Sunday Night Journal — December 30, 2007

The Secret History of the Sunday Night Journal

A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.
—James 1:8

The end of 2007 marks the fourth full year since I began this web site and the Sunday Night Journal. It thereby constitutes one of the most sustained efforts at writing that I’ve ever achieved (the other is a not-very-successful children’s or young adults’ story), and I’m very pleased by that.

I started Light on Dark Water mainly as a place to publish miscellaneous writings of mine that had nowhere else to go. It was also an exercise in learning basic HTML and CSS, which I needed in my job. The Sunday journal, which I began very soon after the main site, was something else: a “mind game,” as people used to say in the ‘60s, a psychological trick that I played on myself.

The term “double-minded” might have been invented to describe me. I can almost always see at least two sides of every question; I can never make a decision without a period of miserable vacillation; I can rarely do anything without thinking that I should be doing something else; I can rarely look back at the major decisions of my life without wondering if they were mistakes (except in those cases where I’m certain they were, and the very few which I’m certain were not, such as my entry into the Catholic Church.) My daughter Clare, when she was dependent on me to drive her to school, even diagnosed and named a psychological disorder after my inability to leave home in the morning without going back into the house at least once and otherwise delaying us: Departure Avoidance Disorder, or DAD.

One chronically troublesome aspect of this double-mindedness is that for as long as I can remember I’ve felt a compulsion to write, but have never been able to keep at it for very long. This is partly because I’m lazy and have difficulty concentrating, but in a greater degree because I have to earn a living and fulfill various other responsibilities. Thus writing seems a self-indulgence to which I really have no right, and time spent on it seems stolen from something else that has a better claim to it (at this moment, for instance, I’m harried by the thought that I should be washing one of the dogs). And when I do take time to write, I have trouble deciding what to focus on; the past thirty years are littered with scraps of unfinished work, including a couple of big projects which I was never able to sustain.

I noticed some years ago that I was far more likely to make the time for writing if I had some sense of obligation to do it: if I promised someone a book review, for instance, or when we needed material for Caelum et Terra. If I’m obligated to someone else, I don’t feel so much that writing is an act of theft.

The Sunday Night Journal, then, was a public commitment (however small the public), to write something every week. At first it was mainly just a promise to myself. Soon my web site statistics indicated that there were a few people showing up every week to read the journal—and, voila, a sense of obligation arose, and I had the extra bit of push I needed to keep up the weekly commitment. I haven’t missed a week, even if all I produced was a short note saying that I was okay after a hurricane.

I now have over 200 of these weekly columns, and can look back on the past four years and see that I’ve accomplished something; I haven’t accomplished nothing. If each these pieces is roughly the equivalent of a printed page, I’ve written a short book. The trick worked; I won the mind game I played with myself.

Now I have another problem. After resisting the temptation to start a blog, I finally started using Blogger for my weekly journal, because that made it simpler and easier. Soon it began to turn into a blog in the full sense. I added Music of the Week. The comments feature enabled feedback and many interesting and lively conversations. I began to post more frequently. As I noted when I started the site, I feared a blog would take over my life, and while it hasn’t done that I do spend a fair amount of time on it.

The result is that this site is crowding out other writing projects. I have several essays in mind that would be much too long for blog entries, and I think I could place some of them with a magazine or two. I have dozens of half-finished or barely-begun poems, and some other things that I superstitiously won’t even mention until I’ve made more progress on them.

Now I’m looking for a way to keep doing this, or most of it, and still make some time for other things. I’ve really been enjoying the normal blogging aspect of this site, and I may give up the weekly journal in favor of shorter and more frequent blog posts. I definitely plan to spend less time on the music reviews, and if I can’t make them shorter and less time-consuming I may drop them altogether. I need to reorganize the whole site—there is, for instance, no SNJ index past March 2007, there is no MotW index past 2006, there is no subject index, etc. I’d like to reorganize the whole site, possibly moving it to WordPress, which has facilities for maintaining non-blog entries. And so forth.

So there may be some changes here. One thing I definitely don’t want to give up, though, is the conversational aspect. I’ve been enriched, entertained, and spurred to deeper thought by everyone who comments here. The site does not, if my web stats are accurate, have all that many visitors—a few hundred every week, a handful in comparison to more widely-known blogs—but that’s more than enough to keep me feeling that it’s worthwhile to continue, and I’m gratified that you find the place interesting enough to keep coming back. My thanks to you, and my wishes for a happy new year.

(Here, by the way, is the first Sunday Night Journal )

Sunday Night Journal — December 23, 2007

The Shepherd’s Complaint

I’d hoped to have as this week’s journal a presentable first draft of a poem I’ve been working on, but as usual the combination of other demands on my time and my own difficulty in concentrating have kept that from happening. The poem is still some hours’ work away from completion even in rough form, which works out to a couple of weeks of total time. But I’ll give you, briefly, its theme, which I’ve had in mind for some time.

Consider the shepherds whose quiet watch was disturbed by the angels singing on the night Christ was born, who went to see the child lying in the manger, and who “returned, glorifying and praising God.” Into a perfectly ordinary night came this massive shock, this intrusion of something that they probably, like most people, didn’t ordinarily give much thought to. They must have felt that they were living in a new world.

And then, after life went back to normal? As far as I can remember we don’t hear anything else about them in the Bible, nor did the world at large seem to know anything of the coming of the Messiah for another thirty years or so.

So I imagine one of the shepherds many years later, at least disillusioned and perhaps even bitter. He’s middle-aged, at least. He thinks something should have happened by now. There was all that fuss on that one night long ago, and then…nothing. It must have been some kind of false sign, or maybe just a delusion. That’s the way life is, isn’t it? A wonderful and exciting beginning, followed by a slow declension into the same old thing, and, in the end, disappointment, as usual.

Let’s say it’s twenty-eight years later. Traditionally it’s been thought that Jesus began his public ministry at around the age of thirty. So the shepherd is again standing at the brink of great events, of another and greater manifestation of the power of God, but he has no idea that it’s coming. From his observation point in time, nothing has happened, nothing is happening.

That’s the situation of our civilization, and the way we all live our individual lives. It’s easy to scoff at the expectation that God is once again going to intervene, this time bringing an end to earthly history as we have known it. It’s easy to become disheartened about our personal hope of attaining the perfect joy and peace which has haunted our lives since we were born. I said disheartened, but it’s worse than that—it’s easy to give up completely, as most of the post-Christian West has given up.

Yet the end of what we know, the end of our personal lives and the end of history, followed by the beginning of something else which we can hardly imagine, is coming at us at an unknown speed, arriving perhaps tonight or perhaps not for many years yet, perhaps not even for centuries with respect to the world as a whole. But it’s out there somewhere, coming at us still, in the dark and impossible to avoid. Like the shepherds, we’ll have the same old thing until suddenly one day we don’t.

Sunday Night Journal — December 16, 2007

Movie Roundup, End of Year Edition

Hard to believe it was back in June when I did the last one of these. I see by our Netflix history that we’ve had 27 rentals since then, and there have been a few from other sources, so I’m not going to mention all of them, just the ones that made a strong impression one way or the other. I’m also leaving out a few, like Wild Strawberries, that I’ve written about separately.

