Latter-day Detritus

Advent I

2011-11-26T14:07:00.000-08:00

Out of the dark primeval night,
as from the womb of time,
and all alone,
came Man.
When did he first look up
and find the stars his friends?
For a thousand times three thousand years
they did not fail,
in their circling paths of light,
to stand above the dark
keeping their promise safe,
until from beyond their unimaginable end
the Word went forth.
And Eastern Kings
saw how their magic paled.
And Glory stood above the cave-born child.

––An unpublished poem by Dom Philip Jebb, quoted in The Coming of God, by Maria Boulding

"This Is My Doctrine"

2011-10-05T15:34:00.000-07:00

It’s official, “This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Theology is required reading.

Written by BYU professor Charles Harrell, this sorely needed book examines the origins of LDS doctrine as we know it today. It is not, of course, an exhaustive treatment of the subject, which would require a whole series of books (and this one clocks in at just about 500 pages). However, it is a tremendous resource that is worth devouring straight through, but will also prove an excellent juming-off point for future reference and study (it’s got good indexes and a vast works cited section).

After an introductory essay––worth reading all on it’s own––the volume proceeds, chapter by chapter, to tackle major doctrines (say, God the Father, or Priesthood) historically. That is, it addresses what beliefs were held in the Old Testament period, New Testament Christianity, 19th-Century Protestantism, then early and modern Mormonism, about each given subject. There are occasional subsections that examine, for instance, thought in the Nauvoo period, if doctrinal developments were particularly significant during those years.

His scriptural exegesis may not have been quite as sophisticated as I would have liked, but, again, for a book of this length, it likely wouldn’t have been feasible to go much deeper. Also, Harrell is not a theologian (though he has published some articles in that arena) so he relies heavily on secondary sources in Biblical criticism. He uses them well, however, staying mainly in areas of broad consensus, and, where there is controversy, presenting a variety of views.

The target audience seems to be Joe Mormon, so those familiar with scholarly work in this area may find a little too much “hand-holding,” but you can’t fault him––I really hope this book finds its way into the hands of many, many Saints, so anything he can do to make it accessible is a plus.

Most importantly, this book helps readers to take the really vital step of shattering one’s idea of theology as God dictating perfect, simple, clear Truth, reducing prophets to secretaries. It reveals that it is a complicated, messy, sometimes contradictory process of serious minds wrestling with the big questions in terms of the texts they’ve inherited and the culture they’re swimming in.

Burn The Stick of Bruce, folks.* This book is the real deal, and it belongs on every LDS bookshelf.

_________________
*Actually, don’t. It’s no longer being printed and so may have some value as a collector’s item.

The Tree of Life

2011-09-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

Life of my life, I search for you. My hope, my child.

Where were you? You let a boy die. Why should I be good, if you aren’t?

Why does he hurt us––our Father?

Help each other. Love everyone––every leaf––every ray of light. Forgive.

How do I get back––where they are?

Please, God, kill him. Let him die. Get him out of here.

What was it you showed me? I didn’t know how to name you then. But I see it was you. Always you were calling me.

I dishonored it all and didn’t notice the glory.

Father, Mother, always you wrestled inside me. Always you will.

The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by. Do good to them. Wonder. Hope.

I give him to you. I give you my son.

Terrence Malick has done something wonderful with The Tree of Life. Visually gorgeous and conceptually stretching, it is a feast of beauty that I will think about (and re-watch) for years to come. It’s a movie in which not much happens––including the creation of the universe and the development of life on earth. It shows that there are no such things as simpler times (usually thought of as behind us), just a different set of complications. A film about guilt and youth and love and pain and loss and joy and just... just everything. Just life.

I used to mock William Carlos Williams’ imagist poem:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

But I was wrong. Oh, how wrong.

So much, so much depends. The meaning of everything, maybe. It all hangs on the subtlest of hinges.

Told on two levels, it includes the story of a family dealing with pain and failure, and the story of life and existence itself. (If you’re looking for a typical narrative arc, keep walking.) It elucidated a lesson taught to me by a wise younger brother of mine: he explained that meaning requires people, minds. An event (or a book, or a sculpture) don’t mean a thing unless they mean it to someone. Further, while the search for meaning seems to be inescapable––we’re hardwired for it––it is doomed to be frustrating until we realize an essential fact...

We don’t find meaning, we make it. It’s a business of craftsmanship, and we build it out of the mundane material of everyday life. We turn to religion, to art, to family, and sometimes to drink. (Incidentally, religious music is used brilliantly in several sequences dealing with the cosmos––appropriate since we can often only make sense of such vastness in terms of faith). Ultimately, the key to fitting it all together can only be found elsewhere:

For, behold, the kingdom of god is within you.

True Values

2011-09-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

The following lines are from the chorus of Katy Perry's Last Friday Night:

Last Friday night
Yeah we danced on tabletops
And we took too many shots
Think we kissed but I forgot

Last Friday night
Yeah we maxed our credit cards
And got kicked out of the bar
So we hit the boulevard

Last Friday night
We went streaking in the park
Skinny dipping in the dark
Then had a ménage à trois

My reaction to those lyrics taught me something important about myself. You see, far more than its describing (and advocating) a life of drunken promiscuity, I am really bothered by the fact that it tries to rhyme "park" and "dark" with "trois."

Take-home message: Want to write songs about eating your young and dismembering hookers? Fine by me. Put it to a catchy tune and I'll probably listen to it. But your lyrics had damn well better scan, or you and I will be enemies forever!

The Trouble with Jack(ie):A Thought Experiment

2011-08-30T14:26:00.000-07:00

Note: When dealing with transgender issues and the Church, pronouns are a tricky business. Does one allow the self identification of the person in question to carry more weight than the Church's insistence on the eternal nature of gender regardless of an individual's psychology? Luckily, the BYU Writing Center provides an alternative! "Werf," a genderless pronoun the BYUWC coined in order to avoid the awkward "he or she" construction and it's cousins, seems to be tailor-made for such a situation, and thus will be in use below.

Jackie was presented to werf's proud parents wrapped in a pink blanket. Werf had two X chromosomes, and the usual complement of reproductive organs. As werf grew though, things got more complicated. Werf felt like werf was in the wrong body. Finally, in college, werf bit the bullet and identified as a male, named Jack. Werf underwent breast reduction surgery and took hormone treatments, trading in a brassiere for a husky baritone voice and patchy facial hair.

But the complications were not over for Jack. Werf fell in love with a gay man, and since it was legal in their state, married him. (Note: Jack had no surgical interventions "south of the border," so to speak. Werf still had a uterus, etc.)

Then Jack and werf's husband met the missionaries. They were converted. They wanted to join the Church. As per the most recent iteration of the CHI:

Baptism and confirmation of a person who has already undergone an elective transsexual operation require the approval of the First Presidency. ... However, such persons may not receive the priesthood or a temple recommend.

So if the call were yours to make, what would you do regarding Jack, werf's husband, and their future involvement in the church?

Consider the following:

•According to LDS teachings, Jack is a woman, married to a man. This is not a gay marriage.

•Does breast reduction really count as an "elective transsexual operation"? After all, plenty of LDS women have plastic surgery. If it does count, what is the minimum cup size you can choose and still be considered an Relief Society member?

•What concessions do Jack and werf's husband have to make to enjoy the full benefits of Church participation (barring the issue of Jack's being ordained)? Does Jack need to get implants? Is it enough if Jack dresses in drag (ie: women's clothing) for Church activities? What if werf wears a kilt? Do the hormone treatments have to stop, or is it sufficient to shave regularly (after all, everyone knows at least one RS member that sports a mustache!)? Does Jack need to consider werf's-self female? Since that would be entirely a matter of personal identity, and therefore internal, how could Church officers police that––regardless of the clothing werf wears, how can you tell the difference between Jack(ie)'s regarding werf's-self as a gay man or a straight female?

•For that matter, what about Jack's husband? Does he have to stop considering himself a gay male?

Rules: You don't get to say, "Just follow the Spirit." That's cheating, and for our purposes, like, totally lame. Besides, even LDS teachings suggest that's a cop out (D&C 9:8).

Miscellany

2011-08-24T17:43:00.000-07:00

A stupendously talented organist. His registrations are particularly amazing.

* * * * *

After returning from a trip to the homestead, my eldest sister related a story the other day that reminded me once again just how awesome my Dad is. I'm not going to be any more specific––for personal reasons––but I'm just very grateful he's in my life.

* * * * *

I was discussing proxy sealings with the same sister, when suddenly my four-year-old niece piped up with: "MARRYING DEAD PEOPLE IS FROM CORPSE BRIDE!"

Wow.

2011-08-21T21:23:00.000-07:00

The more I learn about the universe/crazy physics stuff, the more I am reminded of these lines from the brilliant webcomic A Softer World (caveat lector – occasional strong language/secular humanism):

It freaks me out when I think about how big the universe is.

Just so big and growing bigger, exploding outward constantly in all directions,

so no, I don't care how fast I was going, officer.

A ticket? We're HURTLING THROUGH THE VOID!!

If the creator is anything like the creation, given the weirdness of reality, I suspect god may be less like the dignified, beardy, elderly gentleman of popular imagination, and something more like, say, Tim Burton.

Shouldn't...

2011-08-15T17:47:00.000-07:00

Louis C.K. shouldn't be this funny... or this true to life. The reality/honesty of it ought not to be this significant/hilarious. Nevertheless, it is, (both funny and true) the case. Welcome to human existence.

Howl

2011-07-28T14:55:00.000-07:00

Note: this post has nothing to do with Allen Ginsberg.
––––––––––––––––––

Work sucked today. I took a suicide call.

The caller was a stranger who heard the commotion and went in to see if everything was alright. It wasn't. The man had been hanging for hours, probably all night, when they found him.

I've heard a lot of screaming and crying at work. It's just part of the everyday soundtrack now. There are different varieties: the snarling rage that attends customer and neighbor disputes, and on the most idiotic pretexts; hysterical cries of physical pain when a pregnant young woman gets beat up by her boyfriend––yet again; the quiet, hollow keening I heard as a woman described the sexual abuse of her little boy.

But, before today, I'd never heard anything like this. You could hear the pattern repeat over and over as family members entered the room for the first time, only to find––in place of their loved one––the cold, rigid obscenity of death. One man could only repeat, again and again, "Oh god, oh god, he did it. Oh god." The sounds were hardly distinguishable as human.

And I don't think I'll ever be able to forget them.

So, just a reminder, if you're suffering, if you're contemplating doing something horrible and irrevocable, please reach out and get help. Because, I can promise you, you don't want to cause the kind of pain necessary to elicit what I heard today.

Stunned

2011-07-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

So, I've never particularly liked Ernest L. Wilkinson. This stems from reading some quotes of his that I thought were pretty awful. (Also the BYU building they named after him is fugly.)

Then today, I read this [starts on page 164]. Wowza.

Organizing a student spy ring to keep tabs on professors you don't like? Well, it's not ethical, but... meh. Whatevs.

Lying about it over and over? Not good, but I get it. The flesh is weak.

Intentionally and repeatedly conspiring in order to ensure others––especially the student spies, who were only doing what he told them––took the fall? Throwing his subordinates under the bus? Yeah, that's what makes him a scumbag and a coward.

––––––––––––––
HT: BCC Sideblog

Awesome.

2011-07-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

——Paul Krugman

A Thought and a Poem

2011-06-25T19:29:00.000-07:00

Just a few ideas for a Sunday morning...

“Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the number of people included in the term 'we' or 'us' and at the same time decreases those labeled 'you' or 'them' until that category has no one left in it.”

––Howard Winters, archeologist

––––––––––––
Pioneers
My people were Mormon pioneers.
Is the blood still good?
They stood in awe as truth
Flew by like a dove
And dropped a feather in the West.
Where truth flies you follow
If you are a pioneer.

I have searched the skies
And now and then
Another feather has fallen.
I have packed the handcart again
Packed it with the precious things
And thrown away the rest.

I will sing by the fires at night
Out there on uncharted ground
Where I am my own captain of tens
Where I blow the bugle
Bring myself to morning prayer
Map out the miles
And never know when or where
Or if at all I will finally say,
“This is the place,”

I face the plains
On a good day for walking.
The sun rises
And the mist clears.
I will be all right:
My people were Mormon Pioneers.

––Carol Lynn Pearson

––––––––––––
UPDATE: And here are a few more that I've just been reminded of:

The Mormon Stories Podcast series is über-cool. Check out the most recent offering from the marvelous Joanna Brooks (who also writes great stuff at Religion Dispatches). In her talk she makes reference to Daymon Smith, who has done some brilliant work unpacking and analyzing the history and meaning of "correlation" in the LDS Church. Some introductory blog posts are available from BCC (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9), and his whole dissertation is available here in PDF format. Download it. Read it. Enjoy. It's some of the most fascinating Mormon history stuff I've ever read. Ever. (In other words, if you want to make sense of the modern Church, this is ESSENTIAL reading! Tattoo it upon your soul in letters of fire!)

Variations on a Theme

2011-06-16T17:07:00.000-07:00

They lied to you. The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt.

––Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

––––––––––––
Men never do evil as thoroughly or as joyfully as when they do it in the name of God.

––Blaise Pascal, quoted in The Monks of Tibhirine

––––––––––––
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.

––C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock

––––––––––––
RAHAB: Your war can’t be like any other war ever fought. It can’t be glorious, like all the other wars. It should be a war fought sadly, regretfully. You’re killing your brothers and sisters. If my people were attacking you, they wouldn’t see it that way, but you have to, you know better. Maybe this war is necessary; maybe God does require it. It’s still terrible.
JOSHUA: It’s easier, though, to glory in it. To trample every nagging doubt. Easier not to question.
RAHAB: It’s easier to kill me than to let me go.
JOSHUA: True. I thought I wanted it, war and death and violence. I thought I would find it glorious, though all to God’s glory.
RAHAB: But it’s not.
JOSHUA: No. He has a plan for us, and somehow that plan requires not just death and pain, but slaughter.
RAHAB: I don’t understand that either. And I’m frightened for you. People are going to hear of this. Your story is going to be told. Maybe even read about in books, generation after generation. Doesn’t that thought make you shudder? (JOSHUA turns away, disturbed.) It’s just so easy, people justifying to themselves, “Oh, God’s on our side. Oh, those horrible people are vile and vicious. Let’s wipe them all out.” I worry about it, evil done in your name.
JOSHUA: (A shocked pause, then an outburst.) Why do you do this to me? I never even considered that until now.
RAHAB: I knew men. What you’re doing tomorrow is the worst thing in the world. If God requires it, then maybe you have to obey, but it’s awful, and I think it’s going to be done again and again, and I think people are going to excuse themselves by saying God requires it, even when He doesn’t. I think you’re opening a door to horror and viciousness, and I know you have to open it, I’m even helping you open it, but please, while you do God’s will, find room in your heart for doubt.
[...]
JOSHUA: And now I’m filled with doubt, I’m nothing but doubt!
RAHAB: But is that so bad?
JOSHUA: I don’t know.
[...]
RAHAB: So spare me. Spare my ... family. And save yourself. From the worst excesses you think your God requires.

––Eric Samuelsen, The Plan

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Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

––Bertrand Russell

Fugue in the Key of Gaga

2011-06-08T16:29:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I have a confession. I know I'm supposed to be a music snob –– and believe me, when it gets right down to it, when it really counts, I am; I can snob it up with the best; I'm snobbish enough to know that the most enjoyable musical performance to watch is the one that's flawless but for a single glaring error... that you can harp on all night! –– but I also happen to be [shaky breath, eyes lowered in shame] a pretty serious Lady Gaga fan. Now that I got that off my chest, I want to share something with you. That something is TEH AWESOME.

But first some preliminaries for the uninitiated. One of Lady Gaga's most famous songs is called Bad Romance, (this is the Glee version, which I've used in lieu of the original because this version doesn't use the word "b*tch"):

Now to the point. If J.S. Bach and Lady Gaga had a love-child, he/she would write this amazingness:

You're welcome.

From The Monks of Tibhirine

2011-06-05T13:28:00.000-07:00

Brilliant quote from a great book*:

If you think God is what the different communities believe –– the Muslims, Christians, Jews, Mazdeens, polytheists, and others –– He is that, but also more. If you think and believe what the prophets, saints, and angels profess –– He is that, but He is still more. None of His creatures worship Him in His entirety. No one is an infidel in all the ways relating to God. No one knows all God’s facets. Each of His creatures worships and knows Him in a certain way and is ignorant of Him in others. Error does not exist in this World except in a relative manner. [From the Spiritual Writings of Emir Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri.]

The subject of this book is also given a beautiful, profound film treatment in Of Gods and Men, which is required viewing for anybody who claims to have a soul.

*Very special thanks to Father Peter for sending a copy my way!

A Four-Year-Old's Scriptural Insights

2011-05-28T09:53:00.000-07:00

Niece: She's in the water! Get in the boat! [she = little sister, water = rug, boat = couch].

Me: Maybe she's walking on the water like Saint Peter.

Niece: No! She can't do that!

Me: Why not? Saint Peter could.

Niece: That's because Jesus taught him with his miracles.

Me: Why did Jesus teach him how to walk on the water?

Niece: So he wouldn't drown.

Me: Why didn't Jesus just teach him how to swim?

Niece: Jesus didn't know how to swim. His mommy never taught him.

Me: Oh.

Rapture

2011-05-21T09:46:00.000-07:00

If you didn't make the cut today (i.e.: you're still on the planet), you might take a moment to read something sublime and astonishing and very, very humbling. Quite a reminder of how difficult it is to forgive, and how reluctant we are to do so––both personally and institutionally.

Personal Revelation II

2011-05-19T16:58:00.000-07:00

Well, after yesterday's rather sardonic post (which, no doubt, made me look like a curmudgeonly, hateful S.O.B., and therefore wasn't too far from the truth) I thought something with a rather different tone might be appropriate. In addition, I had a good day at work, helping to resolve some high-stress calls with happy endings, so my mood is brighter.

I'll be brief and unspecific, but this is nevertheless heartfelt, and the result of some serious thought over the past several months.

If you have ever faced an insoluble dilemma, you'll know what a strange, numbing experience it is. Hard thoughts are never far away: This isn't right. Life shouldn't be like this. This doesn't make sense. Nevertheless, this is the dish presented to you. Right, wrong, nonsensical it may be––but it's all yours, so grab a fork.

There are options, of course. There are always options. But in such situations, each choice, any path, is intolerable. Painful. A tragedy. And so, you hope and pray for a miracle. You wait and work and almost hold your breath. Maybe today is the day. Maybe this is the prayer that'll get through the ceiling; you will finally convince the angels of their mistake, and six-winged seraphim will come swooping down to rectify their errors and omissions, bearing coals to burn away what is wrong.

But this isn't the day, and that wasn't the prayer. And you find, ever so slowly, that you have been waiting on the wrong miracle. Priest and Levite have passed you by, but the Samaritan reaches out with his unexpected grace. God has been biding His time, perhaps just waiting for you to finally see the miracle long-prepared: He helps you to select the tragedy you can bear, the suffering you can accept.

It is a strange sort of mercy, but what else are we to expect from "God the surprise."

Personal Revelation

2011-05-18T18:28:00.000-07:00

At work today I realized something important about myself. Heretofore only a slowly swelling knot of impressions and glimpses, it finally crystallized. I used to think I was a pretty nice guy. I was wrong.

There is nothing more perfectly suited to make one doubt the value of humanity in general than interacting with them at their most animal level. Being a 911 operator basically means nobody you talk to is having a good day, and everyone you talk to thinks their crisis demands immediate intervention via tax-funded resources (no matter how petty those "crises" might be).

Also, you face the increasingly insistent and obvious fact that your job is working against the general trend of evolution. I am paid to do the species a disservice––I keep people in the gene-pool who, a few generations ago, would likely never have survived long enough to spawn! It's as though I'm shepherding idiot salmon upriver to safety, when by all rights they ought to get eaten by bears! I can almost see Darwin hanging his head in sorrow, like the lachrymose bench-warmer surrounded by zombie politicians in this McNaughton confection. (Empty your stomach before you click the link, Gentle Reader; he's a veritable Michelangelo of nausea-inducing pseudo-religious political kitsch.)

I seem to be channeling Malthus, so I'd better quit. (He is among the least pleasant Georgian Era economists to have as a spirit-guide, but this is what happens when you combine Ouija and The Wealth of Nations.) I'll just sum up with what a co-worker declared today after several long minutes spent trying to tease the most basic information out of an irate and hysterical caller: "Dumb b*tch probably deserved to get punched in the face!"

And I couldn't agree more.

My Testimony of Cheeses

2011-05-06T19:49:00.000-07:00

Forgive the blasphemous title, Gentle Reader, but I couldn't resist. While working my way through a sliver of Roquefort this evening, I was reminded just how beautiful gastronomy can be sometimes. Among blue cheeses (and I mean this in a good way) Roquefort is like eating a razor blade. A delicious, life-giving razor blade. However, as gorgeous as it is, one cannot eat it without thinking of that noblest of milk-based marvels: Stilton. Oh, Stilton! What I feel for thee is nearly lust. Where Roquefort is a razor blade, Stilton is a sledgehammer to the face. A sledgehammer of ecstasy. As a British sitcom chef once declared: "Halle-bloody-lujah! Cow and bug in perfect harmony!"

Well, any paean of praise I might compose would fall short of the mark, so I'll leave that task to my betters. Enjoy, then, G.K. Chesterton's own Ode to Stilton:

Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour
And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;
England has need of thee, and so have I--
She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour,
League after grassy league from Lincoln tower
To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.
Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men,
Like a tall green volcano rose in power.
Plain living and long drinking are no more,
And pure religion reading "Household Words",
And sturdy manhood sitting still all day
Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;
While my digestion, like the House of Lords,
The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.

Borderlands

2011-04-26T15:26:00.000-07:00

Borderlands marks a place of intersection, a liminal space where roads end but new paths begin, where [new] horizons reveal themselves but also where collisions do us harm. I'm a believing, practicing Mormon, and Mormonism is at its most essential a religion that preaches literally endless human possibilities, eternal progression, and growth. But we Mormons face tremendous pressure to conform, to fit in, to obey, to define ourselves in certain quite limited ways. It is, for many, a religious culture of public orthodoxy and quietly whispered rebellion. And so we carve out spaces for ourselves, and we meet in those spaces, and we come out to each other. We come out. Sunstone Magazine is one such space, where we brave the borderlands––this play came in part from reading back issues of Sunstone.

But where to set it? And then I thought of a used car lot, the one commercial space in American culture where prices are contingent; the one place we still bargain. The very act of car buying is also liminal, but also sort of sleazy: the game of salesmanship, the give and take, the creating of quickly disposable narratives strikes me as quintessentially and disreputably American. Cars represent the transcendent open road of Kerouac and Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe. And Dale Earnhardt: go to any Christian bookstore in the South or Midwest, and see the two big displays on competing tables: the vulgar eschatology of Left Behind, and Dale Earnhardt––prints of him being raptured out of this wrecked #3 car. Cars represent mobility and portability and of course the possibility of instant death. And freedom, and life.

So I wrote a play about coming out, about cars and salesmanship, about death and God and sexual desire. And a space, perhaps a mini-van, where we dare to tell ourselves the truth, and where we are appalled to find how little it sets us free.

The foregoing is from the introduction to BYU professor Eric Samuelsen's new play, Borderlands, published in the March 2011 edition of Sunstone Magazine. Get yourself a copy of this play, Gentle Reader. You won't regret it. It's one of the best pieces of Mormon-themed art I've read in a long while.

The premier production of the play, by Salt Lake City's Plan-B Theatre Company, just closed this month, after being forced to extend the run another week to meet the demand created by rave reviews.

Samuelsen continues to be humane, insightful, and a force to be reckoned with.

Christus Resurrexit!

2011-04-24T06:43:00.001-07:00

Holy Saturday

2011-04-23T10:32:00.000-07:00

The following is from an early Christian sermon, the text actually pre-dates much of the New Testament:

Something strange is happening––there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the Cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: 'My Lord be with you all.' Christ answered him: 'And with your spirit.' He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: 'Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.'

I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in Hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in Me and I in you; together we form one person and cannot be separated.

For your sake I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, Whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed to the Jews in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.

See on My Face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you. See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in my image. On My back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back. See My hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once ... stretched out your hand to a tree.

I slept on the cross and a sword pierced My side for you who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. ... My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in Hell. The sword that pierced Me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

Rise. Let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly paradise. I will not restore you to that paradise, but will enthrone you in heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God. The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager. The bridal chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.

The Sacrament of Grief: VI

2011-04-20T13:33:00.000-07:00

This is Part VI. Read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.

___________________

Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua... [9]

Vespers begins to wind down, though you might just as well say it approaches the climax, as the brothers sing the doxology and antiphon to the final psalm. The Psalms are generally less familiar to Latter-day Saints. We don’t do much with them. In our Sunday School classes they get a grand total of an hour every four years, and it’s a shame. They are a bit wilder than our usual devotional fare, calling on God to pour out judgment on enemies, sometimes even railing at the Lord. Threaded through the lodes of hope and faith there are fine veins of anger and despair. The Psalms, in short, are emphatically not “correlated.” They have a certain emotional heft and gravitas, they bluntly admit to a messy spiritual reality I feel I could never share over a pulpit. That kind of thing just isn’t done; doubts are to be kept on their shelves in the back until they’ve been resolved, at which point we can bring them out, floating in their sealed and labeled jars, showing them briefly to illustrate a point in a talk or lesson. (It’s the confessional grille again though, isn’t it? It is alienating to see these displays, and know that back at your house the little bastards are still armed with teeth and spines and slow venom.) Perhaps this is why we do not engage the Psalms more fully, resistant as they are to the tidy endings and reliable deus ex machina resolutions we like.

When I began learning psalm chant, I was surprised by the sensation of joining in something larger than myself, even if I was singing alone. I think it was (at least partly) the effect of the unflinching honesty, like the rough hands and lined faces that tell the story of those who daily turned their backs on the rising sun and scorched a trail across a continent. You almost feel like you’ve jumped into a river of prayer that has cascaded down the craggy rockface of centuries. Never is that feeling keener than during the Lord’s Prayer.

While always familiar, I actually only memorized the words of the prayer as a fourteen-year-old. Every summer, my grandparents would hold what they termed a “Mini MTC.” All the grandsons between the ages of 14 and 18 were invited for two weeks of scripture study, farm labor, basic music lessons, talk preparation, Grandma’s home cooking, a little fishing, and the attendant insanity of a herd of teen boys under one roof. I will never understand what possessed two otherwise sane individuals, who had already raised and married-off ten children, who had each served missions in their youth and then two more as a couple, to decide that this was just what they needed to spice their golden years. It must have been a logistical nightmare, and an utterly exhausting ordeal for both of them. And that’s only considering the official schedule; rest assured, there was a whole other list of unsanctioned activities that we engaged in with equal enthusiasm. (One year, eight of us nearly drowned––long story––to say nothing of the eyes and digits we ought to have lost pursuing our aggressive, and fairly successful, firework-cannibalizing/bomb-crafting program.) When we weren’t busy making ourselves generally uninsurable, we also memorized a number of scriptures, among them, the Lord’s Prayer. After those summer sessions, I never really thought much about it much. I certainly did not use it in my personal prayer life.

