half later. Opal Honey came from nowhere.

It was wooded, too, like the rest of the East Coast, and the first clearing had been done by Harry Bolingbroke himself with his two sons and his brother. The forest in the area was light, and the clearing done slowly as the farm grew; later, as the farm became a village, there were more hands to work at the confounding of nature, to hem in the woods and provide this little bastion of civilization with a little more soil, a little more land. The clearing of a forest is a small war. But with that wood they built the Methodist church and the small town meetinghouse, both of which were the same building and eventually had to be expanded. The new families needed land, too, and so they cut down the trees and blew the stumps, and used the wood to solve both problems. It was really very elegant. But then the word came down that Opal Honey didn’t approve, and for a time, Bolingbroke stopped growing.

Of course, when Casey Stock moved there with his mom in the summer of 1997, it was growing again, and nobody, now, nobody believed in that sort of thing, things like Opal Honey. The old legend was sort of laughed off, a bit of local folklore from the earliest days of settlement. The stories barely even circulated: Opal Honey, known also by the childish Ojja-Wojja, was the boogeyman of Bolingbroke’s children. But a century earlier, this town had been frankly cowed to absolute pieces by the name that Casey found so delicious.

Casey was such a kid, though; wild in his way. Every seventeen year-old is wild in their own way, I suppose, but Casey was particularly such. Not that he was rowdy; he didn’t go about causing trouble like some kind of maniac. He was just a bit troublesome. He liked to stir things up and watch everything go to pot. He was a lanky kid with a tameless shock of hair and that scraggly mustache kids grow when they want to feel like they’re adults. And he felt that way, damn sure; he’d contradict his teachers, wrong as often as he was right, and he hated the town. He would hop on his bike and bike to nowhere, and come back. He stuck to the roads, and all he saw were unhappy woods kept at bay by trucks and asphalt.

School was better; moody though he was, he wasn’t a pariah. He had his friends, likeminded kids who wanted to get out of the town and into the city, or simply wanted something to complain about, who wore black and boots and fancied themselves intellectuals above and against the other boys, who wore flannel and went hunting and loved the town because it sat on the edge of a world where hunting was still possible. But Casey Stock and Sam Del and Andy Lachlan looked down on those guys and so he made his bed in the town of Bolingbroke among the self-professed intelligent crowd who made a show of reading Marx just to confound their largely-Republican neighbors. Not that they understood Marx, or even paid much deep attention; sometimes it was Margaret Atwood or Ayn Rand or Isaac Asimov; there was nothing coherent they were searching out, feeling out, pursuing. But Casey, Sam, and Andy would still trot them out at lunchtime when they ate alone, looking deathly serious as they drank RC Cola and ate their soggy fries.

The Methodist church, of course, wasn’t the meetinghouse anymore, but it still sat at the center of Bolingbroke village, which turned in concentric circles around it, or more specifically, around the square in front of it. Casey discovered this quickly, and used the natural flow of the narrow village streets to direct his travels as he biked through. It was, he would admit privately, a genuine positive that he could bike so unencumbered through traffic so light. It was a primal pleasure, like flight, and distracting and pure, that ceaseless and seamless maneuvering through the town he otherwise despised as a collection of illiterate peasants, not that he’d ever say that aloud. That, well, that was private, and he wasn’t even sure he believed it. As with many things he wasn’t very sure about – Marx, God, and Ellen Macaffey, who was taller than him and lean and dark-haired and certainly used coconut mango shampoo – he could ignore them when he pedaled. He’d focus on the road and its curvature and the little bumps beneath black rubber tires, the bridge over the Big Deep River, with the blur to either side of him (and the one in his head) relegated to memory.

He didn’t really know his mother. Not that she was distant, but more that Casey was thoroughly self-oriented. He would fight with her disinterestedly, about grades and the detentions he’d get from calling his teachers stupid, and ignore her at dinner while considering nothing at all. Elizabeth Stock was unhappy about that, and about many things, but Casey didn’t much care. Terror and infatuation occupied him with startling frequency, but not his mother; he wasn’t very concerned with her or what she wanted from him. He wasn’t resentful of her, really, but he frankly felt he couldn’t be bothered. He felt vaguely guilty about this, but it was only ever vague.

In a year things would be very different. For now, though, you’ve got a good picture of Casey, who came to Bolingbroke in a huff like the moon crosses the sky, and then suddenly eclipsed.

In a year, there he’d be, marching deeply into the empty woods beyond the village, the trees that seemed to stretch forever even as they crowded behind him. Feeling shut in even in this expanse, the road and his bike an unthinking distance behind him, as night crept into the sky and darkened it shade by shade by shade, he would stop, dead in the realization that he was afraid. He’d feel his way through the woods with the same aimless wandering that guided him through town, anticipating turns and stretches and creeks and fallen trees, following the instinct that drew him in, wending and weaving along this invisible path he’d dowsed. In a year, he wouldn’t know how long he’d have been walking, in what direction he had come from, or how to return. He’d hear the water rushing through a gully far away, but wouldn’t know enough to guide himself by it. He would come in search of the Ojja-Wojja, Opal Honey of the Big Deep River. And there he’d see a sudden light crest the curve of the earth like the rising sun.

But he didn’t know that when he first heard the name.

Man and Superman

Guest post by Ian Koranek

I love superheroes.

I started watching X-Men and Batman: The Animated Series when I was in the third grade and was instantly hooked. Although the latter proved to be the only of the two worth a damn, I’ll always be grateful to the former for introducing me to those characters. As Brian has written about countless times (this blog is called Saint Superman after all), superhero storytelling is about purpose and vocation. Superman goes around helping people and protecting people and saving people for no other reason than it’s the right thing to do.

I’ve always wanted a t-shirt that said, “What Would Spider-Man Do?” Peter Parker, you see, is achingly noble. He always puts others needs before his own, constantly putting on his costume and stopping the bad guys at the cost of his own personal happiness. I’m sure Brian would have no problem canonizing Spidey.

However, I think there is a significant danger in looking to superheroes solely for examples of how to live life vocationally. One of the greatest motion pictures ever made is It’s A Wonderful Life. The protagonist, George Bailey, has none of Superman’s strength nor any of Batman’s gadgets. Yet he dedicated his life to giving himself to the people of Bedford Falls. He was just a regular man and the moral of the story is that a regular man can and does make a difference. However, that film was released in 1946, a good sixty-three years ago. Have any comparable stories been told since? Or are all our vocation driven heroes in red and blue tights?

I can think of one. Several years ago, an episode of The Drew Carey Show depicted this concept beautifully. In the dead of the winter, there was a terrible snowstorm blanketing Cleveland. Winfred-Lauder, the company Drew worked for in the series, was letting their employees go home early. Drew was going to get a ride from a group of co-workers (who had deemed themselves the “positivity club”) but seconds before he could leave, his computer spontaneously caught fire. He stayed to put the fire out and his co-workers left without him.

He found out the next day that the driver of the car he was supposed to be in had hit a patch of ice and crashed, killing everyone in the ironically named positivity club. Drew, convinced that God has spared him, decided to radically change his life. He got the idea that his tedious job was worthless and that he should perhaps become a minister. He went down to his local church to talk to a pastor and see how he could go about making this a reality.

As he was waiting in a pew, a woman came in, and mistaking Drew for a man of the cloth, began to seek his advice. I don’t remember all the details of her sad story, it has been years since I’ve seen the episode. But if I recall correctly, she was a widow and single mother, and one of her children had a severe medical condition. “I’m sorry,” Drew said, “I wish there was something I could do.” “Not unless you can give me a job”, she replied.

It was then that Drew came clean with her. “I’m not really a minister, I’m the Human Resources Director at Winfred-Lauder. Come by tomorrow morning for an interview, and I’ll do my best to find you a job.”

Drew realized that there was dignity and purpose and meaning, indeed moral force, in his occupation. There is certain attitude among members of my generation, I think. There’s this idea that a regular, 9-5 desk job is for losers. Those are only for people who are boring and have no imagination, passion, or spirit. They’re just menial wastes of time. I was a theater major and due to my path in life, am still surrounded by actors and comedians. This attitude is prevalent, trust me.

