I set out to write a post about this article. I did not, in fact, write such a post.

It’s a pretty standard trope that all converts want to talk about is their conversion experience. I suppose that’s somewhat self-perpetuating; the first year of my Catholicism it was all anybody asked me about. For nonverts, it’s fascinating no matter what side you fall on; faithful Catholics heard the story, and rightly so, as something of a triumph, someone being convinced by truth; resentful Catholics heard it with an incredulous wonder, uncertain of what would make anybody jump that fence; Protestants heard it with a bit of suspicion, regretting they hadn’t gotten to me sooner. But all in all, conversion narratives tend to be popular because they lay out, piece by piece, what forced someone to make a decision many people try to avoid making at all.

Joining a religion is a profound commitment, especially when it’s something like Catholicism. The decision isn’t simply anything along the lines of choosing which of all the local church options you wish to partake, but instead a plunging into a particular community, saying “I choose this faith which means these people, for the long haul, in bonds that cannot be severed.” It’s choosing a society as much as it is a means to know God, and I don’t recommend ever doing it twice, because those are bonds you’ll be more or less forced to severe.

When I was going through my Judaism phase — which was brought to mind by my recent reading of Lauren Winner’s Girl Meets God — I was forced to deal with this firsthand, if somewhat obliquely firsthand. I had not made any decision one way or the other regarding joining the Chosen People. It’s a funny place to be, that middle ground, and very painful; I would have difficulty praying at mass, not because I didn’t believe it, but because it represented a choice, a reaffirming of a bond with these people and this faith that I wasn’t sure I wanted to affirm. I had difficulty even contemplating any sort of future plans, unsure if these were people with whom my life would still be wrapped up in a year’s time. That’s how it goes, you see; it’s not that you choose to abandon these people, or that they choose to abandon you, but the most profound cord holding you to them would be severed. Conversations would become strained, awkward, distant. You’d move deeper and deeper into your new social sphere, bonded to these people in a way you’re not sure you’re still bonded to the others.

I remember a conversation in particular with my friend Erik during the height (depth?) of this period. He said “As much as I wouldn’t stop being your friend, this relationship with Jesus is probably the most important thing we’ve shared, and I’d hate to lose that connection with you.” The thing is that he’d be right. I did have people write me off when I joined the Catholic church. Even my dad was upset (he has to an extent gotten over it), but at least I was spared having entered from another religious body, and spared ultimately the difficulty and pain of leaving it for something else. Another conversion story to tell.

The thing about conversion stories is that, as much as they differ, they’re all ultimately the same: I was in a situation which for one reason or another didn’t satisfy me. I felt attracted to something other, and wondered if it might. I explored it, felt my way inside it, participated as much as I felt I could, and ultimately decided it meant more to me than what I was leaving behind. I’ve been involved in enough RCIA programs to know the basic tale. It’s how I felt during the runup to my conversion to Catholicism. It’s how Lauren Winner felt before she came to Anglicanism from Orthodox Judaism. And most disconcertingly, it had been how I felt about Judaism for three years, and still, to an extent, do. I know that Orthodox Judaism can never answer the questions of life to the same satisfaction that Catholicism can. Mostly I’m attracted for what I’ve called it’s deliberateness, and more than that, for it’s firm identity. How’s about that, eh? Nearly a decade into Catholicism and I’m still trying to figure out who I am!

So, no, I’m not planning on going anywhere. I’m Catholic for a reason, and that reason hasn’t gone anywhere. I can never turn my back to Christ, never abandon the Gospel; it means too much, and what’s more, it’s all true. It has written itself upon my heart deeper than I was ever aware, and that beauty can’t be cast off. But there are times I long for the mikvah; when that happens, I remind myself of my baptism, and think “What more could I ever ask for?”

It’s very difficult to find a way to balance work and my blog. I’m sorry I’ve neglected it. It’s not because I’ve had nothing to say but because I haven’t had the will to say it. I’ve been discussing with Nick Milne over at The Daily Kraken collaborating on a joint blog, but he suggested — and rightly so — it’d be better to have multiple people involved on it. It would allow us to be distracted and not worry that you folks out there aren’t getting the Random Thoughts Of Mine that you deserve.

It’s problematic, because it means I haven’t been writing. I’ve been thinking for damn sure about a great many things. I’ve taken up re-reading William Zinsser’s On Writing, I’ve been halfheartedly wrapping up my short story “Opal Honey of the Big Deep River,” I’ve been scripting Stronghold #4 and developing the stories for #’s 5 and 6, but none of that has amount to the serious work of my vocation — which is writing — and neither to the specific form I’ve opted to give it, which is this blog.