Now, though, there is something moving about saying the same words that have been formed by so many lips, words passed from parent to child, words whispered at deathbeds, at burials, at weddings, at births. The same words in a thousand different languages, repeated in time of joy or sorrow, in the face of fear or with gratitude for averted disaster, or just to count away the minutes. Words of a long-gone Jewish mystic, or of God Himself, history buzzes with them. When wondering at the Restoration, puzzled by why, of all the searching souls in the world, this uneducated fourteen-year-old should have his (not uncommon) question answered with light and fire, I think perhaps it was also an answer to the billion pleas: “...thy kingdom come...” Even more encouraging, at the beginning of the prayer we find that in spite of all our weakness, in spite of the evil we commit and the evil we allow, Christ is still willing to say with us “Our Father...”

The whole atonement in two words.

___________________

[9] “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done...”

The Sacrament of Grief: V

2011-04-17T14:24:00.000-07:00

This is Part V. Read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

___________________

“Cristo ... brucia e trasforma il male ... nel fuoco del suo amore sofferente.” [8]

José had called the missionaries before the murders, telling them they were not welcome in his home anymore; he did not want them to come back. Newspapers later reported that his motive was jealousy of the time his wife devoted to the church. These descriptions, and what came after, still make no sense to me. I had been in their home, shared meals with them. With my questionable Spanish and Tiago’s occasional translation we were able to communicate pretty well, though there was frequent confusion and laughter. We saw them together at church meetings, peeking into the room where the elders in the Portuguese program taught their Sunday school class. José was fair haired and worked as a carpenter, bringing to mind occasional comparisons with Jesus that I never did say aloud. During the visit I used to wish I could forget, he had become wistful about his home, tearing up while showing us a video of his mom and the house he’d grown up in before coming to the States. He served us a jelly-like candy he had received in a care package, made––I think––from guava. Cutting translucent wedges out of the soft, dark wheel in the green tin, it was too sweet for me, but seemed to match the exotic flora surrounding the tilled fields of his native soil visible on the television screen.

When we left later that evening, I felt what had become, if not common, then at least familiar during the past year. Talks and discussions of Mormon missionary service frequently mention “loving the people,” which sounds like a general feeling of warmth for the segment of humanity you live with and attempt to talk to for two years. But that isn’t true. At least it wasn’t for me. You don’t love “the people,” you love Matt and Beatrice and Joshua, and worry and hope that the ward will be good to them when you’ve gone. You love Elder Robson both for splurging to go halvsies with you on a proper tree to decorate, and for that strange episode when you dissected the baseball together. (And for deciding that you would accompany him in a guitar/piano hymn improvisation for Zone Conference––which rocked, by the way. And for spending fully half of your MSF one month on parking tickets.) You love Elder Paulsen for eating balut with you which nobody had said needed to be cooked, and for not being vindictive when, after choking them down raw, he got so sick and you didn’t. You love Margie, the less-active sister who was always bubbly and sweet, and also completely out of her mind. You love Gary and Susan and wish they would figure out prayer. Much later, you’ll learn that you still haven’t figured out prayer, and feel a belated sense of sympathy, and hope that someday they’ll forgive you for all your impatience and certainty and immaturity. You love Brother and Sister Blanco for their perpetual kindness and for that amazing Christmas dinner that made you forget the waves of homesickness you believed you would drown under. You love a hundred faces you can no longer put a name to, even though you prayed for them and ached for them until you thought that you had finally run out of places inside that could hurt; a hundred men and women who opened up a sliver of their lives to you. And, God help you, you love José––who wept for his home, as you had––who got up morning after morning, took his tool-belt and his hammer to try to build a new life for his family––who, one day, by only two brutal strokes with the same hammer, shattered that life forever––who turned himself in the same night, cradling his baby son, hands and clothing still wet with blood.

___________________

[8] “Christ ... burns and transforms evil ... in the fire of his suffering love.” Homily of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 18 April 2005.

The Sacrament of Grief: IV

2011-04-13T13:16:00.000-07:00

This is Part IV. Read Part I, Part II, and Part III.

___________________

Iuste iudex ultionis, Donum fac remissionis Ante diem rationis. [6]

The sun is bright for the graveside service, and most of us are melting. Beneath the layers of cotton and wool, my body attempts––unsuccessfully––to cool itself. Whatever heavenly engineer thought up the idea of perspiration must not have considered the effects of high-humidity. The discomfort is not entirely bad though. Like attending a Portuguese Mass with my Spanish-speaking ears, it has a certain blunting effect. I make brief eye-contact with some of the familiar faces around me; a few offer wan smiles. Several of us are surprised that the graves will not be dedicated, but the cemetery is owned by the parish. Their turf, their rules. A brother tells me in a near whisper that the dedication will happen later, very discreetly. The revelation is strangely (and inappropriately) amusing. There is something gothic and Van Helsing-esque about the thought of this genial, balding elder’s quorum member breaking into a graveyard to exercise his ninja priesthood in the dead of night, dispatching a zombie for good measure on the way to a home teaching appointment. Like sawdust on running water, the crowd moves away en masse, slowly separating into smaller and smaller companies. One of the more gregarious young women (her dad used to be our ward mission leader) greets me and Elder Latu, and we talk for a moment. All I can remember now is her confidence that God would mete out justice, and the hard set to her jaw and the gun-metal glint in her eye that this conviction gave her. She is probably right, but the thought is not comforting. Despite the heat, something inside feels cold.

Soon we are alone in the car; Elder Latu and I are quiet. The lull seems to dilate until I have to turn the key in the ignition, if only to forestall the hard thoughts, cauled and bloody, that would have been delivered of our silence. The streets here are always under construction. Cold, wet winters and hot, wet summers are hard on asphalt, keeping it in a perpetual state of crumbling disrepair. This, in turn, results in motorists with formidable skills when it comes to high-speed pothole slalom. Worse––for me at any rate, born with no directional sense whatsoever––is the fact that the foundations for the area’s city planning were laid down by cattle, who, even by bovine standards, were more than usually inept at civil engineering. Water and salt trails became major roadways, and then men, infelicitously touched by the same muse that guided their four-legged predecessors, filled in all the gaps with snarled ribbons of brick and pavement worthy of Gordias. (The only practical Alexandrine solution would involve mushroom clouds.) Slowly I realize that I have not been driving aimlessly. Making the few final, familiar turns, we pull in front of Father Simon’s house.

I had first met him as a result of a missionary set-up. An Elder called me one day during lunch to pass along a “referral.” At the appointed hour, we showed up and knocked on the front door of a handsome home in an older area of town. During the past several years, the neighborhood had begun to attract immigrant workers; one building on the street was little better than a flophouse, crammed to the rafters with many who wanted to send the largest possible share of their earnings to foreign family members. Simon’s house, however, retained much of the air it had exuded since its construction in the 1930s––wide pillared porch, white clapboard siding, double front door. We were soon greeted by a man a few inches shorter than myself, with close-trimmed dark hair salted with grey. He invited us in and offered glasses of glacially cold water, which we accepted gratefully, the insistence of thirst overruling the aching objection of teeth. Chitchat soon dispensed with, (they had ceased calling it “BRT-ing” by this time, and we had discarded [read: ritually incinerated] our copies of The Missionary Guide [7]) we prepared to move in for the kill, when Simon unexpectedly asked us if we’d like to see “the chapel.” Tinkling cymbals of alarm began to sound in my head. Following my companion, I ascended the pleasantly creaky staircase to the upper floor and we were soon ushered into a room dominated by a large white and blue altar with a carved “IHS” on the front picked out in gold. Framed stained glass (reclaimed from a renovated church) hung just inside the sash windows, splashing color on the wall opposite and on a small electric organ. There was a single pew, a crowned two-foot sculpture of Our Lady (much nicer than the ubiquitous examples in backyard shrines), and a small picture of our host. Danger, Will Robinson! Looking closer at the little photo, I could see he was wearing a roman collar... greeting a man who looked suspiciously like... the Pope. (Honestly, who else wears a white zucchetto?) Mayday, mayday! Abort!

Well, we soon laughed, and then finished a very pleasant visit admiring the lovely San Damiano-style cross which a friend had painted for him. So began the most important friendship of my life.

Looking at the house now, I feel something I am not able to fit a name to until much later: sanctuary. The Catholic (and particularly monastic) emphasis on the virtue of hospitality is one area for which I feel Stendahl’s notion of “holy envy” most keenly. That is not to suggest that the Latter-day Saints are inhospitable, but the open and unquestioning reception I have experienced when meeting Catholics called to the consecrated life feels like being blessed, like grace––holy as clasped hands and words breathed through woven white, commonplace and restorative as the smell of the bread Mom used to make in enormous sixteen-loaf batches that left every available surface covered with the steaming, butter-brushed mounds. We climb out of the car and knock on the front door, praying that he’s at home. He is, and invites us in. Soon ensconced in the same kitchen chairs with the same icy water I remember, we talk a little. He asks about the funeral, admitting some surprise that our ward mission leader gave the eulogy (technically not part of a Requiem Mass) reading words from the family members, scrawled on a creased and blotched scrap of paper. After a few moments of quiet, Simon tells us, gently, about some of the comments that have been making the rounds on the Portuguese Christian radio programs, how preachers have suggested that the whole tragedy could have been averted if Marta had remained where the Bible says she should have been: at home, in subjection to her husband.

The little ball of cold I felt earlier uncurls and stretches. Deep in the pit of my stomach its limbs reach and, finding purchase, dig in. My visitor is here for the long-haul, putting down roots. I am colonized.

___________________

[6] “Just judge of revenge, give the gift of remission before the day of reckoning.” From the sequence of the Requiem Mass.

[7] A more loathsome document I have rarely had the misfortune to read. Those who will never be forced to use it cannot understand why, for me and some of my companions, the term “more effective” raises hackles to this day. In the MTC we quickly discovered a foolproof method for identifying which of the canned series of responses to a given hypothetical situation was deemed the best: it was the one that made you most wish to knee the speaker in the groin. Every. Damn. Time.

The Sacrament of Grief: III

2011-04-09T17:52:00.000-07:00

This is Part III. Read Part I and Part II.

___________________

Dies illa, dies iræ, calamitatis et miseriæ, dies magna et amara valde. [5]

I cannot stop looking at my watch, even though I know we’ll get there in plenty of time. It also seems that I have forgotten how to knot a necktie and must make a third attempt. This one doesn’t see much use, which is probably why I can’t get the length right, but it is the closest thing I have to plain black. The red paisleys are so tiny they look just like spots if you’re a few paces away. The telephone conversation of three or four days ago plays on a loop in my skull.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, Elder, but Marta’s husband, José, killed her and Tiago last night. We don’t know why. I’m sorry, Elder.” Pres. Lawson must have been speaking a foreign language, because I didn’t understand a word. While still trying to extract some meaning from those incomprehensible sounds, my autopilot whirred into action. I hung up and found the address and time for the funeral on the inside cover of my planner. It looked like my handwriting, but I couldn’t be sure.

I think it was a Tuesday, because Elder Latu drove us to the library to update the forms for that week’s correlation and Ward Council meetings. He went to work silently and completed everything, almost never asking for my input. He was good at reading people, and I was never more grateful for his instincts. I decided that a double homicide must be newsworthy, and so began to look up local newspapers online. Writing that sounds morbid, but the situation felt so unreal that I needed something solid, something like an anchor. It is tempting to think of this as a part of the “denial” stage in the grieving process, but it wasn’t that at all. It was just bewilderment. It felt similar to those moments while doing homework late at night, when a perfectly common word begins to look misspelled. You try to say the word aloud, thinking that will help the meaning and its symbols to coalesce, but they have become unstuck, and the idea, the sounds, and the little dark shapes on the page seem completely, disconcertingly unrelated.

Now, a few days later, the confusion has given way to numbness. Finally getting the tie length correct, I pull on the jacket of my borrowed suit. My father had it made on his mission in the Netherlands. It has worn remarkably well, but it seems strange that it should fit me. Dad is a couple inches taller than I am, but that really isn’t it. He is just so... big, somehow. It doesn’t matter how old I get, I think that I’ll always feel two feet tall in comparison. In this situation, he would know just what to do and say. He would exude, as he always does, a sense of solidity, sturdiness, shoulders squared to bear whatever burdens life presents. Though we disagree on occasion, sometimes profoundly, I have never been able to understand or sympathize when a peer has said, “My dad’s such an idiot,” or something similar. Don’t misunderstand––their dad may very well have been an idiot––I just don’t know what it feels like to think that. It is possible to be angry with my father, but dismissing him is inconceivable. And today, in many ways, I wish he were going to this funeral in my place. Years back, one of his seminary students killed himself; Dad gave the eulogy. An elderly woman in our stake later requested that he give hers as well, several years before she passed away. My funeral participation has been limited to singing, which is fine. I can believe there might be value in trying to infuse tragedy and suffering with a moment of beauty (though you cannot escape some degree of aloofness or artificiality in this; when a singer is moved to real tears, the result is maudlin at best, and an embarrassing, snot-streaked spectacle at worst). When it really works, the singer’s role is somewhat angelic––a brief moment of brightness, ephemeral but leaving hope in its wake. But no matter how nice the song, it cannot do what my dad can: remind us that there is still dirt under our feet, a sky over our heads, and a sun that will rise in the morning; make us feel safe. And in the aftershock of such incomprehensible brutality, that’s what they need to feel––God knows it’s what I need to feel.

Hours later, we make an odd little group, dark suits and nametags in a neat row, in a church with rather unfortunate 70’s styling. (Imagine the MTC with an A-frame roof, and semi-abstract stained glass.) They will have a Catholic funeral because of their extended family, but Marta and Tiago had been Mormon for years. Watching the caskets process toward the front of the church, I am glad that the service will be in Portuguese. I will be able to follow it generally, but there will be a slight language barrier, making everything (I hope) a bit misty, blurring the edges. The worst for me is noticing the surprisingly small dimensions of the second coffin. An eleven-year-old seems to take up much more space when alive. He is carried by some members of the deacon’s quorum he would have joined in a few weeks. It looks like nothing so much as a broken promise; I suppose the death of any child should look the same. Following Pres. Lawson’s lead, we stand and sit with the rest of the congregants, but eschew the kneelers. Sitting (sometimes kneeling) next to me is a man with rough hands in a t-shirt and ripped jeans. Somehow, he doesn’t look out of place––more importantly, he doesn’t look like he feels out of place. He reminds me a little of Sister Z from my first area, who wore slacks to church. The similarity, though, is not in their mild sartorial rebellion. I am sure that caring for her severely handicapped daughter was draining––imagine a young toddler in the body of a thirty-year-old––but when she would laugh and clap or blow bubbles, Sister Z’s face was suffused with a fierce joy, like she had bottled sunshine inside her. During the funeral mass, when it comes time to make the sign of peace, my rough-around-the-edges pew mate takes my hand and smiles in just the same way. It is bright.

I look away first.

___________________

[5] “That day, day of wrath, calamity, and misery, day of great and exceeding bitterness...” From the responsory of the Requiem Mass.

The Sacrament of Grief: II

2011-04-06T14:49:00.000-07:00

This is Part II. Read Part I here.

___________________

Domine labia mea aperies et os meum adnuntiabit laudem tuam. [2]

The sun isn’t quite down yet, but the placement of the windows keeps it dim in the little annex off the cloister. If you lean forward and look right, you can see the white-hooded brothers seated in the choir stalls. It doesn’t seem dusty, but the light that enters the nave has a misty, opal quality, which I can only assume is caused by the glowing shafts’ catching on motes that drift and sail on the viscosity of the air. There is an added amber hue of burning candles, some flickering on nearby stands. The only artificial light is supplied by a few spots focused on the large polychrome crucifix suspended above the altar’s bulk of concrete and masonry. He looks almost like Dalí’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross, floating impossibly in the void.

Visitors are not invited to join in the chanting. A bit disappointing to me, still fresh with a newly-acquired fluency at reading gregorian neumes, but understandable: the cloister is defined by rules as much as by gates and rails and discreet, painted signs. So we listen, borne upon the slow undulations of their prayer. Most of the buildings are brick, yet manage to suggest the austere nobility typical of old-world Cistercian monuments, temples as sere and still and pale as I imagine their builders must have been.

The air is deliciously cool here, and feels more so in contrast to the sticky heat outside. We had walked about the grounds talking, listening for the bells to announce vespers, and now in the quiet I begin to nod off. Chin dropping like it used to sometimes while teaching discussions that first summer in an endless succession of slummy neighborhoods. (We call them “lessons” now, don’t we?) The guilt is a different flavor though. I am being a bad guest. Father Simon didn’t drive us all this way so I could take a nap, but he’ll never say a word about it even if he is offended. Three years earlier, my companion would have elbowed me in the ribs and then laughed on the way back to the apartment. The guilt then was more focused, shrill almost, and it seemed to emanate from the dark plastic of my nametag and the small stapled handbook in the pocket behind it. I don’t think I was alone in that feeling. Why else would my first pair of Zone Leaders have been so adept at that little thumb-flick that sent the tags flipping over their shoulders to land at the back of their truck cab? They used to execute the maneuver in nearly flawless unison, just before making a rude gesture at another driver who’d annoyed them––Pinocchio stamping on that damn cricket. (One of that pair later went on to make the same gesture in a very quietly produced example of missionary cinema: The Second Vision of José [title redacted] was inappropriate, blasphemous, and incredibly funny. It also starred one of my favorite companions. The ZL played our mission president.)

The divine office continues to unroll at its own meditative tempo. When you are just learning, and sometimes later, it is difficult to quiet the pestering voice inside that demands efficiency. For me, I think that voice is part modernity and part Mormonism. It’s really no surprise that constant childhood reminders to be always “anxiously engaged,” followed by a two-year stint evangelizing under perpetual scrutiny, should have this effect. For all the emphasis on spirituality, mission life can hardly be called “contemplative.” There may be some evidence of this tendency too in 2005’s altered initiatory ritual. While changes to the lustration rites likely came in response to a number of different considerations, their streamlining character is undeniable, and something in me rebels at it. Ritual, liturgy, ceremony––these are absurdities, oriented along wholly different lines than the world of budgets and auto-mechanics and the forty-hour work week. Acts of prayer can seem almost seditious [3], undermining the realization of Huxley’s nightmare vision of “Our Ford” and Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy. [4] Being fair, it isn’t only Mormons who struggle with this. Even benedictine monastics cannot help but joke about their Rule, altering the Latin to better reflect their life’s reality: ora et labora, et labora, et labora...

Twenty or thirty minutes of prayer feels much longer than the same time spent in the rat-race. Those with religious vocations can only maintain such habits because their lives are ordered to enable that prayer, and as an outsider, it can be very challenging to adapt to their rhythms. Father Simon tells me, “These things bear fruit in repetition,” and he is right. For much of the prayer life of my youth, “repetition” was anathema, inseparable from its descriptor, “vain.” I would winnow my mind to find new words to carry my mostly unchanging requests and gratitude skyward: “...nourish and strengthen...” “...give us the energy we need...” “...at least not kill us...” (It depended on who had done the cooking.) But this focus on new verbiage was no reliable prophylaxis against artificiality, and my prayers bounced back off the ceiling no less often than usual.

With time, I have grown to love the traditional texts, never praying more sincerely for the grace of charity than when chanting Paul’s beautiful words to the Corinthians. One favorite, the Magnificat, both soothes and challenges. We sang Finzi’s larynx-slaughtering arrangement in choir, and light glinted off still new facets. Praying the line “as he promised to our forefather Abraham” remains thrilling. (It probably has something to do with singing the tenor part, which cuts through dramatically just then.) This openness to repetition also gives me permission to cherish other phrases. Because he has included it in almost every prayer I have heard him offer, only my father can ask correctly “...that we may discern truth from error...” Heard in his voice, those words are tied up with memories of warm hands on the last Sunday before each new school year, hands––less frequently––bearing a drop of consecrated oil, hands with one familiar slightly-too-short forefinger and a wicked zigzag scar (souvenirs left by a temperamental high-pressure paint gun).

My head pops up again, bobbing like the more sparsely-covered pates of a bishopric from my childhood, who on more than one occasion engaged in synchronized church napping when a High Council speaker was being particularly tedious. (“Studying Lehi’s dream,” an Elder I knew liked to call it.) Blinking, I gaze again at the crucifix. That image never loses its impact. How terrible those poor Brothers must feel if they sleep in! I only had a nametag and a handbook to answer to, but this? It is a slap in the face. An accusation. A reminder that these ritual “absurdities” are really a matter of life and death. A matter of Life Himself.

How strange, I think, not for the first time, that victory should look so like defeat.

___________________

[2] “O Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall declare thy praise.” Invitatory to most offices of the Liturgy of the Hours.

[3] “Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.” C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

[4] Though heaven knows that I am not immune to the attraction of something so gloriously named as “Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy.”

The Sacrament of Grief: I

2011-04-04T18:22:00.000-07:00

Last summer, I was lucky enough to be invited to guest post at one of the bloggernacle biggies. The blog in question (apart from being my gateway drug into blogging) has, I think, the most consistently high-quality material in the 'nacle, so it was very nice to get the invite. I have decided to post the same essay here over the next few weeks, because my mind has been dwelling on the events described therein since Lent began. Unfortunately, it still lacks a conclusion, but perhaps revisiting the material will help with that. Here's to hoping.

___________________

Note: Among my many deficiencies as a missionary were my journal keeping habits. These habits were deficient mainly in that they did not exist. The events described are true to the best of my recollection, but there may well be some inaccuracies regarding certain details and timing. Also, names have been changed to protect the innocent. And the guilty.

___________________

Merear, Domine, portare manipulum fletus et doloris... [1]

Both too early and too late, the phone rings. It is after seven o’clock in the morning when Elder Latu picks up the receiver and mumbles a groggy hello.

“Yeah, let me get him, President.”

The magic words. I am suddenly awake. There isn’t much time, so with my hand covering the mouthpiece I run through a few vocal exercises (who knew those lessons would come in handy as a missionary?) making an attempt at not sounding like I just woke up. The success rate of these games is doubtless pretty low, but they are mission etiquette; pretending slightly greater obedience than we practice is really part of how we show respect for Pres. Lawson. He returns the favor by pretending not to notice, and we are both saved from the unpleasantness of chastening. Even now though, part of me wonders if this is what dropped the sheen of awkwardness between us during mission interviews, dangling there like a theater scrim or the grille of a confessional.

“You knew Marta Souza in the Williams ward?”

“Yes, of course. I know Marta.” Spent almost six months in that area.

Had we been up on time, would I have noticed his past-tense? Knew. Maybe the coming shock was part of God’s punishment for sleeping in.

Only three weeks until I go home.

___________________

[1] “Grant, O Lord, that I may bear the maniple of weeping and sorrow...” From the vesting prayers of the Tridentine Mass.

Good Article, Good Timing

2011-03-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

Fascinating, and thoughtful piece in the SLTrib today; give it a look. For me, the money quote came from Philip Barlow:

Disillusionment with LDS leaders “would evaporate,” says Philip Barlow, Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University, “if people saw the church not as essentially divine, marred only by the weaknesses of human administrators, but rather … [as made up] entirely of human beings — with all of their limitations — who are trying to respond to the divine with which they have (in faith) been touched.”

I'm not sure if he's right, but it's an intriguing thought. Could such a change in paradigm be accomplished organically, or would it require active support of Church leaders? If the latter, then I don't ever see it happening — who would intentionally undermine his/her own influence? It's like congress voting to lower their own salaries: highly unlikely.

Prepare yourselves!

2011-02-26T08:36:00.000-08:00

It begins.

__________
HT: BCC Sideblog
The image above is a depiction of the army of Alexander the Great, which seemed... fitting.

A Conundrum

2011-02-09T15:53:00.000-08:00

When debating religion in the past, on several occasions an opponent has attempted to use Rev. 22:18-19 to demonstrate that the canon is closed, and therefore any further LDS scriptures are false by definition. Using such an argument creates an interesting situation: either the opponent is unaware that such a view is untenable in the light of NT scholarship (because, chronologically, Revelation was not the final book of scripture written), or they are aware that the argument is bad, but they use it anyway.

Currently, I find myself in a situation somewhat similar: I cannot decide if the party in question, ostensibly an expert in the realm that his remarks address, is woefully uniformed (perhaps simply illogical), or if he is being blatantly disingenuous.

Either way, his credibility has turned to ash.

A fun one!

2011-01-21T09:00:00.001-08:00

Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy
by Thomas Lux

For some semitropical reason
when the rains fall
relentlessly they fall

into swimming pools, these otherwise
bright and scary
arachnids. They can swim
a little, but not for long

and they can’t climb the ladder out.
They usually drown––but
if you want their favor,
if you believe there is justice,
a reward for not loving

the death of ugly
and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,
rats) creatures, if

you believe these things, then
you would leave a lifebuoy
or two in your swimming pool at night.

And in the morning
you would haul ashore
the huddled, hairy survivors

and escort them
back to the bush, and know,
be assured that at least these saved,
as individuals, would not turn up

again someday
in your hat, drawer,
or the tangled underworld

of your socks, and that even––
when your belief in justice
merges with your belief in dreams––
they may tell the others

in a sign language
four times as subtle
and complicated as man’s

that you are good,
that you love them,
that you would save them again.

Annoyed...

2011-01-10T16:03:00.000-08:00

It's upsetting to watch friends on the cusp of terrible, potentially life-destroying decisions that they are considering largely because of the opinions of a crazy person (who won't live forever anyway). Kowtowing to such insane whims is just nuts. It doesn't matter if one's heart is in the right place or not -- it's irrational to make any more disastrous offerings on the altar of someone else's good intentions.

That is all.

Rilke for a New Year

2011-01-05T06:21:00.000-08:00

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and ... try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet

Karma

2010-12-09T08:45:00.000-08:00

One of the privileges of unclehood is the opportunity to corrupt young minds. Early and often. This is sometimes achieved intentionally. For instance, due to my direct intervention, my almost-four-year-old niece now believes that the correct answer to

Why did the chicken cross the road?

is actually

To die in the rain. Alone.

Sometimes such lessons are inadvertent. After hearing me use a particular word only once, this same niece apparently squirreled it away in her own personal lexicon, only to pull it out a week later when she told her mother:

Princess Jasmine dresses like a floozy!

But fate, it seems, will have her revenge, forcing me to say things that take me by surprise, as though the words were not my own. Just a few days ago, I found myself instructing my young charges:

Don't feed the Baby Jesus to the giant robotic hamster. At least not so close to his birthday.

Just one day too late...

2010-11-23T13:40:00.000-08:00

Arrgh! Of course this would happen. On the day after my birthday, Cake Wrecks posts the picture of the most perfect cake ever! Oh well... I'm totally getting this next year:

Bad touch! Bad touch!

2010-11-19T10:25:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is fast approaching, turkeys are finalizing their wills, and pancreata across the country are training hard for the extended insulin production necessary to keep Uncle Bob and Aunt Jane from collapsing into their green-bean casserole in a diabetic coma.

However, packing a suitcase and making sure not to forget your photo id are not adequate preparation anymore. Travelers need to get geared up mentally, because this year, courtesy of Uncle Sam, we all get to play a psychologically-scarring round of Violation or No Vacation!

In honor of this newest Thanksgiving tradition, a friend sent me a list of suggested slogans for the TSA to adopt. I'm posting them here in order to provide something to distract you from that most terrible of realizations: "Hey, there's a fist in my cornucopia!" So break out the Vaseline and latex gloves, kids, because it's time for a full cavity search!

We've handled more balls than Barney Frank.

Can't see London, can't see France, unless we see your underpants.

Grope discounts available.

If we did our job any better, we'd have to buy you dinner first.

Only we know if Lady Gaga is really a lady.

Don't worry, my hands are still warm from the last guy.

Throw a few back at the airport Chili's and you won't even notice.

Wanna fly? Drop your fly.

We are now free to move about your pants.

We rub you the wrong way, so you can be on your way.

It's not a grope. It's a freedom pat.

When in doubt, we make you whip it out.

TSA: Touchin', Squeezin', Arrestin'.

You were a virgin.

We handle more packages than the USPS.

Something Wonderful

2010-11-13T14:10:00.000-08:00

From Northumbrian Sequence, by Kathleen Raine––

IV

Let in the wind
Let in the rain
Let in the moors tonight.

The storm beats on my window-pane,
Night stands at my bed-foot,
Let in the fear,
Let in the pain,
Let in the trees that toss and groan,
Let in the north tonight.

Let in the nameless formless power
That beats upon my door,
Let in the ice, let in the snow,
The banshee howling on the moor,
The bracken-bush on the bleak hillside,
Let in the dead tonight.

The whistling ghost behind the dyke,
The dead that rot in mire,
Let in the thronging ancestors
The unfulfilled desire,
Let in the wraith of the dead earl,
Let in the unborn tonight.

Let in the cold,
Let in the wet,
Let in the loneliness,
Let in the quick,
Let in the dead,
Let in the unpeopled skies.

Oh how can virgin fingers weave
A covering for the void,
How can my fearful heart conceive
Gigantic solitude?
How can a house so small contain
A company so great?
Let in the dark,
Let in the dead,
Let in your love tonight.

Let in the snow that numbs the grave,
Let in the acorn-tree,
The mountain stream and mountain stone,
Let in the bitter sea.

Fearful is my virgin heart
And frail my virgin form,
And must I then take pity on
The raging of the storm
That rose up from the great abyss
Before the earth was made,
That pours the stars in cataracts
And shakes this violent world?

Let in the fire,
Let in the power,
Let in the invading might.

Gentle must my fingers be
And pitiful my heart
Since I must bind in human form
A living power so great,
A living impulse great and wild
That cries about my house
With all the violence of desire
Desiring this my peace.

Pitiful my heart must hold
The lonely stars at rest,
Have pity on the raven's cry
The torrent and the eagle's wing,
The icy water of the tarn
And on the biting blast.

Let in the wound,
Let in the pain,
Let in your child tonight.

____________________

A (very) few thoughts: Raine is clearly showing the influence of Yeats here. The temptation to read this as some stream-of-consciousness rambling must be resisted, as there are significant signs of careful construction: the progression of thought, the subtle rhyming, etc. (Note, for instance, the rhymes of the first three lines and the last.) I think "pours the stars in cataracts" is particularly fine. It bears multiple readings, but in this section––considered alone––it is impossible not to hear the voice of the post-annunciation Mary.

Shifting sands...

2010-11-12T06:32:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of buzz recently surrounding the new soon-to-be-released-(but-already-leaked) CHI. Having had an opportunity to peruse some of its contents already, I can confirm that––just like every other edition of the CHI––the book is mostly boring. Of course it is. For those who are interested, there are already several posts in the bloggernacle detailing differences between the forthcoming edition and the previous one (promulgated in 2006) on subjects such as priesthood blessings, homosexuality, and the new prohibition on playing Uno. (The post from that last link is so many kinds of awesome.)

The post from Wheat and Tares (linked above under "priesthood blessings") was something of a catalyst for me, mentally, spurring a crystallization of a few previously unconnected thoughts. In short, I think we may be watching a subtle, but significant shift occurring in LDS theology.

Let's begin by first reviewing the pertinent changes to the CHI:

2006:

Brethren who perform ordinances and blessings should prepare themselves by living worthily and striving to be guided by the Holy Spirit.
...
A priesthood leader who oversees an ordinance or blessing ensures that the person who performs it has the necessary priesthood authority, is worthy, and knows and follows the proper procedures.
...
Only brethren who hold the necessary priesthood and are worthy may perform an ordinance or blessing or stand in the circle.
...
Leaders encourage worthy fathers who hold the necessary priesthood to perform or participate in ordinances and blessings for their own children [29, 2006 CHI].

2010:

Only a Melchizedek Priesthood holder who is worthy to hold a temple recommend may act as voice in confirming a person a member of the church, conferring the Melchizedek Priesthood, ordaining a person to an office in that priesthood, or setting apart a person to serve in a church calling.

As guided by the Spirit and the instructions of the next paragraph, bishops and stake presidents have the discretion to allow priesthood holders who are not fully temple worthy to perform or participate in some ordinances and blessings. However, presiding officers should not allow such participation if a priesthood holder has unresolved serious sins.

A bishop may allow a father who holds the Melchizedek Priesthood to name and bless his children even if the father is not fully temple worthy. Likewise, a bishop may allow a father who is a priest or Melchizedek Priesthood holder to baptize his children or to ordain his sons to offices in the Aaronic Priesthood. A Melchizedek Priesthood holder in similar circumstances may be allowed to stand in the circle for the confirmation of his children, for the conferral of the Melchizedek Priesthood on his sons, or for the setting apart of his wife or children. However, he may not act as voice [140, 2010 CHI; italics added].

In the Wheat and Tares post the 2010 guidelines are viewed as being stricter than those from 2006. I would disagree. Part of the argument derives from the words "worthy to hold a temple recommend." Contrary to the W&T post, I do not read this as identical to "must have a temple recommend." Rather, the priesthood holder must meet the requirements, but need not have the actual document. Perhaps this is nit-picking.

However the 2006 text does not presuppose any distinctions regarding degrees or gradations of worthiness; the 2010 text clearly does. I would suggest that the meaning of "worthy", as used in the 2006 CHI, was generally applied in the sense of "temple worthy." That is not to say that there were never exceptions, and I would presume (and hope) that local leaders who feel so inspired would also be willing to make such exceptions, even though the 2010 CHI makes clearer distinctions and more specific recommendations: if inspiration cannot trump policy, we have moved above (or, more likely, below) the need for revelation.

In any case, this policy shift seemed to be related to some thoughts expressed by Dallin H. Oaks in a recent address in General Conference:

Another part of a priesthood blessing is the words of blessing spoken by the elder after he seals the anointing. These words can be very important, but their content is not essential and they are not recorded on the records of the Church....

Ideally, the elder who officiates will be so in tune with the Spirit of the Lord that he will know and declare the will of the Lord in the words of the blessing. Brigham Young taught priesthood holders, “It is your privilege and duty to live so that you know when the word of the Lord is spoken to you and when the mind of the Lord is revealed to you.” When that happens, the spoken blessing is fulfilled literally and miraculously. On some choice occasions I have experienced that certainty of inspiration in a healing blessing and have known that what I was saying was the will of the Lord. However, like most who officiate in healing blessings, I have often struggled with uncertainty on the words I should say. For a variety of causes, every elder experiences increases and decreases in his level of sensitivity to the promptings of the Spirit. Every elder who gives a blessing is subject to influence by what he desires for the person afflicted. Each of these and other mortal imperfections can influence the words we speak.

Fortunately, the words spoken in a healing blessing are not essential to its healing effect. If faith is sufficient and if the Lord wills it, the afflicted person will be healed or blessed whether the officiator speaks those words or not. Conversely, if the officiator yields to personal desire or inexperience and gives commands or words of blessing in excess of what the Lord chooses to bestow according to the faith of the individual, those words will not be fulfilled. Consequently, brethren, no elder should ever hesitate to participate in a healing blessing because of fear that he will not know what to say. The words spoken in a healing blessing can edify and energize the faith of those who hear them, but the effect of the blessing is dependent upon faith and the Lord’s will, not upon the words spoken by the elder who officiated [Priesthood Session, April 2010; italics added].

How often do we hear people speak in tongues? (Yes, yes, I know. Missionaries do it all the time. I am here referring to the variety of speaking in tongues that was more common in the early days of this dispensation, including immediate revelatory interpretation. I am not using "the gift of tongues" in the "what happens when you read books, use flashcards, memorize vocabulary, buy Rosetta Stone™, and study abroad" sense.) Very, very rarely. Most Mormons (like any other sane person*) would feel a little creeped out by attending some the more exuberant varieties of Pentecostal services. In general, LDS attention to and focus on the cultivation of charismatic gifts has waned. That is, we all seek personal revelation, but we already know what the only acceptable answers are.

I wonder if Elder Oaks's GC comments and these revisions to the CHI may indicate further baby steps in that direction. I guess I needn't have brushed up on my snake-dancing skills.

*Yes, my bias is showing––but, luckily, I. DON'T. CARE.

SPOILER ALERT?

2010-11-10T17:28:00.000-08:00

Guess who just procured a digital copy (see here and here) of the brand-spankin'-new Church Handbook of Instructions! It's like opening your mailbox to find that Amazon has sent your copy of the newest Harry Potter novel a week early!

(However, that I could write the foregoing––and mean it––is a sad, saaaaad testament to the bottomless depths of my nerdiness. Sigh.)

[UPDATED!] Interrupting this regularly scheduled update...

2010-11-09T07:14:00.000-08:00

CLARIFICATION FROM LDS NEWSROOM BLOG:

This weekend, an AOL article reported that Haitians displaced by flooding caused by Hurricane Tomas were not allowed shelter in a Church meetinghouse in Leogane, Haiti. The fact is that other Church buildings in Haiti were used as public shelters, and arrangements had been made for this particular building to be used by a government agency to respond to the disaster. Because of this arrangement, it was unclear to some whether the building could also be used as a public shelter.... The report of this event obviously describes an isolated aberration (emphasis mine).

_____________

Original post follows:

Note: I'm really, really hoping that there is more to this story, perhaps some explanation that will cast the situation in a new light. I will be sure to update as soon as I find/read/hear anything, and I'll be keeping an eye on the Church's Newsroom site.

I had a post planned about a possible (and subtle) shift concerning LDS priesthood doctrine, but then I read an article that left me stunned. It's not often that a news item induces that breathless, punched-in-the-gut sensation, but this one did. And how.

LEOGANE, Haiti (Nov. 8) -- The water in Haiti's seaside town of Leogane rose to the doorsteps of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But if you're local, and homeless, you needn't have bothered coming here for help. Help is for Mormons only.

...

The LDS church is one of the biggest and most modern buildings in Leogane, with the capacity to safely hold and protect 200. The church's hurricane policy? Only church members can seek shelter there. On Friday, 36 congregants and family members slept at the church.

...

"It's not shelter, it's a Mormon church," a church employee said.

Read it and weep.

Really.

Never say never.

Oh.

2010-10-07T23:42:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid that there are some other updates I missed. What a month.

Cody J. Barker, 17

Felix Sacco, 17

Harrison Chase Brown, 15

Alec Henrikson, 18

Interesting Weekend (UPDATED!)

2010-10-07T23:30:00.000-07:00

See here.

Interesting Evening

2010-10-06T22:22:00.000-07:00

After having been very whiny for the past couple of days (as is my wont), I find myself––most unexpectedly––feeling very, very grateful.

When God was assigning families, I really lucked out.

When God was arranging friendships, he was tremendously generous.

And when it seems that I haven't had a glimpse of him in far too long, I find he has left fingerprints in the most surprising places.

“I sought to hear the voice of God and climbed the topmost steeple, but God declared: ‘Go down again––I dwell among the people.’”

––Blessed John Henry Newman

Interesting Weekend (UPDATED!)

2010-10-05T15:28:00.000-07:00

And the thick plottens! Elder Packer's talk has undergone some editing between being delivered and being posted online. The changes are subtle, but (I think) significant. It was very considerate of Elder Packer (and anyone else who was involved in the changes). For more information and discussion, see here.

Alma 30:44:

“...all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it ... do witness that there is a Supreme Creator.”

Wikipedia:

Some anglerfishes employ an unusual mating method. When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females, and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were highly reduced male ceratioids.

At birth, male ceratioids are already equipped with extremely well developed olfactory organs that detect scents in the water. The male ceratoid lives solely to find and mate with a female. They are significantly smaller than a female angler fish, and may have trouble finding food in the deep sea. Furthermore, the growth of the alimentary canals of some males becomes stunted, preventing them from feeding. These features necessitate his quickly finding a female anglerfish to prevent death. The sensitive olfactory organs help the male to detect the pheromones that signal the proximity of a female anglerfish. When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then slowly atrophies, first losing his digestive organs, then his brain, heart, and eyes, and ends as nothing more than a pair of gonads, which release sperm in response to hormones in the female's bloodstream indicating egg release. Multiple males can be incorporated into a single female.

Boyd K. Packer:

“Why would our heavenly father do that to anyone?”

Why, indeed?

Billy Lucas, 15, hanged.

Seth Walsh, 13, hanged.

Tyler Clementi, 18, jumped from a bridge.

Asher Brown, 13, gunshot.

Raymond Chase, 19, hanged.

Why, indeed?

George Q. Cannon, 1897:

[A]bominable crimes are being practiced. How will these be stopped? Only by the destruction of those who practice them.

Ernest L. Wilkison, 1965:

We do not intend to admit to our campus any homosexuals.... We do not want others on this campus to be contaminated by your presence.

Boyd K. Packer, 1978:

[W]e will be able to correct this condition routinely.... the cause when found, will turn out to be a very typical form of selfishness.... It is very possible to cure it by treating selfishness.

Hartman Rector, Jr., 1983:

That’s right, brothers and sisters, I am referring to the mother of all evil, putrid, and vile sins––homosexuality. You know, Satan himself is a homosexual.

Dallin H. Oaks, 2006:

[To a hypothetical gay son or daughter:] Yes, come, but don’t expect to stay overnight. Don’t expect to be a lengthy house guest. Don’t expect us to take you out and introduce you to our friends, or to deal with you in a public situation.

Why, indeed?

Facepalm

2010-09-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

Why is BYU made of FAIL‽

From a student article in BYU's Daily Universe:

Defending Proposition 8—It’s time to admit the reasons

By CARY CRALL

Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the recent United States District Court case that overturned Proposition 8, highlighted a disturbing inconsistency in the pro-Prop. 8 camp.

The arguments put forth so aggressively by the Protect Marriage coalition and by LDS church leaders at all levels of church organization during the campaign were noticeably absent from the proceedings of the trial. This discrepancy between the arguments in favor of Proposition 8 presented to voters and the arguments presented in court shows that at some point, proponents of Prop. 8 stopped believing in their purported rational and non-religious arguments for the amendment.

Claims that defeat of Prop. 8 would force religious organizations to recognize homosexual marriages and perform such marriages in their privately owned facilities, including LDS temples, were never mentioned in court. Similarly, the defense was unable to find a single expert witness willing to testify that state-recognized homosexual marriage would lead to forcing religious adoption agencies to allow homosexual parents to adopt children or that children would be required to learn about homosexual marriage in school.

Four of the proponents’ six expert witnesses who may have been planning on testifying to these points withdrew as witnesses on the first day of the trial. Why did they go and why did no one step up to replace them? Perhaps it is because they knew that their arguments would suffer much the same fate as those of David Blankenhorn and Kenneth Miller, the two expert witnesses who did agree to testify.

Judge Vaughn Walker, who heard the case, spent 11 pages of his 138-page decision meticulously tearing down every argument advanced by Blankenhorn before concluding that his testimony was “unreliable and entitled to essentially no weight.” Miller suffered similar censure after it was shown that he was unfamiliar with even basic sources on the subject in which he sought to testify as an expert.

The court was left with lopsided, persuasive testimony leading to the conclusion that Proposition 8 was not in the interest of the state and was discriminatory against gays and lesbians. Walker’s decision is a must-read for anyone who is yet to be convinced of this opinion. The question remains that if proponents of Prop. 8 were both unwilling and unable to support even one rational argument in favor of the amendment in court, why did they seek to present their arguments as rational during the campaign?

It is time for LDS supporters of Prop. 8 to be honest about their reasons for supporting the amendment. It’s not about adoption rights, or the first amendment or tradition. These arguments were not found worthy of the standards for finding facts set up by our judicial system. The real reason is that a man who most of us believe is a prophet of God told us to support the amendment. We must accept this explanation, along with all its consequences for good or ill on our own relationship with God and his children here on earth. Maybe then we will stop thoughtlessly spouting reasons that are offensive to gays and lesbians and indefensible to those not of our faith.

A few hours after the article was published, it was removed from the site. The explanation?

The Daily Universe made an independent decision to remove the student viewpoint titled “Defending Proposition 8” after being alerted by various readers that the content of the editorial was offensive. The publication of this viewpoint was not intended to offend, but after further review we recognized that it contained offensive content. This is consistent with policy that The Daily Universe has, on rare occasions, exercised in the past.

"Independent decision," huh? The lady doth protest too much, methinks. The fact they even felt the need to emphasize that the decision was "independent" strongly suggests that it was anything but. As Morris Thurston wrote elsewhere: "It seems obvious that it was taken down not because a few students objected to it, but because people in authority objected to it."

My request (and many requests by others) for some clarification as to what was deemed "offensive" has gone, most unsurprisingly, unanswered. BYU journalism students should take note, though: Deseret News has just had a massive lay-off, cutting their staff in half, so it's very possible that BYU journalists may actually be forced to find work at real newspapers (God forbid!) where the overarching editorial style is not Pollyanna's Glad Game, where fact is valued over positive thinking, and rationality is more important than being faith-promoting.

Finally, this whole debacle illustrates precisely why I hate it when Mormons and Mormon institutions try to dissemble––the dishonesty doesn't bother me, it's the fact that they're just so damn bad at it.

[And, yeah, I did use an interrobang in the first sentence––thanks for noticing!]

Daniel, Isaac, and Neal

2010-08-30T18:54:00.000-07:00

A very interesting point to consider in light of the ubiquitous "the world is getting steadily more awful" meme we often hear in religious discussion. (This attitude or presumption is even more influential in faiths with a strong millennialist streak, such as Mormonism.)

The author, depicted with (counterclockwise from upper left) Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Sophia of Hanover and William of Orange.

Aboard ship, our protagonist, Daniel, morbidly ponders the possibility of a wreck as he continues to record his memoirs of his university education with his friend Isaac Newton––specifically regarding the new (and more accurate) sundial they built.

From Quicksilver, Vol. 1 of The Baroque Cycle, by the brilliant and inimitable Neal Stephenson:

One cannot board a ship without imagining ship-wreck. Daniel envisions it as being like an opera, lasting several hours and proceeding through a series of Acts.

Act I: The hero rises to clear skies and smooth sailing. The sun is following a smooth and well-understood cœlestial curve, the sea is a plane, sailors are strumming guitars and carving objets d'art from walrus tusks, et cetera, while erudite passengers take the air and muse about grand philosophical themes.

Act II: A change in the weather is predicted based upon readings in the captain's barometer. Hours later it appears in the distance, a formation of clouds that is observed, sketched, and analyzed. Sailors cheerfully prepare for weather.

Act III: The storm hits. Changes are noted on the barometer, thermometer, clinometer, compass, and other instruments––cœlestial bodies are, however, no longer visible––the sky is a boiling chaos torn unpredictably by bolts––the sea is rough, the ship heaves, the cargo remains tied safely down, but most passengers are too ill or worried to think. The sailors are all working without rest––some of them sacrifice chickens in hopes of appeasing their gods. The rigging glows with St. Elmo's Fire––this is attributed to supernatural forces.

Act IV: The masts snap and the rudder goes missing. There is panic. Lives are already being lost, but it is not known how many. Cannons and casks are careering randomly about, making it impossible to guess who'll be alive and who dead ten seconds from now. The compass, barometer, et cetera, are all destroyed and the records of their readings swept overboard––maps dissolve––sailors are helpless––those who are still alive and sentient can think of nothing to do but pray.

Act V: The ship is no more. Survivors cling to casks and planks, fighting off the less fortunate and leaving them to drown. Everyone has reverted to a feral state of terror and misery. Huge waves shove them around without any pattern, carnivorous fish use living persons as food. There is no relief in sight, or even imaginable.

––There might also be an Act VI in which everyone was dead, but it wouldn't make for good opera so Daniel omits it.

Men of his generation were born during Act V* and raised in Act IV. As students, they huddled in a small vulnerable bubble of Act III. The human race has, actually, been in Act V for most of history and has recently accomplished the miraculous feat of assembling splintered planks afloat on a stormy sea into a sailing-ship and then, having climbed onboard it, building instruments with which to measure the world, and then finding a kind of regularity in those measurements. When they were at Cambridge, Newton was surrounded by a personal nimbus of Act II and was well on his way to Act I.

But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true––that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place––that men had made a reasonably trouble-free move from the Garden of Eden to the Athens of Plato and Aristotle, stopping over in the Holy Land to encrypt the secrets of the Universe in the pages of the Bible, and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since [emphasis mine]. Cambridge was run by a mixture of fogeys too old to be considered dangerous, and Puritans who had been packed into the place by Cromwell after he'd purged all the people he did consider dangerous. With a few exceptions such as Isaac Barrow, none of them would have had any use for Isaac's sundial, because it didn't look like an old sundial, and they'd prefer telling time wrong the Classical way to telling it right the newfangled way. The curves that Newton plotted on the wall were a methodical document of their wrongness––a manifesto like Luther's theses on the church-door.

*In England, the Civil War that brought Cromwell to power, and on the Continent, the Thirty Years' War.

Mosquerade

2010-08-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but I am in the mood for some serious refudiation today!

By now, unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard about the attempts to build a mosque/community center at or near the site of the World Trade Center buildings (or where they used to be).

In legal terms, the situation is quite simple: if they own the property and that property is correctly zoned, they can build whatever the hell they want.

If we want to concern ourselves with sensitivity or decorousness, things get a bit more complicated. There are lots of opinions on the subject; both sides have marshaled numerous arguments to their defense. However, I would like to address just one thing that has come up repeatedly, which I found irksome.

When someone says that the mosque site is just too close, their opponents will frequently say something along the lines of "Well, how far away is far enough?" That argument is just too smug for my liking. The suggestion, of course, is that "too close" is basically meaningless, because nobody will be able to make a rational argument explaining that, while two blocks is too close, three blocks (or whatever) would be fine. If the refudiators cannot offer a specific acceptable radius –– and of course they can't –– then their opponents feel they've won. Game, set, match. But they'd be wrong.

Let's do an experiment. You'll need a box of matches or toothpicks and a few friends. Begin to put the matches/toothpicks on a table, one at a time, stacking them roughly on top of each other. Tell your friend to say stop when you have made a "pile." Repeat with your other friends. Chances are, they will have stopped you at different points in the process. So, how many toothpicks does it take to make a pile? 5? 6? 83? Attempting to pick a specific number will always be arbitrary. However, that does not mean that the word or concept of a "pile" is worthless.

Trying to draw a line at the outer radius of a "too close to ground zero" zone is going to be arbitrary too. But that does not mean that there's no such thing as "too close." Mosque proponents ought to acknowledge that, instead of wasting time with semantic games whose sole benefit is ego-stroking, but which do nothing to promote understanding or further the possibility of a fair and amicable resolution.

Diagnosis and Solution

2010-08-16T17:39:00.000-07:00

The problem.

The cure.

You're welcome. It's just what I do: "Fixing the world, one indecent exposure at a time."

Don't you just LOVE Lewis?

2010-08-07T18:58:00.000-07:00

I've just read a most fascinating quote. It comes from Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis:

Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question––how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.

You know, I think that's just a capital idea.

Now, I CAN say I'm surprised...

2010-08-05T01:55:00.000-07:00

L.A. Times headline: Judge strikes down Prop. 8, allows gay marriage in California

My only comment: "Wow. I wasn't expecting that."

I may have more comments later, but it's 3 AM, so I'm gonna sleep on it.

I can't say I'm surprised...

2010-08-01T22:54:00.001-07:00

First, read this article. Can you tell what's missing? The holes aren't just in the article either––almost every comment that mentioned any of those holes has also been "moderated." The Deseret News echo-chamber apparatchiki once again behave with all the journalistic integrity of Stephen Glass.

Enjoy this sampling of comments that the moderator felt were allowable:

LJ | 7:46 a.m. July 30, 2010
I also choose to remember the good in people. Thank you Deseret News for showing respect to George's children and grand children at this sensitive time.

JBs | 7:54 a.m. July 31, 2010
Good post, Tony. And a very classy way to handle this, DesNews. Thanks!

dung beetle | 8:33 a.m. July 31, 2010
Yes, George lost his way and the Lord and the Church lost a great servant when he would not retrace his footsteps. He has to deal with the consequences. We can mourn his losses (and ours) without remembering the ugliness. Let the Trib deal with that - they do it so well.

daizy | 10:45 a.m. July 31, 2010
This is nothing to make an issue of. Stop this!

countrygirl | 6:12 p.m. July 31, 2010
my sympathy and prayers go to the family of Elder Lee. There are so many positive and uplifting thoughts floating around 'out there', so I choose to think positive and uplifting thoughts. When I leave this earth, I would sure love it, if people remember the good things I might have said or done. I too have a very dear person in mind, who was instrumental in teaching my husband the Gospel and thereby changing his life forever for the better, this person some not so smart things later in his life, but that doesn't detract from the good he did for us and others. God knows our hearts, he knew us before we were born.

Californian#1@94131 | 7:37 p.m. July 31, 2010
The Trib and most of its forum posters never miss a chance to heap mud on anyone or anything Mormon, and some of the posters here ought to go and stay over there.

Just lovely. I particularly like the shrill demand from "daizy." On the website, it's impossible to see what got her so upset, since almost every comment that even mentioned the "issue" she so disliked is now no longer there. Simply put, it is not the responsibility of journalism to "choose to remember the good [only]," to never remember "the ugliness," or "to think positive and uplifting thoughts." Nor is the suppression of pertinent information "classy." To report facts is not to "heap mud," and the facts (that the ex-General Authority in question was excommunicated and later convicted of molesting a little girl) absolutely ARE something "to make an issue of."

