Why The Seven Storey Mountain?

Nine hours of sleep is enough. Get to bed at a decent hour, set your alarm, get your ass out of bed, bundle up, scrape the ice off your car, and go to Mass on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul -- that was January 25th. Pray for whoever it was under the blue tarp, on the driver's side of the smashed car, along the icy road yesterday morning. A dozen police cars, lights flashing, the empty closed road, the quiet and patience of all the other drivers obediently crowding into one lane; then a jack-knifed semi and two or three flattened small trees in the median strip, all witnessed that here eternity and the world just met.

I had been reading and since have finished Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. It was one of four spiritual classics offered for sale at Bishop Barron's site Word on Fire. I thought well yes, I'll get it, but I can just as well buy it and the other three from Amazon.Smile cheaper, and make the half-percent donation to my local parish. This wasn't mean of me, I hope.

Thomas Merton's prose is beautiful, better than his poetry, but something about him annoys me. Why is his story considered so remarkable? Because he had been known in the publishing world since childhood -- his grandfather worked for Grosset and Dunlap, he met "Bob" Giroux and Mark van Doren at Columbia -- and so when he became a Catholic and a monk, the word spread? ("A Trappist, no kidding! Well well ... say, tell him if he can give me eighty thousand words, I'll take a look at it. He had a way with words as I recall." Pause. "Are monks allowed to write memoirs - at thirty?" Professional chuckle....) Then there is the whole business of his own hermitage on the grounds of Our Lady of Gesthemani in Kentucky. I've seen photos, it's a lovely little house. What did the other monks think of his being allowed this treat? Did he need such quiet and privacy, or was it a reward for being a rainmaker for the firm?

The Seven Storey Mountain doesn't even seem very spiritual. Three or four times in the book, he suddenly outflows with a short paragraph that seems to come from outside himself, and to be wise. You'll know because you'll be startled, and underline it. Otherwise he seems to be always looking at himself, admiring himself and marveling at his journey.

Often it's a literal one. From the interesting childhood and adolescence in Bermuda, France, and England to the specific geography of Manhattan streets, churches, and college campus sports fields, one gets the impression of someone privately telling a circle of friends, not so much anything spiritual that they can use, but rather: Ah yes, remember? I left all that. I left it. In fact I would even say (it's me talking again, not him), that in the chapter on his trip to pre-Castro, lushly Catholic Cuba, he writes the only psychological explanation I have ever read and begun to understand, on why some people enjoy really eat-everything, ride-the-local-buses travel. Admitting that he survived "the perilous streets and dives of Havana" with probably angelic protection, he says,

... this absence of trouble, this apparent immunity from passion or from accident, was something that I calmly took for granted. God was giving me a taste of that sense of proprietorship to which grace gives a sort of a right in the hearts of all His children. For all things are theirs, and they are Christ's, and Christ is God's. They own the world, because they have renounced proprietorship of anything in the world .... 

Maybe not too many travelers think in those words, -- and again, if this is a spiritual classic for everyone, what does all that mean? -- but the attitude of own-the-world confidence might be common. Merton here sounds as if made in the very mold of his own grandfather, "Pop" of the childhood chapters, whose loud, American (of course) tourist enthusiasm embarrassed the boy living, for the moment, authentically with his artist father in a hamlet in the Auvergne.

He may own the world but he perhaps should have explored his own backyard more, or read more comic novels. As we read on we meet his "little man" for example, the mysterious Indian "poor little monk" Bramachari, whom he met among his young Columbia friends and who seems to have introduced Merton to the idea of "spirituality" being the possession of all religions. This man sounds just like the Guru of E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels. He too wafted about, penniless and peaceful, boarding with and teaching meditation to wealthy middle aged ladies (and running up liquor bills) until their husbands had had enough. When "Daisy's Guru" was found out as a London curry cook he decamped in the night with the silver .... The decade is right, too: the spiritualism-mad, table-turning 1930s. Did Merton never crack a smile at himself?

For that matter, did he ever have a backyard to explore? Not really. For all I know Thomas Merton may be among the greatest saints in heaven, and it may be most uncharitable to pick out the annoyances in his most famed book. But the curmudgeons who give it bad reviews on Amazon notice what I do. They notice the endless word painting about landscapes, and the tales of a sad little orphaned family -- he had one brother -- brought up helter skelter and pulled in and out of schools in Europe and America without much rhyme or reason, none of this background striking him as perhaps explaining some emptiness and anger. About three fourths of the way along in his story, he does, as one curmudgeonly reviewer says, go into sheer raving. He discovers Harlem, and the plight of the Negro. It's all the "furtive sensualities and lusts of the rich whose sins have bred this abominable slum," and so on, pages' worth, only by the time the crusading Russian baroness who raised his consciousness about it asks him "Well Tom are you coming out to Harlem for good?" to help, he had made up his mind about his vocation and had been accepted into the monastery in fresh, rural Kentucky.