The Queen. As good as people have said.

The Passenger. I’ve now exhausted most of the Antonioni available at Netflix. This one is not in a class with his best (e.g. L’Avventura), but it’s very good. As always with Antonioni, there are some wonderful images. I’ll want to see it again sometime.

Band of Outsiders (French Bande à Part). Except for a barely-remembered viewing of Weekend in the late ‘60s, this is my first exposure to Godard. I really can’t justify it, but something about this movie got under my skin, some kind of early ‘60s sense of possibility. Considering it objectively, I don’t think it’s really that great, but there’s something wistfully charming about it. Or maybe I just fell for Anna Karina. Anyway, I think this was the first Netflix rental that I couldn’t send back without watching it a second time. There is a dance scene which I thought was wonderful—and I’m not one to admire dance scenes—and which I’ve learned since is quite famous.

Invaders from Mars. Yet another instance of my fascination with early ‘50s sci-fi. Pretty awful. Somewhat similar to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but not nearly as good.

The Leopard. Visconti’s version of Lampedusa’s highly regarded novel, which I have not read. Lavishly well done, but I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for it. Interesting performance by Burt Lancaster as the Prince; I was disappointed to learn that his Italian was dubbed.

Loves of a Blonde (Czech Lásky Jedné Plavovlásky). The seduction and abandonment of a naïve factory girl set in the dreary world of socialist industrialism. The pathos is almost unbearable. It’s very good but so painful that I don’t think I’ll want to see it again.

White Nights (Italian Le Notte Bianche). Visconti again; very beautiful imagery, and an opera-like melodramatic romance. Worth seeing for anyone who likes black-and-white photography, but basically rather slight.

The Fast Runner. This was another one of my wife’s selections which I probably would never have picked, but which I ended up liking. It’s a drama set among the Inuit people and is almost three hours long. I can’t stay awake for a three-hour movie unless it’s really good, or at least really exciting, and I didn’t think I was going to make it through the long slow opening of this one. But it sort of picks up after the first hour and a half or so. The window onto Inuit culture and the Arctic environment alone make it worth watching, and the plot is good, though a bit frustrating for me (and my wife had the same opinion): I found the opening setup—past events which are going to be worked out in the rest of the story—extremely confusing, which meant that some of the later parts were also confusing. And, although it’s embarrassing to admit this, I had trouble telling some of the characters apart. I know, that sounds bad, but it wasn’t just that they all have the same eye, hair, and skin color—they’re also wearing very similar heavy parkas almost all the time, except for when they’re wearing almost nothing.

But it’s worth seeing in spite of all that. Really. I guess I should note, for those with young children who might wonder if theirs would find the exotic subject matter interesting: no, it’s not for children. Inuit culture is not cuddly.

Down by Law. Even relatively casual American film buffs are very well aware of this one, I’m sure, but I had never seen it. It’s a good story, but what’s unforgettable about it to me, and what I’d like to watch over and over, are the opening scenes of New Orleans. As I’ve probably said (and is anyway probably obvious) I love black-and-white photography/filmography, and it doesn’t get any better. Those scenes really capture something about New Orleans, too.

The Star Maker (Italian L'Uomo Delle Stelle). Another wife pick. This one really took me by surprise. For the first half or so I thought I was watching one of those charming bittersweet stories about life in rustic Italy (actually Sicily, I think), maybe a little like Il Postino or Christ Stopped at Eboli or maybe even The Tree of Wooden Clogs. But this takes a darker turn. A con man wanders through the villages claiming to be a talent scout and charging people to photograph them for what he claims is a screen test, but of course they never hear from him again. Without revealing anything essential, I’ll just give you two hints: there is a beautiful girl named Beata, and at a crucial point one of the con-man’s victims, a police official, insists on a screen test for which he chooses to recite Dante (I think). Whether intentional or not—and the quoting from Dante makes me think it is intentional—there are some definite religious implications here.

I’m a little hesitant to recommend this, partly because of two over-explicit sex scenes, but more importantly because the events become very painful. If you haven’t seen it, consider it, but also consider yourself warned. I slept very badly after watching it.

Metropolitan. As with Down by Law, most people who have an interest in American films outside the usual Hollywood run are familiar with this. I’d been wanting to see it for a while. It’s been compared to Jane Austen in its ability to use the rather small doings of well-to-do people as a way of pointing to something more substantial, and that seems accurate. But just as a matter of personal taste it isn’t something I’d be in a hurry to see again.

10 Items or Less. This one was borrowed from my daughter Ellen and her husband. It’s in every way a small film, but one of those which is far more appealing than any description could communicate. It’s the sort of thing that might be called a feel-good movie, but not in any sappy or sentimental way. Morgan Freeman plays a semi-retired actor considering a semi-comeback role in a small film very much like this one and is doing a bit of on-site research at a supermarket in a heavily Latin area of Los Angeles. A delightful Spanish actress, Paz Vega, plays a checkout girl who is hilariously venomous about being stuck in the express lane. They spend the day together. They go home, each feeling a bit more encouraged about facing the next phase of his or her life. That’s it. But it’s great. There is a certain amount of very crude language, most of which is very justifiable in context. If you’re willing to put up with that, it’s a marvelous experience. Hint: if you like Napoleon Dynamite (I do) you may like this; not that it’s in any direct way similar, but it has a similar sort of charm (and I’m really trying hard not to use the word “quirky”). However, if you don’t laugh out loud the first time Paz Vega’s character speaks this may not be the movie for you.

Intervista and Juliet of the Spirits. These are both by Fellini, of course, and they’ve caused me to consider seriously the possibility that I don’t much like him. I saw 8½ years ago, in a dark print with murky sound, and it didn’t make much impression on me one way or the other. I saw Amarcord sometime in the ‘70s and remember liking it, although I don’t remember anything specific about it. I actively disliked most of Intervista. My wife didn’t even sit through it; she went off to do something else before it was even half over. I persevered, determined that there must be something worthwhile beyond the chaotic activity and manic people chattering incessantly but uninterestingly at high speed. In the end I liked two scenes: a very affecting one where the aged Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, playing themselves, watch themselves in the famous fountain scene from La Dolce Vita, and the ending sequence where…well, let’s just say some really weird stuff happens.

But Intervista is described as being eccentric even for Fellini, a sort of semi-autobiographical comment on life as a filmmaker. I was expecting more from Juliet. But here was the same incessant fluttering and chattering, and in addition a clumsy and somewhat dated Be Yourself sort of message. The best I can say for it is that it has some really arresting imagery. But as a complete work of art: thumbs down.

Winter Light. I was startled to learn that the Swedish title is The Communicants, which is probably better, although “winter light” certainly has its applicability and resonance. I saw this back in the ‘70s without really understanding it. I just finished watching our Netflix copy for the second time, and it’s magnificent. From the Christian point of view there is obviously a great deal to be said about this portrait of a Lutheran clergyman admitting to himself that he has lost his faith—far, far too much for me to try to go into here. So I’ll just say that almost every image and every line of dialog is pregnant with meaning. And that while Bergman was not a believer he understands what faith is about, what the implications of having or not having it are. The film seems to me very ambivalent on the subject, and certainly gives no comfort to atheists.

Sunday Night Journal — December 9, 2007

Klaatu the Genocidal Peacenik

NOTE: spoilers follow. Don’t read any further if you’ve never seen The Day the Earth Stood Still and don’t want to know how it ends.

(I think this is fair use of this image, copied from Wikipedia).

If you’ve seen it, you know this classic 1951 movie involves an alien emissary sent to earth to teach us the ways of peace. Most people with a taste for such things consider it one of the best of the early science fiction movies. (I’m one such person, and I’m very fond of it.) I think it’s also one of the first, maybe the first, to present the aliens not as evil monsters but as wise, intelligent, compassionate beings, not only a lot smarter than us but a lot nicer.

Well, maybe not so nice, once you get to know them.

The emissary, Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, spends a big part of the movie demonstrating how much nicer than the barbaric earthlings the aliens must be. He’s gentle, intelligent, kind, sensitive, and tolerant, and he possesses the patrician dignity of voice and manner which Americans like to attribute to an English gentleman.

We, of course—the earthlings—are naturally going to do violence to a man like this in a movie like this. Or did that plot have yet to become a cliché in 1951? At any rate, that’s what happens. And in the end Klaatu departs, disappointed, but not before giving a speech explaining to the people of earth exactly where they stand in relation to the galactic civilization which he represents: their warlike habits are nobody’s business but their own as long as they are confined to their own planet. But once they venture into space their war-making will not be tolerated. If they know what’s good for them, they’ll give it up. Here is the key passage:

I came here to give you these facts: It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration.

The movie is generally considered an anti-war classic, the vehicle of a Cold War message about the menace of nuclear weapons. For me, and I suspect for many viewers, Klaatu seems such a very decent person that we don’t really absorb the full significance of his words. Peace--yes! No war, ever again. Wonderful! Sure, he threatens grave measures should earth begin to export its violence, but he’s established himself as such a fine and reasonable man that the threat seems less horrendous than it is. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago when I ran across the text of the speech and met the bare words separated from Michael Rennie’s urbane delivery that I really grasped their icy ruthlessness.

The civilization which Klaatu represents cherishes peace so dearly that it will not hesitate to incinerate every living thing on this planet in order to preserve it. Obliteration will happen automatically, carried out by an army of robots which exist only for that purpose. No one will agonize about it. No one will even have to make the decision or give the command.

There’s something about this cold-blooded fantasy that’s even worse than the typical ways we justify our wars, or used to—it’s also more than a little reminiscent of more recent dreams of high-tech weapons systems that will make war obsolete. That it should be considered a message of peace must be evidence of something, but I’m not sure what. Of several things, I suppose: the intensity of our dread of war, for one. A politically-induced blindness, perhaps: the object of shaming the ruthless powers that rule the earth seems so compelling that the fact that this fantasy replaces them with something even more ruthless isn’t immediately noticed. And of course there’s always the perennial temptation to disregard the means if the end is worthwhile.

It also points up the maddening logic which the desire to end war—not just a particular war, but all war—eventually must face. Because the only way to stop the unjust or illicit use of force is, finally, the possession of greater force, the message of this anti-war film is one heard more often from militarists than pacifists: peace through strength.

There is of course another response to aggressive violence, the response of non-violent resistance, in which one is willing to suffer and die rather than resort to violence. I think this is an honorable and virtuous action on the part of an individual, but I’m not convinced that it can be so on the part of a state. In any event there are certainly no signs that any state intends to behave this way. I think we are going to be struggling for the foreseeable future with the question of when and how violence is justifiable for the purpose of stopping violence.

Klaatu’s speech:

Sunday Night Journal — December 2, 2007

The Dark Door Thrown Open

I’ve spent most of the time that I would normally have spent writing my weekly journal in reading Benedict XVI’s new encyclical Spe Salvi (In Hope We Are Saved). So I’m going to content myself now with some very unorganized comments on a few passages that particularly struck me. I’d be happy to hear the views of others—there are already some in the comments on the “Intolerable Story” post below.

“Hope”, in fact, is a key word in Biblical faith—so much so that in several passages the words “faith” and “hope” seem interchangeable.

This is a crucial insight for me. Perhaps the words are not technically interchangeable (as we have discussed here about truth and beauty) but it is true that you cannot have either of them without also having the other.

The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life

One who does not recognize the enormous, shouting, leaping importance of this has not truly experienced the transition from not-faith to faith. I don’t mean that as a criticism; it may well mean that he has never truly been without faith, and that’s good. It could also, of course, mean that he says and maybe even believes that he has faith, but really doesn’t. And that’s bad.

…the liberation that [St. Josephine Bakhita] had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had “redeemed” her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody.

The attempt to share this hope with others is very difficult in the modern world, especially if the other is post-Christian or nominally Christian in the way that many Americans and Europeans are: having been surrounded with a dessicated and emptied Christianity, they believe they know what it is, and have rejected what they see. It is harder for them to see it as it really is than for someone to whom it is completely new. Some of my favorite writers (O’Connor, Percy) made the attempt to break through those barriers a major component of their art.

The effort to evangelize is perverted, it becomes a rotten and stinking thing, when it ceases to be a burning desire that the other would know joy and becomes instead an arena of egotistical combat, a sort of war or perhaps mere bullying, a determination to make the other submit. Some people who flee from evangelization do so because they are afraid of what the faith might require of them; more, I think, flee because they are afraid to hope—they do not dare to risk the disappointment of believing the promises and then finding that they are not true. But some flee because of the stink, and I don’t blame them.

On the one hand, we do not want to die; above all, those who love us do not want us to die. Yet on the other hand, neither do we want to continue living indefinitely, nor was the earth created with that in view. So what do we really want? Our paradoxical attitude gives rise to a deeper question: what in fact is “life”? And what does “eternity” really mean? There are moments when it suddenly seems clear to us: yes, this is what true “life” is—this is what it should be like.

I’ve know this in certain dreams: a combination of peace and joy that if encountered in waking life at all lasts only for an instant. I’ve had only a few such dreams in my life. But I remember them vividly, and I think I always will. And nothing that this life can offer could replace my hope that those dreams are a taste of a kind of life that I can really attain someday.

…we have no idea what we ultimately desire, what we would really like. We do not know this reality at all; even in those moments when we think we can reach out and touch it, it eludes us… All we know is that it is not this. Yet in not knowing, we know that this reality must exist.

Does the word must refer to my inability to bear the thought that this thing might not exist? Partly, perhaps. But also there is the mysterious half-formed intuition that there would be something that didn’t quite make sense, something that didn’t add up, in a cosmos where my soul is imprinted with the absence of this thing if it does not in fact exist.

Life in its true sense is not something we have exclusively in or from ourselves: it is a relationship. And life in its totality is a relationship with him who is the source of life. If we are in relation with him who does not die, who is Life itself and Love itself, then we are in life. Then we “live.”