The article was not a eulogy. It was a NEWS item, printed in a publication that is still (ostensibly) a NEWSpaper. The omissions in the article were not minor––they were like writing a book on the Bush administration, but never mentioning 9/11 or the Iraq War.

It is disappointing that the Deseret News has chosen to behave as though there is no elephant in the room, because now that elephant casts a substantial shadow over the question of their professional ethics.

I like the adage that (good) "fiction uses lies to tell the truth." Too often, the Deseret News does precisely the opposite.

A New Favorite

2010-07-21T16:05:00.000-07:00

Fanfare for the Makers
Louis MacNeice

A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what?
To the small fire that never leaves the sky.
To the great fire that boils the daily pot.

To all the things we are not remembered by,
Which we remember and bless. To all the things
That will not notice when we die,

Yet lend the passing moment words and wings.

–––––––––––
So fanfare for the Makers: who compose
A book of words or deeds who runs may write
As many who do run, as a family grows

At times like sunflowers turning towards the light.
As sometimes in the blackout and the raids
One joke composed an island in the night.

As sometimes one man’s kindness pervades
A room or house or village, as sometimes
Merely to tighten screws or sharpen blades

Can catch a meaning, as to hear the chimes
At midnight means to share them, as one man
In old age plants an avenue of limes

And before they bloom can smell them, before they span
The road can walk beneath the perfected arch,
The merest greenprint when the lives began

Of those who walk there with him, as in default
Of coffee men grind acorns, as in despite
Of all assaults conscripts counter assault,

As mothers sit up late night after night
Moulding a life, as miners day by day
Descend blind shafts, as a boy may flaunt his kite

In an empty nonchalant sky, as anglers play
Their fish, as workers work and can take pride
In spending sweat before they draw their pay.

As horsemen fashion horses while they ride,
As climbers climb a peak because it is there,
As life can be confirmed even in suicide:

To make is such. Let us make. And set the weather fair.

Improvements

2010-06-21T22:08:00.000-07:00

Have any of you seen this monstrosity? Yeah, now they're selling it in the BYU bookstore. [Dry heaves.]*

But it's okay, because somebody made it better.

And then somebody perfected it!

–––––––––––––––––––
*Be careful, every time somebody looks at that painting with any reaction other than revulsion, an angel is infected with syphilis.

Fat and Happy

2010-06-18T19:42:00.000-07:00

Just got back from Seth's celestial birthday dinner:

Braised beef shortrib on polenta with pan jus and horseradish cream

Fingerling potatoes with chimichuri and lime mayonnaise

Pizza with roasted leeks, mushrooms, and corn (sounds weird, but was wonderful)

Pizza with speck (ham cured and flavored with juniper), sopprassata, garlic, tomato, and hand-pulled mozzarella

Rooibos tea

Amazing food, enjoyed with some of my favorite people in the world. Now it's naptime.

Best. Song. Ever.

2010-06-10T17:03:00.000-07:00

Trinity Sunday?

2010-05-29T17:52:00.000-07:00

In the broader Christian world (at least those brands of Christianity with the decency to have a liturgical year) tomorrow (well, starting this evening, really) is Trinity Sunday. This focus on the members of the Godhead makes sense liturgically: Easter––Ascension (Jesus), Pentecost (Holy Ghost), and now a feast about all three of Them (or all One of Them, depending on how you look at it.);-)

Saying, "all three of Them," probably set my own patron saint revolving in his grave; he hated a certain heresy so much, he took the opportunity at the Council of Nicea to smack Arius in the face. And that brings us very neatly back to the point, as the Arian heresy tends to form a part of many LDS folks' concept of deity. (It's the notion that the Son is somehow less divine than the Father––a part of the McConkie school of thought; note that this is different than saying the Son subjects Himself to the will of the Father, which is Biblical.)

We Mormons tend to over-emphasize the distinctions between the various members of the Godhead. In fact, we often use the term "separate," which is not helpful in clarifying our beliefs for those of other faiths. (This is part of a larger problem of defining various shared theological words differently than most Christians, and then––even among ourselves––not using those words with much precision or consistence. For example, consider the word "spirit," which we use to refer to the third member of the Godhead, the Light of Christ [itself a problematic term], the general atmosphere ["a special spirit," or "you've brought a wonderful spirit to this meeting," are common uses], or the individual non-[or, for Mormons, less-]material immortal part of every person. Sheesh.)

It's understandable that we should want to be clear about our uniquely-Mormon beliefs, but frequently we swing the pendulum too far, resulting in an equal (but opposite) doctrinal confusion. After all, the Book of Mormon takes pains to emphasize that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are "One God."

Similarly, most of our dismissals of the Trinity are really straw men. So we argue against a "doctrine" that orthodox Christians do not actually profess. (To be fair, I have spoken with many protestant Christians who, while trying to define the Trinity, actually teach modalism––also called the Sabellian heresy.)

Given the extremely broad spectrum of belief possible under the Mormon umbrella, you'd be surprised how closely we can approach the doctrines accepted by our brothers and sisters who dwell in different theological terrain. You may find this article by Blake Ostler pretty eye-opening!

Finally, when we consider our doctrinal differences, we may be straining at theoretical gnats, but swallowing our own behavioral camels. We should take counsel from (and comfort in) two relevant quotes:

What soul ever perished for believing that God the Father really has a beard?

––C.S. Lewis

I never hear of a man being damned for believing too much.

––Joseph Smith

Just for fun...

2010-05-21T15:09:00.000-07:00

As the sun sets...

2010-04-04T22:20:00.000-07:00

...on the first day of this Easter season, I offer two pieces, both choral adaptations of originally instrumental works set to texts of the Requiem.

Agnus Dei
(Adapted from Barber's stunning "Adagio for Strings," it's probably too long––and too difficult––to be practical in an actual liturgy, which is a crying shame.)

Text:
Agnus Dei, qui tollis pecatta mundi
dona eis requiem.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,
dona eis requiem sempitername.

O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,
Grant them rest.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,
Grant them eternal rest.

Lux Aeterna
(Adapted from "Nimrod," of Elgar's "Enigma Variations"––I've sung this one, and it's far more challenging than it sounds actually! Ignore the silly slide-show that accompanies it.)

Text:
Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine,
cum sanctis tuis in aeternum,
quia pius es.
Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis,
quia pius es.

Let everlasting light shine upon them, Lord,
with Thy saints for ever,
for Thou art merciful.
Grant them eternal rest, Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them,
for Thou art merciful.

Easter

2010-04-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

One of my Easter traditions is to re-read the following essay by Eugene England. It never fails to move me. I hope you enjoy it.

Easter Weekend
It might have been 1986, because Easter came in March and I was on my way to Montreal. But I went to see Dustin Hoffman in The Death of a Salesman (bought a ticket at the last minute from a scalper), so it must have been two years earlier on my way to Boston. When I left the theater Wednesday afternoon, I walked east along Forty-second toward the small circulating library on Forty-first and Fifth Avenue, where I was to wait for Greg Reece, a young friend who had lived with us for awhile and now worked in New York. I grinned as I watched the confidence games being played by sidewalk hustlers––giant showy posters and pirated tapes for sale, and shell games of various kinds, especially the one using three cards on a cardboard tray held by a strap around the neck. I knew the games were basic small cons that worked on tourist gullibility and greed, and I went by without even stopping. But then I decided to get a snack, jaywalked to the Burger King for some french fries, and came out right onto a game in progress.

There were three black locals and the obvious mark––a white, thin-faced tourist. I watched, munching and smiling to myself, as the dealer placed three different cards on his tray, one the ten of clubs, then turned them over and shuffled them. The three others could place twenty dollars or more on the tray, then guess which card was the ten and turn it over. If they were right, the dealer matched what they had put down; if not, he took it. The other two locals––one an older man, with a startling band of pure white hair frizzed out between his black beret and his neck, and the other, perhaps twenty, in royal blue stretch pants––won occasionally, but the tourist kept missing, even though it seemed to me quite easy to follow the movement of the cards. In fact, every time he missed and wiped his hand nervously on his red tie I congratulated myself that I had guessed right.

As I became engrossed, the dealer began to ask me after each miss if I knew where the ten was, and I said "Sure" and pointed to it––correct every time. Slowly the bets got larger and the dealer, keeping up a constant patter about how easy it was ("See how often these guys win?"), began to chide the tourist for his misses ("See how this guy," pointing to me, "does it."). Finally, after the tourist missed on a sixty dollar bet, the dealer asked me to point out the ten without turning it over. "Just look under a corner and see if you're right." I said I was, and he said, "Show this guy. Put down sixty dollars, turn over the card again, and you can win." I refused ("That wouldn't be fair to you," I said), so he had Black Beret do it and win sixty dollars. They all made fun of me, and some others now gathering around did, too.

I felt my heart going, pulsing in my head as the game continued, and then the same sequence developed again: a miss by Red Tie, constant patter, invitation to look (right again), then insistence by all that I turn up the card again and take the sure winner. I thought of the ticket I'd bought for Death of a Salesman, four times what I had ever paid for a play before, and I thought about other plays I wanted to see. I took out my wallet, looked down to count––$149 for all the rest of the trip––and watched myself put out the sixty dollars and turn over the card. Three of diamonds.

I was dazed. The game went on without a hitch––mostly wins by Black Beret and Stretch Pants, losses by Red Tie. The pace accelerated and the crowd was growing and talking, some commiserating with me. I tried to pull away. The patter motored on, and I knew the panic of loss, of betrayal, of desire. I wanted everything to stop. I wanted bitterly not to have lost, to be back at Burger King before all this, to have watched the cards more carefully. But I could still see, as a great calm in the frenzy of talk and shuffling, the cards––and how right I was each time. The patter focused more on me. "Turn it over. See, you're right. Put your money on it. I owe you one, I'll make it up to you, this time three for one." Black Beret was helpful, like a kind uncle: "Do it," he whispered. "He wants you to win it back––it'll get the crowd with him." The dealer's eyes were enlarged, protruding, the mouth constant. I looked into my wallet and––with a lurch––put sixty dollars down and turned the card over. Six of hearts.

"No, look, it's this one," said Black Beret, sympathetically, turning over the ten. The crowd jammed in and swelled its noise. "That isn't fair, you promised him." "Mind your business," snarled the dealer––then, with a quick glance toward Fifth Avenue, "Oh, oh, cops coming." The crowd left, and the dealer, Black Beret, Stretch Pants, and Red Tie walked quickly together toward Broadway, leaving me frozen, spent, swirling in a tempest, damned, gaping, clear only about one thing––I was the mark, the only mark.

As I stood there and then walked east I was absolutely serene and absolutely violated: calm, unsurprised to see no police descending on the illegal game, intensely aware of people, food carts, lights, dimming sky––but cordoned off, invisible. I walked down Fifth Avenue to the library and went up to the reading room and got out my paper for the Shakespeare meetings to go over until Greg came, but I could not see the words.

I watched a lady across the table in a print dress and imitation fur-collared coat that she kept partly buttoned. She had notebooks and folders full of bills and receipts and lists and slips that she kept shuffling and restacking and poring over and making new lists from. At first I thought she was balancing her checkbook, but she kept going over the same things, shifting in her chair, restacking the lists, sighing, copying new figures, pursing her lips, returning to the notebooks and then the slips of paper, erasing, writing, always intent. I couldn't tell what she was doing. I had to stop watching.

* * *
Greg and I walked back along Forty-second, past Burger King to Broadway, where we went underground and caught the B train local up to Seventy-ninth. Greg could see something was wrong but didn't pry, just stopped suddenly––twice––to look at me as we talked, once putting his hand on my shoulder. We got off and walked back to Seventh-sixth, where he had booked tickets for Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind at the Promenade. (But that was 1986, wasn't it?) "I'm a little short on cash. Can I send you a check?" I asked, and he said sure and didn't object when I suggested that, instead of going to dinner before the play, we walk down to Lincoln Center and see the Chagall windows in Avery Fisher Hall and grab a soft pretzel with mustard on the way ("My favorite tourist indulgence," I said with just the right touch of self-mockery). My mind had come unfrozen enough to begin to calculate how I could make it home on my remaining twenty-nine dollars cash without getting any more money or admitting my plight––and in a way that would make me suffer (that seemed very important): One dollar for the subway, one for the pretzel, another dollar fare to Greg's apartment in Brooklyn after the play.

But what about getting to the airport? As we walked, Greg filled me in on his job with a new TV production company, but he could tell I was preoccupied. "How can I get to LaGuardia from your place by 7:30 in the morning?" I suddenly asked. (That must have been 1984). He stopped and looked at me, then went on. "Well, you can sleep in, have one of my great breakfasts, and take a taxi right up there, maybe twenty minutes," he said. "Or you can get up at 5:00, leave me asleep, grab a piece of toast, and take the subway back in here and then out to the airport––give yourself two hours." After a moment, seeing I was serious, he added, "The taxi is twenty dollars, the subway plus the bus from the nearest stop is two."

Back at the theater, Greg told me we were in the old Manhattan Ward meetinghouse. He pointed to the unusual arched doorways and alcoves and blocked-in windows as we went through the foyer and up the stairs into the main theater. When my eyes adjusted I could see the huge encompassing arches on four sides that had framed the original chapel and supported the dome above. The space was now filled on three sides with banks of seats, with a wide stage on the fourth side and a catwalk above. In the program I read, "First constructed in 1928 as a Mormon Church, the building was refurbished and officially opened as the Promenade Theatre in 1969. ... New York's only Off-Broadway theatre on Broadway."

Shepard's play, one of his earliest, is a preparation for the more well-known Fool for Love; both plays chart the agony of Western misfits, grotesque and universal in their irrational revenges and bizarre, literally or spiritually incestuous, loves. Greg doesn't like Shepard's work and had gotten the tickets after my phone call only out of kindness, but I find Shepard the most attractive as well as troubling new American dramatist. He is willing to use the bleak lives and dry landscapes and tacky motels and vicious words that are one part of a section of America usually neglected in drama, the twentieth century West I grew up in. And he does not merely imitate those lives but invests them believably with the great human themes of love and death and with passages of poetry and even occasional, quite "unrealistic" but believable epiphanies. For instance, at the end of this play, Jake, who has nearly killed and then deserted his wife in one of his recurrent fits of jealousy, returns to tell her that her reality, the truth of her generous, ingenuous being that has so infuriated him, is also what makes all other ideas and presences unreal, merely a lie of his mind. In an act of amazing mercy that her unique reality has taught him and finally made possible for him to do, he gives his life to preserve her––and in doing so finally changes himself.

* * *
It hurts very much to think of you. How could you suffer not only our pains but our sicknesses and infirmities? Did you actually become sick and infirm or merely feel, with your greater imagination, something like what we feel when we are sick and infirm? But could you actually "know according to the flesh," as you say, if you didn't literally experience everything with your body? And if you did literally experience our infirmities, did you know our greatest one, sin? Everyone says you didn't sin, that you were always perfect. But how then could you learn how to help us? And yet if you did sin, if you actually became sick and infirm and unwilling, for a moment, to do what you knew was right, how does that help us? I don't want you to hurt like this, like I do now, to be ashamed, to hate the detailed, quotidian past. Yet I want you to know the worst of me, the worst of me possible, and still love me, still accept me––like a lovely, terrible drill, tearing me all the way down inside the root, until all the decay and then all the pulp and nerve and all the pain are gone.

Can't you tell us directly, without all the mystery and contradiction, if what I feel is right? Could it be that your very willingness to know the actual pain and confusion and despair of sin, to join with us fully, is what saves us? It's true, I feel your condescension in that; I feel you coming down from your formidable, separate height as my Judge and Conscience. I feel you next to me as my friend. Did it happen in Gethsemane, when you turned away from your father and your mission for just a moment? I think so. So how can I refuse to accept myself, refuse to be whole again, if you, though my Judge whom I hide from, know exactly what I feel and still accept me? Yet it hurts so much to hear you tell of your pain to Joseph Smith, when you remember that moment in the Garden. You say, "Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit––and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink––Nevertheless, glory be to the Father, and I partook and finished my preparations unto the children of men."

Was that preparation so painful, even when you recalled it as the resurrected Lord––and so many hundred years later––that you still shrank and could not complete your sentence? Is that pause between "shrink" and "nevertheless" the actual moment of your Atonement? And why did you also tell Joseph that you will be red in your apparel when you come, in garments like one that treadeth in the winevat? Why will you have to say then, "I have trodden the winepress alone, and have brought judgment upon all people; and none were with me."

Who is it can withstand your love?

* * *
It cost me five dollars from Dorval Airport to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal, but I had paid for the room in advance and could fast for a few days. The other participants in my seminar Thursday afternoon seemed to like my paper on "Shakespeare as a Healer," though they were more interested in his possible knowledge and use of Renaissance psychological therapy than in my evidence for his preoccupation with Christian ideas about healing the soul. It was just as well. I was feeling very much a hypocrite, a talker, an absurd posturer who knew to do good and did it not. What did I really know about healing?

The next day I slipped out between sessions to visit the Montreal Fine Arts Museum, just up Rue Sherbrooke from the hotel, but found it closed. It was Good Friday in heavily Catholic French Canada. Walking back I heard singing from a small stone Protestant church. A constantly smiling, bustling, very delicate black woman found me a seat and gave me a program and hymnal (I watched her a moment, noticing her color and her soft, scurrying solicitude; New York had seemed all black, the Shakespeare Association meetings lily-white). The choir finished singing a Monteverdi motet, and a lay reader, a tall blonde woman with a black surplice hanging loosely over her bright orange dress, gave the Old Testament lesson from Isaiah 53, the "suffering servant" passage: "He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him. ... by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities. ... he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors." Then we sang Bach's Chorale from the St. Matthew Passion:

O sacred head, sore wounded,
With grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded
With thorns, Thine only crown. ...

What Thou, my Lord, has suffered
Was all for sinners' gain:
Mine, mine was the transgression,
But thine the deadly pain.

Back at the hotel I asked about other Good Friday observances. Were any scheduled at Notre-Dame, the large cathedral-like church I had seen while walking through the Old City by the St. Lawrence River the night before? The concierge was uncertain but thought there would be something at 3:00 p.m., the traditional hour of Christ's death. He confirmed by calling the church for me. Since I had to walk, I left right after the general session that ended at 2:00 and hurried east along Rue Sherbrooke to Rue Université and then south to Notre-Dame, which in daylight seemed built somewhat like the two-towered Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Only two blocks away I found police cars setting up barriers for a crowd of several thousand people just coming along Rue Ste. Catherine from the east and turning down Rue Université to the church. I joined them and found an English-speaking participant who explained they had made a twelve-mile march beginning that morning, an annual pilgrimage complete with "stations of the cross" as the stopping places. A truck with large loudspeakers was leading, and a man in the front seat continuously sang religious songs for the marchers. They were of all ages and dress: priests, nuns, groups of children, solitary housewives, blue-collar men, young couples, many with wooden crosses hung around their necks, some in groups carrying full-size crosses, a few with banners: "Vendredi Saint," "Jesus, Notre Sauveur," etc. They were welcomed at the Cathedral by a brass band and a large crowd; then all of us pushed in to fill the huge main floor and the two galleries.

As we waited I walked the full circuit of aisles, trying to respond, as I had in the cathedrals in Europe, to the builders' sense of space and light. The stained glass in this church is too realistic and sentimental for my taste, but the sanctuary, with its high altar, is gorgeous: rich in light, simply proportioned but with much sculpture, which is focused in a huge figure of the risen Christ, seated in glory above a figure of the crucified Christ. The artworks and small chapels on the perimeters are ordinary, except for a striking painting of an early French nun earnestly teaching Indian children, the children's faces angled in what seems accusing innocence toward the viewer. I thought of Tucker-man's chilling line, "They have their tears, nor turn to us their eyes."

A white-robed priest began to address the congregation about 2:30 and continued for twenty minutes. My French was only good enough to get the general drift: an informal homily on the sins of the day. I moved up the left outside aisle and slipped into a marble corner at the side of the stairs from the nave up to the sanctuary, where I could watch both the priest and the audience. He was obviously very popular, occasionally joking, using the device––which seemed to work well––of repeating a rhetorical question, "And have we sinned?" followed by an example or two and then the question again. Occasionally his exhortations led him to mention a hymn, which he would then start singing, and the congregation would join in. Finally an usher spotted me and sent me to find a seat; but by this time there weren't any, so I stood at the back. The priest, now far away from me, mentioned Mary and then began singing "Ave Maria." I heard a trumpet behind me softly join in and turned to see a black teenager, who reminded me of Stretch Pants, slowly move forward through the main doorway, playing the melody. Then, as the singing ended, he continued playing solo, slowly moving back. His mother was standing in an alcove, watching, and after he finished, she moved to stand by him, her hand on his arm.

At 2:50 the priest quickly finished his talk and a complete silence fell over the congregation until 2:55, when a group of priests, white-robed and hooded, evidently representing all of us, filed up to the altar and gazed up at the crucified Savior until 3 :00. The signal of the moment of death was a sudden lighting of the brightest altar lights; all the congregation stood and remained in silence for a few minutes. Then slowly we left.

* * *
In the mid-seventies I sometimes went fishing at North Eden. That tiny delta and valley, opening into the east side of Bear Lake in northern Utah, was homesteaded, along with a similar, smaller valley, South Eden, late in the nineteenth century. Two small reservoirs were built in North Eden to hold water through the summer for irrigating hayfields and perhaps a few gardens. Someone planted the reservoirs with rainbow and brook trout, which grew, as did the native cutthroat, into huge fish in those isolated, food-rich lakes: the cutthroats lean, fierce fighters; the rainbows and brookies jeweled and heavy-sided. One of my father's complicated business transactions had left him with a partial interest in the one remaining ranch and a key to the gate at the valley's west end that kept most people away from the reservoirs.

On a mid-August morning before sunup, one of Dad's clients, who insisted on taking his Jeep Wagoneer, drove us east from Salt Lake City to Evanston and then north along the Utah-Wyoming border through Woodruff and Randolph, down the long incline to Laketown on the south shore of Bear Lake, then up the east side.

I was alone in the back seat, only half-listening to my father's usual cheery commentary and storytelling. My own thoughts were dull, almost despondent: I had been released from St. Olaf College the year before in what looked to me (and some colleagues) like a decision to eliminate my influence on students, one of whom had joined the Mormon Church. Then I had been turned down for a position at BYU, apparently because of concern about what parents might think about how a person of my unorthodox views and background might influence students. At the same time, I was turned down at the University of Utah, because, as one of my former teachers there confided with regret, "This department simply won't hire an active, believing Mormon." (Which was I, too devoted a Mormon––or not devoted enough? Where was my home, my vocation? In Zion or in exile?)

We had moved to Utah and were subsisting on part-time institute teaching for the Church in Ogden and Salt Lake and a writing fellowship in Leonard Arlington's Church History Division––and a large garden at our home in Kaysville. And I had begun to lose confidence. Perhaps I didn't have a job simply because I wasn't good enough, didn't have enough scholarship published or good enough teaching evaluations to overcome those other qualms administrators were having (after all, I hadn't been accepted at the other places to which I had applied either). I had felt the mantle leave me when I was released as branch president in Minnesota, and no spiritual security had replaced it. I found it hard to pray, to remember what it had felt like to bless my branch members and family with complete assurance and to know with certainty the Spirit's response. I wondered constantly, in blank repetition through broken sleep as we drove, if I had lost my way, if the Lord knew there was such a person anymore. I wondered where the deepest part of me had gone.

We had our boat in the higher lake by 7:00 a.m. and headed for the upper end, where the fishing just out from the stream mouth had been best in late summer. I sat in the prow facing the early sun and the sharp canyon wind, smelling the water and observing the long scar the mule-pulled Fresno scrapers had made long ago as they brought down fill for the dam. Suddenly I saw to my right a V in the water, much like our boat's wake but very small, moving rapidly across to the shore on our left. I silently pointed and Dad slowed so that we intercepted the double riffle, just behind a four-foot rattlesnake, moving with the same motion it makes on open sand, its yellow on black diamonds and beige rattles and thick body clearly visible under our prow. None of us spoke.

Using wet flies cast with a bubble, we each took our limit of three trout over five pounds and, acknowledging the mutual agreement of those fishing on this private lake, put the many others we caught back. Two that my father caught with his own self-designed version of a double woolly worm that ended in a red tuft must have weighed over eight pounds.

We tried some dry fly casting in the early afternoon, and I watched a huge brookie rise to take my dragonfly and then, coming in, suddenly turn uncontrollably under the anchor rope and snap the delicate leader, close enough that I could see the rich scattering of blue and red-gold aureoles down its side. I felt it go, with no regret. By 4:00 the wind up the canyon off Bear Lake was too strong for good fishing, and we left. Dad and I both offered to drive, but the client, who had taken a nap, insisted he wasn't tired and for variety headed around the lake to Garden City and down Logan Canyon, with me sleeping across the back seat and Dad dozing in the front.

* * *
When I came up out of unconsciousness I had my hands on my father's head and could feel his hair and blood. I couldn't hear the words I was saying, but I felt them from the blessing part of me, the deepest part, before consciousness. Dad was more conscious than I was but more hurt. I gradually began to see the ground, the fir trees, then the cars just down from us. There was a blue Austin impaled at a slight angle onto the front of the Jeep. All of the Jeep's doors were sprung open, and the freezer of huge fish was splashed across the highway. I kept my hands on Dad's head and began to hear his moaning, then felt pain emerging in my own chest and struggled to breathe.

Police came over soon and told me our driver had fallen asleep and run head-on into the Austin, which had been driven by a German tourist whose legs had been broken. Ambulances were on the way. Each new face asked me where we caught the fish. Our driver, who wasn't hurt at all, kept apologizing, frantically. He knew my father was dying. When the ambulances came, they put Dad in the first one and tried to get me to lie down by him, but that made it even harder for me to breathe. At the Logan hospital they made me lie down for x-rays of my broken ribs, and I nearly fainted. Then the technician told me they had seen what looked like a bruise on the upper aorta in my father's x-rays and were going to rush him to Salt Lake because the artery could burst at any moment.

I asked the technician if he would help me give my father a blessing, and he nodded and went for some consecrated oil. We found Dad on a gurney in the next room, barely conscious, the whole left side of his face, where he had struck the dashboard, going purple. I blessed him with life, specifically with the five years he had told me that spring he needed in order to complete the arrangements to consolidate our family investments and transfer them into the Church's missionary funds. The words were given to my tongue, beyond my mind. I called Charlotte and Mom and told them we'd had a slight accident, to call Dad's friend, heart surgeon Russell Nelson, and to meet us at the LDS Hospital.