He seems to show a pattern of discovering and condemning evil, and then of turning on his heel and walking prayerfully away, full of "peace." So do we all, we sinners, but can he never crack that smile at himself? As a very young man he bowed his head before his generation's wholesale, amorphous guilt at the coming of World War II. It was the inevitable wages of their evil. He was in his early twenties. But then he had to think very hard about whether or not he was willing to be drafted and serve. Odd logic, no? And why do anguished pacifists always want to be stretcher bearers? There is the Quartermaster's Department. Ask around. My father did.

And what of the great sin in his life? -- the one that got him rejected from the Franciscans and that you cannot find in the pages of The Seven Storey Mountain? The one you have to go to Wikipedia, for example, to sniff out? Apparently he had an affair and got a girl pregnant in England when hardly out of his teens. He was swiftly bundled up and shot off to America, to live with, or at least near, Pop. Of mother and child nothing was ever known. They "may have died in the London Blitz." "The child has never been identified." It was as if Merton was a wayward prince and heir, desperately requiring all this protection.

What bothers me (about this episode) is the way Merton harps (throughout) on the theme of the evil and filth of his early life. Because he cloaks the actual event, but we know from other sources that this is the big one, we are left to presume (unless we hear of something worse) that by filth he is talking about a girl he once loved and about a son or daughter who is his. As the abbess interviewing a postulant remarks in the novel In This House of Brede, " 'A cold heart is no good for a religious.' " And what also bothers me is that all the fine people Merton went on to meet and, some of them, to draw into the Church after his example, "Lax" and "Rice" and Mark Van Doren and Bob Giroux and the Baroness and all the rest, never not a one of them said you know Tom, the better part of faith might be to go back to England and find that girl and at least be a father to your child. The only one who comes close, and it is to Merton's credit that he chronicles this, is the priest in the confessional in New York who lambastes the weeping man after the Franciscans reject him. "He gave me to understand I was wasting his time and insulting the Sacrament of Penance by indulging my self pity in his confessional." You cheer for that priest.

Now, who knows? The woman herself or her family may have had so much of the future Father Louis' annoyances that they were glad to hand him his walking papers and shrink into anonymity from him. But by now my impression of the writer is of a rudderless, unhealthy personality, and I am only halfway through. And the book is said to be a spiritual classic.

While finishing it I cheated and looked ahead, as you see, at Wikipedia's article on the whole life of Thomas Merton. I learned he "battled" with his abbotts at the monastery he had been so happy to enter, about being allowed to leave, rather frequently it seems, to travel and live out the famous writer's life of scholarly correspondence and conferences that his books had earned him. Just turned fifty in 1966, he also undertook a serious love affair with a young woman who was his nurse when he was hospitalized for back surgery. Forays into Zen and American Indian mysticism -- in general the hunt for mystic experiences and the freedom they give the community of mystics above religion, since who is to say what God may not vouchsafe to his best creatures? -- that is my judgment of what he  was looking for -- these explorations continued apace. He foreshadowed them when he described his first few nights in Our Lady of Gesthemani at the age of 25. (His life is so full of genuine adventure we forget how young he is throughout.) Disappointed at the "icy" reading material he is given, which prudently discourages the newcomer's hope of any "summits" or otherworldly contemplative joys, he writes,

...I was left with the impression that contemplation in a Trappist monastery was liable to be pretty much secundum quid [i..e., true or fruitful sometimes, as far as it went], and that if I had a secret desire for what the lingo of the pious manuals would call 'the summits' I had better be cautious about the way I manifested it."   

Here the former lycee schoolboy also objected to bad transliterated French, particularly the word "vouchsafe." On top of everything else Merton knew full well, and he was told by people who knew, that his vocation was writing first. The writer wants quiet and solitude -- a little hermitage -- the writer wants to have or invent experience -- travel, mysticism, love affairs -- the writer has almost an extra organ where is housed lack of charity, which he needs to look askance at the world and chronicle it with his precious comments added on, unlike any other writer's: so Merton sneered at ordinary people's "unsophisticated" taste in movies, or at his grandmother's wasting her life putting on cold cream, because she hadn't got grace, or at his fellow postulant "Fat Boy," who couldn't hack the Trappists and returned to the world. True, Merton is young all during a lot of this. Some writer once said the young are righteous.

I would not for a moment want to give the impression that I dislike The Seven Storey Mountain because it shows the author was imperfect, or chose the wrong path in life. He may stand among the greatest saints of heaven. And I must disclose some small prejudice against him, as he disclosed the angry priest in the confessional. Years ago I wrote an article lamenting my spotty Catholic education, and I mentioned that I knew nothing of one "Thomas Merton." An old lady wrote me in the days of letter writing still. She exclaimed with underlining, "Thomas Merton was a devil! He turned Buddhist ...." I never forgot her vehemence.

I dislike it because the author seems to me such an unlikable man. Here is someone who, for all the beautiful prose, knows in his bones that he is on his own and so is everyone else. Well, alone except for God, who, on the last pages, offers to Thomas Merton a sort of grand doxology, in italics. You have to read it to believe it. " 'You will be praised, and it will be like burning at the stake ....' "

The Seven Storey Mountain was offered for sale on Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire website. But in one of his many excellent YouTube videos, the Bishop once said that religious journey memoirs are not very interesting in general because they are all the same. The convert, the returning soul, whoever, are all "influenced by" this book or that, this teacher, that friend, this mysterious "pull," this set of coincidences (frankly) or some other. The theme of all of them must be, here I am, a brand plucked from the burning; aren't I marvelous, and aren't you glad? Though the writers of religious journey memoirs will not like to hear it, it's Christ who is interesting, not us.

In a way it's easy to write a brand-plucked-from-the-burning memoir. Merton shows how: word-painting about landscapes and some blushing acknowledgement of past foolishness. But that leaves another category of book, the true spiritual classic, which I submit The Seven Storey Mountain, religious journey memoir and a cagey one at that, is not. So then what really is? 

Paradiso

My dear things! Fatheads!

Just random notes, you know.

In the middle ages -- remember not long ago we were reading that biography of Caterina Sforza? --  aristocratic ladies (and don't we sometimes wish we had been one of them, instead of the farm wife all our ancestresses likely were) aristocratic ladies were happy if they could have among the rooms of their palaces, or their husband's hunting boxes, a "paradise" of their own: a cozy set of rooms, more like an entire floor at a fine hotel today probably, but still a relatively small, private, warm-in-winter, cool-in-summer interior, decorated as they liked, and meant to be a feminine refuge from whatever loud public life their husband's or father's career required of them. One imagines stucco walls hung with Renaissance Madonnas and tapestries from Ovid, and young girls playing lutes amid plashing fountains and parrots. Only no tropical monkeys please, even if they were a gift from some duke's possessions in New Spain. Anne Boleyn, sensible, cold weather Renaissance Englishwoman, disliked them and so do we.   

Clearly the weather is cold outside the windows of my paradiso. Still it is a great joy to get home from work at an unreasonably early hour, having gone in to work at an unreasonably early hour, and to be able to light the little lights and mix a cocktail, and just safely watch the snow.   

The twenty-parts-water rule?

So I have just started my subscription to Horticulture magazine, and spent a relaxing evening this week going through it from cover to cover. (I promised you the occasional houseplant or cocktail theme, remember, while we dip our toe into the ocean of Gregorian chant.) In a short article called "Air Plants Aloft" by Frank Hyman, September-October issue, I find he makes use of "the dregs of leftover beverages" like coffee or sodas, mixed one part beverage to twenty parts water, as a substitute for expensive commercial air-plant (Tillandsia) fertilizer. But he pours it into other houseplants as well.

I like this. In an old houseplant care book from the '70s I once came across the suggestion to use the rinsing-out water from milk jugs as a fertilizer for a particular purpose, I forget what, and then not long ago in a wine book -- I forget which -- was it Kermit Lynch's Adventures on the Wine Trail? -- I think maybe -- the writer admired the chic French lady winemaker who made beautiful wine and poured the tired dregs into her outdoor rosemary plants and potted lemon trees, of course this was in Provence or someplace romantic and hot, and they were beautiful and healthy too. As to Mr. Hyman's specific twenty-parts-water-to-one-part-beverage-dregs rule (mind you the French lady used pure wine), that is interesting because in his Vintage: the Story of Wine Hugh Johnson retells the Odyssey's tale of strong Thracian wine being normally diluted with twenty parts water. Odysseus gives it full strength to the Cyclops: the Cyclops passes out and Odysseus gouges out his eye and escapes.

But I am asking whether I ought to try the twenty parts water rule with my leftover wine, for my houseplants. They need nutrients, no? Why should a meek teaspoon per gallon, of some blue-green store-bought tincture that has been under my sink in a yellow bottle for a year and a half, burst more with good properties than a 6 ounce splash of a stale Rhone in that same gallon? Only it looks so odd to water your philodendrons and things with reddish water. What if it kills them? What if it attracts bugs in this early fall heat? What if it works great?

 

Meanwhile, chant: Three minutes and 42 seconds. Modern people (good looking people), modern dress. Twelfth-century music from our twelfth century friend, Hildegard of Bingen. I don't have the exact text handy, but it's Ave Maria and you will note the melismas, the long fluttering singing of many notes on one syllable. Of course you can also upload all sorts of very serious videos accompanied by Renaissance art full of flailing arms and legs of angels and spiky crowns, but then people think you are some sort of holy roller and all you want to show is that this is possible.

The soprano is Geraldine Zeller, the recorder player, Helge Burggrabe. Concert in February 2010. No applause! You're in church. 




  

Dipping a toe in new water

My dear things -- my fatheads, remember? -- I hope you won't mind, but I want to dip my toe into a new ocean of a topic. I might carry on with a houseplant or cocktail from time to time, and no I didn't forget my decision to immerse myself in the 12th century -- almost the very day I started a new job, so sorry! -- but now, what with one thing and another, I have decided to learn about Gregorian chant.

I kid you not. You may recall I've delivered myself of scattershot opinions about music before. I am just coming away from a nice little vacation from retail work, therefore from the awful music that serves as retail's background noise almost everywhere; so the norm of awful, inescapable music is somewhat on my mind. I never noticed this soundtrack to all of American life until some years ago struggling into a French language textbook full of first-impression essays on the country. A writer in this book marveled at it.

Unfortunately, and here already we're talking about One Thing and Another, the modern Mass is similarly so well known as so full of poor music that I feel impelled to try to know what came before. We will certainly consult right away the fine and good-humored article "Can Bad Catholic Music be Stopped?" at Catholic Herald, and probably go on consulting it frequently and happily.

I should clarify. The topic of Gregorian chant is perhaps ninety per cent out of the blue, but not one hundred per cent for me. I read Rumer Godden's novel In This House of Brede a long time ago, too. In that alone lay a cursory education in the Divine Office, and its music, music, music. (The nuns get a new young postulant with a great high soprano voice. The choir mistress is thrilled to report to the abbess. " 'Mother! We can sing Gaude Maria Virgo again! Oh, Mother!' ") To be impelled: let's add it to our slowly growing list of twenty English words. Impel has the sense of being driven forward, unlike compel, which suggests driven together. From the Latin pellere, to drive. 

Now to begin I must assume you have made for yourself  a " 'Gregorian Chant for the Seasons of the Year' radio" on Pandora. If not, there is always YouTube. This is how we must begin our learning, in bits and pieces. Only it's a bit immediately discouraging, when you load in something random having used just those keywords Gaude Maria Virgo, to see the comments from the exhausted young people that pop up below your result. "OMG, had to listen to it for Music Appreciation class." "For real nothing like old white people music..."

What I had got from my keywords was the above clip, Alleluia, O Virga Mediatrix, the composer, Hildegarde of Bingen (1098-1179 -- the 12th century!). It is meant to be chanted at a certain time during the Mass: after an Old Testament reading and sometimes a New Testament epistle, comes a reading from a Gospel; before the Gospel the congregation prepares itself by standing and singing  "Alleluia." Or it used to. More often we sing "Hah-lay, Hah-lay, Hah-lay, LOOOOO-yah!" to a kind of foot-stompin' hoedown tune with crashing honky-tonk piano accompaniment. Gracing her much nicer, medieval Alleluia, Hildegarde wrote a short acclamation of the Virgin Mary, perhaps to be sung on a Marian feast day. Note the title is O Virga, branch, not O Virgo, virgin.

Alleluia! O virga mediatrix,
sancta viscera tua
mortem superaverunt
et venter tuus omnes creaturas
illuminavit
in pulchro flore de suavissima integritate
clausi pudoris tui
orto.

Alleluia! O branch and mediatrix,
your sacred flesh
has conquered death,
your womb all creatures
illumined
in beauty’s bloom from that exquisite purity
of your enclosèd modesty
sprung forth.

 The Latin and its translation are taken from The International Society of Hildegarde von Bingen Studies, which is also where we find the sheet music and a short reflection on the complex interweaving themes of words and music. Medieval people, the author writes, knew Biblical references to Aaron's flowering rod and the flowering branch of Jesse, and saw "the similarity of the two Latin words, virgo (virgin) and virga (branch or rod) ... [also] the illustration of salvation history as a tree of life rooted in those patriarchs and blossoming into the Virgin and the fruit of her womb was popular in medieval art."

Not only must we new learners address ourselves to that sort of background, it appears already we must learn some basic music. Like what a melisma is. "A succession of notes sung upon a single syllable," from the Greek melos, song. I did know one small thing about chant already, namely, that the more important or dense the meaning of the text, the more elaborate the singing will be. It's on purpose. You see how the last word orto, "sprung forth," is honored, by my count, with forty-seven notes thanks to its religious significance. That is going to require some memory skills, practice, and breath control.  

And all this in the 12th-century Rhineland, which we shouldn't think of as some sort of Dark Age impenetrable green forest but we probably do. (Were they drinking riesling yet?) Given the professionalism of the soprano in our YouTube example, from whence -- we must ask -- could a 12th century German abbess expect to recruit the farm girl, wattle-and-daub nuns to sing this daunting material? Our cheerful author of "Can Bad Catholic Music be Stopped" has something interesting to relate.

In Britain and most of the West, we’ve lost the habit of communal singing. The only people required to sing together are primary school children, but it’s been decades since they were encouraged to stretch and develop their voices. As a music teacher told me the other day: 'Modern adults just can’t reach the high notes that the old hymns demanded. So they don’t even try.'

