Recalled to Life

Yes, there are people on whom suffering is not wasted. Yes, the effect of suffering, properly absorbed, does, at times, sensitize us, motivating us to act more faithfully and attentively towards other people. Not always, of course: Suffering often makes one more callous and self-centered. And if insight is forthcoming, more often than not it is not required in the day-to-day situations we confront. As a young "existentialist" I, like others in my generation, tended to assume, uncritically, that suffering is inherently ennobling and valuable. Life and study have brought me to a more discriminating and, one hopes, a more discerning position.

This brings me back to my aunt. By the standards of the world, and by her standards, I was a good nephew. Today, do I better understand her plight than I did decades ago? I probably do. Did the degree of my empathy or compassion matter to her? I doubt it, mainly because she almost certainly took it for granted. What she wanted and needed from me was not profound sympathy but sympathetic presence; she wanted me to be with her. Would she have valued my efforts to explain her to the world? Yes, though I can't imagine she thought this required heavy reflection or rhetorical skill beyond sincerity and love.

  -Shalom Carmy, "Recalled to Life," First Things December 2019

Radio & redemption

I know nothing of Ben Kingsley's spiritual formation, but he made a deeply Christian observation about the nature of man while being interviewed on August 29 by Rachel Martin on NPR's Morning Edition regarding his role as Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann in the recently released film Operation Finale: 

But these people — however difficult it might be for us to swallow — were human beings. …For the years of extermination between 1933 and 1945, it was men and women who did this. It was not my duty to humanize anything because tragically, it's already human.

As Kingsley implies, we all have a tendency to distance ourselves from evildoers so that, unconsciously or elsewise, we can categorize them as something other than human. To the extent they are sufficiently distanced, they can be cut off from membership in society. 

The problem, of course, is that evildoers, sinners, are in fact fully human and on occasion try to enter human society. That problem was exposed during a discussion the previous evening on NPR's All Things Considered about the comedian and cinéaste Louis C.K., lately revealed as a serial sexual harasser, who had attempted a return to the stage on August 27. During that discussion, Ailsa Chang asked, "And what makes someone deserving of redemption?"

Unsurprisingly, a clear answer was not forthcoming.

In the May 2011 issue of First Things, Wilfred McClay asked, "But how, in a society that retains its Judeo-Christian moral reflexes but has abandoned the corresponding metaphysics, can a credible means of discharging the weight of sin be found?" In this #MeToo moment, we should be grateful that sexism and sexual harassment are being identified as the sins they are. At the same time, we are slowly beginning to realize that the sinners and evildoers are human beings just like the rest of us. If none of them can do anything to deserve redemption, then none of us, no human being, can deserve redemption.

Of course, that's the thing about redemption. "Redeem," properly understood, is not a reflexive verb but a transitive one. One cannot redeem oneself: one must be redeemed by another. If our society has rediscovered the self-evident truth that humans are sinners and evildoers, then perhaps it's ready to hear about the God who redeems sinners.

After the apocalypse, a non-dystopia

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. 2014: Alfred A. Knopf, New York. Kindle edition.

Station Eleven confirms my deeply held conviction that influenza will kill us all. It begins with an outbreak of the "Georgian flu," which is not only remarkably contagious, but finishes off the infected within 12-24 hours. And just like that, civilization is gone.

Or rather, almost all the people are gone. Civilization persists, particularly in the form of the Traveling Symphony, a company of musicians and actors which caravans from settlement to settlement around Lake Michigan performing orchestral pieces and the Shakespearean canon. Their motto, taken from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, is "Survival is insufficient." Or, as Mandel seems to be suggesting, survival has never been sufficient for the human species.

While Station Eleven kicks off with an apocalypse, it's far from a dystopian novel. Mandel uses Arthur Leander, a Canadian actor of some celebrity, to create the book's through-line: all the main characters are connected to him, even if in a minor way, although he dies of a heart attack just before the Georgian flu strikes. (No spoiler alert required: said cardiac event begins on the very first page.) Leander enables Mandel to move the narrative back and forward in time, and to introduce the titular "Station Eleven:" a self-published comic book by Leander's first wife which is itself set on a sort of ruined world. The Leander storyline is much more than a narrative device, however: it's a means by which Mandel can illustrate that human culture persists wherever humanity persists.

Life without running water, electricity, or any other features of post-18th century technology would be hard and uncomfortable. It would not, however, be a life without culture. That, at least in part, is the glory of humanity, which reflects the glory of the culture of the Trinity.

I admire boysenberry more than any ordinary syrup

As the legions of faithful readers of this blog will readily imagine, the list of reasons for me to go on is not only passingly brief, but growing briefer by the day. Over the years, pancakes have almost entirely dropped out of our Sunday-morning-breakfast rotation because the sugar-and-carb overload not only leaves one in a mild state of self-loathing, but even worse fails to fend off hunger pangs through the morning worship service.