But all confidence left me on the ninety-minute, blaring-sirens ambulance ride to Salt Lake. I sat in the front seat, Dad and a doctor and nurse just behind me through a curtain. As the driver radioed ahead, asking Dr. Nelson to be ready and describing the emergency, I was constantly sure someone would soon push through the curtain to tell me the aorta had burst and my father was dead. When we arrived, Dad was rushed into surgery and Charlotte stayed with me while I got us checked in and walked to my own room. Then I couldn't breathe again. Charlotte got them to look at my x-rays, which I was carrying; they decided that my collapsed lung needed immediate attention and sent Charlotte out while an intern gave me a local, made an incision, and pushed a hollow needle between my ribs and began to evacuate the chest cavity so my lung would reinflate.

Charlotte came back to tell me my father was fine––except for some missing teeth and a broken jaw. The new x-rays they took for Dr. Nelson showed no bruise on the aorta. I thought of the fish, the brookie, and the part of me that moved to heal my father before I knew anything. We were alive.

* * *
I made it back to Manhattan (another seven dollars, leaving me twelve dollars) in time to meet Greg for the matinee of Hamlet at the Joseph Papp Shakespeare Festival Theater near Astor Place. "Put both these tickets on the tab for that check I'm sending you," I said when he came up. "I owe you for the toast." I was anxious to see what Liviu Ciulei, the great Hungarian director who is now in charge of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, would do with this difficult and (in my opinion) usually butchered play and to see the popular movie actor, Kevin Kline, do the lead. (This was certainly 1986.) I was disappointed in both of them: more of the same traditional misreading of the play as simply a struggle by a romantic intellectual to get enough courage to take bloody revenge on the uncle who killed his father.

Ciulei's best decision was to let the costuming and instincts of the actors follow Shakespeare's words and show Hamlet becoming more and more like his monstrous uncle as he succumbs to the revenge spirit. The poison that symbolizes that spirit is initially dropped by the uncle into Hamlet's father's ear, then, in the call to revenge, is dropped into Hamlet's ear by the father's ghost and, in direct response to Hamlet's threats, into Laertes' ear by Claudius. By the play's end that poison is spreading to corrupt and finally kill them all. Ciulei also allowed Harriet Harris to play Ophelia in a way that let the words speak true, even against the rest of his direction. She was able to show a woman and her innocent love being ground to pieces between the sinful male "honor" of Hamlet and the sinful male "protection" of her father.

After the play we walked up past Christopher Park and found, at the corner of West Fourth Street, a quartet of young men, two on violin, one on viola, and one on cello, just beginning Haydn's "Sunrise Sonata." They were about the same age as Stretch Pants and the trumpet player in Montreal but were dressed in levis and T-shirts, like the dealer. They were excellent musicians, and most of the rowdy crowd stood quietly or passed by carefully. Nearly everyone put a quarter or two into the open case, but I waited, thought, felt within me the war of blame for the con game––and guilt and racism––against all my opposing beliefs, and furtively put in five dollars. As we caught a bus up Seventh Avenue, I told Greg I thought I'd get some rest before Easter, left him at his station on Forty-second, and transferred across and up Madison to the empty apartment on Sixty-third that Dave and Karen Davidson had lent me for the weekend. I bought bread at the corner deli and explored the refrigerator––but still felt I shouldn't eat and slept uneasily.

* * *
This is my report. I have been assigned to George England, one of my descendants, for thirty years now. He carries my own name but does not use George often, though that is his first name. I have protected him well, but I do not understand him. I think I should remain on this assignment for at least one more ten-year term.

The main problem is that George understands what is right to do but does not do it. He knows more about the Atonement than I did when I was branch president in Lyme Regis––or even when I became a patriarch in Plain City after the crossing to Utah. He writes constantly about it, even when he is writing for the gentiles about literature. Many people praise him for what he says; they write letters to him telling how he helped them live the gospel better and helped them understand repentance. But he still does terrible things. It is still hard for him to be honest. He covers up his mistakes with lies. He pretends he knows things or remembers people or has read books when he has not. I think he loves to do right, but he has a hard time being honest or kind when the chance to do so is sudden or embarrassing or when he is in pain or lonely. If he has time to think, he is very often good, but not when he is surprised.

When I helped him marry Charlotte Ann, you know how much better he was for awhile. He began to learn from her to be generous before he thought about it. He even began to be honest like she is, without toting up the cost. But after all that self-pity when he lost his job at St. Olaf ten years ago he began to be a hustler, to cut corners, to take advantage. I was able to use that car accident to help him know he was good. And when you arranged for him to be a bishop, that was fine for awhile. But he seems to have lost contact with Charlotte Ann. He isn't listening to her very well, and he isn't telling her what he really feels. I think she is getting tired.

Perhaps he is writing too much. I am certain he is not praying enough. He is worried, though, and wondering, sometimes frantically, I think, why there is not someone to help him the way he has helped some who have needed him. He does not seem to be able to ask for help. Perhaps something will happen that we can use. I hope so. My heart reaches out to complete the circle. I think some good chances will come now that he is in a bishopric again and working with the primary and the Cub Scouts––and also when he becomes a grandfather in two years.

I am sorry about the language of this report. I know you want me to learn from him, but it is hard when he talks so very little. Please excuse all mistakes.

* * *
I couldn't sleep and then overslept, so I had to run all the way up through the Easter-dressed people on Fifth Avenue to make it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Eighty-first by the 10:30 opening. I paid one dollar of the four-dollar suggested contribution (leaving me one last bus fare plus just enough to get to the airport the next morning). I went right to the Rembrandts and Vermeers, but even there I found I could only focus well on two paintings: Rembrandt's gentle "Christ with a Pilgrim's Staff" and Vermeer's quiet, consuming "Woman with a Blue Pitcher," the young housewife working calmly in that corner of a room that Vermeer painted again and again, as if he might understand the whole world through one place seen completely. Then I hurried down the long hall, past the antique pianofortes, to the south wing––Manet's white apparition, "Woman with a Bonnet," framed in the doorway as a beacon visible all the way. But I turned quickly to find my favorite Manet at the far right: "The Dead Christ with Angels."

Critics of the nineteenth-century French Academy did not like the extreme realism, the precisely bird-like blue wings on the two angels and the heavy, black-shadowed cadaver. But I find the moment captured by Manet extremely moving. It is not the traditional moment of shining glory after life returns. It is the dark time of struggle as Christ's divine spirit is still creating the resurrection from within his still-dead mortal body, with the angels still sorrowing, holding him up, urging life to return. I agree with Emile Zola, the French novelist, who wrote of Manet's "obstinate eye and audacious hand," his ability to imagine and realize such angels, "those children with great blue wings who are so strangely elegant and gentle." These are the angels Mary Magdalene saw later, when she found the tomb empty, the two still "sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain" (John 20:12). At the front of the painting is a snake, the one from Eden, its head about to be crushed according to the promise.

I took the bus across Central Park to the chapel on the second floor of the Church-owned office building on Sixty-fifth and Broadway so I could make sacrament meeting at noon. After the sacrament was administered, a short Easter musical program preceded the regular testimony bearing. But if this was 1986 then it was on the last Sunday of March, rather than the first Sunday, when Mormons normally fast for twenty-four hours and bear testimony. And the printed program I saved proves that it was indeed Easter. Anyway, after the choir's "Easter Hymn" and a woman's quartet singing "The Lord's Prayer," the choir leader (Andrea Thornock, I see from the program) sang "He Was Despised" from The Messiah. She had dark hair and wore a long surplice-like overdress. It was made of what looked like velvet and was dyed a striking grape red. Her somber alto voice reminded us of the costs of salvation: "He was despised, rejected, a man of sorrows"––her voice pronounced exactly the grief in that three-note dying fall on "sorrow" that must have come from Handel's own pain. She looked straight into our eyes, as she slowly turned and looked across the congregation: "He hid not his face from shame, from shame and spitting."

Then Liz Hodgin, in a lovely floral print and pink hat, sang the soprano solo that has been called by Kenneth Clark and others the greatest piece of human music: "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth." But it is that, I believe, only when it is sung by someone, like Liz, who believes, who sings her own testimony as well as Handel's. And our hearts were lifted from the depths Andrea had properly taken us down to. I blessed Andrea for planning such a program and for being part of it, for remembering, though we Mormons don't often notice Good Friday, what that somber day is meant to recall: that Christ was suffering servant as well as glorious victor, that, like all of us sinners, he had to die before he could be resurrected.

The bishop bore his testimony, not about the resurrection but about the power of repentance, which he had experienced personally. An elegantly dressed businessman picked up the theme by confessing, in a careful, broken voice, how Christ had changed him twenty years before, suddenly, completely. A short man with a beer belly, thinning, long black hair, and a black leather jacket, almost a caricature of the aged hippie, spoke softly of his long, slow, still-backsliding conversion. And a young Puerto Rican on the bench in front of me, whom I had noticed struggling for courage to get up, spoke last. He told how a few weeks before he had made a Saturday trip to see this strange part of New York, had wandered into the LDS visitors' center on the main floor just below us, and had met some missionaries and joined the Church. He tried to describe his former sins and how he had changed. "I'm sorry in all the world," he kept saying. "I'm sorry in all the world."

Holy Saturday

2010-04-03T16:49:00.000-07:00

Easter Even
Christina Rossetti

There is nothing more that they can do
For all their rage and boast;
Caiaphas with his blaspheming crew,
Herod with his host,

Pontius Pilate in his Judgment-hall
Judging their Judge and his,
Or he who led them all and passed them all,
Arch-Judas with his kiss.

The sepulchre made sure with ponderous Stone,
Seal that same stone, O Priest;
It may be thou shalt block the holy One
From rising in the east:

Set a watch about the sepulchre
To watch on pain of death;
They must hold fast the stone if One should stir
And shake it from beneath.

God Almighty, He can break a seal
And roll away a Stone,
Can grind the proud in dust who would not kneel,
And crush the mighty one.

* * * * * * *

There is nothing more that they can do
For all their passionate care,
Those who sit in dust, the blessed few,
And weep and rend their hair:

Peter, Thomas, Mary Magdalene,
The Virgin unreproved,
Joseph, with Nicodemus, foremost men,
And John the Well-beloved,

Bring your finest linen and your spice,
Swathe the sacred Dead,
Bind with careful hands and piteous eyes
The napkin round His head;

Lay Him in the garden-rock to rest;
Rest you the Sabbath length:
The Sun that went down crimson in the west
Shall rise renewed in strength.

God Almighty shall give joy for pain,
Shall comfort him who grieves:
Lo! He with joy shall doubtless come again,
And with Him bring His sheaves.

From an anonymous, early-Christian sermon:

Something strange is happening––there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the Cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: 'My Lord be with you all.' Christ answered him: 'And with your spirit.' He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: 'Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.'

I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in Hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in Me and I in you; together we form one person and cannot be separated.

For your sake I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, Whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed to the Jews in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.

See on My Face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you. See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in my image. On My back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back. See My hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once ... stretched out your hand to a tree.

I slept on the cross and a sword pierced My side for you who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. ... My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in Hell. The sword that pierced Me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

Rise. Let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly paradise. I will not restore you to that paradise, but will enthrone you in heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God. The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager. The bridal chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.

Good Friday

2010-04-02T17:51:00.000-07:00

The Thirteenth Station
Emeric J. Carmody, O.Carm.

Glowering dusk and a figure at your knees;
The clotted Face against your burning breast.
Grief’s storm past, deeper seas
Wind-churn and boil to whiteness. At last His rest:
The ledgered sum full paid for Eden’s bail.
O mounting flame! As through His vacant eyes
The tangent riddles of your heart congeal:
Pale Gabriel. The stir of love within. Black skies
Kindled into ecstasy by the timbre in His cry.
Old Simeon. His Father’s house. That dark “not yet.”
And then, that sword-thrust dawn, He waved good bye
Through purple mists. John’s hand. The sun has set.
Cloth and aloes waiting. Enough. Heat-white,
Your heart shall sing Magnificat throughout the night.

Very special thanks are due to Fr Peter, for sharing the gorgeous sonnet above––the first time, a few years ago, and then again this year. You know it's good when we are forced to turn to Bach to find music to pair with it! Today's music is, of course, the beginning to the immortal Matthäus-Passion, a monumental piece so glorious as to beggar all description. It is required listening for Good Friday. Leonard Bernstein called it "a revered masterpiece––perhaps one of the divine dozen in all musical literature ... a work of such dramatic power and invention, as seldom, if ever, been equaled." I am inclined to agree with that assessment.

Maundy Thursday

2010-04-01T19:09:00.000-07:00

“And the Vine said . . . Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?”

The great Vine left its glory to reign as Forest King.
“Nay,” quoth the lofty forest trees, “we will not have this thing;
We will not have this supple one enring us with its ring.
Lo, from immemorial time our might towers shadowing:
Not we were born to curve and droop, not we to climb and cling:
We buffet back the buffeting wind, tough to its buffeting:
We screen great beasts, the wild fowl build in our heads and sing,
Every bird of every feather from off our tops takes wing:
I a king, and thou a king, and what king shall be our king?”

Nevertheless the great Vine stooped to be the Forest King,
While the forest swayed and murmured like seas that are tempesting:
Stooped and drooped with thousand tendrils in thirsty languishing;
Bowed to earth and lay on earth for earth’s replenishing;
Put off sweetness, tasted bitterness, endured time’s fashioning;
Put off life and put on death: and lo! it was all to bring
All its fellows down to a death which hath lost the sting,
All its fellows up to a life in endless triumphing,—
I a king, and thou a king, and this King to be our King.

–Christina Rossetti

Meditation on Meditation on the Sacrament

2010-03-25T19:31:00.001-07:00

In the new April Ensign there is an entire page devoted to a tiny poem by one Brother Anderson (p. 9). While I am aware that the Ensign is not (nor does it pretend to be) a literary magazine, and while I know that the poetry it occasionally publishes is not great art (nor does it pretend to be), this work is as unfortunate and insipid a piece of doggerel as I have ever encountered. Let's take a look at it!

Meditation on the Sacrament
How small a sip of water,
how tiny a crust of bread,
yet in these emblems we are lifted,
in them we are fed.

As we think of Jesus
and the sacrifice he gave,
we feel His constant mercy,
His loving power to save.

The author does manage to end lines one and three in each stanza with a consistent "feminine ending" (strong-weak), but that is the only positive comment that can be made in regard to the meter. To understand the real metric weakness here, we're going to have to examine just how this poem scans––or, more accurately, does not scan.

Hōw smáll • ā síp • ōf wátēr,
(iamb).......(iamb)..(amphibrach)

hōw tínȳ • ā crúst • ōf bréad,
(amphibrach)(iamb)(iamb)

yét īn thēse • émblēms • wé āre • líftēd,
(dactyl).........(trochee)..(trochee)(trochee)

–– ín • thēm wé • āre féd.
(iamb*)(iamb)....(iamb)
[*This line could arguably be rendered: (trochee)(cretic).]

Ás wē • thínk ōf • Jésūs
(trochee)(trochee)(trochee)

ānd thē sá•crīfíce • hē gáve,
(anapest)..(iamb)..(iamb)

wē féel • Hīs cón•stānt mércȳ,
(iamb)...(iamb)...(amphibrach)

Hīs lóv•īng pów(ē)r • tō sáve.
(iamb)..(iamb*).........(iamb)
[*If you give "power" two syllables, this foot is an amphibrach.]

A mess, no? Particularly egregious is the addition of an entire extra foot(!) to the third line. The fourth line might be considered as having two feet, but I believe assuming a silent first beat is a better interpretation than the alternative (if not better poetry). Similarly, in the final line, "pow'r" (with one syllable) makes more sense. Now, poetic rhythm need not be wholly consistent––in fact, variety can be refreshing and is a useful tool for drawing attention to an important line or thought––but in a poem this short, this much variety smacks more of either sloth, inattention, or an infelicitous lack facility on the part of the poet. (I suspect the latter in this case.) A poem so short, which does not aspire to be free-form, cannot sustain this much irregularity. In a longer work, a poet may attempt a Hopkins-esque "sprung rhythm," but not here, having such a limited scope.

Leaving aside rhythm for the moment, let us turn to word choice. Good poetry can pack a lot of information and/or feeling into a small space. I am reminded of that wonderful line by Blaise Pascal: "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter." Good writing, and poetry particularly, only contains as many words as it must, and no more. To achieve that end, every word has to be right, conveying exactly what the poet means to say. Brother Anderson's Meditation, sadly, is plagued with vague-aries (to coin a term). Consider this line: "...yet in these emblems we are lifted..." Surely not. "In"? We may be "lifted" or "saved" by the sacramental bread and water, but certainly not in them. What does that really mean? In the next stanza we find another word that feels out of place, this time not a preposition, but a verb: "...and the sacrifice he gave..." We know what he is getting at, but do we usually describe sacrifice as something "given"? We can say more comfortably, "...the sacrifice he made..." True, in that case the line would not rhyme (it would make an assonance), but in my mind, that would be more forgivable. Perhaps a better solution would be, "...the offering he gave..." In any case, the poem is sorely in need of more editing if Brother Anderson wants to express himself clearly.

Finally, what is the raison d'être of this poem? Can the author justify the cost in ink and paper? Does he say anything new? Does he even teach anything old in a new way? The basic message seems to be that the sacrament ordinance is important to our salvation, and that it is an example of small things bringing to pass great things. This is hardly new; it has been said before, and said more ably. Though we might argue that the poem could be useful as a kind of doctrinal mnemonic device, we would have to admit that its poor execution fails at even that purpose.

We can do better. We should do better. This is, I suspect, another example of one of Mormonism's most pernicious cultural failings. We tend to get the categories of "good" and "inoffensive" mixed up. Thus, a "good" movie or book is one with little swearing and no sex. "Good," used in this sense, really describes what a thing is not, rather than what it is. I am not trying to make an apologia for obscenity or pornography, but I am making a plea contra-pablum. (And, frankly, this poem approaches Janice-Kapp-Perry-levels of treacly preciousness.) Mormon artists have got to start challenging us to rise to the occasion. Some artists are doing an admirable job at that, but it is difficult within a marketplace in which "EFY music" is actually (and unimaginably!) profitable. I think and hope that the time is coming when LDS artists and thinkers neither feel like they must leave the church for the sake of their artistic/scholarly integrity (Richard Dutcher), nor are driven out of it for their work (Neil LaBute, Brian Evanson*).

There is no doubt that Brother Anderson is a good person, and I am sure that this poem is sincere, but we should remember what Oscar Wilde said about that:

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

Truth comes from the oddest sources sometimes. Speaking of which, here's a poem from Brother Wilde that is actually worth the time spent reading it.

Ave Maria plena Gratia

A scene of wondrous glory, as was told; Of some great God who in a rain of gold; Sickening for love and unappeased desire,; prayed to see God’s clear body, and the fire; And now with wondering eyes and heart I stand; Before this supreme mystery of Love:; An angel with a lily in his hand,; And over both with outstretched wings the Dove.
______________________________________

*It's true that both of these writers have done some very edgy, gritty stuff. However, their works which led to Church discipline were, by comparison, relatively mild. LaBute wrote a play in which a few Mormon characters did some really bad things, and Evanson wrote a few fairly dark short stories. Having read much of the material myself, the fact that it led to disciplinary councils is, frankly, laughable. Like other high-profile excommunications, I suspect that if their works were published today, nobody's membership would have been on the line. Similarly, had Bushman tried to publish Rough Stone Rolling in the early 1990's, BYU scholars might today refer to "the September Seven."

Regarding our newest federal legislation:

2010-03-21T22:59:00.000-07:00

Damn.

That is all.

Ravishingly Lenten

2010-03-18T21:07:00.000-07:00

"Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my crying come unto thee." This text is set to an unfinished piece by Purcell. It's a shame he didn't get to complete it, as the extant portion shows tremendous promise. This recording is somewhat slower than many others, but the conductor beautifully draws out the luscious dissonances. Enjoy.

Hearing that, it's impossible not to recall Amulek's instruction on prayer:

Therefore may God grant unto you, my brethren, that ye may begin to exercise your faith unto repentance, that ye begin to call upon his holy name, that he would have mercy upon you;

Yea, cry unto him for mercy; for he is mighty to save.

Yea, humble yourselves, and continue in prayer unto him.

Cry unto him when ye are in your fields, yea, over all your flocks.

Cry unto him in your houses, yea, over all your household, both morning, mid-day, and evening.

Yea, cry unto him against the power of your enemies.

Yea, cry unto him against the devil, who is an enemy to all righteousness.

Cry unto him over the crops of your fields, that ye may prosper in them.

Cry over the flocks of your fields, that they may increase.

But this is not all; ye must pour out your souls in your closets, and your secret places, and in your wilderness.

Yea, and when you do not cry unto the Lord, let your hearts be full, drawn out in prayer unto him continually for your welfare, and also for the welfare of those who are around you.

And now behold, my beloved brethren, I say unto you, do not suppose that this is all; for after ye have done all these things, if ye turn away the needy, and the naked, and visit not the sick and afflicted, and impart of your substance, if ye have, to those who stand in need––I say unto you, if ye do not any of these things, behold, your prayer is vain, and availeth you nothing, and ye are as hypocrites who do deny the faith.

Therefore, if ye do not remember to be charitable, ye are as dross, which the refiners do cast out, (it being of no worth) and is trodden under foot of men.

And now, my brethren, I would that ... ye come forth and bring fruit unto repentance.

Appropriate thoughts as we continue to prepare for Holy Week––remembering to pray with our hands and feet, as well as on our knees.

A twitch upon the thread...

2010-03-17T18:49:00.000-07:00

I have been re-reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and have enjoyed it immensely, so I thought I might give the 2008 film adaptation another try. I remember being rather underwhelmed by it the first time 'round, but as it features the highly-talented Ben Whishaw* as Sebastian, I was willing to take a second look.

My initial reaction, as it turned out, was correct. The acting isn't bad, but neither is it great. The music is rather nice. However, the adaptation really misses the whole point of the book: At the end of the novel, Charles Ryder has come to find, by a painful and circuitous path, faith and love of God. In the film, he only comes to a fond, agnostic indulgence of the puzzling religious impulses one sees in others. "Oh-ho!" the screenwriter seems to chortle at us, peering down magnanimously over his reading glasses, "Yes, well, I suppose if you must, you must. I can be a tolerant modern with the best of them––wink at your theological idiosyncrasies, wot. Now run along and go play with your imaginary friend, Jesus; the adults are talking 'art'."

I just found an interesting review of the film, written when it came out, that bemoans the retooling of a deeply-Catholic novel into a quite bald-faced anti-Catholic movie. That's a legitimate criticism. I was, however, quite surprised to read this little chestnut in the review:

The nature of the relationship between Charles and Sebastian is quite thoroughly discussed in the book. And Sebastian is repeatedly set off from the group Evelyn Waugh dubs "the sodomites" who are led by Antony Blanche––who in the book is THE homosexual in the story AND whose role in the story is to articulate the point-of-view of[,] well, Satan. The key discussion of the relationship between Charles and Sebastian comes through the analysis of the Italian mistress, Kara. She speaks of "these romantic male friendships that you British have," which occur in youth and are a precursor for adult love. Her warning about the relationship has to do with the fact that chumming around getting sloshed and being feckless with your buddies is something children do, and that growing up will mean letting the idyllic, wistful summers of childhood go. And she thinks Sebastian is going to struggle to accept adulthood.

AND THIS is what Brideshead Revisited is about. The invitation of grace to "grow-up" and assume responsibility for our lives ... Sebastian isn't a drunk because he wants to be gay and the Church has filled him with guilt about it. He is drunk because he doesn't want to accept the limits and urgency and intensity of adult Christianity (italics mine, L-dG).

I'm afraid there is only one adequate response to these assertions:

BALLS.

If you really don't think there's any homoerotic tension/overtone here, you haven't been reading carefully, and you certainly haven't besmirched your mind with any knowledge of the author's life. When referring to the first term at Oxford after meeting Sebastian, Charles reminisces that it was like a kind of childhood:

[I]ts toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins...

After he converted to Catholicism, Waugh burned his own diaries from his years at Oxford. Nevertheless, virtually all his biographers are willing to admit that he had a number of homosexual affairs as a young man. He was known to be somewhat flamboyant. In his memoirs, Sir Harold Acton remembered the Waugh of this period as

...a prancing faun, thinly disguised by conventional apparel. His wide-apart eyes, always ready to be surprised under raised eyebrows, the curved sensual lips, the hyacinthine locks of hair, I had seen in marble and bronze at Naples... Though his horns had been removed, he was capable of butting in other ways.

Ahem! Now that we have cleared that sordid business up...

One if the interesting features of Brideshead Revisited is the subtitle of the third section: "A Twitch Upon The Thread." This is a reference to a rather odd little detective story by G.K. Chesterton, featuring his beloved Father Brown character. I thought it might be interesting to put it up (and why not, as it is in the public domain). For your reading pleasure, then, you will find below Chesterton's short story, The Queer Feet. (Notice how I maturely pass over the coincidental nature of the story's title and the foregoing subject matter.)

*If you are not familiar with Mr. Whishaw's work, I cannot recommend highly enough the beautiful and miraculous film Bright Star. It is one of the loveliest things I think I've ever seen––truly, truly exquisite.

______________________________

The Queer Feet
by G.K. Chesterton
If you meet a member of that select club, "The Twelve True Fishermen," entering the Vernon Hotel for the annual club dinner, you will observe, as he takes off his overcoat, that his evening coat is green and not black. If (supposing that you have the star-defying audacity to address such a being) you ask him why, he will probably answer that he does it to avoid being mistaken for a waiter. You will then retire crushed. But you will leave behind you a mystery as yet unsolved and a tale worth telling.

If (to pursue the same vein of improbable conjecture) you were to meet a mild, hard-working little priest, named Father Brown, and were to ask him what he thought was the most singular luck of his life, he would probably reply that upon the whole his best stroke was at the Vernon Hotel, where he had averted a crime and, perhaps, saved a soul, merely by listening to a few footsteps in a passage. He is perhaps a little proud of this wild and wonderful guess of his, and it is possible that he might refer to it. But since it is immeasurably unlikely that you will ever rise high enough in the social world to find "The Twelve True Fishermen," or that you will ever sink low enough among slums and criminals to find Father Brown, I fear you will never hear the story at all unless you hear it from me.