And I would add: we have also those other human beings whom we love who also are, or should be, in this relation. Because I am joined to them by love, my hope literally does not exist if it is not also hope on their behalf. I don’t speak of “humanity” here; I can’t love “humanity” as a whole or in the abstract. I speak of specific individuals.

We must free ourselves from the hidden lies with which we deceive ourselves. God sees through them, and when we come before God, we too are forced to recognize them.

This is something I look to with both hope and dread. Anyone who has ever found such a lie in himself, a successful lie which did in fact deceive the very self that told it, must ever after feel unsure of his motives and wish to have them purified.

Suffering and torment is still terrible and well-nigh unbearable. Yet the star of hope has risen—the anchor of the heart reaches the very throne of God. Instead of evil being unleashed within man, the light shines victorious: suffering—without ceasing to be suffering—becomes, despite everything, a hymn of praise.

This frightens me. I doubt my ability to participate in this conversion of suffering to praise. I can only hope that God will not test me past my limits.

In the end, even the “yes” to love is a source of suffering, because love always requires expropriations of my “I”, in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love.

Like the song says: “Love hurts.”

The Christian faith has shown us that truth, justice and love are not simply ideals, but enormously weighty realities. It has shown us that God —Truth and Love in person—desired to suffer for us and with us. Bernard of Clairvaux coined the marvellous expression: Impassibilis est Deus, sed non incompassibilis—God cannot suffer, but he can suffer with….Let us say it once again: the capacity to suffer for the sake of the truth is the measure of humanity.

Or for the sake of love—meaning love in its fundamental sense, the will toward the good of the other. And let us not say only will; although I know that’s the traditional term, it only represents the essential: this “will” may, and properly should, include an active emotion of desire for the good of the other; Benedict describes this in Deus Caritas Est as a fusion of eros (not only in the sexual sense but in a broader sense, an actual and specific emotion of affection) and agape that is particularly, if not exclusively, a feature of Christian love. At our best, we will the good of the other not cooly but ardently.

Yes, there is a resurrection of the flesh. There is justice. There is an “undoing” of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright.

“And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song…”

(Note: the online copy of Spe Salvi at EWTN is much more readable than the one at the Vatican site, in my opinion.)

Sunday Night Journal — November 25, 2007

My Head Hurts

I really don’t feel like thinking very hard about anything tonight, so I thought I’d tell you about my headache.

It’s a sort of quasi- or semi-migraine that I get sometimes. It was present when I woke up this morning and nothing I could have done would have made it go away until four or five in the afternoon; this is the way it always works. Now, around nine, the pain is mostly gone, but I still feel vague and shaky. I know of a few things that can bring this on—certain foods eaten late in the evening, for instance—but sometimes the cause is not clear. When I’m going to have one I usually wake up sometime around three or four in the morning knowing that it’s coming. Sometimes taking three aspirin then will quell it, sometimes not: last night, not.

I’ve known people who have real migraines, and this isn’t as bad as some of those. I had a co-worker once who could get them at any time and if he felt one coming on during the work day he had to call his wife to drive him home. I can function with mine, more or less. But I’d much rather not. It’s not just the headache itself—there’s an overall feeling of weakness and sickness and a curious sensation of being somehow out of touch with everything, including my own body. It hurts to use my eyes. It hurts to use my mind (and I wonder what the mechanism of that is? what goes on in the brain that causes thinking to produce physical pain?).

So I puttered around this morning, feeding animals, eating breakfast, reading part of the newspaper (including, masochistically, the account of last night’s wretched Alabama-Auburn game). Then I spent several hours on the couch, occasionally reading a bit until my head hurt too much, attempting to read again when I got too bored, occasionally drifting into a half-sleep.

There was one useful thing I could do, though, one that’s always available in any unpleasant situation as long as at least a little consciousness and will remain: I could offer my bit of pain to God, in reparation for my own sins and on behalf of all those I love.

Although there is plenty of warrant for this form of prayer in the New Testament, it’s very much a Catholic thing that most Protestants don’t go in for (I don’t know about the Orthodox). I suppose it sounds too much like salvation by works for traditional Protestants, and just sort of weird and primitive to liberal Protestants. Which is unfortunate, because even on the most pragmatic grounds it’s a very useful practice: one isn’t generally allowed to see what effect it may have in the lives of those for whom one prays, but it benefits immediately the one who prays.

You have to willfully ignore human psychology in order not to see that the need for purpose, in small things and great, ranks below only the most fundamental requirements of the body in importance. We instinctively despise meaningless activity, even if it isn’t painful. Meaningless and severe suffering is almost intolerable to contemplate, much less to experience. But to make any pain or unhappiness or discomfort something offered to God as a prayer gives it a purpose that instantly makes it much easier to bear.

This is one of many instances in which Catholic belief, which seems at first glance the most difficult to accept, full of doctrines which seem to fly in the face of everyday practical sense and to be in opposition to much of what we want, is surprisingly well fitted to the deepest structure of the human psyche. It doesn’t offer a simple or easy intellectual resolution of the problem of suffering, or promise to put an end to it in this life. But it gives us a way to turn it into an act of love. I hope that if the time ever comes that I must suffer in earnest, I’ll have the will and the ability to use this gift.

Sunday Night Journal — November 18, 2007

Women, Music, and Modernity

“You’re into girls.”

That was the startling but not inaccurate remark my wife made last Saturday when she walked by as I was browsing YouTube for Patty Griffin songs. Since 90% of my music listening is done when I’m alone in my car going to and from work, and she is constitutionally pretty indifferent to pop music anyway, I was a little surprised that she would notice any sort of trend. I guess it had come to her attention a few Saturdays earlier when I was repeatedly playing that Nightwish video featuring Tarja Turunen that I posted recently.

Anyway, she’s right. I do listen to a lot more music by women, from very American singer-songwriters like Griffin to Nordic metal sirens, than I did fifteen or twenty years ago. For most of the many years, going back to the mid-‘60s, that I’ve been seriously interested in music, my favorite singers have been male. I didn’t give this any thought for a long time, but at some point I became aware that it was a definite preference. Male singers, especially those with really distinctive and unconventional voices, like Van Morrison, were the ones who moved me. Theirs were the voices capable of conveying the emotions I felt. Most women’s voices seemed, in comparison, almost insipid: pastels, where I preferred strong and vivid colors.

I’m not sure exactly when this began to change; it may have been around 1990 or so, when I discovered the Cocteau Twins: I liked Elisabeth Fraser’s voice precisely as a female voice. And I remember thinking something along those lines when listening to Portishead’s Dummy. At any rate, the shift in taste continued steadily. I don’t know that one can expect to have an explanation for a change of this sort, but I can say this much about it: where I once preferred the male voice because it’s more capable of expressing what I feel, I now value (I won’t say “prefer”) the female voice in part because it expresses something else, something that seems mysterious and other. It is, in fact, a bit similar to the sight of a beautiful woman, but sexual only in the very broadest sense: a consciousness of the other sex as a rich and alluring mystery.