Nonetheless, I cheerfully concede that the International House of Pancakes makes a quite excellent buttermilk pancake, and I get the occasional craving for a short stack covered in boysenberry syrup. I was accordingly driven to the depths of existential despair when told this morning that the blessed blackberry is no longer available at IHOP. O tempora, o mores!

Thankfully for you young people, the cause for boysenberry syrup's return has been taken up on the Facebook. It may be too late for my generation, but think of the children.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz is Walter Miller's 1960 retelling of Western history through the lens of the monastic movement, but set in the American West after an apocalyptic nuclear war in the late 20th century. I read it after my Hindu neighbor insisted on loaning me his copy after we got into a discussion of comic books and science fiction during a Diwali party his family was hosting; such is ordinary life for a conservative presbyterian pastor these days.

As the Wikipedia notes, Canticle is widely recognized as a literary masterpiece, even being the stuff of dissertations and such. It's categorized as science fiction (since it spans the 27th to the 38th centuries), but as I note above, it's not really science fiction so much as an attempt to dramatize the role of the Church and persons religious in the development of the West during the first two millennia of Christendom. Much of the plot, such as it is, of Canticle's three sections focuses on the preservation of books and, later, development of the learning contained therein. But if that were all Canticle is, it would be little more than a presaging of Thomas Cahill's lamentably oversimplified How the Irish Saved Civilization.

Instead, Miller shows how the Church laid the foundation for Western civilization by insisting on the doctrine of the imago dei, man made in the image of God. In Canticle's first section, "Fiat Homo," the Church insists that those grotesquely mutated by nuclear fallout nonetheless are fully human and must be treated as such. In its second section, "Fiat Lux," an all-too unpleasantly human abbot boldly declares abominable a secular philosopher's suggestion that the men of their day are some kind of lesser, man-created beings precisely because that would make them something other than a reflection of God himself. While the third section, "Fiat Voluntas Lux," builds to another nuclear war, its centerpiece conflict is a debate between an abbot and a government official over euthanasia for the those in horrible suffering. According to Miller, mankind perennially and perversely denies his own humanity by refusing to value actual human beings and their lives; the Church and her members must bear witness against this dehumanization and insist that learning be founded on a Christian humanism.

As Miller tells the tale, it seems the Church is always on the losing side of the argument, but nonetheless her humanistic values work their way into civilization's warp and woof. I think he's right, and it's a fact worth remembering in these dark days for the citizens of the former American Republic. The Great State of Colorado, in which I consider it a privilege to live, just ratified a measure allowing for "assisted suicide" (one of the currently favored euphemisms for "euthanasia"). Our nation's misbegotten electoral college has permitted election to the office of President a man who aggressively dehumanizes all, individually and collectively, with the temerity to displease him. Humanism itself has fallen upon such hard times that the very notion is associated primarily with aggressive secularity, not the imago dei, and Christians shut down at its very mention. From my vantage point, all signs are that we have lost the argument.

In these dark days, A Canticle for Leibowitz helpfully reminds us that the Church's simple duty is to bear witness to the truth of God's Word, which against all common sense teaches us that man is made in the image of God to such an extent that God himself could become a man. Church history teaches us that we will lose many, many arguments, but because of God's grace and Spirit the Church will continue to bear humanity through the ashes of the destruction mankind repetitively and continually wreaks upon himself.

Peter Shaffer

I feel mildly insincere proclaiming my great admiration for a playwright’s work when I’ve really only carefully studied two of his works. But as both those works are undisputed masterpieces, I think it only right to note Peter Shaffer’s death last week by discussing Equus and Amadeus.

I can’t remember whether I saw the film or read the play (I believe in my college freshman English class) first, but I do know that the reading was when I was struck by the struggle of Amadeus’ lead character, Salieri. In exchange for musical gifting, Salieri had offered God piety and devotion, and so felt betrayed when the “obscene child” Mozart manifested an effortless genius which Salieri could never hope to attain. Salieri’s plot to avenge himself against God by destroying Mozart demonstrated a zealous adherence to the principle of justification by works seen only by the Pharisees and the counter-reformation’s inquisitors. That Shaffer could draw an entirely human portrait of such a man was itself a demonstration of apparently effortless genius.

Equus preceded Amadeus. Again, I can’t remember when I first encountered it, although I know it was during my university days when I was particularly preoccupied with how questions of theology and faith are worked out in the arts. In Equus, the only way a boy crippled by guilt and shame can think to save himself is by attacking a god of his own creation. In both Equus and Amadeus, the lead character locates the source of his turmoil not in himself or in his sin, but in the God who is his ultimate judge.