If medieval farm girls were presented to convents at the trainable age of ten as Hildegard of Bingen was, though granted she herself hailed from a manor, that might explain where the voices came from to sing Alleluia O Virga Mediatrix in 1150. How do we replicate that custom? For our part, we grapple only with hoedown Hah-lay-looo-yahs, or "Let There be Peace on Earth," its old sexist references to God the Father dutifully purged. And yet, encouragingly, who leads us in a cappella "Immaculate Marys" (the Lourdes Hymn)? Who even introduces the Latin Agnus Dei sometimes ("qui tollis peccata mundi")? The priest who is either quite old, -- or quite young.

On YouTube the bored very young roll their eyes at Hildegarde's "old white people music." They may never know what Dark Age peasants knew it meant. Meantime there are those few good-humored if testy blogs out there, commiserating on the singing of bad songs and the loss -- temporary, pray, a "Babylonian Captivity" -- of a heritage, an ocean, of complex Catholic musical beauty. The testiness and humor are encouraging too, in themselves, for in them are passion and wisdom. As a returning prodigal to the Mass, I read the testy warnings about "All Are Welcome" before being asked actually to turn to it in the hymnal. Frequently. "Probably what the devil sings to welcome souls to hell," a frustrated commenter had snorted. At the same website a man fumes about it all being traceable to the smarmy 1970s, "that kidney stone of a decade."
 
I like that, too. (They pass.) Only the English language could express that. Kidney: from the ME kidenei; < ?. Strange. That means no known derivation.

Testimonies, doors, buildings

Part 7, and the wrap up. 

One more testimony you must give, which might seem pusillanimous too, is that Christianity does supersede Judaism after all. It must, to have any real meaning. As in the Christmas carol, if there is a way to be good, and happy, and free of the errors of your time, and pardoned of sin and even yes immortal in your body, it is because he appeared, and the soul felt its worth. But this won’t make much sense unless you begin with the background of a (most extravagant) God who has loved and had a teaching plan for humanity for all time, slowly selecting one patriarch, family, tribe, and nation, to lay the vital ground work. Without the groundwork, Jesus is just another holy man from a certain place and time. There would be no reason why a Christ might not come from ancient Luoyang. But if he came from one nation, whose rituals and studies are fine but insular, whose moral laws are excellent but lead on to no daily mystic comfort and no personal promise except a sort of group satisfaction at the end of time, then it makes sense that his gigantic life must burst out of that nation, and supersede it. That is painful. We are back to the God who breaks promises – or to precious recastings of bewildered prophets. But if not, then Christ was not whom the apostles and martyrs knew. Truth has to matter. And it has to be somewhere, yes in a building.

We come to the act of re-opening the door. Having decided it’s pusillanimous not to acknowledge that the Gospels built your world, besieged by the Gospels’ enemies, I don’t know how to explain walking through a door at all except to say that sitting at home intellectually assenting seems not enough. It’s always personal. As for the choice of door, I was never a seeker in a vague way. Pageantry and ritual beckon, as do the familiarities of childhood. (Once or twice I watched the Mass for Shut-ins, partly to forestall explanations to people. It is just as I remember. And it is much like Jewish services, too, in the ineluctable presence of middle aged, musical women. They do everything, especially sing. “What have we done for the homeless?” they warbled carefully one Saturday. I wanted to shout at the tv. What have you done about Islam?)

But which door, and why? It’s almost as if cradle Catholics have a choice of Catholic doors. That must startle the potential convert and I am glad I’m not one. If I had started from nothing and plunged into my style of unabridged-books, natural-fabric research, I might have been in for some very intense and unsatisfying years. Because you see you can go to YouTube and find anything.

There are priests who regard our Vatican II, fifty years on, as the disaster from which only God can save us. They argue well. Try meeting the late Father Gregory Hesse, or the then-young Fathers Donald Sanborn and William Jenkins, discussing indefectibility and magisterium on old serious talk shows uploaded from a television station in Ohio in the 1980s. “The Novus Ordo is an anti-Mass – everything stripped in it, reversed – you’ve never heard of the Ottaviani intervention because the revolutionaries did not want you to.”* There have cropped up in the last fifty years alphabet-soup traditionalist Catholic societies, SSPX, FSSP, in communion with Rome or possibly not, scattered around the world conducting Latin Masses without lay help or crashing jamboree music. Father Sanborn is now a bishop – of what church, by whose authority? – Father Jenkins still has an actor’s voice, not golden or silver but maybe bronze, and an actor’s looks.

I listen and learn a little. If I were truly a convert I might worry. Which Catholic church? I might worry about joining people who consider themselves the saving remnant, and are in Ohio besides. I would balk at having to hunt out the occasional Latin Mass in grand old churches in bad old neighborhoods, curiously also where one finds old courthouses and hospitals, other relics of order in a different time. And yet I would also want the truth and I would probably be busy consulting old jettisoned books, diving down the rabbit hole of authenticity.

It must have to do with one’s overdrugged vision, drained of color, but none of that for me. I’m back at the church that is available to me, in the parish where I live, because at this strange time in history one wants to have chosen sides honestly but mostly it’s a relief to accept a birthright, and anonymity in it. The jamboree music will surely pass.