By my, my, the difficulty! I have such little time outside of work which I can give to this blog, and other things that require my attention. I suppose I could spend less time watching Star Trek and more time blogging. I suppose I could take a moment to shoot off a post in the morning between my prayers and my train. I could even put Fallout 3 away come the weekends and let Saturday or Sunday be a day I give, at least moreso, to writing. And yet, when I contemplate writing, I’m worried much more about my book or my short stories, having given a year to nonfiction and analysis. But those projects often paralyze me — “Opal Honey” in particular is not progressing the way I’d like it to — so I just sit there. Not writing.

My friend Alex tells me I need to take my own advice and give regular time to writing. It doesn’t matter what. My thoughts on cheeseburgers. A struggle to remember a crazy dream. The strange things the guy in the office next door shouts into his phone. Something. So I’m going to try and give that a shot at some point in the morning or in the evening. Till then, courage; keep me in your prayers.

KeMiRo posting:

One of my college art professors and an award winning editorial illustrator in his own right, Robert Meganck, has a great read on the importance of context in our society.  I felt it a worthy read as any other and had to share it with you guys.

On January 12, at 7:51 a.m. a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeve T-shirt and Washington Nationals baseball cap positioned himself against a wall next to the L’enfant Plaza Metro station. He pulled a violin out of its’ case, turned the case around, put a few dollars in it as seed money and began to play.

During the next 43 minutes while he preformed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. After 3 minutes, one middle aged man turned his head to listen before moving on. Shortly after, a women threw a buck in the case. In the time that he played, seven people stopped for a moment to listen, 27 gave money for a total of $32 and change.

The violinist was Joshua Bell, a onetime child prodigy and an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days prior to the Metro station performance, he played to a filled house at Boston’s Symphony Hall where OK seats went for $100.

The violin was a $3.5 million Stradivarius. The music was some of the most beautiful classical music ever written.

More at the jump.  Maybe Brian and or myself can address this later ourselves (when my plate isn’t piled so high).

One love.

Duh.

By teeing up a public battle over abortion in thehealth care bill now before the Senate, congressional Democrats could be risking more than just the fate of the legislation.

Hanging in the balance are millions of Catholic swing voters who moved decisively to the Democrats in 2008 and who could shift away just as readily in 2010.

According to exit polls, President Barack Obama won the support of 53 percent of Catholic voters, a seven-point increase over the showing of the Democrats’ 2004 nominee, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a Catholic. Among Latino Catholics, who are often more conservative than their white counterparts on social issues, Obama did even better, winning more than two-thirds of their support, a 14-point improvement over Kerry’s totals, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Those gains will be at risk if a polarizing abortion fight takes place in the Senate.

“There could be political repercussions in the election. It could be harder for the Democrats to keep those Catholics voters they gained and they may put some of their members at risk,” said John Green, a religion and politics expert at the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron.

EDIT: So, I’m an idiot. I had this thing about *Memorial Day*. My bad.

So it’s Veteran’s Day, and I feel the need to stir up the pot even at this late day. I’m sure many of you will hate me after this.

I posted the famous Wilfred Owen poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” instead of something like John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” because I think Owen has it right. The McCrae poem is hostile and violent in its memorializing the dead, demanding apocalyptic revenge, perpetuating violence for violence and blood for blood, lest the dead have died in vain. The key, though, is that in war, to die in vain means to die on the wrong side; therefore, of course, at some point, soldiers’ have died in vain. We can avoid this all we want by saying they died for a movement or an ideal or simply that the fact that they died makes them heroes who by definition didn’t.

McCrae wrote:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

To me, that’s….vile. Dreadful. Let us go to war simply on the grounds that people have died in the war we’re in. What a way to thank our soldiers, by sending them into combat.  That’s the desperate glory that Owen talks about. As I’ve written before, we all want to be heroes. We all want to be worth a damn. We all want to matter. And the old call goes out — “It is sweet and proper to die for your country.” And rather than heeding the call of the Gospel to moral greatness, to the abandonment of self into the hands of God in the service of others, we grab our guns and march into righteous combat.

I know, I know, that there are times when war is necessary. But I’m so often struck by how many people find it desirable, something in which we should find glory, rather than something we should mourn and wretch at.

But that’s me.

Night.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! –  An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen, 1918

In the latest scientific discovery, it seems God works in mysterious ways.

Last night, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection. Muhammad, you might remember, is the infamous Beltway Sniper, who terrorized a large swath of Virginia, DC, and Maryland in 2002. I remember it very well, living in Richmond at the time, because he came as far south as Ashland, about fifteen minutes from where I was living, and school was closed for two days in absolute terror of kids being picked off at their bus stops. After our “sniper days” ended, I still walked nervously in the dark to await the bus, afraid the bullets could come at any moment. That’s a pretty weird goddamn feeling, and I will never, ever forget it. But at least I lived; others were not half as lucky.

And so he was caught, tried, sentenced, and executed. He died without remorse, maintaining his innocence, and went silently to his death. It was almost defiant. Remarked one witness, “They both [Muhammad and teenage accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, who was a minor and thus will not be executed] committed the same crimes. No, I don’t feel any closure. I mean, it’s … it … nothing changes.”

Nothing changes.

If I may adhere to my blog’s tagline a moment, and find God in the geekiest place, this reminds me of an exchange from — you guessed it! — Deep Space Nine, the episode “Duet”. Major Kira has captured a Cardassian war criminal, the infamous Gul Darhe’el, who ran a brutal labor camp during Cardassia’s occupation of Bajor, renowned as it were for the murders committed under his watch and per his orders. Intent on seeing the man die for his crimes, he waits in his cell and mocks her. “Let them kill me. Don’t you see? It doesn’t change anything! Kill me. Torture me… it doesn’t matter. You’ve already lost, Major. You can never undo what I’ve accomplished. The dead will still be dead!” And it’s as true as anything he says. The dead will still be dead.

That’s the  sad reality. It would be damned nice if killing the guilty could undo what they’ve done. It’d be damn nice if we could bring back every murder victim, undo every rape, resuscitate the bodies found under Gacy’s floorboards using the drops of life wrung from them. But we can’t. The past is done, and cannot be undoable. It lives in our memories and stalks us in our sleep and makes us fear for the future. We can’t fix things like that. So we settle. We settle for revenge. They hurt us, and now we’re going to hurt them. It is, in its way, justice.

But Bishop Loverde of Arlington — no heady liberal — responded to the upcoming execution in a characteristically pastoral way.

Because each person is created in God’s image and likeness, each person retains an intrinsic human dignity — even someone convicted of a heinous crime. This dignity is what leads the Church — while acknowledging the legitimate defense of individuals and society — to teach that the death penalty cannot be justified when a government has other ways to protect its people adequately against an unjust aggressor:

If non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm — without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2267; Evangelium Vitae, 56).

In solidarity with this teaching and with the consistent appeals made by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for an end to capital punishment in modern society, we are called to choose hope — hope in the redemption of an immortal soul – over the despair embedded in the death penalty. If the woman had been stoned, she would not have had the opportunity to “not sin anymore.” And so, despite the initial reactions we might have in seeking revenge, we must not opt for the death penalty.

And that’s true, too. I spent some of yesterday praying for Mr. Muhammad, that he’d admit and seek forgiveness for his crimes, that he’d be shown the mercy none of us deserve, but that all of us have been offered: freedom from death and entry into life.  Because nobody is irredeemable, and we are called to choose hope. And hope can have no place in a death penalty regime, where we make the decisions Christ alone can make. Life and death are not and should not be in our hands.

Today’s the day! Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall fell.

Well, “fell” is the wrong word. It didn’t come toppling down on November 9, 1989. No, it was simply the culmination of a process in which what the wall signified — the restricted passage of East Germans into the West — ended. Really a chaotic process, too; the wall didn’t come down because the people tore it down. It was fraught with confusion, miscommunication, and soldiers unwilling to fire on the crowds. It was strangely peaceful, a Blue Jeans Revolution.

Now, I know I’ve written before about the history of the twentieth century and my abject fascination with the cultural processes of the Cold War. But this is a seminal event that needed to be marked, here of all places. The Fall of the Wall meant the beginning of the end for the Soviet bloc, the crumbling of their external empire very soon followed by the crumbling of their internal one, and the beginning of the painful process of reintegration and rapprochement with the NATO nations, a process that, no, isn’t wholly complete, and probably won’t be until there is no one left alive who remembers Gorbachev.

It always strikes me that the seminal moment of triumph came in Germany. Everything over the next two years would smack of anticlimax: the slow collapse of Soviet instruments of power, the violent overthrow of Ceauşescu in Romania, the attempted hardline putsch of 1991 in Russia, all of that seemed merely the process of historical inevitability following the dramatic events in Berlin, that joyous crossing of Checkpoint Charlie. The war that began in the German invasion of Poland ended with the Germany invasion of Germany.

I could wax theological for a while on the origins of this in John Paul’s papacy, but let’s not right now. Let’s just remember that it happened at all. Because that’s pretty cool, too.

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.