Shaffer’s characters toil beneath the gaze of a pitiless God, with no whisper of hope that he might have delivered himself over for the forgiveness of some. Nonetheless, Shaffer understood that humanity is, fundamentally, homo adorans. Our lives are measured, then, not by our accomplishments, but by our service and worship to the God who is.

1x

While I now listen to almost all my podcasts at twice normal speed, a couple employ such carefully constructed soundscapes that their meaning would be obscured, and their impact radically diminished, if their playback were sped up.

One, of course, is Nate DiMeo's The Memory Palace, a faithful celebration of the human beings who populate history books. Every episode is, honestly and truly, beautiful. DiMeo has begun listing credits at the end of the show, but his original practice was to simply let music fade out each story, giving the listener a moment to reflect on the human experience he has just heard. You can't rush The Memory Palace. You have to give heed to every beat, every carefully constructed sentence, and then think. And think.

The only other, at least so far, is The Truth, an anthology of radio drama for the podcast age. In this case, the story is not simply content, but a construct built of sound, pacing, and style. Rush it, and you won't get it.

I'm not sure what would get me to slow down to 0.5 speed. A pharmaceutical advertisement?

Voter identification & American identity

My media consumption habits led my meandering thoughts into some surprising confluences yesterday. Whilst working out, I listened to a Center for Global Development podcast in which two researchers pointed out that progress toward the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals cannot be measured unless all persons in the developing world have a legal form of identification, beginning with registration at birth. The contrarian I am, I immediately began wondering about the people who might not want to be registered at birth. (Let the record show Pa Curmudgeon was careful to register me as a natural-born U.S. citizen under color of law, and I have the State Department-issued piece of paper to prove it.) 

I remembered Robert Heinlein, the Ayn Rand of science fiction, whose work I read avidly in high school until it dawned on me that his exaltation of the heroic individual was profoundly anti-humanist. But while I was still an adolescent, I read, in any number of forms, Heinlein's argument that the truly free individual will abandon any society which makes legal identification mandatory. Objectivism aside, this always seemed to me a very American concept: the individual should not be hindered by the regulatory government, even when the individual runs the very serious risk of endangering himself.

Then I opened up the December 8 Denver Post to an article on the living situation of Robert Dear, now infamous for shooting up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs a couple weeks ago. Reporter Kirk Mitchell visited the plains of Hartsel, Colorado, a desolate, utilities-free place where newcomers squat in trailers and makeshift fortresses of dubious structural integrity on plots of land bought in order to strike it rich in marijuana cultivation. (No one has yet struck it rich, by the way.) I'm a big fan of the electrical grid and indoor plumbing, so the lifestyle doesn't appeal to me, but there's something very American, and definitely western, about people willing to suffer any adversity in their attempt to live their lives as they choose.

Out here in the Great American Desert, we tend to associate that instinct with conservatism, and conservatism tends to be associated primarily with the Republican party. As I was eating my raisin bran (I'm at an age at which fiber intake becomes a controlling priority), I thought it ironic conservative Republicans are insisting that people must have a government-issued identification card in order to vote. Call me naïve, but it doesn't seem very conservative, or even very American, to ask the government permission to exercise a personal, unalienable right.

A humanist, in the best sense of the term

Amazon made some kind of deal with the late Kurt Vonnegut (Jr.)'s estate, and has been releasing some of his previously uncollected short fiction in Kindle editions. It was uncollected for a good reason: it's mostly rather slight fare, with little of the intellectual heft or daring of his breakout Slaughterhouse Five or the underappreciated Galapagos. Nonetheless, reading it has been a helpful refresher for me.

I discovered Vonnegut during my senior year of high school, and had worked through all his published works by the time I graduated college. Having been confronted by the bleak nihilism of Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions, I wasn't surprised to learn that John Irving, in whose world according to Garp we are all terminal cases, studied under Vonnegut at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. In spite of my youth, however, the nihilism wasn't why I compulsively read Vonnegut.

Instead, it was his humanism, in the best sense of the term. Vonnegut, for all his despair over humanity's fatal flaws, loved human beings and insisted on treating all people as such. That humanism informs even the early writings now being released, the stuff he wrote for popular magazines back when popular magazines published short fiction rather than cooking tips from vapid celebrities. (I can't find the quote, but I remember Vonnegut writing about selling short stories to Cosmopolitan long before it became "a harrowingly explicit sex manual.") Every page drips with compassion for his characters, even when he's making fun of them.

Cynicism is filled with contempt, and Kurt Vonnegut was no cynic. He was a humanist, in the best sense of the term, and that's why I still find his writing refreshing.

How do we begin the immigration conversation?