In the Catholic Church, alphabet soup sects and all, one pursues the most outlandishly courageous and heroic attack at life, at one’s allotment of it on this speck in the cosmos, that could ever be. From creation to apocalypse to every book and every saint and to every extravagant notion (pick one), God as bread in every church, personal immortality, and so on – there can be no structure more crazily designed for our profit. The soul feels its worth.

But I pause over the seekers, the converts. I was going to write a short story about a middle-aged woman, maybe diagnosed with something bad, who has all these jumbled thoughts in her head but still wants to sign up for what is true. I was going to call it “You Boys Will Never Get This Figured Out in My Lifetime.” It’s a rude title, I wish you wouldn’t make me write it.

And that's how the summer intern essay ended. Of course, bless her heart, there is no way she got this far.


*Letter to Pope Paul VI written by Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, et.al., in June 1969, accompanying a study outlining objections to the Novus Ordo or New Mass. "The faithful never, absolutely never, asked for changes in the liturgy to make the Mass easier to understand."   

Spookiness

The summer intern essay, part 6.

He teaches a ferocious morality, laws pared down to a perfect core. Child, your sins are forgiven, but mind the details. Not just murder but anger is wrong. Not just adultery but looking is wrong. Love your enemies. Forgive since you are forgiven. Be perfect. The combination of moral ferocity and forgiveness from another quarter – himself – must mean an eternal protection from the insane new rules of any era. The state or your neighbor or professor is not your master.

He is shrewd. No it would not make sense for him to drive out demons by the power of Satan, for why would Satan drive out himself? If then he drove them out by the spirit of God, then yes the kingdom of God is upon you (Matt. 12). Spooky scenes ring true. The only people who recognize him even as he approaches are those “possessed by demons.” I don’t understand this, but it makes sense that evil knows its enemy and must testify. They answer him as evil would. “What is your name?” “Legion.” 

 Investigating for the first time in decades the Gospels’ teaching stories cannot be the end of it. After them comes Passion and Resurrection. I don’t quite understand the logical jumps from moral teachings to: Child your sins are forgiven to: crucifixion equating to: future pardon if you believe all the foregoing: circularly, forever – a perpetual motion machine? – but the Resurrection also brings with it eyewitness avowals. The old proofs never change. Why would eyewitnesses to a dead man risen, go on later to their own executions affirming a sad lie? And the affirming and the testifying go on and on, century upon century, echoes of the big bang. Even if you timidly insist on the “Resurrection story,” it still built the West. It codified all the teaching and mercy and spookiness that made the soul feel its worth, as “know thyself” and even Sh’ma Yisrael did not. 

You may have thought it noble and truthful to wait to say I told you so at the end of time, to continue to live in the civilization that Christ and his Christians built. “This really wasn’t ever sound – what an unfair turn – but I’ll accept it as background.” But I came to think that’s kind of pusillanimous.

Yes, it probably would be like this

Or, what didn't get past the summer intern, part 5. 

If given all this you return to the Gospels as perhaps the plinth of the civilization, even if you don’t like the whole god-from-a-young-maiden trope, what do you find they are about, and what did the main character say or do? He is at minimum the most important person who has ever lived. Here are eyewitness records. It would be as if someone had been around to chronicle the Big Bang, and all its echoes. If you like origins and authenticity, well here you go.

As you read, even from the first few chapters of the first gospel, what starts to build is a sort of backward-assembling mental apparatus that reaches into the books and muses, well – yes – if a god, if God, came to earth, it probably would be like this. He doesn’t hover massively over the Roman Forum, telling Caesar what to do, although that might have been useful. Anyway why not Alexandria, why not Luoyang? Rather, he comes to an impoverished speck of earth on this speck of a planet whose smallness and greatness we do and do not grasp. He does the most important thing he possibly could, which is be human, like wonderful us. He knows family and friendship and death. He lives all except marriage, which also makes sense, since one God even in his full humanity cannot have a spouse. (But then why a mother?) A wife would imply children, and the one God cannot … oh wait.

Still the Gospel record rings true. Heedless people would flock to him for healing and then walk away in joy, often not bothering a whit about his teachings. Crowds would frantically rush, unled, to block his escape across the lake because they wanted their chance to be cured. Normal people would sit around and expect to be fed. His friends would deny him at the crisis. Of all reasons to die, well yes, what is worse or more typical than the human way of execution by “authority,” which is mortal itself. And what gift would humanity like to be given, if not absolution from wrongdoing, from guilt, and then bodily life after death? “Child, your sins are forgiven.”

I say blandly it would be like this because I have two more ideas in mind as background. One is the Christmas carol O Holy Night: “He appeared, and the soul felt its worth.” I wonder if that line alone does not sum up Christianity and its good news. Does Islam teach the soul its worth, or the authoritarian tatters of Western liberalism either?

 The other idea I have in mind comes from a beautiful coffee table book I used to own about astronomy. It was full of gorgeous pictures, color tinted, from the Hubble telescope. Galaxies, clouds, clusters of clouds of galaxies incomprehensibly huge, incomprehensibly far away. Half way through the book, I thought, “It only has meaning because we know. It’s just information – pictures on a page.”

The great universe is focused only on us and it has no meaning except that we are here to live and think about it. Have you any indication that the pictures in the coffee table book amount to anything else? In Renoir My Father Jean Renoir quotes his father the painter as scoffing, “that fool Galileo. Tells us we’re not the center of the universe, and no one behaves as if it were true.” Our backward-assembling mental apparatus returns to the Gospels to find out, after healing and feeding heedless clamoring people, what the Son of Man said about behavior.

No one's fault: what didn't get past the summer intern, part 4

Years go by. Christmas always beckons. The Our Father remains the most perfect of prayers. The ritual words of the old Nicene Creed beckon. Large fragments of it still lie in my memory. “God from God, light from light … We believe in the life of the world to come.” I like ritual. I used to like bowing to the open Ark, and touching one’s Siddur to the Torah scroll in respect.

 Islam returns, as it has not done since Muslim slave ships cruised into Irish coastal towns and stole people from their fields, or imprisoned American sailors in the Enlightenment-era Mediterranean. Facing it, for our vanguard, we have the tatters of Western liberalism, white-eyed and gibbering, administering abortion and new sexes. It hates intolerance, and wants to change the world.

And you, personally again. Life goes on, you’re not 25 or 40 or 50 anymore. It’s no one’s fault that your grandmother’s old Sunday Missal, flipped open to remembered garish pictures of Scourging or Assumption, is something you can hold in your hand that is not foreign. It’s a true memory.

Curious changes (more of what didn't get past the summer intern)

Part 3

What is there actually in it, apart from its large abstract attractions? I joined having read old books and expecting therefore to meet old stereotypes, characters out of Tales from the Hasidim, filled with joy. I met nice ordinary people heroically fitting their children’s b’nai mitzvot preparations into their busy lives. I met mostly the very elderly.

 For me for a while there was a lot in it. When you consult only your own right reason plus personal study to make a dramatic interior change in life, you can hum along for quite a while thinking “I’ve joined.” I’m now authentic, doing new things, cooking new foods, deciphering the base text under all the others. I now believe what is true. The new experiences and the learning resemble slow-growing technical proficiency at a job. You can be reassured you will build memories, which is exactly what might be said to a new hire anywhere.

However, years of observation and even very enthusiastic participation taught me what my grandmother, anybody’s grandmother in any previous Western era, could have told me instantly. Judaism is for Jews. It exists as a perpetual motion machine to keep them Jewish, united, and practicing, which is fine. But if, by any chance like me, you find after all that you do not wish to keep kosher or observe what seem rather bleak holidays, largely unrelated to the seasons; if you do not have a Jewish family and lack the memories, the “support networks” and anyway the desire, to name one item, frenziedly to prepare for and then rest on every Sabbath; if you find you instinctively and even childishly believe things which Judaism does not very vigorously address (“we believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come”); if in sum you learn a sort of negative print of the convert Ruth’s lesson, that to convert must be to marry and go to the land, no more and no less; if you learn also that most of the rest is fierce liberal politics, to the point of such moral bankruptcy that you sit in a sanctuary knowing that while God may be loving and everywhere and these are excellent people, you would never dream of consulting this denomination’s authority on any question; then you might find you have had enough. Remiss though it was not to explain yourself, you might slip gradually away.

A curious change did come, just shortly before. The Reform movement jettisoned its old prayer book, Gates of Prayer, for a new one called Mishkan T’filah. I got to see firsthand what it looks like when a group of far off intellectuals, who know thoroughly the language and the rubrics they are changing, impose their changes on a faithful who lack the tools to understand what’s been done. It was kind of like seeing a little Vatican II imposed on someone else. “It’s memory-erasing,” even I, who had no real memories, commented to another woman as we looked at the open book. “You’re right,” she said. Not that anyone except the very keen knew much what the old prayer book had been about. Thick lines of Hebrew stood mystifyingly over translations you trusted were accurate. “I want to know what the Hebrew says,” an old lady once complained. The English made for “a synopsis,” her scholarly man friend replied carefully, of a still older prayer book. She wasn’t satisfied. Palimpsest upon palimpsest, dilution after dilution. Will a future time look back on this as the era when intellectuals and priests stood like angels with flaming swords, blocking the peasants’ path to religion? Except Muslims, who open the gates wide and want all crammed in.

What didn't get past the summer intern: how to be a religious badass

Part 2. Of course there's more.

Believers will leer in turn at this fresh groping after truisms. “Of course it’s Christianity.” But for me it makes a new thought, that what has been lost is an ability to credit the Gospels with what we have. People call Western civilization Judeo-Christian, but most Westerners are not Jews. We have also a great heritage from classical antiquity, but we’re not reading Aristotle all day. If there is any legacy that churchgoers at any rate are exposed to regularly, it would be the Bible. For churchgoers that means the Gospels. In turn we mean the life and person of Jesus, not mere compassionate teacher and nice man but Lord and Savior.

Who was he, yes what did he teach, that Islam did not, such that Christian or even Christian-informed Western (liberal) men respectfully open doors for women, and Muslim men shroud them? What groundwork did he lay, such that tearing it up means a new culture based on the holiness of abortion and gay marriage?

As for the personal side. (It is still there.) What the individual seeker wants, even if he knows enough to know things like Buddhism would be too foreign to pursue, is to “sign up for what is true.” The phrase comes from a Prager University video.

For a long time I thought Judaism must be it. The Old Testament’s stout evidence of the God who does not change his mind appealed. So did the fact of patriarchs and prophets saying things which already had a meaning for centuries, before anxious and sometimes it seems, precious recastings into a new they secretly meant Jesus mold. I liked its healthy freedom from the main pagan trope, tales of gods fathering gods on mortal women. And I have a great yen for origins, for authenticity. Show me always natural fabrics, from-scratch recipes, unabridged books. I desire to peer through the palimpsest. What was the first writing? Why was it erased?

I am sure a Catholic high school education circa 1980 helped to chop off at soil-level what was naturally a religious personality, and might even have remained a Catholic one. There is a lot to enjoy and be proud of in the supernatural pageantry of the Church and in its tactile pleasures too. All those saints’ days and litanies and solemnities; holy cards, angels, the rosary. Gregorian chant, next to which I sometimes think all music is cacophony.

But gardeners call it damping-off, when seedlings fall over and die in a moldy soil. Damping off happens, I should say, when you learn that all the Gospel stories were made up years later, to make Jesus seem like a god. Our Vatican II stands, all of it, like a break of scorched earth itself. When the liturgy admires Jews as “first to hear God’s word,” you reflect. Very well, how are they wrong? Especially when the record seems to show Jewish behavior as a group across millennia is very good, even without belief in vicarious redemption. Judaism can seem more humane than Christianity. No Jew proclaims “no man can come to the Father except through me.” There is a freedom to it: the new convert likes the expression “Israel will be vindicated at the end of time.” You can look forward to being that speck in space then, shouting “I knew it all along!” God is not Jove, to mate with women. God does not change his promises. Notice the only people of antiquity whom a Greek or a Pharaoh would recognize are, spookily, still here.

Let me add something that only occurred to me very recently. Even with these religious sums and, if you were ever a convert, more of your own added up under the credit and not debit column, almost no one would convert to Judaism today, were it not for the existence of the state of Israel. I am glad the state lives – having been brought into being without a Messiah, mind you, which was once the crux of it – but we converts and ex-converts cannot deny that Medinat Yisrael with an army and everything makes the Jew badass. That’s fun. I am talking about a generation like mine, children of World War II veterans, grown up vaguely aware of Israeli heroisms like Entebbe and the Ethiopian airlift. Further generations brought up on college BDS campaigns may never darken a temple’s door. A hundred years ago, splendid credit column or no, the Jew in turn might have seemed only cringing and Oriental and weird. For the bulk of history before that he would have seemed much worse. Unjoinable. I wish it had all been friendlier back in those days, but it was not.

Changing and changing about, or -- what didn't get past the summer intern

Part 1. Well of course there's more. 

I sit down for the third time in my life to write about my religious experience. This may be a dangerous thing, since each of the previous two times, I made a decision, announced on paper, which in fact so served to clear my head that I instantly turned around and did the opposite. At 25 I wrote about accepting my native Catholicism, got published, and turned Jewish. At 40 I at length digested my Jewish “journey,” got published, and found that after all it had become too thin a gruel to live on. And shortly left. With no pained or weepy explanations to my friends there, which was remiss of me. I did get a few phone calls, which I ignored. Which was remiss of me.

In The Closing of the American Mind Allan Bloom wrote that in his teaching experience, “students who had had a really serious fling with drugs, and gotten over it,” seemed emptied out of much ability to experience much else with freshness or enthusiasm. “It was as if their vision had been drained of color.” Religious experiments, changing and changing about, may be like that. I remember cleverly telling my journal, after all my efforts now it was over, that one might say the Master of all and I had agreed to shake hands and say no more about it.

That was ten years ago. I find I would like religion in my life again, or rather no, that isn’t quite how it begins anew. It is almost no longer personal. And I was never a “seeker” in some vague way. I never approached Buddhism or anything else. What has happened to the whole Western world has been two things, Islam’s rise and liberalism’s fall. (Now anything further that I write touching these two topics will be derivative, just other people’s observations and conclusions on politics or “elite agendas,” so you must excuse me if I seem to fling off the occasional truism.) Islam’s violence is an everyday shock and Western liberalism seems to have nothing left in its tank but a kind of leering, white-eyed boredom causing it to decide idiotic things like there aren’t two sexes anymore, and to administer the resulting lawsuits. If the latter half of this observation, about Western collapse, did not use to be so, what has been lost or forgotten and where did it come from?