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I seriously love Stephen King.
The Stand introduced me to some basic ideas that I’ve flirted with, dated for a while, married, and had a couple of kids with — a broadly supernatural world beyond question, full of fear and demons and natural gods; fantasy set in places other than some ersatz Medieval France; apocalypticism as beginning as well as end; and a notion of religion akin to the way it was understood thousands of years ago — as a bulwark against darkness instead of a way to be a peace and be loving (neither of which I dispute as good things, but neither of which I find entirely applicable to my experience of God).
My work has been full of those themes. I wish I could post a copy of “The Ways of Things” to show you what I’m talking about. I’ve striven to perfect the art of the impenetrable supernatural that exists for its own sake and not for ours, that has its own concerns and its own mysteries which are, quite frankly, not our business. I point to The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and “The Langoliers”, both of whom featured such strange and difficult creatures. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, in particular, interests me in that regard, with the philosophical confrontation between Tom Gordon himself and the so-called God of the Lost
I guess I am, like CS Lewis, a converted pagan, but those pagan attitudes still hang around sometimes. I read with fascination about old Roman sacrificial rites, about being drenched with a bulls blood and entrails, and in my mind Coyote lords over the desert. I don’t believe in them like I believe in Adonai, no, but I tend to think of the angels in the same way. I read Isaiah and watch them, those flaming ministers, who are so other, so far away, that we can have nothing to do with each other, and I wonder — do they see me the same way?
One thing about getting older is, holidays fluctuate with meaning, significance. Birthdays lose their luster, the profound sense of worth and….ripeness, I suppose. Now, barring serious coordination between you and your friends, who most likely have jobs and/or school to manage, birthdays are just another day. Halloween loses its true worth once you hit thirteen (varying from state to state I suppose), and is turned into just another day. Sure there are Halloween parties to attend but, walking ten blocks in search of free candy hitting each house on the way is ten times more awesome than any ol’ party, costumed or otherwise. I’m six years old, you mean to tell me, that I can just go up to people’s doors, say ‘trick or treat’ and they give me free candy? That’s amazing.
Even more amazing, going through college, was (and is) all the girls our age who use Halloween night as an excuse, a very, thinly veiled excuse, to dress up as whores and playboy bunnies. It’s not like, a small, isolated thing. It’s like some damn epidemic. As if sixty-percent of the female student body get together and make a pact to dress up as trashy as they can short of getting arrested for indecent exposure. It’s something else, and it’s kind of sad. I wonder if they would dress up like that every other day of the year were they able to get away with it. It’s probably a serious lack of creativity coupled with the ever present female insecurity and competition with other females (even in those things most absurd), et cetera et cetera.
Throughout college the few Halloween parties I did go to were mediocre or bad experiences until my third year in school where I decided to skip the trouble all together. You’d think parties in costumes would be more fun than parties without, but somehow, people manage to screw it up.
Christmas is much the same story, though while the significance has shifted, rather than diminished. As I matured, even as an adolescent and a teenager, and my faith grew, I grew in prayer and focus on Christ more during this time of year and not so much whether or not my folks got me what I asked for. As an adult, it only gets more true. A lot of the Christmas magic is gone, I hate to say. There is this very raw sense of love and fulfillment and electricity in the air when I was younger that seems to diminish the older I get. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the toys I got, because I quickly got over all that stuff over time. It’s mostly another day I get to spend at home with my folks, and thank god my mom is the amazing decorator she is; she brings the house to life every year. I turn to the reason for the season, the birth of Jesus, and make that my focus, and yet, Christmas almost, almost feels like another day. It’s frustrating, because I ask myself what happened? Did I just get old? Why does that mean the magic and sense wonder of things is diminished?
I don’t mind getting a job and paying bills and playing the dating game (no fun, by the way), but why does the world become less remarkable with each passing year?
God is the only constant in my life. Sometimes I wish that wasn’t the case.
One love.
Humanity was built for love, and unless we love, we are less human. To give is affirming of our existence, and ultimately humanizing. Indeed, the whole of human freedom is built upon this.
What is our freedom? Is it freedom to do what we please?
Is this the freedom for which Christ has liberated is?
Indeed, how did Christ liberate us? Was it not his death on the cross?
Christ’s death was an act of radical love, the complete gift of self, and indeed, the greatest love-gift possible, as he himself said “No man has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.” This act of love opened for us a new covenant as the sacrifice of the Passover lamb initiated another, and into this paschal mystery we enter through our baptism.
By our baptism, we are initiated into the family of God, and called and gifted holiness — and what is holiness but to love? The goal and purpose of Christians is not just to preach salvation so that heaven might be peopled, but to preach Christ and Christ crucified, the fulcrum of history and axis of the universe, so that all may enter into God’s family and live the lives for which we were meant.
From the very beginning, man was called to live in the radical gift of self, complete and unwavering. As I’ve written in the past,
“If I love,
I cut my chest
and wrest my heart
and thrust myself through
the veil of death,
hand myself over
leaving nothing.
I would no other
way of dying.”
Man was made for this — to live and die for others, in service to all and in love for all, and the great tragedy is that we’re all too damnably selfish to do it. The new covenant makes it possible for man to live in this way, in the complete and total gift of self, even to death. This is Christianity — the fissure healed, the injury soothed, the rift shut, and man restored to man’s proper dignity — sacrificial love. Christianity is thus properly the only really humanizing humanism.
We find our completion and healing from our brokenness in Christ, the Christ who has freed us from sin and brought us into God’s family,
whose flesh we share,
whose name we bear,
in whose house we reside,
and being thus righted, restored to us our humanity. Only in Christ is man brought here, only in Christ may we be brought out of Egypt. But we aren’t pulled out of slavery just so that we can speak and shout about how happy we are that we’re going to heaven, and wouldn’t you like to go, too? Rather, we are made more human, and are then called to live fully human lives, the complete transformation, total theosis. Saint Athanasius wrote “God became man so that man might become God,” or rather, that God’s incarnation occurred that we might be fully remade in an image and likeness we have long since forsaken. This is a total change to human life, to our lives, and requires far more from us than simply witnessing to others.
I was hungry, and you fed me
I was thirsty, and you gave me drink
I was imprisoned, and you visited me
I was naked, and you clothed me
The very core of our faith is to love God and to love others, with the same devotion and protection as we do ourselves, indeed, to count ourselves as nothing and seek only for others — to be made totally fire.
Behold our God who calls us! Behold our God who asks so much! Live as free men, not as slaves, for we have been freed by Jesus Christ, by Jacob’s God!
I love it when stereotypes are somehow broken. I like it when people act in ways truly bizarre to those outside their heads. This is true of racists, as well.
The fact is that nobody gets up one morning and decides to be and do evil. Everyone acts according to their own sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, and sometimes that gives us gross evil and sometimes just…strangeness. I’m consistently amazed to find how many racist groups are less about murder than they are, at least in theory, about separation. In the same way I was shocked to find that Zora Neale Hurston supported segregation, here’s some Klansmen for Obama.
From the article:
“Obama might be a better candidate for our cause because he’s racially conscious. One of our big things in the National Alliance is to raise the racial consciousness of our people. Young whites in universities, they’ve been stripped of any kind of racial identity. Obama may be a racist in a positive sense for his people — that will awaken a lot of the whites, knock some sense into them. They’ll see that non-white Americans are allowed to be proud of who they are, to be racially conscious, to talk about their people or their community without being attacked as being racist. Let’s face it, white people aren’t going to fight for their causes, for their kind with a white president. I don’t think McCain even acknowledges that a white race exists. He’s all about granting amnesty to illegal aliens. The fact he wants to keep us in wars in the Middle East for 100 years, that’s not a good thing. I give Obama credit, he seems to have stuck to his guns as far as pulling the troops out of Iraq. He’s a very intelligent man, an excellent speaker and has charisma. John McCain offers none of that. Perhaps the best thing for the white race is to have a black president. My only problem with Obama is perhaps he’s not black enough.”
Whuda thunk that white supremacism had nuance?
Today was Free Book Day a James Branch Cabell Library, where they try to unload all the crap they couldn’t sell during the library sale to make way for new material. Free Book Day generally is the bottom of the barrel, but there’s some jewels in there if you’re willing to look. I, of course, went and found five of them.
Just what I need. I already have a sizeable library of two- to three-hundred books, most of which I’ve either not read at all or started, got halfway through, and got sidetracked before finishing. I’m a book packrat. I buy books. I buy them used, I buy them cheap, I buy them on whims and never touch them again. And don’t get me started on free or discounted books. I have them by the armload. It’s a problem, and I’m never entirely sure what to do about it. Most of my reading time is bound up in class; I have three lit classes this and next semester, and in between, I’m never entirely sure where to start.
- Strauss and Howe’s Generations?
- Liturgies of the Western Church?
- Against the Apocalypse?
- Under A New Sky: A Reunion with Russia?
- Alistaire Cooke’s Six Men?
- End of Empire?
- Germany Tried Democracy?
- The Jewish Law?
- Vatican II In Plain English?
- Witness to Hope, yet again (never finished it)?
- A History of the Weimar Republic?
- A Long Way Down?
- The Upanishads?
- Troilus and Cresyde?
- A Farewell to Arms?
- The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton?
- Understanding the Bible?
- An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan?
- Women in Love?
- To the Lighthouse?
- Being Geniuses Together?
- Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation?
- Man Ray’s Montparnasse?
- True at First Light?
- Babylon Revisted?
- Big Sur?
- Tender is the Night
- Mystics?
This is my reading list. Geez.
Short answer? No.
Long answer? No, because.
The Catholic Church is not based on the bible. I know, I know, that’s a weird thing for a Church to say about itself, almost an anathema, eh? But it’s true. We’re not. So how can that be?
Modern church foundations, you know, how denominations happen, are generally that someone reads the bible, disagrees with a present interpretation in some way, and feeling that he has the truth, decides to set up a church which incorporates this and other teachings which this guy has gleaned from the Scriptures. Ideally, it’ll be pretty internally consistent, too, and all of the things this church believes are things they found in the bible.
That’s a great process if you want to start up a new church, but what if your Church existed before the New Testament was written? Guess what? Ours did.
Regardless of whether or not you think Catholicism is a sort of pure and ancient Christianity (which I happen to), or that it’s been hopelessly compromised, there is a pretty well-established institutional unity dating back to at least the early second century, meaning that its direct institutional roots lay with the Apostles, meaning we pre-date the New Testament.
This basically means that we have, by necessity, a fairly different view of how to read and use the Scriptures. Since we were already kickin’ for a couple decades when the first epistles were written, and were coming up on our first century when the last of the NT was completed, and damn near in our third century when the NT was definitively compiled, and in our sixteenth when it was finally made official — we understand the Scriptures as being a tool, a gift.
We love and cherish the Scriptures, which are proclaimed from the pulpit every week. We respect the Scriptures. We study and know them. We learn from them and dialogue with them. But they quite simply are not our foundational documents, because we were already there when they happened.
We don’t really base the Eucharist on John 6 or the Last Supper narratives as present in Mt, Mk, and Lk, because we were doing the Eucharist before they were written; they were written, partly at least, as catechetical tools, aids for teaching and learning, the writing-down of the stories we were already telling, the compiling of our knowledge and memory of Christ, and especially with John, a theological exploration of who he was. But all of this predates them.
The same with Paul’s epistles; he was giving advice to churches already established, recording his remonstrations and prayers for them, instructing them in a faith that already existed before he wrote a single word.
As a record of our roots and our origins, as sacred writing, as profound theology which we have taken into our deposit of faith, we love the Scriptures. But the Church comes before it. The Church is the body of Christ, and his self-revelation is not the Bible, but the Man. And we had the Man first.
Godspy has an essay on the Rosary we can all relate to.
I confess to not saying it pretty much ever these days for all the reasons covered.
Here you go. My official electoral map projection for next Tuesday.
Obama 341
McCain 197
Obama wins popular vote 53%-45%
Senate: D-58 R-42
Bekah over at The Road Well Travelled has some positively stunning thoughts on the need for political reformation in the United States according to the John Allen article I posted earlier.
Four years ago there was some play in the blogosphere about creating a Catholic alternative. If you searched my blogs archives, you’d find some links back to the particular blogs that were promoting this at the time. It’s coming around again, through a few more prominent blogs. The problem is there just seems to be a lack of motivation in the proper fields. I’d be all over it in a heart beat, but I have no poli-sci experience, no knowledge of how to start a third party or how to influence the parties we have! I did a little bit of research four years ago and it looks like you need to have a core group in any state you wish to raise a candidate, and every state’s regs are different. So you’re talking about a significant presence in every state in the nation, or at least a significant presence in one state to kick things off, which is difficult to engender given the basic scattered nature of the blog population which are discussing these ideas.
On a tangential note related to the platform issues that are in discussion in various comment boxes, I think that the Constitution, namely in the Bill of Rights and Amendments, has a fundamental flaw. I believe that Protestant ideology* is too enmeshed in the foundations of the country. What I am referring to is the over-emphasis on the individual as a unit of society. An alternative paradigm is to consider the family unit as the basic unit of society and formulate the role of government around supporting, sustaining and stimulating the life, health and well-being of the family to raise successful, contributing citizens. I believe natural law supports this structure. An individually centered government is too easily subverted to a government protecting its own self-interests through manipulation of the individual rather than preserving the public square for the ultimate development of the human person through protection of the natural formation of the individual within the family. What benefits families, ultimately benefits individuals, as psychological research, especially in the area of broken homes, demonstrates. But the reverse cannot be held as true, as individual “rights” can indeed conflict with the well-being of the family unit.
I absolutely, fundamentally agree. She raises excellent points about the nature of the Constitution, which is why, as I wrote in an earlier post, I believe Roe v. Wade to have been pretty consistent with the tradition of American jurisprudence and constitutional law. The problem is the Constitution itself.
It’s hard to say things like that, because here in the States, the Constitution is holy writ. It is revered and studied and debated. There are differing interpretative schools, true, but the document itself is never questioned, its foundations challenged. We simply don’t even consider that the founders may have messed up, founded the government on flawed ideas of what the ultimate end of man and state should be, and that those ideas, taken to their logical conclusion, have led us to this place.
A truly Catholic ethic — not creedal Catholicism — needs to form the core of our government, and I agree the focus should be on the family and the good of the family. To that I add that our top-down system needs to be transformed into a bottom-up one, embracing the principle of subsidiarity, with decisions always being left to the lowest competent level.
TIME has an absoltely bloody fascinating article on the unexpected and unlikely global phenomenon that is the High School Musical franchise.
Traditionally, a television’s show success hinges on reaching a particular market on a particular night. But HSM’s success has been built less from high viewer ratings than generating buzz — and buying — connected to the show. “HSM showed a [show's success] doesn’t just happen on one night,” says Ross. “You weave it together, forming a partnership between programming and marketing. You go different places to reach different people.” The franchise had good timing; HSM’s appearance coincided with the rise of a global middle class that’s equipped to absorb it. When it first came out in 2006, the newly minted consumers in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia had the TVs to watch it on; their kids could keep the buzz alive via Internet and cell phone. After the movie aired on Chinese TV, Ross called his man in Beijing to ask for viewer numbers. “Oh, above average,” came the response. “About 50 million.”
I often wonder if this sort of thing doesn’t presage some sort of global, Western-style monoculture distinguished only by culture flourishes instead of actual beliefs and honest differences, if the rise of the global middle class doesn’t demand the massive export of American entertainment and restaurants to the point of superceding their own. Of course, all of this has been tied to the bizarre phenomenon of America’s endless economic growth which has, in fact, finally ended. If the economic collapse continues, I wonder how much American culture will be able to spread overseas in the way it’s accustomed to doing so.
I wrote back in August (really, it was June) about Zora Neale Hurston, a prominent African-American writer, philosopher, and anthropologist, who opposed the end of segregation. It was the strangest thing I’d ever heard; never had I even entertained the notion that segregation was anything other than a profound evil, a moral wrong sustained by the government.
I wrote:
A prominent black intellectual, a prominent member of the Harlem renaissance, opposed the end of segregation in the United States for what she believed would be its inevitable damage to black culture and distinctiveness. Integration, she argued, would only reinforce the idea that the only notable difference was skin color, and encourage ethnic identity as opposed to cultural identity. Essentially, she believed segregation was a good thing, ultimately, in allowing the development of a strong, well-defined black culture that was a good and wonderful thing, which she experienced during her formative years, and which she ceaselessly advocated. In her writing for Fire! Magazine, which she published alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, she argued that black writers should not abandon dialect-writing; where some maintained that it further reinforced the idea that blacks were to be subordinate, Hurston held that strong dialect was essential to black culture, and should be clutched tightly and cherished.
In a way, she was right about the effects of the end of segregation; previously vital, vibrant black communities across the United States have dispersed, and much of the old black culture has been obliterated through the en masse assimilation of the population. Jackson Ward here in Richmond, once considered the Harlem of the South, an essential center of African-American art and music, is now mostly a student district, and the city of Richmond itself, despite being mostly black in population, has little remaining to distinguish it from Virginia as a whole.
I agree with Hurston to the point that the development of black culture — really, the development by any group of a self-sustaining and enriching culture — was good thing of itself, and she was right in that the end of segregation resulted in that culture’s collapse. I think that the HSM phenomenon is a symptom of a global problem, the conquest of the world by American culture to the detriment of the receiving populations. We associate modernization with Westernization, never concluding that there could have been a distinctly-Japanese way of living in the modern world, or a particularly African expression of the same. But we don’t and can’t know, because any country’s rise to wealth and prosperity is accompanied by it being divvied up into markets by foreign companies who begin importing blue jeans and Jessica Simpson.
Is this a good thing?
John Paul II always used to write about how it was necessary for cultures to remain themselves, that there is something special about Poland and about the Igbo and about Thailand and about Papua New Guinea and about Mexico for their Polishness, Igboness, Thainess, New-Guineanness, and Mexicanness, respectively. These cultures have found their own approaches on how to deal with life and its concerns, new ways to understand and live the Gospel, that they have valid things to say to the human experience — and that our endless economic and cultural conquest diminishes and devalues all of that.