I agree with his perspective, but I'll be the first to admit that this lecture from M. Daniel Carroll of Denver Seminary, delivered at Beeson Divinity School, begins on a somewhat pedantic note. Unless it's a sermon, I consider listening to someone tell me something I already know and agree with a waste of time, and I almost gave up during the first five minutes. But then Carroll gives a reading of the Old Testament as a collection of immigrant narratives, and concludes by making the point that if the Scriptures invite us to identify with and find ourselves in its narratives, then they call us, as Christians, to identify with and find ourselves in immigrant narratives.

Read as the primary humanist text, the Bible enables and equips us to find the human even, and perhaps especially, in those we identify as alien.

Lunch ladies are heroes

For 30 years now, TED talks have been enabling educated white people to think they have deep insight into the world. As an educated white person who thinks he has deep insight into the world, I like TED talks, and, precisely because I am their target audience, I have come to despise the smug preening of so many of them. Nonetheless, I subscribe to the TED podcast because every once in a while I hear one which touches on our common humanity rather than our overweening self-confidence. Jarrett Krosoczka's paean to lunch ladies is a lovely reminder that, whatever else one might say about the public schools, very many of their employees are decent human beings who genuinely are working for what they perceive to be the good of children. More: it's a reminder that what makes America great is a fundamental sense of decency which is grounded in a recognition of the value of human beings as such.

A running time of under 5 minutes, and I was weeping halfway through; if you have a heart, so will you.

False & illuminating

The First Things website just posted Richard J. Mouw's "My Favorite Heretic," in which he recommends reading those hostile to our faith precisely because their false beliefs help illuminate the content of the faith. It's a lovely bit of writing, clearly the result of a life spent in reflection on sympathetic reading of every writer one reads. 

"Some perspectives come close to the Christian vision precisely because they are, in another sense, so far away from it."

We can learn something about our God from every book, even from those who urge us to reject our Lord. In the end, there's no other reason to read.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Just look at that face.

The cynical amongst my vast international readership might suggest Mrs. Curmudgeon and I would be suckers for pretty much any movie featuring a beautiful African-American girl with (let's be honest) unruly hair who has issues caused by being abandoned by her mother and father. Nonetheless, Beasts of the Southern Wild is, objectively, astonishing.

I won't try to summarize the plot because, while it appears to have one, it really can't be summarized in any way other than the way the curmudgelings summarize movie plots, by exhaustively recounting, scene-by-scene and line by line, everything that occurs. I had read and listened to any number of reviews and interviews with the director before we saw the movie, and I was utterly unprepared for anything that happened. (I should, however, insert a spoiler alert here; I'm a critic, not a reviewer.)

It's easier to jump straight from plot to symbol and archetype: Beasts of the Southern Wild is a consideration of the end of the world executed through a metaphorical account of how New Orleans and the Gulf Coast came through hurricanes Katrina and Rita seven years ago. And yes, it is audacious as all get out.

It works because of Quvenzhané Wallis, who, as Hushpuppy, delivers the most astonishing big-screen debut since Amy Adams in Junebug. The kid doesn't just carry the movie, she is the movie. According to the director, Benh Zeitlin, she rewrote her lines before each day's shooting, which makes me really hope she's responsible for "Kids who got no mommy and daddy have to live in the woods and eat grass and steal underpants." So true, and here's hoping the Adoption Exchange puts that on a bumpersticker.

By turning our attention the residents of the Bathtub, an mythical outpost south of a flood-control levee on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, the film runs the risk of coming off as a patronizing celebration of the noble savage. It escapes this by Court 13's approach to film-making, which is so collaborative it allows a six year-old to write her own lines. The company is comprised of Louisiana locals who had major input into the final product. Moreover, Hushpuppy's father, Wink, is hardly romanticized: his care for his daughter could be generously called "competent" only by a severely delusional hippie, and he also happens to be a violent drunk who is in the process of drinking himself to death. Hushpuppy is the movie's only hero.

Beyond that, Beasts of the Southern Wild is about far more than, well, the southern wild. The bayous are menaced not just by storms, but also by aurochs, prehistoric beasts who ate cave babies and are released from icy suspended animation by the melting of the polar ice caps. (Don't worry: this is all covered in the opening scenes.) The aurochs menace and destroy everything and everyone, not just the Bathtub, so the viewer cannot safely distance himself from the threats facing Hushpuppy and her neighbors.

While I don't think this movie is a celebration of people who make some pretty foolish choices and live a rather sordid lifestyle, it does claim that they, and by metaphorical extension, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, exist and have a story, and that story should be heard. In that sense, it is a profoundly humanistic film in the sense that it defiantly recognizes that even the lowest of men are created in the image of God and, as such and even if only as such, deserve our recognition. Hushpuppy doesn't summarize the plot, but she does summarize the film when she says at its end, "Future scientists will know there was Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub."