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?

Wow. Just, wow (or: the summer intern and me)

Of course. Of course. It's July. The season of summer interns.

Now it may be the essay wasn't very good, and it may be that summer interns also have strict instructions: we don't do personal spiritual journey stuff, that crap is a dime a dozen.

Which is fine and perfectly understandable. However, a response time of 48 hours is a new thing for me, even in this age of submissions by email attachment only. Remember the fun of manila envelopes, and the hand-writing of an address of a magazine or book publisher, usually including an exciting New York zip code? You waited ages for a reply. A thin little envelope meant no. Once in a great while a thicker SASE -- self-addressed stamped envelope -- held better, held most exciting developments. Yes, I have seen "galley proofs."

A no in 48 hours tells me that the essay was not read. (Can't you hear every amateur huffing just that complaint?) Perfectly understandable. No summer intern building her resume is going to forward anything from an uncredentialed person like myself. Or an old one -- I slyly mentioned that her very magazine had published me in 1992! I can almost see the "face palm" and the "eye roll." Before she was born, perhaps. I can almost hear what they have each been told. "You're the gatekeepers. It's summer.  Keep the crap off my desk and only send me stuff you can absolutely get behind." And I was honest in my "short bio," admitting to a day job in retail liquor and to blogging because that made me more productive than carefully composing obedient things for gatekeepers. I didn't phrase that quite so rudely.

And I was obedient, too. I cut amusing anecdotes, and a great deal of junk, to bring the word count within required limits. I had already learned a fresh lesson all on my own. Sometimes you have to write very badly to purge from your system topics you are not competent to write about.

So my options today are to put the essay here, a little at a time, or to hunt for another publishing platform. That means to unearth its unsolicited manuscript address -- they are devilishly harder and harder to find -- research "our needs," and present myself again to a summer intern. All the while they get younger, and oneself does not.

The thing was about religion. On a related note, I was reading St. Augustine on my Kindle at lunch yesterday. Do you know he went on and on about the pears he and his friends stole "from the tree beside our vineyard" (in North Africa?) when he was sixteen? I mean, seriously went on and on. I don't compare myself to him in the slightest, I only note, he perhaps would have gotten a face palm/eye roll from a summer intern too.  

What you want

What you want -- having already found Monstera deliciosa, or "Bette Davis plant" -- is lavender to grow in a pot on your south-facing balcony this summer. You also want true, clove-fragrant "pinks" or dianthus, not to be confused with the more showy but scentless grocery-store carnation (albeit still a dianthus). And a lilac bush, again to grow in a pot on your balcony.

Therein lies a tale. Your friend, or beau as your other friend calls him, bought you two lilac bushes as a springtime birthday present two years ago. He knew you loved them. You had the best of intentions to plant them in your old backyard, let them grow a year or two, and then dig them up and transplant them to whatever place, house, condo, apartment, turned out to be home, actually. You did plant them, and you planted protecting and obvious metal garden stakes at the site of each, and explained to the right people that these were to remind everyone not to mow them down. They bloomed the day you moved.

Alas, they got mowed down. They got stomped down, by the landlord who did not know the story, and who for the first time in twenty years chose that summer to fix up the side of the garage where the garden lay. Maybe all that time he had been kindly avoiding stomping the garden.

Unhappy at their loss and feeling remiss at the way I -- I mean, you -- treated the beau's presents, I waited my chance to make it up somehow. Two years, another abrupt move and some job changes intervened. Now at last I have it: a freshly purchased lilac bush, just about the right size to be two years old, placed neatly in a bright blue pot and ready to act the part of one of the very ones he chose. If pressed I am ready to say the other one didn't make it. Will he remember he did not choose "dwarf Korean," however? One trusts not.

Lilac in the foreground. The lavender lies at the cat's feet and the "pinks" behind her. It's a very small garden. Lilac: from the French lilas, via Arabic lilak and Persian lilak or nilak, meaning bluish; further, from nil, indigo, and Sanskrit nila, dark blue, indigo. The plant is a member of the olive family, Olea, imagine that! I almost bought a sweet olive, Osmanthus fragrans, from a grower out east, until I realized that $25 for a plant in a three-inch pot was in itself a recipe for horticultural disappointment.

What you also wanted were tulips to go in the real, outdoor garden your neighbor began planting, even without the condo association's permission twenty years ago -- remember? -- and so you slung a few closeout-priced bulbs in the ground last fall and here they are. Some are small and orange. Some are pink, and bigger. Tulip: from the Fr. tulipe, via Turkish tulbend, turban. 

She also has bluebells, more of a forest plant, but welcome.

Another English word I have learned lately is sedevacantism, but therein lies an entirely different tale. It is from the Latin, and means "vacant chair." You would almost have to enjoy theology.