The Vernon Hotel at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annual dinners was an institution such as can only exist in an oligarchical society which has almost gone mad on good manners. It was that topsy-turvy product––an "exclusive" commercial enterprise. That is, it was a thing which paid not by attracting people, but actually by turning people away. In the heart of a plutocracy tradesmen become cunning enough to be more fastidious than their customers. They positively create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spend money and diplomacy in overcoming them. If there were a fashionable hotel in London which no man could enter who was under six foot, society would meekly make up parties of six-foot men to dine in it. If there were an expensive restaurant which by a mere caprice of its proprietor was only open on Thursday afternoon, it would be crowded on Thursday afternoon. The Vernon Hotel stood, as if by accident, in the corner of a square in Belgravia. It was a small hotel; and a very inconvenient one. But its very inconveniences were considered as walls protecting a particular class. One inconvenience, in particular, was held to be of vital importance: the fact that practically only twenty-four people could dine in the place at once. The only big dinner table was the celebrated terrace table, which stood open to the air on a sort of veranda overlooking one of the most exquisite old gardens in London. Thus it happened that even the twenty-four seats at this table could only be enjoyed in warm weather; and this making the enjoyment yet more difficult made it yet more desired. The existing owner of the hotel was a Jew named Lever; and he made nearly a million out of it, by making it difficult to get into. Of course he combined with this limitation in the scope of his enterprise the most careful polish in its performance. The wines and cooking were really as good as any in Europe, and the demeanour of the attendants exactly mirrored the fixed mood of the English upper class. The proprietor knew all his waiters like the fingers on his hand; there were only fifteen of them all told. It was much easier to become a Member of Parliament than to become a waiter in that hotel. Each waiter was trained in terrible silence and smoothness, as if he were a gentleman's servant. And, indeed, there was generally at least one waiter to every gentleman who dined.

The club of The Twelve True Fishermen would not have consented to dine anywhere but in such a place, for it insisted on a luxurious privacy; and would have been quite upset by the mere thought that any other club was even dining in the same building. On the occasion of their annual dinner the Fishermen were in the habit of exposing all their treasures, as if they were in a private house, especially the celebrated set of fish knives and forks which were, as it were, the insignia of the society, each being exquisitely wrought in silver in the form of a fish, and each loaded at the hilt with one large pearl. These were always laid out for the fish course, and the fish course was always the most magnificent in that magnificent repast. The society had a vast number of ceremonies and observances, but it had no history and no object; that was where it was so very aristocratic. You did not have to be anything in order to be one of the Twelve Fishers; unless you were already a certain sort of person, you never even heard of them. It had been in existence twelve years. Its president was Mr. Audley. Its vice-president was the Duke of Chester.

If I have in any degree conveyed the atmosphere of this appalling hotel, the reader may feel a natural wonder as to how I came to know anything about it, and may even speculate as to how so ordinary a person as my friend Father Brown came to find himself in that golden galley. As far as that is concerned, my story is simple, or even vulgar. There is in the world a very aged rioter and demagogue who breaks into the most refined retreats with the dreadful information that all men are brothers, and wherever this leveller went on his pale horse it was Father Brown's trade to follow. One of the waiters, an Italian, had been struck down with a paralytic stroke that afternoon; and his Jewish employer, marvelling mildly at such superstitions, had consented to send for the nearest Popish priest. With what the waiter confessed to Father Brown we are not concerned, for the excellent reason that that cleric kept it to himself; but apparently it involved him in writing out a note or statement for the conveying of some message or the righting of some wrong. Father Brown, therefore, with a meek impudence which he would have shown equally in Buckingham Palace, asked to be provided with a room and writing materials. Mr. Lever was torn in two. He was a kind man, and had also that bad imitation of kindness, the dislike of any difficulty or scene. At the same time the presence of one unusual stranger in his hotel that evening was like a speck of dirt on something just cleaned. There was never any borderland or anteroom in the Vernon Hotel, no people waiting in the hall, no customers coming in on chance. There were fifteen waiters. There were twelve guests. It would be as startling to find a new guest in the hotel that night as to find a new brother taking breakfast or tea in one's own family. Moreover, the priest's appearance was second-rate and his clothes muddy; a mere glimpse of him afar off might precipitate a crisis in the club. Mr. Lever at last hit on a plan to cover, since he might not obliterate, the disgrace. When you enter (as you never will) the Vernon Hotel, you pass down a short passage decorated with a few dingy but important pictures, and come to the main vestibule and lounge which opens on your right into passages leading to the public rooms, and on your left to a similar passage pointing to the kitchens and offices of the hotel. Immediately on your left hand is the corner of a glass office, which abuts upon the lounge––a house within a house, so to speak, like the old hotel bar which probably once occupied its place.

In this office sat the representative of the proprietor (nobody in this place ever appeared in person if he could help it), and just beyond the office, on the way to the servants' quarters, was the gentlemen's cloak room, the last boundary of the gentlemen's domain. But between the office and the cloak room was a small private room without other outlet, sometimes used by the proprietor for delicate and important matters, such as lending a duke a thousand pounds or declining to lend him sixpence. It is a mark of the magnificent tolerance of Mr. Lever that he permitted this holy place to be for about half an hour profaned by a mere priest, scribbling away on a piece of paper. The story which Father Brown was writing down was very likely a much better story than this one, only it will never be known. I can merely state that it was very nearly as long, and that the last two or three paragraphs of it were the least exciting and absorbing.

For it was by the time that he had reached these that the priest began a little to allow his thoughts to wander and his animal senses, which were commonly keen, to awaken. The time of darkness and dinner was drawing on; his own forgotten little room was without a light, and perhaps the gathering gloom, as occasionally happens, sharpened the sense of sound. As Father Brown wrote the last and least essential part of his document, he caught himself writing to the rhythm of a recurrent noise outside, just as one sometimes thinks to the tune of a railway train. When he became conscious of the thing he found what it was: only the ordinary patter of feet passing the door, which in an hotel was no very unlikely matter. Nevertheless, he stared at the darkened ceiling, and listened to the sound. After he had listened for a few seconds dreamily, he got to his feet and listened intently, with his head a little on one side. Then he sat down again and buried his brow in his hands, now not merely listening, but listening and thinking also.

The footsteps outside at any given moment were such as one might hear in any hotel; and yet, taken as a whole, there was something very strange about them. There were no other footsteps. It was always a very silent house, for the few familiar guests went at once to their own apartments, and the well-trained waiters were told to be almost invisible until they were wanted. One could not conceive any place where there was less reason to apprehend anything irregular. But these footsteps were so odd that one could not decide to call them regular or irregular. Father Brown followed them with his finger on the edge of the table, like a man trying to learn a tune on the piano.

First, there came a long rush of rapid little steps, such as a light man might make in winning a walking race. At a certain point they stopped and changed to a sort of slow, swinging stamp, numbering not a quarter of the steps, but occupying about the same time. The moment the last echoing stamp had died away would come again the run or ripple of light, hurrying feet, and then again the thud of the heavier walking. It was certainly the same pair of boots, partly because (as has been said) there were no other boots about, and partly because they had a small but unmistakable creak in them. Father Brown had the kind of head that cannot help asking questions; and on this apparently trivial question his head almost split. He had seen men run in order to jump. He had seen men run in order to slide. But why on earth should a man run in order to walk? Or, again, why should he walk in order to run? Yet no other description would cover the antics of this invisible pair of legs. The man was either walking very fast down one-half of the corridor in order to walk very slow down the other half; or he was walking very slow at one end to have the rapture of walking fast at the other. Neither suggestion seemed to make much sense. His brain was growing darker and darker, like his room.

Yet, as he began to think steadily, the very blackness of his cell seemed to make his thoughts more vivid; he began to see as in a kind of vision the fantastic feet capering along the corridor in unnatural or symbolic attitudes. Was it a heathen religious dance? Or some entirely new kind of scientific exercise? Father Brown began to ask himself with more exactness what the steps suggested. Taking the slow step first: it certainly was not the step of the proprietor. Men of his type walk with a rapid waddle, or they sit still. It could not be any servant or messenger waiting for directions. It did not sound like it. The poorer orders (in an oligarchy) sometimes lurch about when they are slightly drunk, but generally, and especially in such gorgeous scenes, they stand or sit in constrained attitudes. No; that heavy yet springy step, with a kind of careless emphasis, not specially noisy, yet not caring what noise it made, belonged to only one of the animals of this earth. It was a gentleman of western Europe, and probably one who had never worked for his living.

Just as he came to this solid certainty, the step changed to the quicker one, and ran past the door as feverishly as a rat. The listener remarked that though this step was much swifter it was also much more noiseless, almost as if the man were walking on tiptoe. Yet it was not associated in his mind with secrecy, but with something else––something that he could not remember. He was maddened by one of those half-memories that make a man feel half-witted. Surely he had heard that strange, swift walking somewhere. Suddenly he sprang to his feet with a new idea in his head, and walked to the door. His room had no direct outlet on the passage, but let on one side into the glass office, and on the other into the cloak room beyond. He tried the door into the office, and found it locked. Then he looked at the window, now a square pane full of purple cloud cleft by livid sunset, and for an instant he smelt evil as a dog smells rats.

The rational part of him (whether the wiser or not) regained its supremacy. He remembered that the proprietor had told him that he should lock the door, and would come later to release him. He told himself that twenty things he had not thought of might explain the eccentric sounds outside; he reminded himself that there was just enough light left to finish his own proper work. Bringing his paper to the window so as to catch the last stormy evening light, he resolutely plunged once more into the almost completed record. He had written for about twenty minutes, bending closer and closer to his paper in the lessening light; then suddenly he sat upright. He had heard the strange feet once more.

This time they had a third oddity. Previously the unknown man had walked, with levity indeed and lightning quickness, but he had walked. This time he ran. One could hear the swift, soft, bounding steps coming along the corridor, like the pads of a fleeing and leaping panther. Whoever was coming was a very strong, active man, in still yet tearing excitement. Yet, when the sound had swept up to the office like a sort of whispering whirlwind, it suddenly changed again to the old slow, swaggering stamp.

Father Brown flung down his paper, and, knowing the office door to be locked, went at once into the cloak room on the other side. The attendant of this place was temporarily absent, probably because the only guests were at dinner and his office was a sinecure. After groping through a grey forest of overcoats, he found that the dim cloak room opened on the lighted corridor in the form of a sort of counter or half-door, like most of the counters across which we have all handed umbrellas and received tickets. There was a light immediately above the semicircular arch of this opening. It threw little illumination on Father Brown himself, who seemed a mere dark outline against the dim sunset window behind him. But it threw an almost theatrical light on the man who stood outside the cloak room in the corridor.

He was an elegant man in very plain evening dress; tall, but with an air of not taking up much room; one felt that he could have slid along like a shadow where many smaller men would have been obvious and obstructive. His face, now flung back in the lamplight, was swarthy and vivacious, the face of a foreigner. His figure was good, his manners good humoured and confident; a critic could only say that his black coat was a shade below his figure and manners, and even bulged and bagged in an odd way. The moment he caught sight of Brown's black silhouette against the sunset, he tossed down a scrap of paper with a number and called out with amiable authority: "I want my hat and coat, please; I find I have to go away at once."

Father Brown took the paper without a word, and obediently went to look for the coat; it was not the first menial work he had done in his life. He brought it and laid it on the counter; meanwhile, the strange gentleman who had been feeling in his waistcoat pocket, said laughing: "I haven't got any silver; you can keep this." And he threw down half a sovereign, and caught up his coat.

Father Brown's figure remained quite dark and still; but in that instant he had lost his head. His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million. Often the Catholic Church (which is wedded to common sense) did not approve of it. Often he did not approve of it himself. But it was real inspiration––important at rare crises––when whosoever shall lose his head the same shall save it.

"I think, sir," he said civilly, "that you have some silver in your pocket."

The tall gentleman stared. "Hang it," he cried, "if I choose to give you gold, why should you complain?"

"Because silver is sometimes more valuable than gold," said the priest mildly; "that is, in large quantities."

The stranger looked at him curiously. Then he looked still more curiously up the passage towards the main entrance. Then he looked back at Brown again, and then he looked very carefully at the window beyond Brown's head, still coloured with the after-glow of the storm. Then he seemed to make up his mind. He put one hand on the counter, vaulted over as easily as an acrobat and towered above the priest, putting one tremendous hand upon his collar.

"Stand still," he said, in a hacking whisper. "I don't want to threaten you, but––"

"I do want to threaten you," said Father Brown, in a voice like a rolling drum, "I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched."

"You're a rum sort of cloak-room clerk," said the other.

"I am a priest, Monsieur Flambeau," said Brown, "and I am ready to hear your confession."

The other stood gasping for a few moments, and then staggered back into a chair.

The first two courses of the dinner of The Twelve True Fishermen had proceeded with placid success. I do not possess a copy of the menu; and if I did it would not convey anything to anybody. It was written in a sort of super-French employed by cooks, but quite unintelligible to Frenchmen. There was a tradition in the club that the hors d'oeuvres should be various and manifold to the point of madness. They were taken seriously because they were avowedly useless extras, like the whole dinner and the whole club. There was also a tradition that the soup course should be light and unpretending––a sort of simple and austere vigil for the feast of fish that was to come. The talk was that strange, slight talk which governs the British Empire, which governs it in secret, and yet would scarcely enlighten an ordinary Englishman even if he could overhear it. Cabinet ministers on both sides were alluded to by their Christian names with a sort of bored benignity. The Radical Chancellor of the Exchequer, whom the whole Tory party was supposed to be cursing for his extortions, was praised for his minor poetry, or his saddle in the hunting field. The Tory leader, whom all Liberals were supposed to hate as a tyrant, was discussed and, on the whole, praised––as a Liberal. It seemed somehow that politicians were very important. And yet, anything seemed important about them except their politics. Mr. Audley, the chairman, was an amiable, elderly man who still wore Gladstone collars; he was a kind of symbol of all that phantasmal and yet fixed society. He had never done anything––not even anything wrong. He was not fast; he was not even particularly rich. He was simply in the thing; and there was an end of it. No party could ignore him, and if he had wished to be in the Cabinet he certainly would have been put there. The Duke of Chester, the vice-president, was a young and rising politician. That is to say, he was a pleasant youth, with flat, fair hair and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and enormous estates. In public his appearances were always successful and his principle was simple enough. When he thought of a joke he made it, and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able. In private, in a club of his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly, like a schoolboy. Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated them a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a Conservative. He himself was a Conservative, even in private life. He had a roll of grey hair over the back of his collar, like certain old-fashioned statesmen, and seen from behind he looked like the man the empire wants. Seen from the front he looked like a mild, self-indulgent bachelor, with rooms in the Albany––which he was.

As has been remarked, there were twenty-four seats at the terrace table, and only twelve members of the club. Thus they could occupy the terrace in the most luxurious style of all, being ranged along the inner side of the table, with no one opposite, commanding an uninterrupted view of the garden, the colours of which were still vivid, though evening was closing in somewhat luridly for the time of year. The chairman sat in the centre of the line, and the vice-president at the right-hand end of it. When the twelve guests first trooped into their seats it was the custom (for some unknown reason) for all the fifteen waiters to stand lining the wall like troops presenting arms to the king, while the fat proprietor stood and bowed to the club with radiant surprise, as if he had never heard of them before. But before the first chink of knife and fork this army of retainers had vanished, only the one or two required to collect and distribute the plates darting about in deathly silence. Mr. Lever, the proprietor, of course had disappeared in convulsions of courtesy long before. It would be exaggerative, indeed irreverent, to say that he ever positively appeared again. But when the important course, the fish course, was being brought on, there was––how shall I put it?––a vivid shadow, a projection of his personality, which told that he was hovering near. The sacred fish course consisted (to the eyes of the vulgar) in a sort of monstrous pudding, about the size and shape of a wedding cake, in which some considerable number of interesting fishes had finally lost the shapes which God had given to them. The Twelve True Fishermen took up their celebrated fish knives and fish forks, and approached it as gravely as if every inch of the pudding cost as much as the silver fork it was eaten with. So it did, for all I know. This course was dealt with in eager and devouring silence; and it was only when his plate was nearly empty that the young duke made the ritual remark: "They can't do this anywhere but here."

"Nowhere," said Mr. Audley, in a deep bass voice, turning to the speaker and nodding his venerable head a number of times. "Nowhere, assuredly, except here. It was represented to me that at the Cafe Anglais––"

Here he was interrupted and even agitated for a moment by the removal of his plate, but he recaptured the valuable thread of his thoughts. "It was represented to me that the same could be done at the Cafe Anglais. Nothing like it, sir," he said, shaking his head ruthlessly, like a hanging judge. "Nothing like it."

"Overrated place," said a certain Colonel Pound, speaking (by the look of him) for the first time for some months.

"Oh, I don't know," said the Duke of Chester, who was an optimist, "it's jolly good for some things. You can't beat it at––"

A waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead. His stoppage was as silent as his tread; but all those vague and kindly gentlemen were so used to the utter smoothness of the unseen machinery which surrounded and supported their lives, that a waiter doing anything unexpected was a start and a jar. They felt as you and I would feel if the inanimate world disobeyed––if a chair ran away from us.

The waiter stood staring a few seconds, while there deepened on every face at table a strange shame which is wholly the product of our time. It is the combination of modern humanitarianism with the horrible modern abyss between the souls of the rich and poor. A genuine historic aristocrat would have thrown things at the waiter, beginning with empty bottles, and very probably ending with money. A genuine democrat would have asked him, with comrade-like clearness of speech, what the devil he was doing. But these modern plutocrats could not bear a poor man near to them, either as a slave or as a friend. That something had gone wrong with the servants was merely a dull, hot embarrassment. They did not want to be brutal, and they dreaded the need to be benevolent. They wanted the thing, whatever it was, to be over. It was over. The waiter, after standing for some seconds rigid, like a cataleptic, turned round and ran madly out of the room.

When he reappeared in the room, or rather in the doorway, it was in company with another waiter, with whom he whispered and gesticulated with southern fierceness. Then the first waiter went away, leaving the second waiter, and reappeared with a third waiter. By the time a fourth waiter had joined this hurried synod, Mr. Audley felt it necessary to break the silence in the interests of Tact. He used a very loud cough, instead of a presidential hammer, and said: "Splendid work young Moocher's doing in Burmah. Now, no other nation in the world could have––"

A fifth waiter had sped towards him like an arrow, and was whispering in his ear: "So sorry. Important! Might the proprietor speak to you?"

The chairman turned in disorder, and with a dazed stare saw Mr. Lever coming towards them with his lumbering quickness. The gait of the good proprietor was indeed his usual gait, but his face was by no means usual. Generally it was a genial copper-brown; now it was a sickly yellow.

"You will pardon me, Mr. Audley," he said, with asthmatic breathlessness. "I have great apprehensions. Your fish-plates, they are cleared away with the knife and fork on them!"

"Well, I hope so," said the chairman, with some warmth.

"You see him?" panted the excited hotel keeper; "you see the waiter who took them away? You know him?"

"Know the waiter?" answered Mr. Audley indignantly. "Certainly not!"

Mr. Lever opened his hands with a gesture of agony. "I never send him," he said. "I know not when or why he come. I send my waiter to take away the plates, and he find them already away."

Mr. Audley still looked rather too bewildered to be really the man the empire wants; none of the company could say anything except the man of wood––Colonel Pound––who seemed galvanised into an unnatural life. He rose rigidly from his chair, leaving all the rest sitting, screwed his eyeglass into his eye, and spoke in a raucous undertone as if he had half-forgotten how to speak. "Do you mean," he said, "that somebody has stolen our silver fish service?"

The proprietor repeated the open-handed gesture with even greater helplessness and in a flash all the men at the table were on their feet.

"Are all your waiters here?" demanded the colonel, in his low, harsh accent.

"Yes; they're all here. I noticed it myself," cried the young duke, pushing his boyish face into the inmost ring. "Always count 'em as I come in; they look so queer standing up against the wall."

"But surely one cannot exactly remember," began Mr. Audley, with heavy hesitation.

"I remember exactly, I tell you," cried the duke excitedly. "There never have been more than fifteen waiters at this place, and there were no more than fifteen tonight, I'll swear; no more and no less."

The proprietor turned upon him, quaking in a kind of palsy of surprise. "You say––you say," he stammered, "that you see all my fifteen waiters?"

"As usual," assented the duke. "What is the matter with that!"

"Nothing," said Lever, with a deepening accent, "only you did not. For one of zem is dead upstairs."

There was a shocking stillness for an instant in that room. It may be (so supernatural is the word death) that each of those idle men looked for a second at his soul, and saw it as a small dried pea. One of them––the duke, I think––even said with the idiotic kindness of wealth: "Is there anything we can do?"

"He has had a priest," said the Jew, not untouched.

Then, as to the clang of doom, they awoke to their own position. For a few weird seconds they had really felt as if the fifteenth waiter might be the ghost of the dead man upstairs. They had been dumb under that oppression, for ghosts were to them an embarrassment, like beggars. But the remembrance of the silver broke the spell of the miraculous; broke it abruptly and with a brutal reaction. The colonel flung over his chair and strode to the door. "If there was a fifteenth man here, friends," he said, "that fifteenth fellow was a thief. Down at once to the front and back doors and secure everything; then we'll talk. The twenty-four pearls of the club are worth recovering."

Mr. Audley seemed at first to hesitate about whether it was gentlemanly to be in such a hurry about anything; but, seeing the duke dash down the stairs with youthful energy, he followed with a more mature motion.

At the same instant a sixth waiter ran into the room, and declared that he had found the pile of fish plates on a sideboard, with no trace of the silver.

The crowd of diners and attendants that tumbled helter-skelter down the passages divided into two groups. Most of the Fishermen followed the proprietor to the front room to demand news of any exit. Colonel Pound, with the chairman, the vice-president, and one or two others darted down the corridor leading to the servants' quarters, as the more likely line of escape. As they did so they passed the dim alcove or cavern of the cloak room, and saw a short, black-coated figure, presumably an attendant, standing a little way back in the shadow of it.

"Hallo, there!" called out the duke. "Have you seen anyone pass?"

The short figure did not answer the question directly, but merely said: "Perhaps I have got what you are looking for, gentlemen."

They paused, wavering and wondering, while he quietly went to the back of the cloak room, and came back with both hands full of shining silver, which he laid out on the counter as calmly as a salesman. It took the form of a dozen quaintly shaped forks and knives.

"You––you––" began the colonel, quite thrown off his balance at last. Then he peered into the dim little room and saw two things: first, that the short, black-clad man was dressed like a clergyman; and, second, that the window of the room behind him was burst, as if someone had passed violently through. "Valuable things to deposit in a cloak room, aren't they?" remarked the clergyman, with cheerful composure.

"Did––did you steal those things?" stammered Mr. Audley, with staring eyes.

"If I did," said the cleric pleasantly, "at least I am bringing them back again."

"But you didn't," said Colonel Pound, still staring at the broken window.

"To make a clean breast of it, I didn't," said the other, with some humour. And he seated himself quite gravely on a stool. "But you know who did," said the, colonel.

"I don't know his real name," said the priest placidly, "but I know something of his fighting weight, and a great deal about his spiritual difficulties. I formed the physical estimate when he was trying to throttle me, and the moral estimate when he repented."

"Oh, I say––repented!" cried young Chester, with a sort of crow of laughter.

Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. "Odd, isn't it," he said, "that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man? But there, if you will excuse me, you trespass a little upon my province. If you doubt the penitence as a practical fact, there are your knives and forks. You are The Twelve True Fishers, and there are all your silver fish. But He has made me a fisher of men."

"Did you catch this man?" asked the colonel, frowning.

Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. "Yes," he said, "I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."

There was a long silence. All the other men present drifted away to carry the recovered silver to their comrades, or to consult the proprietor about the queer condition of affairs. But the grim-faced colonel still sat sideways on the counter, swinging his long, lank legs and biting his dark moustache.

At last he said quietly to the priest: "He must have been a clever fellow, but I think I know a cleverer."

"He was a clever fellow," answered the other, "but I am not quite sure of what other you mean."

"I mean you," said the colonel, with a short laugh. "I don't want to get the fellow jailed; make yourself easy about that. But I'd give a good many silver forks to know exactly how you fell into this affair, and how you got the stuff out of him. I reckon you're the most up-to-date devil of the present company."

Father Brown seemed rather to like the saturnine candour of the soldier. "Well," he said, smiling, "I mustn't tell you anything of the man's identity, or his own story, of course; but there's no particular reason why I shouldn't tell you of the mere outside facts which I found out for myself."

He hopped over the barrier with unexpected activity, and sat beside Colonel Pound, kicking his short legs like a little boy on a gate. He began to tell the story as easily as if he were telling it to an old friend by a Christmas fire.

"You see, colonel," he said, "I was shut up in that small room there doing some writing, when I heard a pair of feet in this passage doing a dance that was as queer as the dance of death. First came quick, funny little steps, like a man walking on tiptoe for a wager; then came slow, careless, creaking steps, as of a big man walking about with a cigar. But they were both made by the same feet, I swear, and they came in rotation; first the run and then the walk, and then the run again. I wondered at first idly and then wildly why a man should act these two parts at once. One walk I knew; it was just like yours, colonel. It was the walk of a well-fed gentleman waiting for something, who strolls about rather because he is physically alert than because he is mentally impatient. I knew that I knew the other walk, too, but I could not remember what it was. What wild creature had I met on my travels that tore along on tiptoe in that extraordinary style? Then I heard a clink of plates somewhere; and the answer stood up as plain as St. Peter's. It was the walk of a waiter––that walk with the body slanted forward, the eyes looking down, the ball of the toe spurning away the ground, the coat tails and napkin flying. Then I thought for a minute and a half more. And I believe I saw the manner of the crime, as clearly as if I were going to commit it."

Colonel Pound looked at him keenly, but the speaker's mild grey eyes were fixed upon the ceiling with almost empty wistfulness.

"A crime," he said slowly, "is like any other work of art. Don't look surprised; crimes are by no means the only works of art that come from an infernal workshop. But every work of art, divine or diabolic, has one indispensable mark––I mean, that the centre of it is simple, however much the fulfilment may be complicated. Thus, in Hamlet, let us say, the grotesqueness of the grave-digger, the flowers of the mad girl, the fantastic finery of Osric, the pallor of the ghost and the grin of the skull are all oddities in a sort of tangled wreath round one plain tragic figure of a man in black. Well, this also," he said, getting slowly down from his seat with a smile, "this also is the plain tragedy of a man in black. Yes," he went on, seeing the colonel look up in some wonder, "the whole of this tale turns on a black coat. In this, as in Hamlet, there are the rococo excrescences––yourselves, let us say. There is the dead waiter, who was there when he could not be there. There is the invisible hand that swept your table clear of silver and melted into air. But every clever crime is founded ultimately on some one quite simple fact––some fact that is not itself mysterious. The mystification comes in covering it up, in leading men's thoughts away from it. This large and subtle and (in the ordinary course) most profitable crime, was built on the plain fact that a gentleman's evening dress is the same as a waiter's. All the rest was acting, and thundering good acting, too."

"Still," said the colonel, getting up and frowning at his boots, "I am not sure that I understand."