I truly believe that being a performer and entertainer is my vocation. But for God’s sake, if everyone was an artist, society would collapse. St. Paul tells us, “For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function…since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us exercise them” (Romans 12:4-6). My father was a “desk jockey” for his entire career. I would be wrong, not to mention ungrateful, if I had some smug resentment for him. I can tell you, by the way, that my father is not a passionless man. (You should get him started on the Tridentine Mass, geez…)

Speaking of parents, my Mom always said to me that it didn’t matter what I did for a living (as long as it wasn’t, in her words, “illegal or immoral”. A qualifier which killed my dreams of pimping and drug dealing, but I moved on.) All labor, no matter how tedious it may seem, contributes to the betterment of humanity and is therefore in the service of God.

[NOTE: As originally posted, this piece cut off in the middle of "service". It has been restored.]

The Incarnationalist Manifesto

As per my recent revival of literary reading, my recent appraisal of the coterie of present-day young Catholic writers, and my recent hunger to write well and write regularly again, I’ve decided to hammer out a rough statement on Incarnationalism, the artistic philosophy I and my compatriots hashed together a few years ago. An attempt was made some time ago by my present-day roommate Ian Koranek, but we both found it insufficient, as it was more a statement of personal beliefs than of artistic principles. I hope that giving it a shot here and publishing it here might encourage my fellow-writers and artists of a Catholic persuasion to consider adopting it as an operating philosophy.

Incarnationalism: the word refers to the belief that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” It is writing in the tradition of Dostoevsky, Chesterton, and Waugh. It is modern. It is narrative. It is coherent.

1. God is real, and life has meaning.
2. Incarnationalist art and literature is representative of the world, therefore it portrays a world wherein God is real and life has meaning.
3. Art is not an abstracted ideal, and does not exist for its own sake in its own world.
4. Incarnationalist art has function in the real world. It is art with social purpose, and isn’t divorced from lived human experience; therefore, it is not abstracted to the point of unintelligibility, and respects the intelligence of its audience.
5. The Incarnationalist believes in truth and beauty, but does not separate truth and beauty into all-encompassing ideals.
6. The Incarnationalist is concerned with portraying a world in which human life is charged with grandeur and meaning, but not romanticized.
7. The Incarnationalist respects the role and function of God and of grace.
8. The Incarnationalist is responsible for their work.
9. The Incarnationalist is not above their audience.
10. The Incarnationalist is traditional; they do not reject narration or coherence.
11. The Incarnationalist is a revolutionary; they portray a world at odds with the commercial, disposable culture which surrounds them.
12. The Incarnationalist does not laud or espouse violence in their work.

I’d like to open this up to dialog, so that it can be hashed out and broken down and revised until it represents an honest engagement, both literary and artistic, with Catholicism and the modern world.

Housekeeping

I’ve added a new chunk on the blogroll — “Wild Intellects.” It’s basically a bunch of people who either I described or have described themselves as belonging to the Catholic literary generation I described in “Bohemia’s Parish Church: Wild Intellects in Catholicism” a few days ago. I will not lie about my ambition here; I do want us to pool our talents, but at the very least acknowledgement of our commonalities would satisfy me.

I’m also wondering if, perhaps, you guys prefer the current format of a big post more or less sporadically, or the old one of regular, daily blogging that often got bogged down in its very frequency, but sometimes inspired me to write a lot about something simply by virtue of being forced to think about it.

Thanks in advance for your thoughtful responses, sure to be genius.

My Father, the Mystic

I suffer — if such a word can be applied to so minor an ailment — from irritated cuticles. I don’t know if this is common, as I’ve never asked, but they hurt quite often, growing red and swollen, seemingly without cause.  The pain, minor as it is, is quite distracting, and I tend to exacerbate the problem in my attempts to fix it; often, I simply resort to band-aids, the flesh-colored strips on the terminus of at least one digit, and often more. It’s been going on for as long as I can remember, and used to cause me quite a bit of distress; as a kid, I worried about whether or not this represented a real problem, but I’ve more or less accepted that, sometimes, reaching into my pocket to draw out a twenty will be a mildly unpleasant experience. Time dulls pain.

As it happened, though, one evening a solution of sorts presented itself. I was maybe twelve or thirteen years old — perhaps younger, but certainly not older — and awash in the self-doubt of youth (which I’ve written about again and again and again),  with my dad awash in the certainty of age. He’s a full-time trucker and a part-time mystic, who teaches and sings about a theology I vehemently disagree with. His faith is stubborn — much as mine is — even when his own confidence falters, which I’ve seen, and he’s a believer that all Christians can be miracle-workers, a sort of pre-modern (but not pre-Christian) appreciation and respect for the supernatural world that so often eludes we wannabe mystics and elders and shamans. Taking seriously his role as my religious instructor, rebellious towards that as I was, he would use our shared time during long summer trips in the truck to impress upon me his faith and why he believed it and what it meant. For him, that translates, practically, to speaking in tongues and healing. The first I’d seen again and again and again to the point of pedestrian disinterest, but the second — that seemed new, and more importantly to my burgeoning adolescent mind, verifiable.

So I asked him, in a wide-eyed mixture of disbelief and supreme, unthinking, unassailed hope, to see if he could go about healing me. Imagine the scene; an adolescent boy and his strong-featured blue-collar father, sitting together on the bottom bunk of a Freightliner Century Class’s sparse, functional, monotone cab (which always reminded me of the USS Defiant, full of cubbies and cabinets and other hidden, tucked-away spaces). He clutched my left index finger in his hand, not tightly, but with a gentle firmness, in contrast with the ferocity with which he closed his eyes and held them shut, surely contributing to the crows’ feet that make of them a parenthesis. He prayed in roughly the formula I grew up learning: first, to thank God for the grace you request, under the assumption that God will grant anything faithfully asked and to demonstrate your belief that God has done it and will do it and is doing it. “Thank you Father God,” it went, “for granting this healing to Brian’s finger.” He spoke of God’s fidelity in the past, as though challenging God to be consistent (which we’ve all done), his promises of healing (a helpful reminder in case he’d forgotten), and his own confidence that God would prove beneficent now.

Regardless of the reasons, I wasn’t healed then, although it’s worth noting that this was part of a string of intrusions of various forms of Christianity in my life along the road to my eventual conversion. Whatever happened, the event has been fixed firmly in my memory as significant, a moment of a true meeting with my dad, who’d always been something of a distant, if familiar, figure due to his job, which took him across the country for weeks at a time. We’d always talk about music and science fiction — and both in the form of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, struggling in vain to teach me the lyrics to “The Time Warp” and “Science Fiction Double Feature” —  sharing thoughts about Star Trek and the cheap sci-fi novels he bought in truck stops that inevitably made their way down to me, but this was significantly different. It was my first mature confrontation with religion, and has inevitably colored my approach and understanding of religion ever since. In those days, before I was religious, before I had the slightest comprehension of who I was in the world or what the world was or what it meant, before even my wildly conflicted teen years, I got a glimpse of Christianity as something whole and practical and present in the real world, that God was capable of penetrating through the cloak of the material plane and acting plainly. My dad had on another instance, which may have been the same trip, prophesied for me according to his practice, and again with absolute confidence; both incidents profoundly impressed upon me how otherworldly the world could be, how porous the boundaries could seem.

As cold and academic and clinical as Christianity could sometimes seem — it is, after all, a religion profoundly interested in the Word, and therefore in ideas — I caught right there and then a notion that it was more than Sunday bible studies, that it could be functionally present and interact with the world. In this, I was a pagan; I broadly understood — much as I denied it — that the world is supernatural, that the supernatural is relevant, and that it can both interact with us and be interacted with. This was a sort of a primitively sacramental view of the world I held then, and something profoundly attractive to me even now, much as I’ve advanced past it. Its the root of honest, virgin paganism, if you will, untouched by revelation but certainly aware of the breadth of the world, the horns at midnight, the ghosts in the night, the silent wolf around the bend in the river. Heh. It’s even the root of romanticism, which is probably what’s attractive about it.

I eventually came to appreciate the force of my father’s devotion to the Scriptures, how it colored his vision, but that came later. First was the mist; only then followed Brigadoon.