"Colonel," said Father Brown, "I tell you that this archangel of impudence who stole your forks walked up and down this passage twenty times in the blaze of all the lamps, in the glare of all the eyes. He did not go and hide in dim corners where suspicion might have searched for him. He kept constantly on the move in the lighted corridors, and everywhere that he went he seemed to be there by right. Don't ask me what he was like; you have seen him yourself six or seven times tonight. You were waiting with all the other grand people in the reception room at the end of the passage there, with the terrace just beyond. Whenever he came among you gentlemen, he came in the lightning style of a waiter, with bent head, flapping napkin and flying feet. He shot out on to the terrace, did something to the table cloth, and shot back again towards the office and the waiters' quarters. By the time he had come under the eye of the office clerk and the waiters he had become another man in every inch of his body, in every instinctive gesture. He strolled among the servants with the absent-minded insolence which they have all seen in their patrons. It was no new thing to them that a swell from the dinner party should pace all parts of the house like an animal at the Zoo; they know that nothing marks the Smart Set more than a habit of walking where one chooses. When he was magnificently weary of walking down that particular passage he would wheel round and pace back past the office; in the shadow of the arch just beyond he was altered as by a blast of magic, and went hurrying forward again among the Twelve Fishermen, an obsequious attendant. Why should the gentlemen look at a chance waiter? Why should the waiters suspect a first-rate walking gentleman? Once or twice he played the coolest tricks. In the proprietor's private quarters he called out breezily for a syphon of soda water, saying he was thirsty. He said genially that he would carry it himself, and he did; he carried it quickly and correctly through the thick of you, a waiter with an obvious errand. Of course, it could not have been kept up long, but it only had to be kept up till the end of the fish course.

"His worst moment was when the waiters stood in a row; but even then he contrived to lean against the wall just round the corner in such a way that for that important instant the waiters thought him a gentleman, while the gentlemen thought him a waiter. The rest went like winking. If any waiter caught him away from the table, that waiter caught a languid aristocrat. He had only to time himself two minutes before the fish was cleared, become a swift servant, and clear it himself. He put the plates down on a sideboard, stuffed the silver in his breast pocket, giving it a bulgy look, and ran like a hare (I heard him coming) till he came to the cloak room. There he had only to be a plutocrat again––a plutocrat called away suddenly on business. He had only to give his ticket to the cloak-room attendant, and go out again elegantly as he had come in. Only––only I happened to be the cloak-room attendant."

"What did you do to him?" cried the colonel, with unusual intensity. "What did he tell you?"

"I beg your pardon," said the priest immovably, "that is where the story ends."

"And the interesting story begins," muttered Pound. "I think I understand his professional trick. But I don't seem to have got hold of yours."

"I must be going," said Father Brown.

They walked together along the passage to the entrance hall, where they saw the fresh, freckled face of the Duke of Chester, who was bounding buoyantly along towards them.

"Come along, Pound," he cried breathlessly. "I've been looking for you everywhere. The dinner's going again in spanking style, and old Audley has got to make a speech in honour of the forks being saved. We want to start some new ceremony, don't you know, to commemorate the occasion. I say, you really got the goods back, what do you suggest?"

"Why," said the colonel, eyeing him with a certain sardonic approval, "I should suggest that henceforward we wear green coats, instead of black. One never knows what mistakes may arise when one looks so like a waiter."

"Oh, hang it all!" said the young man, "a gentleman never looks like a waiter."

"Nor a waiter like a gentleman, I suppose," said Colonel Pound, with the same lowering laughter on his face. "Reverend sir, your friend must have been very smart to act the gentleman."

Father Brown buttoned up his commonplace overcoat to the neck, for the night was stormy, and took his commonplace umbrella from the stand.

"Yes," he said; "it must be very hard work to be a gentleman; but, do you know, I have sometimes thought that it may be almost as laborious to be a waiter."

And saying "Good evening," he pushed open the heavy doors of that palace of pleasures. The golden gates closed behind him, and he went at a brisk walk through the damp, dark streets in search of a penny omnibus.

Ashes: VI

2010-03-09T18:40:00.000-08:00

Here we are at last with our final installment of Eliot's long, difficult, intense, and intensely personal Ash Wednesday. I have not, up to this point, added much in the way of analysis and interpretation. I tend to see scripture and poetry (somewhat) in the same category: they are neither tidy nor aloof. So interpretation, however much we may desire or pretend to the contrary, is usually quite personal. That is not to say that we are reduced merely to picking the linty fruit of our own navel gazing. (That was a more revolting analogy than I intended! Sorry.) Indeed, to the extent we are able, I think both God and good sense require us to seek knowledge by the usual, pedestrian, earth-bound means: research, logic, pondering, even (gasp!) debate, or at least discussion. In this process, objectivity ought to be a goal, but we should not fool ourselves into believing that we are above the fray.

Ultimately, we are laborers, and that means we work in the valley and, with time, among the foothills. We have not yet ascended the mountain. We are masons wielding trowel and mud and brick. As such, we must have enough perspective to know how to use a square and a plumb-line. We are not, however, the Architect, and our glimpses of the blueprints are, for the most part, fragmentary.

At the same time, as believers in the reality of the Holy Spirit, we should hope in (and work for) those moments when, amid the dust and rubble, a rock momentarily becomes a seerstone––when our battered lanterns miraculously cast light through walls, and even into hearts.

With these caveats in mind, then, let's briefly (and far from definitively) examine where Eliot has led us thus far.

I
Ash Wednesday begins in the desert. This is a common image for Eliot, author of The Waste Land and The Hollow Men. Modernism, wandering through the territory of savage individualism, cannot help but lead to anxiety and alienation, and, ultimately, to nihilism. Ayn Rand is the marijuana to Sartre's heroin––a gateway philosophy, if you like, a path toward No Exit.

The soul is weary. All is arid sameness. Having sought the World, he finds it only ash. The power in the earth, in nature, in life itself (and it is real: "veritable") is stripped away precisely because it is "transitory." Hitting rock-bottom, the rock crumbles and the bottom drops out. Lacking power to reach for the possibility of the divine ("blessèd face"), the soul would try to build something "upon which to rejoice," but how can it lay a foundation on nothingness? Even the modern poets' reaching to outdo one another in ironic paeans of sophisticated despair (like drowning men holding a peeing contest) ultimately holds no interest. Any effort to "rejoice" is a laughless joke, and now, in the blackness, the soul must consider that it might have missed something, some reality it didn't see, some meaning. If so, surely there will be judgment. In a world of nothingness, failing to notice the single reality is the ultimate sin, indeed, the only sin. In fear then, the soul begins to pray, begging mercy. In the last few lines, quoting the liturgy, Eliot has tied this single soul to a community. Perhaps we can see here some refutation of modernism's shrill insistence on individualism and the alienation that results. Perhaps to be saved at all we must be saved together.

II
My immediate reaction as I begin to read the second stanza is relief. It isn't cheerful, but there is some respite from the intolerable, insuperable despair. The poet begins to consider death itself, forgetting, oblivion––perhaps there is some rest here. He has been consumed utterly: "my legs" (mobility), "my heart my liver" (life), and "that which had been contained in the hollow round of my skull" (thought). There is a "Lady." Perhaps Dante's Beatrice? There is a focus here on the colors white and blue, which are distinctly Marian. This is a strange kind of paradise. The soul has been reduced––pared down to essentials? The bones "shine" and "chirp." He offers himself to "oblivion" (are we to associate "oblivion" with God?) and thereby retains himself, or at least some part of himself (Matt. 16:25 may be applicable here). Is this a kind of resurrection? We are not really in Christian territory yet, not as it is commonly understood. There are whiffs of Oriental incense (Buddhism? Nirvana?), yet I am reminded of some descriptions of Theosis: being swallowed in, or participating in the life of God himself. And in this section God does indeed invite these bones to participate, commanding them to prophesy. Now begins a litany of paradox, some of which, again, strikes me as Marian. (She is often associated with "the Rose.") Still, this is clearly not an expected kind of paradise for the believing Christian. Three times, he refers to the end of "love." (Perhaps more of a Buddhist notion, aimed at freeing oneself from all desire, craving, and attachment.) At least, though, the torture of the first stanza is alleviated. There is peace; there is some "land," some "inheritance."

III
The third section is a Pilgrim's Progress of sorts, maybe a Jacob's Ladder. I think Eliot is broadening his perspective, so I look at the first two stanzas as little summations of our progress to this point. The first refers to a "devil" that wears the face of "despair," which was the major opponent in the first section. The second stanza transcends that trial, leaving the devil "twisting, turning below," and now passes through a place with "no more faces," a place reminiscent of another devouring animal (like the leopards), an "agèd shark." There is no struggle here––it is peaceful, though not paradisaical––but the soul is ready to continue upward.

(I suppose I should mention that a "stair" is also an important image in Dante's Divine Comedy, which was a constant inspiration/preoccupation for Eliot. Indeed, the fragment of Dante used in the next section comes from a line that mentions a "stair.")

The third stanza is uncharacteristically lush. It is full of life and gorgeous pastoral imagery (in stark contrast to the sere beginning), but this richer language adds a new challenge: the poet hints––finally!––at eroticism. Eliot has escaped his own head––remember, from the first section:

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain

––he is now ready to face some of the basic challenges of incarnational theology. A reference to a "fig" is a common sign of fecundity, and it doesn't take a psychology major to guess at what Freud might say when addressing the meaning of a "slotted window" and an "antique flute." The soul is not immune to these temptations, but ultimately leaves behind "distraction" and the "music of the flute" [insert sophomoric joke here], finding "strength beyond hope and despair," continuing to climb.

This section ends with another quote from the liturgy:

Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy: But speak the word only.

These are the words spoken by the celebrant before he consumes the Host, and so occur in the same place in this poem as they do in the Mass: the intersection of the physical and the Divine.

IV
The soul now finds itself, again, in a kind of paradise––a moment of rest before the coming "exile." As in section II, we find the Lady, but this paradise is no valley of dry (albeit bright) bones. This is a garden growing in "violet" and "green." The Lady is still associated strongly with the colors blue and white, but notice that she makes "cool the dry rock and made firm the sand / In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s colour." The Lady is an agent of growth and life; there are no leopards stripping flesh from bones. In turning rocks and sand blue, she seems to be sanctifying the physical realm. There is a kind of salvation at work, perhaps a restoration to an Edenic ideal: "restoring / Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring / With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem / The time."

The poetry itself seems restored to life. We don't hear the jarring, fragmented rhythms of the opening. This "life" seems more holy (in this section, in contrast to section III, the aforementioned "flute is breathless"––Ahem), and at only a gesture from the Lady,

...the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken
Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

V
I have to agree with C.E. Chaffin that the fifth section of Ash Wednesday is... unfortunate. The rhythm and bizarre rhyme scheme are distracting and tend to rob this section of what impact it might have otherwise had. Nevertheless, a few observations:

We are back in the world. This might explain the intent of the choppy rhythm and mincing rhymes: it is difficult to find transcendence here. We are too busy, the "world is too much with us" (to rob another poet). The poet meditates, rambling, on the Word. Though He created it, the "unstilled world" does not recognize Him. We are unable to fully turn to Him, so he cries out: "O my people, what have I done unto thee."

Still, there may be cause to hope. Lines like "...the last desert before the last blue rocks..." and "The desert in the garden the garden in the desert..." suggest that we move through cycles of desert and garden; there are oases along the way, where we can be taught (as in the final section) "to sit still," where we might again see the Lady, where we can be reminded of The Word.

VI
As I haven't yet presented the conclusion, I will say little, but do want to highlight a thought or two. In this final section, we find we have come full circle. Life is still life, with all its difficulty and darkness, but the heart has changed. Where the first section begins with "Because," indicating that life has caused despair, we now find the word "Although," indicating hope in spite of the suffering and buffeting of mortal life.

More than that, maybe finding our faith (broken and weak though it might be) can return to us the love we used to feel for the world. But we must be careful to remember that "This is the time of tension between dying and birth..."––we are not here to stay.

Finally, we should see a glimpse of another possible identity for "the Lady." Wisdom is, in holy writ, often depicted as female––Sophia, in fact––but this depiction is also closely tied to another holy being, hinted at here with the words "spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden ... spirit of the river, spirit of the sea." As a guide and teacher throughout the poem, it is possible the author means to suggest that this is the work of the Holy Ghost.

So, now, enjoy the sixth and final installment of T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday:

VI
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH LENT...

2010-03-04T05:18:00.000-08:00

...so I won't call this an "interlude," but you must watch it anyway!

OK Go + Rube Goldberg = AWESOME!

Ashes V

2010-03-03T23:06:00.000-08:00

In our penultimate installment of Eliot's (somewhat dense and obscure, but intensely personal) poem, we find a quote from one of the most extraordinary moments in the liturgical year. Known as, "The Reproaches," this text is sung during the liturgy on Good Friday, and is as harrowing, in its way, as that awful moment in the accounts of the Passion: My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me!

(A copy of the sheet music for this setting is available here should you like to follow along.)

The sung text in the video above is in both Latin and Greek (so don't adjust your speakers if you aren't picking it up). Here's the English text, at no additional charge:

O my people, what have I done unto thee, or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me.

Because I brought thee forth from the land of Egypt: thou hast prepared a Cross for thy Saviour.

Hagios, o Theos. Hagios ischyros. Hagios athanatos, eleison imas.

(Holy and mighty. Holy God. Holy and immortal, have mercy upon us.)

Because I led thee through the desert forty years, and fed thee with manna, and brought thee into a land exceeding good: thou hast prepared a Cross for thy Saviour.

Hagios, o Theos. Hagios ischyros. Hagios athanatos, eleison imas.

What more could I have done unto thee that I have not done? I indeed did plant thee, O my vineyard, with exceeding fair fruit: and thou art become very bitter unto me: for vinegar, mingled with gall, thou gavest me when thirsty: and hast pierced with a spear the side of thy Saviour.

Hagios, o Theos. Hagios ischyros. Hagios athanatos, eleison imas.

I did scourge Egypt with her firstborn for thy sake: and thou hast scourged me and delivered me up.

O my people, what have I done unto thee, or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me.

I led thee forth from Egypt, drowning Pharaoh in the Red Sea: and thou hast delivered me up unto the chief priests.

O my people, what have I done unto thee, or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me.

I did open the sea before thee: and thou hast opened my side with a spear.

O my people, what have I done unto thee, or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me.

I did go before thee in the pillar of cloud: and thou hast led me unto the judgment-hall of Pilate.

O my people, what have I done unto thee, or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me.

I did feed thee with manna in the desert: and thou hast stricken me with blows and scourges.

O my people, what have I done unto thee, or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me.

I did give thee to drink the water of life from the rock: and thou hast given me to drink but gall and vinegar.

O my people, what have I done unto thee, or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me.

I did smite the kings of the Canaanites for thy sake: and thou hast smitten my head with a reed.

O my people, what have I done unto thee, or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me.

I did give thee a royal sceptre: and thou hast given unto my head a crown of thorns.

O my people, what have I done unto thee, or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me.

I did raise thee on high with great power: and thou hast hanged me on the gibbet of the Cross.

O my people, what have I done unto thee, or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me.

[Caveat lector: Most English translations are rendered with some slight differences from the foregoing (and likely with somewhat greater accuracy), but this version had a kind of "King-James-Version-y goodness" that always feels like home to me.]

For those of you who are still sore over that bit of unpleasantness in 1054 (and I'm not going to name names... Brandon), consider the following something of an olive branch. While still technically Roman chant, it has a much more "Eastern" church flavor––and, I must admit, chant with an ison is pretty cool. (JP II would say it's just part of breathing with "both lungs"... though some of those basses on the recording sound like they must have three or four at least! As a tenor, I am simultaneously filled with awe and covetousness. Then again, in opera, the tenor usually gets the girl, so there are some consolations––though mostly everyone is dead by the end anyway.)

Now, back to the text!

Drawing on lines from Micah, Jeremiah, and Isaiah, the text is heavily informed by the Old Testament. The Isaiah quotes are, for me, particularly interesting, as I spent some time digging in the early verses of Ch. 5 during my mission. The prophet sets his words in a style common for his time, inspired by (or at least imitating) a popular song-form. One of the important points we should note comes in verse 2, as the speaker rolls out a litany of all the things he has done to ensure the vineyard's success:

And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein: and he looked that it should bring forth grapes...

The inclusion of the winepress is an unusual point. Normally, one such press would be sufficient for a number of neighboring vineyards; it was something of a communal resource. To build your own winepress was an expensive investment, and it suggests that the master of the vineyard was expecting extraordinary yields. This explains the real sense of despair and anger the master feels when, in spite of all he has done, the vines only produce "wild grapes." (Perhaps we should think about this chapter when we are bemused by a certain NT passage involving a rather unfortunate fig tree.)

Understanding what a winepress really meant to grape-growers is important. I mean, I like grapes as much as the next guy, but really, what's the big deal? In the ancient world, lacking the technologies of refrigeration and rapid transportation that we enjoy today, wine-making was the only way of turning this economically essential fruit into something valuable and lasting. We can nip down to the supermarket, but in the ancient world, months (years, really) of hard work would vanish in a couple weeks if it couldn't be bottled as wine.

Scripturally, the symbolism of the winepress resonates further. In a rather gory passage (Isaiah 63), the theme arises again:

I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people [there was] none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.

And for the observant Latter-day Saint, there should be another familiar echo:

[H]e shall deliver up the kingdom, and present it unto the Father, spotless, saying: I have overcome and have trodden the wine-press alone, even the wine-press of the fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God (D&C 76:107).

(Note the beautiful relationship here between the two kinds of "blood stains" in these passages; the blood of those who reject Christ (in Isaiah)––blood spilled by destruction––will stain His garments, whereas, if our garments are marked with His blood––spilled by salvation––we are rendered "spotless.")

The vicissitudes of life, even the cycles of the year remind us: we are here for a brief season, then we wither and are gone. Only the Master Craftsman is able to make of us something that lasts, something of real value: if we allow Him, he will make us like Himself. After all, Lewis reminds us, everything that exists––every tree, flower, planet, and supernova; every human relationship we cherish––is only here for one purpose: "Every Christian is to become a little Christ."

How perfect, then, that He has chosen to reach toward us (and allow us to reach toward Him) most often through bread and wine.

Anyway, I must dash. (There is nothing like gratitude to remind me just how much repenting I have to do! It's a good thing I still have some Lent left; it's like a runway that lets us get our feet on the ground and taxi to the next liturgical terminal, so we don't just crash into Easter.)

Here's the Eliot you've been waiting for:

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

O my people.

Ashes: Interlude

2010-03-01T22:35:00.000-08:00

Today, a portion of Tennyson's monstrously long In Memoriam. Dealing with the nexus of faith, doubt, and the demands of integrity, the poet relies on music as a metaphor to describe man's struggle with (or struggle toward) God and faith. It is, I think, as potent an image as Jacob and his angel.

Canto 96

You say, but with no touch of scorn,
Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes
Are tender over drowning flies,
You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.

I know not: one indeed I knew
In many a subtle question versed,
Who touch'd a jarring lyre at first,
But ever strove to make it true:

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

He fought his doubts and gather'd strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length

To find a stronger faith his own;
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone,

But in the darkness and the cloud,
As over Sinai's peaks of old,
While Israel made their gods of gold,
Altho' the trumpet blew so loud.

Ashes: IV

2010-02-26T23:36:00.000-08:00

Nothing much to report today, apart from the cold that is making the rounds in my apartment. However, as I got the stomach flu, I am exempt––at least that's what I keep telling the Lord in our ongoing conversations.

(Speaking of which, that reminds me of a part in the book Cryptonomicon in which Goto Dengo, a Japanese soldier/prisoner recuperating in a Catholic hospital in the Philippines, begins to have discussion-arguments with the crucifix on his wall. The Lord always wins, remaining silent. Finally, going stir-crazy, Dengo tries to figure out what "INRI"––the superscript above the cross––is supposed to mean. One of the possibilities he considers is strangely reminiscent of a story once told me by a cleric, who shall remain anonymous: "Initiate Nail Removal Immediately" was Goto's guess.)

Drat. That wasn't particularly Lenten, was it? Well, let's make reparation thus:

The music is really too glorious to fit the season, but the text is suitably humble (from the deuterocanonical Book of Judith):Spem in alium nunquam habui praeter in te
Deus Israel
qui irasceris
et propitius eris
et omnia peccata hominum in tribulatione dimittis
Domine Deus
Creator coeli et terrae
respice humilitatem nostram
Or, in English:I have never put my hope in any other but in you,
O God of Israel
who can show both anger
and graciousness,
and who absolves all the sins of suffering man.
Lord God,
Creator of Heaven and Earth
be mindful of our lowliness.
Composed by (who else?) Thomas Tallis, this motet, Spem in alium, is set for eight five-part choirs, singing simultaneously. How a composer can juggle 40 independent lines of music without disaster is beyond me... far, far beyond me.

Part four (of six) of our Eliot series follows:

Who walked between the violet and the violet
Who walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary’s colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary’s colour,
Sovegna vos*

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

_____________________________________
*The words, "Sovegna vos," come from a fragment of Dante's Purgatorio. Interestingly, they were originally intended to serve as a portion of the epigraph for Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock––though, ultimately, he chose a different quote. The fragment,

'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor'.

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.

reads, in Eliot's own translation:

'be mindful in due time of my pain'.

Then dived he back into that fire which refines them.

Thus, in Ash Wednesday, the words are a call to remembrance: "Be mindful [of me/us?]..." For more information regarding the influence of Dante on this text, see this article.

Ashes: III

2010-02-24T04:44:00.000-08:00

With compliments to Fr. Peter, and apropos of living in BYU's unmarried housing––a hotbed of celibacy!––let's begin today with a brief reading from the monastic rule par excellence, St. Benedict's:

The life of a monk [or Mormon missionary!] ought always to be a Lenten observance. However, since such virtue is that of few, we advise that during these days of Lent he guard his life with all purity and at the same time wash away during these holy days all the shortcomings of other times. This will then be worthily done, if we restrain ourselves from all vices. Let us devote ourselves to tearful prayers, to reading and compunction of heart, and to abstinence.

During these days, therefore, let us add something to the usual amount of our service, special prayers, abstinence from food and drink, that each one offer to God "with the joy of the Holy Ghost" (1 Thes 1:6), of his own accord, something above his prescribed measure; namely, let him withdraw from his body somewhat of food, drink, sleep, speech, merriment, and with the gladness of spiritual desire await holy Easter.

In 2006, I had the opportunity to sing during a session of General Conference (a good but grueling experience––I don't know where the MoTab Choir members get their stamina). My favorite song from that set was a scriptural paraphrase of a Book of Mormon text, set (by the incomparable Ronald Staheli) to an arrangement of Sibelius' beautiful Finlandia. Below you can view a video of this performance:

The scriptural passage from which the text was derived was, of course, the Psalm of Nephi.* (See here to read it in its entirety). It strikes me that this is an especially appropriate text for Lent. This Psalm possesses a dual nature, painted with penitence and gilded with praise. Consider, for instance, this passage:

...[M]y heart exclaimeth: O wretched man that I am! Yea, my heart sorroweth because of my flesh; my soul grieveth because of mine iniquities. I am encompassed about, because of the temptations and the sins which do so easily beset me. And when I desire to rejoice, my heart groaneth because of my sins; nevertheless, I know in whom I have trusted.

And now compare with the central line of the entire psalm:

Awake, my soul! No longer droop in sin. Rejoice, O my heart, and give place no more for the enemy of my soul.

Trust has delivered Nephi from his sins, triumphant only within the triumph of Christ. Nephi recites a litany of his blessings, which––considering his sins––would only serve to deepen his self-condemnation, were it not for the Atonement. This is God's alchemy (what C.S. Lewis called the "deep magic" in his Narnian Chronicles), which not only purifies us, but turns our dross to gold! The following line is especially telling:

He hath filled me with his love, even unto the consuming of my flesh.

This is a fascinating image, reminiscent of John Donne's famous words:
"Batter my heart, three person'd God... [B]end / Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new... [F]or I / Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free..." It also calls to mind Pope Benedict's statement: "...[We must] strive toward truth with our whole heart, mind and will... It is then we see clearly. It is then that we are truly children of God living in His Majesty’s unfathomable reality of fiery love."

In our Lenten gardening we sow the seeds of Easter, and though the work is demanding and necessarily somber, it is suffused with quiet, expectant joy: Winter fades––Spring Himself is on the way!

I didn't go to church today;
the sun was shining so,
And drifting motes dropped like God's grace
through golden light below.
The rich grass preached and and rose like Christ,
the trees were up-flung hymns––
Great, open-throated orisons
of leaf and waving limb.
The zephyr-Spirit blew me where
it listed, and I went,
Becoming––for a moment––an
apostle, freshly sent.
Hear a homily of sunlight
making Truth a bell to ring:
There is Life from dark earth bursting!
Ah,
Come, my Jesus,
Thou true Spring!

Poor fare, I know––I'm no poet. Let's leave it to the professionals. Another installment (three of six) of Eliot's Ash Wednesday follows:

III

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the fig’s fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute,

stops and steps of the mind over the third stair,

Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy

but speak the word only.

___________________________________________

*For those interested:

Here you can find a paper by the poet describing how he adapted the text (contains complete lyrics for the song).
Here is a form-critical analysis of Nephi's Psalm.
Another analysis.
Yet another analysis.
Brief thoughts on possible temple imagery in the psalm.

Ashes: Interlude

2010-02-20T12:55:00.000-08:00

For those who would like further information about the poem Ash Wednesday, and some guidance in interpreting it (including the four installments still to come), please see the following resources:

Brief Summary Analysis
T.S. Eliot: Ash Wednesday (C.E. Chaffin)
Ash Wednesday: A Religious History (Theodore Morrison)
Eliot's Ash Wednesday, I (James Loucks)
Ash Wednesday (John Ferguson)
Ash Wednesday: The Purgatorio in a Modern Mode (Sister M. Cleophas)
Ash Wednesday and the Land between Dying and Birth (John Cunningham and Jason Peters)
T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets: Poetic Confession as Psychotherapy (Dennis Brown)
What T.S. Eliot Almost Believed (J. Bottum)––An interesting criticism of faith (or, more precisely, the lack thereof) in Eliot's poetry.

Ashes: II

2010-02-19T23:52:00.000-08:00

The next installment (two of six) of Eliot's Ash Wednesday.

(By way of friendly advice, don't worry if some of this seems pretty opaque; Eliot is challenging at the best of times, and this is difficult stuff even for him. There are some analyses online––which I will find and link to at a later date––but sometimes poems like this one defy analysis, and have to be intuited rather than interpreted.)

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

Ashes: Interlude

2010-02-18T00:35:00.000-08:00

It is with great regret that I announce that my Lenten fast has been hijacked by a pagan deity. At approximately 5:00 PM, I made violent and abundant offering to Commodus, the porcelain goddess. Services began again at 9:00, and now we have had a kind of Vigils at 1:00 AM. It has been surprisingly regular, and might even be a benefit to observing the Divine Office if it weren't for the fact that it is so damned distracting to pray: "Glory be to the––BLLLEEECHERRRGurbleurble." (Though to be fair, one is always sure to make a profound inclination!) On the bright side, pagan worship is something of an improvement for me, as I am usually rendered completely atheist upon vomiting––it can take days to work my way back even to Pantheism.

I suppose I'll say "hi" again at 5:00, though I am somewhat worried by the fact that there are no fluids left. We've just gone clean out of bile, and so I suppose we'll have to move on to CSF and lymph, if we don't just jump straight to eyeballs and kidneys. It has been a real experience; have you ever puked so hard your joints hurt?

Ashes: I

2010-02-17T09:41:00.000-08:00

First, the photographic evidence: Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris. I did attend Mass this morning, and it was lovely. LDS missionary experience stood me in good stead, as the liturgy was bilingual, so I could follow along without a hitch really. (Well, not including the Spanish responses. I reverted to the English ones I'm used to.)

The homily was interesting (and brief, as he had to give it in two languages, one after the other), drawing on a passage from Mark:

So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.

Thus the Lenten season bears fruit as God works in us, though often we know not how. Our job then becomes one of clearing ground and weeding and watering. Ascesis and penitence are mainly a matter of getting out of God's way, making a place for him to work.

When it came to the imposition of the ashes, they used the formula from the NT: Repent (vertical mark) and believe the Gospel (horizontal).

The parish is in a transitional situation. They built the school first, and are now in the process of raising funds for the church proper, so Mass takes place in the gym area; there are no kneelers, just the vinyl floor over cement slab. This, combined with the short space between the rows of chairs, made kneeling during the Eucharistic prayer an interesting experience, but by golly you were focused!

The only disappointment was the Sanctus. Nobody knew the setting they were using, including the priest and the cantor––the congregation didn't stand a chance. It was in Spanish, so it wasn't in the little booklets, and it didn't sound like it was one the Spanish-speakers had ever heard before. (Again, mission experience came to the rescue: there has never been a disaster in religious music so spectacular as one abortive Zone Conference musical number in which I participated. It was pretty much an a capella invocation of the First Horseman of the Apocalypse––Pestilence himself rode with us that morning. I was hoping the earth could just swallow us all up afterward. Honestly, the mere memory induces literal nausea. The unfortunate Sanctus is no big deal at all.)

Anyway, there will be more meditation forthcoming, but for now a little poetic thought (part one of six):

Ash Wednesday
T.S. Eliot

I

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

The Valentines of Valentine's

2010-02-12T22:49:00.000-08:00

Though the martyr St. Valentinus was removed from the general calendar in 1969 due, in part, to a paucity of historical information about him, I thought we might bring him up anyway in an attempt to divert some of the flood of treacle soon to unfold.

His name derives from the Latin term valens, or "worthy." We use the related words "value" or "valuable" in English, and our Spanish brothers and sisters frequently use the phrase "vale la pena," meaning, "it's worth it" (literally: it is worth the pain, or effort). His name isn't in the earliest martyrologies, but was added in 496 by Pope Gelasius I (though with the admission that his deeds were "known only to God").

It seems that there were actually at least three different saints of that name, and all of them were martyrs. One a Roman priest, another a bishop, and the third a man martyred in Africa. Apart from their name, the historical sources at least make clear that all of the men were very fond of chocolates. (The foregoing sentence was a shameless lie, but it would be pretty cool, no?)

Here's a bit of one of them anyway:

I'm feeling romantic already.

Finally, in honor of the more popular observances of this coming Sunday, a favorite by W.H. Auden:

The Love Feast

In an upper room at midnight
See us gathered on behalf
Of love according to the gospel
Of the radio-phonograph.

Lou is telling Anne what Molly
Said to Mark behind her back;
Jack likes Jill who worships George
Who has the hots for Jack.

Catechumens make their entrance;
Steep enthusiastic eyes
Flicker after tits and baskets;
Someone vomits; someone cries.

Willy cannot bear his father,
Lilian is afraid of kids;
The Love that rules the sun and stars
Permits what He forbids.

Adrian's pleasure-loving dachshund
In a sinner's lap lies curled;
Drunken absent-minded fingers
Pat a sinless world.

Who is Jenny lying to
In her call, Collect, to Rome?
The Love that made her out of nothing
Tells me to go home.

But that Miss Number in the corner
Playing hard to get....
I am sorry I'm not sorry...
Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet.

There's some interesting theology tucked away in there, should you care to tease it out (not to mention some simply very-clever writing). Apologies to friends and relatives who are offended by "tits." Though, on second thought, most of us have had sufficient experience with them (though we may not remember it) that I don't really feel bad. Happy St. Valentine's Day, all!

Daily Universe: Letter and Response

2010-02-02T17:43:00.000-08:00

This was printed in today's edition of the school newspaper:

BYU vs. BYU-Idaho

Brigham Young University-Idaho and Provo are both Church schools, yet they differ nearly as two different worlds. After two years at BYU-Idaho, I transferred to BYU and I have been both pleased and disappointed. The new academic pressure to be successful flourishes within the walls of each building on campus. Yet the “Spirit of Ricks” that enchants and supports the students of BYU-Idaho does not exist here as clearly as in Rexburg. The standards of living are not held to such high regard and practiced with such strictness here at BYU. Though many people strive to do their best in maintaining the Honor Code, I believe the students here at BYU would benefit from working a little harder at raising the bar.

Girls, watch your skirts and clothing. It is essential to the sanity of our young men and to the dignity of womanhood that you are modest. Young men, you are priesthood holders. It has been asked of you to be clean in your appearance. Also, it is time to work together and keep curfew. The contents within the Honor Code have been set up by prophets, therefore, Heavenly Father has asked us to live a little different from the rest of the world. Great blessings and unity thrive at a university that is living a strict honor code together. I believe it is time for BYU to wake up and recommit to keeping the Honor Code. It does not restrict our lives but enriches our lives.

Chelsea Jamison
Spokane, Wash.

My riposte:

The Honor Code is a fine document, but we should be careful not to stray into the realm of fanaticism in its application. Letters like Tuesday's "BYU vs. BYU-Idaho" skirt the line. Suggesting that "the contents [of] the Honor Code have been set up by prophets" is somewhat misleading. It did not come down from the mountain with Moses, scrawled on the back side of the Decalogue. Those interested in the history of the Honor Code (and the many and varied permutations that have occurred over the years) should avail themselves of the free copy of "BYU: A House of Faith" online: http://www.signaturebookslibrary.org/byu/chapter3.htm#honor>. More to the point, the Honor Code has value only insofar as it helps us to live the gospel. Increased strictness for its own sake is actually counterproductive. Hugh Nibley, one of BYU's most celebrated scholars, wrote: "The worst sinners, according to Jesus, are not the harlots and publicans, but the religious leaders with their insistence on proper dress and grooming, their careful observance of all the rules, their precious concern for status symbols, their strict legality, their pious patriotism. Longhairs, beards, [etc.] come and go, but Babylon is always there: rich [and] respectable.... [T]he haircut becomes the test of virtue in a world where Satan deceives and rules by appearance" (from "Approaching Zion," emphasis mine). If a BYU education has taught me anything, it is the frightening ease with which we swallow camels, while distracted by ultimately irrelevant gnats.

Nicholas Sherwood
Granby, Missouri

To be perfectly honest, I am rather proud of my restraint. I was pretty tempted just to say: "Hell, if you really liked Auschwitz North that much (and the frozen wasteland that surrounds it), I'm sure the reindeer will take you back if you ask nicely."

Foot in Mouth Diseaseor, It Goes Down Like Buttah

2010-01-27T21:16:00.000-08:00

Only a few days ago, Reed Cowan's new documentary, 8: The Mormon Proposition, made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival. It has been in the news recently, and has––as you might expect––stirred up a real rumpus in Utah. (Though, strictly speaking, the film doesn't really drop any bombshells. Does anyone really believe that the Church didn't play the major role in that campaign? Does anyone really believe that the Church hadn't been planning for initiatives like this since the mid 90's, beginning in Hawaii? Honestly, you'd have to be living under a rock.)

In any case, one of the most talked-about issues in conjunction with this movie is an interview with Utah senator Chris Buttars. The interview was quite inflammatory (as we will see in a moment) and Buttars seems a little confused that people are so worked up.* He has recently stated that Cowan et al deceived him during the interview, explaining why he would make such impolitic comments on record and on camera. And what, you may ask, was the nature of this damnable lie? What were the subtle machinations that so ensnared the good senator? Well, Gentle Reader, I'll tell you: a crew-member mentioned serving a mission at some point in their conversation, and another crew-member, the cameraman actually, was wearing a BYU jacket. I know––the mind reels at such demonic cunning! Indeed, so subtly planned was this trickery that it required its perpetrators to lay the groundwork years earlier. Their commitment to their dark scheme was total, the cameraman actually going so far as to enroll at BYU, study there, and claim his degree at the end of his studies. Wheels within wheels, my friends! However, even that will not prepare you for the utter, satanic dedication with which the other crew-member crafted his own back-story. Would you, could you believe it if I told you––and I swear that I lie not––the crew-member in question had actually served an LDS MISSION!?! Like the Gadiantons of old, the methods given them by their dark masters are nothing less than "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

But enough about that. Let's take a gander at the text of the interview itself, and see if we can understand why it has become so infamous...

I believe in the Constitution being something that was inspired of God and the way these people are destroying the Constitution is they’re saying the Constitution is a living document, that means it’s subject to change. [Also they're saying that punctuation is unimportant and run-on sentences are not a bad thing to use when you are an elected official even though they make the fact that you get to vote on state educational policy a kind of cruel irony and sounding like a mongoloid in a public setting won't really affect your political career negatively because you live in Utah and having an "R" after your name in campaign materials essentially guarantees your reelection.] But truth don’t change [No it do not––though apparently proper subject-verb agreement do], it does not change, and I won’t accept any of that. So they say, well, marriage is between a man and a woman and that’s changed, [Whaaaa? Isn't that a contradiction? Either marriage is between a man and a woman OR it has been "changed." You can't have both. It makes about as much sense to say "The sun really does still rise in the east every morning, and that's changed." Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?] look around, look at all these combinations. Combinations of abominations, [Homeboy is mixing up Ether 8:19 and Matthew 24:15] as far as I’m concerned. To me, homosexuality will always be a sexual perversion and you say that around here now and everybody goes nuts, but I don’t care. [Well, if by "perversion" you are referring to something "of an unnatural or abnormal kind," as per the dictionary, then you're on thin ice. The argument of the "crime against nature" just doesn't hold any water, scientifically speaking. In practically all species that reproduce sexually, homosexuality is observable, particularly when you're considering higher vertebrates. In species that have life-long, monogamous pairings, there are also life-long, monogamous, homosexual pairings. The incidence stays pretty stable at 5 to 8%, whatever group you consider. Now, remember, in animal populations these members do not usually reproduce... yet they don't die out. This is not to make any moral or ethical claim regarding homosexuality, but the "it's unnatural" argument just does not stand up to scrutiny in the light of current science.]

They want to talk about being nice, but they’re the meanest buggers I’ve ever seen. [This is called "cherry picking." Of course they're the "meanest buggers" you've ever seen! How could they not be, when you've restricted your sample only to include "buggers"? Now, if you were to consider non-buggers, your evaluation might change. You cannot very well say, "Those straight folks are mean buggers," precisely because those straight folks are, by definition, not "buggers."] It’s just like the Muslims. Muslims are good people and their religion is anti-war, but it’s been taken over by the radical side and the gays are totally taken over by the radical side. You don’t see the gay ["...the gay..."? Presumably "the gay" has a name, yes? "Have you talked to the gay this morning?" "What, you mean Bob?" "Yeah, like I said, the gay."] out there saying “let’s not do this gang.” [Ah, punctuation, thou art a fickle mistress! Suffice it to say there is a world of difference between "[L]et's not do this gang," and "[L]et's not do this, gang." Those commas are important, kids!] You see them marching around with signs and everything else. [Yes, just like those darn Muslims. Marching their signs right into the Pentagon, or really tall buildings in New York. You can hardly turn on the news these days without hearing about someone picketing a nightclub or an embassy in the middle east. Those Taliban rebels hiding in caves with their poster-board and magic markers, lobbing pithy slogans at US troops. The horror.]

I believe the whole thing is immoral and I believe you're moving towards... You see, [But wait! What am I moving towards? Don't leave us hanging!] if you say to me “Quit shoving your morals down my throat, Buttars,” my answer back is “You know my morals. What’s yours?” What is the morals of a gay person? [Yes, senator, what is they?] You can’t answer that, [No, you can't, because it sure as hell isn't English!] because anything goes. So now you’re moving towards a society that has no morals and there’s never been a nation that survived that’s done that. [I can't even think of anything funny to say to this, the implication is so incredibly offensive. Today dressing in drag, tomorrow smashing babies with shovels––it's a slippery slope. How long has it been since this man was last on the home planet?]

There’s a lot of dollar costs. [Yes, there is... there is a lot of costs. And, please note, they're of the "dollar" variety... as opposed to... I dunno, rupees?] You take their trying to have insurance rights the same as a man and a woman. Now, when you’re married, insurance companies can quantify, we got this many married people so they run their underwriting. You have no way to do that with gay people [Really? It would be impossible to register domestic partnerships and know their total number? Is this like some kind of gay Schrödinger's cat paradox? Once you put the homos in the filing cabinet you cannot know how many there are?] and you’re going to take on paying for all the extra, most often, diseases, and that’s huge. [Pause with me a moment. Let us revel in the glory of that statement. Repeat with me: "And you're going to take on paying for all the extra, most often, diseases, and that's huge." I don't know what that means, but could you puree it so I can smear it all over my body? Please. Luxuriate in the nutcase-ness.] And now you, as a straight, get to share that cost. That’s what I’m talking about. Those kinds of diseases are not exclusive with gays, but they represent the huge majority. [Evidently, he is unaware of the continent of Africa. More to the point, do gays currently get some special tax break or lowered insurance rate? Do they not currently pay for some of the benefits heterosexuals enjoy? Wouldn't a stable gay partnership represent the same kinds of economic benefits as a stable straight partnership?]

I believe that you will destroy the foundation of American society because I believe the cornerstone of it is a man and a woman and a family. It is, in my mind, the beginning of the end. Oh, it's worse than that. Sure, Sodom and Gomorrah was localized, this is world-wide. You can’t tell me that something was going on in Sodom and Gomorrah** is not going on wholesale right now and to a large degree among the gay community... [That's right. If there's one thing you know about gay people, it's that they all like gang rape! Oh, wait. That's not quite right is it, particularly when you consider that most sexual assault perpetrated against males is committed by... wait for it... straight men. Sexual assault, ironically, is not an uncommon form of anti-gay crime. See here for more information.] The underbelly is they do not want equality, they want superiority. [And gang rape! Don't forget that!]

The man is a wonder. He has his foot so far in his mouth, he could use his toes to wipe his backside. Honestly, people took the trouble to go to a voting booth and cast a ballot for this guy? What is wrong with you, Utah? It's like some kind of horrible dream.

There's no place like home... There's no place like home... There's no place like home...
___________________________

*Do remember that this is the same man who, when a colleague on the senate floor referred to a bill as an "unwanted baby," chimed in to say that "...this baby is black. It's a dark, ugly thing..." and was then shocked when people took issue with his choice of words!

**See here, and here for some interesting discussions on the subject.

There is only one canonized description of the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah. It comes from Ezekiel:

As I live, saith the Lord God, Sodom thy sister hath not done, she nor her daughters, as thou [speaking of Jerusalem] hast done, thou and thy daughters.

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

Ezra Taft Benson, April 1989 general conference:

The scriptures abound with evidences of the severe consequences of the sin of pride to individuals, groups, cities, and nations... It destroyed the Nephite nation and the city of Sodom.

Neal A. Maxwell, April 1999 general conference:

When love waxes cold, let the poor and the needy beware too, for they will be neglected, as happened in ancient Sodom.

Selfishness likewise causes us to be discourteous, disdainful, and self-centered while withholding from others needed goods, praise, and recognition as we selfishly pass them by and notice them not.

Seamus Heaney, again...

2010-01-24T19:54:00.001-08:00

This is another favorite of mine, Gentle Reader, by our incomparable Irish friend.

Punishment

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

This piece, like many of Heaney's poems from this period, draws on the bog, both for material and metaphor. The body of his "little adulteress" was pulled from the peat bed in 1951. The author's musing on the details of her body and her history leads him to dredge up memories from the swamp of his own experience of Ireland's conflict with Great(er) Britain.

In the first stanza he begins by reliving part of the young woman's execution. Significantly, he is not a simple observer––this is first-person experience: "I can feel the tug of the halter..." His language is highly intimate, erotic even, as he segues to an exterior perspective. From "the nape of her neck" he moves to "her naked front," then with greater detail to "her nipples." He begins to use seafaring jargon, referring to the "frail rigging of her ribs." The third stanza moves into the present––she is a corpse now––but continues to echo the sailing imagery with an anchor ("weighing stone") and buoyant "rods and boughs."

The fourth stanza begins to be less personal. The victim is viewed as organic material, a "sapling." Time spent under ground has turned her bones to "oak" and her skull into a "brain-firkin" (a kind of small barrel). Shaved hair has become the stubble of a harvested field. Heaney continues to use enjambment, creating a rhythmic awkwardness to match his discomfort with coming subject matter. Simultaneously, we see a kind of enjambment of imagery––consider the "rods and boughs" that are part of both the sailing metaphor and the notion of her having bones of "oak." The "stubble or corn" comes from the world of agriculture, and colors our understanding of "her noose" (earlier called a "halter") as a "ring," perhaps like the ring in the nose of an animal. The next stanza then changes the meaning of this "ring"; it stores "memories of love," like a wedding ring, but the next line––referring to her as a "little adulteress"––reveals that the "love" was illicit.

Heaney's words become yet more sympathetic, describing her as "beautiful" and "undernourished"; a "poor scapegoat"––for where is the man who shared in her sin? And now we begin to see the author's own sin, we become privy to an equally intimate "moral nudity." (Does he hope we will see his soul with the same understanding and kindness with which he has viewed her body?) His understanding has enabled him to "almost love" her, yet he confesses that he would have acceded to her death, at least by the consent of "silence." (The notion of casting "stones" here is ambiguous: is this a reference to death by lapidation, or are these light and dark stones cast as votes?) The author describes himself in terms yet more damning: he is a "voyeur." His consideration of her is not unsullied by personal interest; she is material for him to craft. Yet he sees her in ways more intimate even than her lover, who never viewed the honeycomb of her exposed brain, her "muscles' webbing," or––a beautiful line––"all [her] numbered bones."

He then shows us that his hypothetical assent to her death was not mere sentiment, because he has already committed an equivalent sin of omission. When Irish women were punished by being shorn and smeared with tar, then handcuffed in public––their own adultery was political: having relationships with British enemies of Irish independence––he too "stood dumb." His disapproval is weakened by being alloyed with insincerity. Yes, he would later speak of his "outrage," but this was "conniv[ing]," a nod to the "civilized" establishment. (Is this poem itself an example of that disingenuous impulse? After all what could be more "civilized" than turning his condemnation into literature?) Bone deep, he understands (and therefore––to some degree––sympathizes) with this "tribal, intimate revenge." He is a collaborateur, yet who among us could say different?

[Note: the body pictured above is not the body described in this poem. (You might have noticed that the head isn't shaved; besides which, the body in the image is male.) Unfortunately, there are no pictures available of the "little adulteress." For those who are interested, Heaney did write a different poem about the body in the photo: see here.]

Screwtape: "I ♥ Pat"

2010-01-18T10:38:00.000-08:00

Pat Robertson, on the 700 Club, said the following regarding the Hatian earthquake:

They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French." True story. And so, the devil said, "OK, it's a deal." And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.

Forget physics and plate tectonics, it's just Satan! And remember, if Haiti weighs as much as two ducks... SHE'S A WITCH!

Well, it appears that the prince of darkness himself has just responded in a letter to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action.

But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.

Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth––glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"?

If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox––that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it––I'm just saying: Not how I roll.

You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings––just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best,
Satan

LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS

In any case, raise your glasses, folks. Here's to Pat and to his dear old uncle Screwtape!

"Why am I so afraid?"or, The Scientology Test

2010-01-11T20:48:00.000-08:00

First, watch this:

Comedy Central Presents

Friday 10pm / 9c

Maria Bamford - Cult

www.comedycentral.com

Joke of the Day

Stand-Up Comedy

Free Online Games

I was surprised this week to read this article.

You ought to read the whole thing, but let's just start with the little story that opens the piece:

A woman sat at her dining room table, buried in dozens of books and magazines. She looked discouraged. Her daughter asked if she could help.

The woman said she was preparing a Relief Society lesson. She told her daughter she didn't know how she could possibly "boil down all the information" she had collected for the lesson. The process, the woman acknowledged, was both time consuming and frustrating.

The daughter looked surprised.

"Why," she asked, "are you trying to boil down information? An inspired* Church-writing** committee has already done that for you."

The committee's work, the daughter continued, has been approved by the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency. It has been translated into dozens of languages and sent around the world. It corresponds with the lessons and information taught at the same time to other auxiliaries and quorums in the Church.

Now the woman looked confused.

"Everything you need––and more––is in your manual," the daughter said. "Now, here––drink this kool-aid. I made it specially."

(Okay, so that last little bit I made up, but seriously...)

The story concludes later:

Following the advice of her daughter, the woman above turned off her computer, shut the dozens of books open on her dining room table and picked up her manual and scriptures. The frustration she had previously experienced disappeared. She knew the material was doctrinally accurate. She knew its source was valid. It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. She had won the victory over herself. She loved Big Brother.

(That last bit I did NOT make up... George Orwell did.)

Mormon blogger, Ronan James Head, invented a little examination that would prove extremely useful if more LDS folk employed it. It is called "The Scientology Test." It is safe and easy to use, plus it's absolutely free. Here's how you perform it:

1. Select a statement or text to examine.
2. Read and/or listen to it carefully.
3. Pretend that this statement/text actually came out of The Church of Scientology.
4. In that context (i.e. Scientology), does the statement make you think, "Wow. What a creepy cult..."?
5. If your answer is "Yes," the text in question has just failed the Scientology Test.

Brothers and Sisters, that article just failed the Scientology test... BIG TIME.

Brother Louis Midgley, a Mormon scholar, wrote the following about an LDS book of scriptural commentary, but it is quite germane to the subject at hand:

Such [approaches] also tend to close the door on the untapped possibilities within the scriptures. Our tendency is to rely upon presumably authoritative statements on matters that may seem urgent to us, but which may not have been of concern to those responsible for providing us with the [scriptures]. [We] seem to approach the text ... already knowing ... both the questions and the answers. Hence there are really no new insights, no discoveries on the teachings found in the text, that are not already accessible from sources already familiar to the Saints.

This injunction is somewhat like gun-control legislation: those who are going to use the guns illegally won't scruple at obtaining them illegally. Gun owners conscientious enough to be properly licensed probably aren't going to shoot anyone anyway, licensed or not. Similarly, teachers that are going to use crazy-go-nuts materials will likely use them regardless. Teachers who will fastidiously follow this counsel are probably responsible enough to be trusted to select and use outside materials in a way that does not detract from the lesson's intent.

If I were running the show (and we can all be thankful that I'm not), I would try to implement the following:

1. Focus the materials back on the scriptures. "Text, without context, is pretext." The manual should be designed to guide us through the canonical text––on its own terms! Currently, the approach is often the opposite: we use gobbets from the scriptures, stripped of their setting, and mix them willy-nilly in a kind of theological hobo stew. This approach is in many ways demeaning to the scriptures; we pull them apart, take just the bits we like, and then force those bits to fit into our molds. This is called "proof-texting," and it sucks.

2. Institute more Teacher-Improvement classes, and broaden their focus. These classes are currently a possibility, but they don't get used very frequently, which is a shame. It would be nice if these classes could also cover some basic skills of scriptural interpretation (helping class members to find and avail themselves of all the great material and resources that are out there), and preparing talks to help them practice public speaking skills.

3. Remember that memory is the residue of thought. (See here.) I don't know really how to implement this institutionally, other than saying we need to become comfortable with having questions, capable of accepting a certain degree of ambiguity. I think that we are supposed to have questions to wrestle with. Wresting can make you tired and dirty, but it was the closest Jacob ever got to an angel. We don't like the questions that cannot be answered neatly and wrapped up with a bow––consequently, much of our teaching feels... well... packaged. It's like Velveeta. Not that there's anything wrong with Velveeta, and I'm sure it delivers some basic nutrients, but wouldn't you rather have Stilton?
____________________

*Inspired? Sure! But let's not get carried away and suggest that "inspired" always means correct. For instance, read the following story from BYU Professor, Daniel Peterson, who has written lessons for Church manuals for years:

Having, some time back, served on the Gospel Doctrine writing committee of the Church for nearly ten years, I would never, ever, take a Gospel Doctrine manual to be an official and binding declaration of Church doctrine. We tried to get things right, we prayed about our work, and what we did was reviewed in Salt Lake before publication, but it scarcely constituted scripture.

A story:

Once, the scriptural selection about which I was assigned to write a lesson included, among other things, Acts 20:7-12, in which the apostle Paul drones on for so long in the course of a sermon that a young man (ironically named Eutychus or “Fortunate”) dozes off and falls from the rafters. Paul has to restore him to life. As a joke, I inserted a passage in my lesson manuscript that read somewhat along the following lines:

QUOTE
Have a class member read Acts 20:7-12. Have you ever killed anyone with a sacrament meeting speech? How did it make you feel? What steps can you take in the future to ensure that it does not happen again?

Members of the committee laughed, and the committee chairman sent my lesson on up, incorporating their suggested revisions but also still including my little joke, to Salt Lake City. Where it passed Correlation. (I can only assume that each member of the committee chuckled and then passed it on, expecting that somebody else would remove it.) When I received the galleys of the lesson back for final approval just before it went to press, the joke was still there. I faced one of the greatest moral crises of my life, but finally called Church headquarters and suggested that they probably didn’t really want the lesson to go out to Church members entirely as it stood. So the joke was removed.

The point being that Gospel Doctrine manuals are not to be confused with authoritative divine revelations.

**I have no idea why they hyphenated that; it makes no sense grammatically. A "brick-laying committee" is a committee that lays brick. Thus a "Church-writing committee" would be a committee that writes Church. But I digress...

A Christmas Meditation

2009-12-16T16:41:00.000-08:00

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not... but was grateful anyway.

Shepherd's Carol

We stood on the hills, Lady,
Our day’s work done,
Watching the frosted meadows
That winter had won.

The evening was calm, Lady,
The air so still,
Silence more lovely than music
Folded the hill.

There was a star, Lady,
Shone in the night,
Larger than Venus it was
And bright, so bright.

Oh, a voice from the sky, Lady,
It seemed to us then
Telling of God being born
In the world of men.

And so we have come, Lady,
Our day’s work done,
Our love, our hopes, ourselves
We give to your son.