The music world has changed, too: there are a lot more women making a lot more good music in a lot more different styles than there were thirty or forty years ago. Back in the ‘60s women were generally present only as singers. In the folk-singing world, there were Joan Baez and Judy Collins and others like them who sang the traditional repertoire and, as time went on, more and more songs written by the emerging mostly male singer-songwriters of the time. In rock, the girl, or girls, in the band worked generally in the “canary” model of the jazz era—they added something different and distinctive to the sound, and of course to the visual presence, but they usually didn’t compose or arrange or play; the musical vision as a whole was at most only partly theirs. I suppose Joni Mitchell was the first, certainly one of the first, women to put the whole singer-writer-instrumentalist package together. More followed, until the present flood. Women like Emmylou Harris and Patty Griffin and Karen Peris (of The Innocence Mission) have recently produced, or had a key role in producing (a role beyond singing, that is) some of the music I love best and think most likely to stand the test of time.

This isn’t surprising, considering the general and steady increase in freedom and opportunity for women that’s happened over the past hundred-plus years, developments made possible by the combination of technical and social changes that we call modernity. As a Catholic with a deep love of the traditional Christian culture of the West, I’m very much aware of the dark side of these changes: the damage to family life, for instance, and all the other things that I don’t need to belabor here. Yet the world is a richer place for the work of these artists, and unfortunately we don’t get a chance to pick which aspects of our culture we would like to preserve and which to change or discard.

I was thinking of this last week after reading a news story about a woman in Saudi Arabia who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail after being gang-raped. It was carefully explained that she wasn’t actually being punished for being raped, but for her behavior leading up to the rape: being present in a car with a male who was not her father, brother, or husband. A few days earlier I had read an account of the practice of stoning in Iran; it’s a legal punishment for adultery. I cannot conceive of the mind of a man who could bury a woman up to her neck and then throw stones at her until she is dead, which must involve battering her head beyond recognition. (The stones can’t be too small, or they won’t do enough damage, but they can’t be too big, or the victim will not suffer enough.) I don’t understand how a man could do such a thing to a woman and still respect himself as a man. Even less do I understand what is probably the case, that these men would not respect themselves if they did not do it.

I don’t agree with those who say that we, as a civilization, are faced with a stark choice between embracing the worst of our own culture and submitting to radical Islam; I don’t see why we can’t try to reform ourselves even as we resist them. But if I am ever somehow forced to choose between modernity and the violent reaction against it, I’ll unhesitatingly take the problems of emancipation over those of oppression.

Sunday Night Journal — November 11, 2007

Inappropriate Use of the Word “Inappropriate”

Sometime in the past month or two over on the Thursday Night Gumbo blog (see link in sidebar at right), in a thread that I’m too lazy to try to locate now, Francesca Murphy observed that people who use the word “inappropriate” are generally fascists, or at least control freaks. I laughed first, and then applauded, because I think she has a point.

This is one of those small but significant ways in which bad language both reflects and fosters bad thinking. It’s been some years now since I began to notice myself reacting to it with what first seemed to be an unreasonable irritation. I finally realized that it annoyed me because people were using it as a substitute for “wrong.” In a time when the existence of objective moral standards is doubted and denied, and when no one wants to be accused of being judgmental, it’s very bad form to say that anything short of mass murder is just plain wrong; mass murder, and perhaps racism.

But yet: order must be maintained. People in authority (or those who just wish they were) still need and desire to tell other people what to do. How can they justify it, if they can’t appeal to some standard which is eventually rooted in the concept of right and wrong? “Inappropriate” became the solution. There may be no right and wrong, but appropriate and inappropriate remain. This was crystallized for me in something I read some years back, which I would never be able to locate now. A teacher whose subject involved ethics stated with obvious pride that he instructed his students that no one had the right to tell them what is right and what is wrong. The interviewer asked—mischievously, perhaps—whether that approach might make classroom discipline difficult. Replied the teacher, “I tell them that as the teacher I decide what is appropriate and inappropriate.”

In other words, there is no objective standard for behavior in his classroom, merely his personal preference, which is enforceable on others purely because he holds the power. It’s not necessarily wrong to disrupt the class, but it is against his will. The parent’s exasperated “Because I said so” is elevated to metaphysical legitimacy. It really is not so far-fetched to see the ethics of totalitarianism in this. For me it conjures Nurse Ratchet, or a bad schoolteacher: the tight-lipped enforcer of petty rules which are their own justification. Why it should seem less oppressive to submit one’s will to what is “appropriate”—by definition a floating standard, determined only by context—than to an objective standard of right and wrong is a mystery to me.

One place where this term pops up again and again is in the context of the sexual molestation of children: “inappropriate touching,” etc. One wonders: under what conceivable conditions would it be “appropriate” for an adult to touch a child sexually?

Another frequent usage is in relation to racial insults (imagined or real, trivial or serious). One of these occurred in a federal agency a week or two ago. An employee had worn a racially charged costume to a party. The head of the agency was instantly in trouble, and vowed to punish the offender: “We do not tolerate inappropriate behavior at DHS,” she said. (Story here).

A benign interpretation of this use of the word, I suppose, is that the people involved really know that the offense is not truly wrong; it’s only bad manners or poor judgment. But “do not tolerate” is pretty strong. The implication is that the offender could lose his job or be subject to some other fairly serious punishment. For something that is merely “inappropriate”? If it’s only inappropriate, the punishment is grotesquely disproportionate. But if it’s seriously wrong, why not say so?

Using ketchup as the base for barbecue sauce is inappropriate. But as strongly as I might feel about that, I don’t think those who do it should be subject to legal penalties. At least not on the first offense.

Sunday Night Journal — November 4, 2007

Fear of Beauty

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry’s side.
Then came a departure….

What he has to say now is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

—John Berryman, #1 from 77 Dream Songs

Berryman’s reaction is the natural one, the one the natural man must come to in the end. The world will, finally, disappoint you and break your heart. Nothing particularly calamitous is required; the passage of time is sufficient. That image of the sea wearing on the land is particularly significant to me, because the little strip of Mobile Bay beach which is near my house and which I deeply love is continually being eroded.

Attachment to the world is deprecated in both the Christian and Buddhist traditions. As I understand it, the Buddha’s great insight—and I think it’s perfectly accurate from the natural point of view—was that attachment to anything at all is the cause of suffering. Unable to conceive of an individual consciousness which would not experience attachment, he envisioned a condition of perfect non-attachment in which the individual would disappear into the One (I hope I’m not over-simplifying this). And Christian scripture is full of warnings against caring for the things of this world; the world is the phrase used over and over again in reference to everything in earthly life which can hold our attention and devotion and keep us away from God. Sometimes we seem to forget that it refers not only to sinful things but to good things as well, and I think that tendency is especially pronounced among those of us who live in the material comfort of the industrialized world.

And yet there is also John 3:16: “For God so loved the world….” There must be a way to love the world properly, in imitation of God. Natural love for it will be disappointed and can in fact lead to the forgetting of God and the loss of one’s soul. But there is a supernatural love for it, the love demonstrated by God which we can and should echo, as we echo his creative power in our arts. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…” Well, we know what happened to the son when he came into our world. We can love the world, but we must love it with the knowledge that we will be hurt by it, and with the willingness to be hurt. The pain in fact constitutes a proof of the love.

Buddhism is right, as far as it goes, about attachment. It should have no trouble understanding the inevitability of the Crucifixion. But it knows nothing of the Resurrection, not only because it knows no God but because the unaided human mind could hardly be expected even to conceive that God, the God revealed to Jews and Christians who is not a being but Being itself, would enter his own creation and suffer at its hands.

Because of the Resurrection, we can give ourselves to the world in love. We can never possess it; that’s in the nature of things, as the Buddha saw, and the desire to possess it is one aspect of the temptation against which the scriptural warnings about the world are directed. And we must not allow ourselves to be possessed by it; we must not surrender our souls to it; that’s the other aspect of the temptation. But we can open our hearts to it, and offer ourselves to the pain it will inevitably bring us, and hope that this offering will somehow work for its salvation as well as our own.

I came across this passage from Pope John XIII recently, part of a list of things that he intended to do “only for today.”

Only for today, I will have no fears. In particular, I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful and to believe in goodness.

This struck me as mildly surprising, coming from a pope. Why should he consider fear an obstacle to the enjoyment of beauty and the belief in goodness? This suggests to me that he would have understood Berryman, as well as the Buddha, but that he knows something they don’t. His counsel that we should not be ruled by the fear of loss and disappointment is a direct result of hope in the Resurrection; hope engenders courage. I hear that hope is the subject of Benedict XVI’s next encyclical, and I’m looking forward to it.

Sunday Night Journal — October 28, 2007

Ain’t It Grand?

Ain’t it grand
To be a Christian?
Ain’t it grand?

—Blind Willie McTell

A few weeks ago my wife and I were in a restaurant which had a pretty good selection of pop music playing in the background. The music wasn’t loud enough to be heard clearly, but I kept recognizing songs when a loud guitar or vocal line cut through the ambient noise. One of these was the guitar solo in Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” which is not a favorite song of mine but has always caught my attention because of these poignant lines:

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown, the dream is gone

I suppose most people recognize the sensation described there, and the sadness that comes with it. I know it very well myself, and have done for as long as I can remember. But it struck me that evening, with a great sense of relief, that to be a Christian is to believe that the sadness is not the end of the story. That “fleeting glimpse” is not just a stray emotion, a meaningless fluctuation of consciousness, a bit of irrational hope that is ultimately no hope at all. It is a real glimpse of something that is really there. The inexpressible yearnings known by every human heart have a real object, and a real hope of attaining it.

Materialism and atheism have their built-in presuppositions and prejudices, and one of these is the notion that the burden of proof is always on the non-materialist. They scoff at this universal desire for the transcendently perfect, but as a matter of objective reason, it is at least as plausible that the desire itself should constitute evidence of its object as that it should be considered a pointless emotion. After all, as many have pointed out: we know hunger, and food exists; we know thirst, and water exists; we know sexual desire, and sex exists; we long for love, and love exists; we desire to know, and knowledge exists. It should be at least puzzling to anyone who thinks about the question with an open mind that we could have a spiritual hunger that cannot, in the nature of things, ever hope to be satisfied.

A week or two after the “Comfortably Numb” incident I was reading an article in The Atlantic by an evolutionary biologist arguing for a purely naturalistic explanation of altruism and generosity. The underlying assumption was that it’s very important to have such an explanation. It’s not enough that evolution be able to explain the material development of the human body; it must explain everything, including our moral development and the existence of morality itself. For those committed to the idea that scientific materialism is the only valid approach to reality, all of reality must, obviously, be seen as the sort of thing that can be approached this way. Therefore evolution must be an all-encompassing explanation. The author said nothing about this goal, but it was implicit throughout the article.

The theoretical objections to this view are obvious, and have been taken up by people much better equipped for it than I am. What struck me was the sheer unnecessary constriction and narrowness of it, and the sense of how much larger my mental world is than the author’s. My conception of the world includes the material, and more; the materialist’s cannot admit even the least trace of the spiritual. I can believe in everything that science can establish about the material world; I can also believe in a God who created that world for purposes of his own. Therefore I do not have to forcibly crush my natural instinct to look for purpose in the world, or in my own life. I do not have to crush my instinctive belief that love is something real, not just a byproduct of material phenomena. Or my belief that the self which is the one thing of which I am immediately and indisputably conscious has no actual existence. Or my belief that good and evil are objective categories. Or my belief that to choose one over the other must have some sort of ultimate consequence for the chooser.

None of this proves that Christian belief is true, of course. But it does mean that one who holds it lives in a world that is far more naturally suited to human beings than the world of the materialist. It is a grand world, in two senses: it is both large and splendid. I have yet to hear a convincing materialistic explanation of how such creatures as ourselves got into a world which is so much less than they are.

Note: you may, depending on how your computer is configured, be able to hear a thirty-second sample of that Blind Wille McTell song here, at the Amazon page for the CD. Or try this eMusic sample. But the one at Amazon is better; it’s a later recording on which you can really hear the big ol’ 12-string guitar.

Sunday Night Journal — October 21, 2007

An Extraordinary Logic: Wild Strawberries

I’ve been planning to re-acquaint myself with the Bergman films I saw and loved many years ago, and to see those I haven’t, which are many. This is my first step, and as it turns out a very good place to begin. I would recommend it to anyone who’s curious about Bergman but has been put off by what they’ve heard about him, or perhaps, as someone said here a while back, by a bad experience with one of his more difficult or disturbing works.

This film is also a good example of what makes the non-religious Bergman so interesting to some Christians, especially to Catholics. It’s not only that he takes on the big questions and treats them profoundly. It’s that many of the themes of Christian spiritual life work themselves out on an earthly level in the lives of his characters. Wild Strawberries is very similar in that respect to Babette’s Feast, another great film which has no religious intention but is much loved by Catholics because it bears such deep and clear parallels to certain aspects of the faith. It’s not hard to suppose—in fact it’s hard not to suppose—that Bergman’s childhood as the son of a Lutheran clergyman left his mind deeply impressed with Christian ways of thinking even though he rejected the faith. He consistently confirms our belief that the empty place in the human heart is, in fact, as we are so often told, God-shaped.

Wild Strawberries might be described as a story about Purgatory, an earthly and secular rendering of the process we can all expect to undergo after death. It’s a process that frequently begins before death for one who is open to it, a painful process of recognizing how and where one has failed and what one may have lost as a result—a recognition which may itself be the punishment for those failures—and of preparing to accept forgiveness. The film is the account of one day in the life of an elderly physician, Isak Borg, in which both internal and external events come together to confront him with his failures as lover, husband, and father, bringing him a deep and almost unbearable pain (“Is there no mercy?” he begs at one point) followed by the beginnings of reconciliation. And it’s so beautifully done in every way, so rich in its details and their meanings, that anyone who is susceptible to Bergman’s art is likely to find himself wanting to watch it over and over again.

The Criterion Collection (may it be praised) DVD also includes an interview with Bergman. Any Bergman fan who’s acquainted with Wild Strawberries but hasn’t seen this interview should seek this disk out at once. It was done in 1998, when Bergman was 80 and semi-retired. He comes across as a surprisingly unpretentious man, given his achievement and celebrity. Toward the end of the interview he speaks interestingly and movingly about death and faith.

The first comes up in reference to his beloved third wife, whom he married in 1971 and who had died in 1995. His grief is plain; he describes himself, calmly, as “crippled” by her death. And he goes on to say that after having been terribly afraid of death for many years he had, around the time he made The Seventh Seal, at last taken comfort in the idea that it would be a simple extinction. But his wife’s death has disturbed this comfort: that he might never meet her again is “an unbearable thought,” in “violent conflict” with his previously comforting views. Anyone who has his own unbearable thoughts will sympathize.

And when the interviewer asks him if he has perhaps returned to faith in his old age, Bergman dismisses the idea with a laugh, but then begins to reflect: he is “not what you would call religious in any way” but has “a whole lot of ideas about other realities that surround me. I have the feeling sometimes that we’re part of an infinitely larger pattern….You can feel that sometimes.”

Indeed. Or, in the words Bergman gave to Isak Borg some fifty years ago: “In this jumble of events, I seemed to discern an extraordinary logic.”

•••

Postscript: This Is More Like It

On the occasion of Bergman’s death in July of this year, I was irritated by a rather stupid (may as well speak plainly) dismissal of his work by John Podhoretz. Some weeks later my friend Robert sent me a link to this far more perceptive piece by John Simon. Perhaps the Shakespeare comparison reaches too far, but I have no doubt that Simon is far closer to the mark.

Sunday Night Journal — October 14, 2007

Complaining of the People (A Metapolitical Comment)

Yeats tells how Maud Gonne (“my phoenix”) admonished him for regretting that he had spent much of his life working for the ungrateful Irish people:

Thereon my phoenix answered in reproof,
‘The drunkards, pilferers of public funds,
All the dishonest crowd I had driven away,
When my luck changed and they dared meet my face,
Crawled from obscurity, and set upon me
Those I had served and some that I had fed;
Yet never have I, now nor any time,
Complained of the people.’

Yeats argues with her, but ends:

And yet, because my heart leaped at her words,
I was abashed, and now they come to mind
After nine years, I sink my head abashed.

—“The People”

One night last week I watched part of the “debate” among the Republican presidential candidates. I couldn’t muster a great deal of interest, and it wasn’t long before I decided I had something more important to do. I felt a little guilty about this, as though I were shirking my responsibility to be an informed citizen. But there are good reasons for not paying too much attention: it’s far too early in the campaign for these productions, and the “debates” themselves are somewhat fraudulent anyway, not being real debates at all but rather a chance for the candidates to air their preferred sound bites. For the media there’s always the hope that one of the candidates will commit what’s known as a “gaffe”—meaning, usually, the utterance of a forbidden truth—which can be turned into a forty-eight hour scandal.

Still, one of these men may be the next president of the most powerful nation in the world, and some of them seemed pretty solid, as if they might really care about the country and really want to right what’s wrong with it, and govern it for the general good. So I ought to find out what they believe and what they intend to do and decide whether I should vote for one of them.

Yet I began to think, depressingly, that it doesn’t really matter that much who wins, because events are being driven by forces too great for one person to turn or counter, no matter how well-intentioned. One by one the big questions came up in the “debate”: health care, Social Security, race relations, immigration, oil consumption, and of course the war in Iraq. And I found myself thinking that it’s all but certain that none of these will be addressed in a way that would lead to any hope that they would be resolved (with the possible exception of the war), for the simple reason that too many of the American people do not want it to happen. To resolve any of them would be painful, and would require some degree of general sacrifice. And no politician is going to ask that of us. We don’t want to hear anything except promises of more.

One psychological stress of living in a democracy (however imperfect) is the knowledge that ultimately there is no one to blame for its problems except the voters. Similarly, in a more-or-less free-market economy, consumers make most of the final decisions; the roads are jammed with enormous SUVs, and WalMart thrives, because that’s what large numbers of people want. We all like to blame the government or big business for doing what we don’t like, and yet we reward them for continuing to do it. We don’t like the size of the government or the amount of money it spends, we recognize that Social Security is headed for trouble, and yet we aren’t willing to face any proposed solution that doesn’t, in the end, give us more for less. We complain about taxes and the size of the government, and yet it’s always someone else’s spending that we want to see cut. We complain about American jobs going overseas, and yet we aren’t willing to pay the higher prices that would be required to keep them here.

More fundamentally, we don’t like or trust each other enough to have a sense of agreement about the common good, or to practice self-discipline for the sake of it. Everything I said above is open to the objection that the problem could in fact be fixed without pain to most of us if only some other group would cooperate: if the government wouldn’t tax us so heavily or spend so freely on those other people, if corporate CEOs didn’t make so much money, and so forth. And I’m sure these objections are partly true, enough so that we all feel justified in holding out for our own demands—after all, everyone else is.

Most fundamentally of all, I don’t think the majority of the American people really understand or care much for the tradition of self-government and responsible citizenship. The obligations and privileges of the latter that were taught to earlier generations seem to have little place in modern schooling. (I’ll never forget the deep and almost romantic passion with which my high-school civics teacher spoke of them.) Apart from specific clauses of the Bill of Rights, we don’t really care much for the Constitution anymore. We’re losing the concept of law as abstract, impersonal, and binding on everyone. And we’re replacing it with a desire to be ruled by a class of benevolent authorities who will solve problems on the basis of their private sense of justice and of who among their constituents is most in need of special treatment, creating a body of law that is a tangle of rules unconnected to the Constitution or indeed to anything fixed.

This is a pessimistic judgment—and, I admit, a somewhat petulant one—but it is not a partisan one; I could fill it out with examples from Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. I very much hope it’s excessively pessimistic, but I don’t feel especially abashed about voicing it. Possibly Yeats, an aristocrat at heart, did not see Ireland’s future as requiring of most of her citizens what I think is required of ours.

Sunday Night Journal — October 7, 2007

Cart and Horse and Caritas

This is a follow-up to last week’s journal; I want to expand a bit on my reasons for more or less dropping out of the bitter and embittering American cultural-political debate. (My apologies if I repeat myself; I felt that I had not said all that I wanted to say. And for convenience I’m going to use the word “politics” and “political” to refer to the whole complex of issues.)

I say “more or less” because I don’t mean to say that I’ll never comment on these questions at all, much less forbid that they ever be mentioned in the comments. And I certainly don’t mean to say that I’ve abandoned my views on the specific matters that make up that debate. But I don’t want to be defined by them. I don’t want to write so that someone who doesn’t know me well would take one look at this blog and say “Oh, a conservative” (or “Oh, a liberal”—yes, there are some who would see me that way) and dismiss everything I have to say. As I mentioned last week, I think this may have happened at least once or twice. And I really don’t want it to happen because I am far more concerned with other more fundamental things.

My recent multiple re-readings of the opening sections of Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritus Est (God Is Love) have confirmed me in taking this direction. The pope’s wonder-filled vision of love as the essence of reality is deeply moving to me. And my own perception of that same reality is what I want above all to communicate to anyone who reads what I write. Most especially, it’s what I want to communicate, or at least suggest, to anyone who has not seen it.

Truth divides, necessarily. There’s no getting around that. But if division must exist I would much prefer that it involve the ultimate questions. Who and what are we? What are we for? What is the world, and what is it for? To whom, if anyone, are we responsible, and what does that responsibility entail? What do we dare to hope? One’s answers to those questions are much more important than one’s views on any political matter.

The word “divisive” is thrown around much too freely. Usually “you are being divisive” means “you are unwilling to accept my judgment that this matter is unimportant.” But our political debate is all too often genuinely divisive with respect to the ultimate questions: disagreement about secondary things can create a climate of suspicion in which primary things can’t even be discussed.

As we all know, it’s the so-called “social issues” that are the source of much or most of the rage that has characterized the American debate for many years now. Is it good for anyone to have sexual relations with anybody as long as they both consent? What is marriage? Should abortion be restricted? What about pornography? How should homosexuality be treated in the law? Is materialistic evolution deniable? And so forth. As things presently stand, there’s not much place for dialog on these: if you come down on one side or the other, anyone on the other side is not likely to listen any further to you. I want to avoid displaying the tribal symbols, so to speak—to avoid giving the signals that too often produce reflexive hostility and rejection.

The broad political questions involved here are, for any one of us, less urgent and important than the individual souls we encounter. If someone I know has had an abortion, my first concern is not for her status before the law, but for her. I want her to know that the heart of reality is love, not just love in the abstract but love for her in particular, and that in the end nothing can separate her from that love except her own refusal of it. Almost certainly there is some pain, or a scar covering that pain, in her heart, and it may be keeping her away from God by many different means. She may not be able or willing to face God, or even the possibility that God exists, unless she can believe that he is ready to pour out his love and mercy on her. My job is to help her see that. If by my words—harsh or callous or merely careless words commenting on the political question—I fail to assist her toward that vision, or, God forbid, even hinder her, what is God’s judgment on me likely to be?

Similarly for the practicing homosexual: the idea that men can marry men and women marry women is akin to the idea that a circle can have four corners. It implies an understanding of the word “marriage” that makes it mean something altogether different. But that argument, and the following one about laws, is secondary to my encounter with that person. Only if I am guided first and foremost by the desire that he (or she) would see and know divine love do I have the right to expect him (or her) to listen to anything I have to say about human love. If by flippant or derogatory remarks in the context of the political argument I make it more difficult for him or her to see divine love, what is God’s judgment on me likely to be?

I realize, of course, that there is a place for hard words. Sometimes a shock is what’s needed; we have the example of the prophets and of Jesus himself for that. But I can think of several arguments against a resort to denunciation on the part of those who are not explicitly called to it. There’s the simple fact of human nature, that one is far more likely to respond to kindness and sympathy than to anger and condemnation. There’s the fact that the harshness of the prophets and, at times, of Jesus was directed mainly to those already of the household of faith who were not living up to their calling. And there’s the example of Jesus and the woman about to be stoned for adultery: only after he had saved her life did he tell her to go and sin no more.

At any rate I’m about as certain as one can ever be about this sort of thing that hard words are not what God wants from me. And if he does want it he will have to tell me so directly.

It’s occurred to me, in thinking about all this, that Christians across the political spectrum have been guilty of putting the cart before the horse. I think it’s pretty obvious that many “progressive” (to use their preferred term) Christians have less interest in the faith itself than in the political purposes to which it can be put—anyone paying attention can see the association of doctrinal skepticism with left-wing activism. But Christians who are orthodox in doctrine can slip into a more subtle mistake which still puts the cart before the horse: they can, perhaps unconsciously, see the establishment of a Christian social order as the crucial step toward saving souls rather than vice-versa. The paradox is that it’s only the conversion of individuals that can bring about solid and lasting social change.

We all know this, I think, but sometimes we need a reminder. I got a useful one recently from, of all people, the entertainment editor of the local paper. Discussing the controversy over an appearance by the rapper Ludacris, he said, “Funny thing about the [culture war]—yelling ‘charge’ tends to signify that you're actually a re-enactor, rehashing a battle that was over before you woke up. Actually being a culture warrior means living a life people want to emulate.”

Sunday Night Journal — September 30, 2007

Goodbye to Politics and Culture Wars

It’s been twenty-five years or so since I first heard someone explicitly take politics into account in his views of another person. A friend was asking me about a mutual acquaintance, saying “I’m not sure about him. He seems like a nice guy and his politics are okay, but…”

I don’t really remember what followed, partly because I was so shocked. I certainly had (and have) my own strong political and cultural views, but have never thought of such views as elements of character. Since then, of course, I’ve learned that the impulse to view them in exactly that way is quite strong in a lot of people, and that the intensity with which they are not simply held but insisted upon often makes any extensive social contact with people holding them difficult or impossible for one of differing views.

A week or two ago I ran across the blog of someone I know. In his most recent post he lamented the fact that he doesn’t believe in hell, because he wants very much to believe that President Bush will go there. He was probably not 100% serious but neither was he 100% in jest. I know this person fairly well and like him, though I haven’t seen him for a while. But if I were in the room with him and he began to talk this way I would only want to get out of the situation: I wouldn’t want to get into what would only be an unpleasant and fruitless argument, but even a silent failure to assent would soon become obvious and awkward, and a gulf would open between us.

My first thought was that here was an example of just how vicious things have gotten, but then I remembered the way the left felt about Nixon and Reagan, and the way the right felt about Clinton; this sort of thing is not entirely new. But I doubt more than a handful of cranks would have wished, say, Eisenhower or FDR or JFK in hell. I remember the horror and dismay with which JFK’s assassination was greeted in the South, where he was not at all popular; those who felt otherwise would have hesitated to express it publicly. But I have no doubt that if Bush were assassinated there would be open and unashamed celebration by many.

These bitter divisions took hold of this country in the 1960s and have never healed. I don’t think they ever will heal, actually; I think they will get worse, barring some sort of near-miracle. There are, very broadly speaking, two hostile parties in the nation and each regards the other as an enemy—not just a group of people who have the wrong ideas but an entity which must either conquer or be conquered. I think only the fact that the division is not geographical and that there is no physical property at stake keeps our metaphorical culture war from breaking out into actual violence. It’s a religious conflict in the sense that it’s a conflict over first principles; “liberal” and “conservative” are often not just intellectual or ideological terms but expressions of allegiance to a set of assumptions that go all the way to the root of what one believes about what it means to be human.

But it’s not my purpose at the moment to talk about the nature of the division, only about how I plan to treat it on this blog—which from here on will be rarely if at all.

I’ve leaned this way for a long time. I never intended my original web site or, later, this blog to be a vehicle for political discussion, partly because I don’t think I have anything particularly distinctive or useful to contribute to it. Scattered through my Sunday Night Journal entries you’ll find statements to that effect. But now it’s a firm and explicit conviction and intention which follows from my reasons for writing in the first place.

What are those reasons? Well, mainly I write because it’s a sort of compulsion which I’ve felt for as long as I can remember. But secondly, and more relevantly for this discussion: I see something beautiful and I want to tell people about it. As things stand today, politics and the broader struggle that we call the culture wars can only get in the way of that effort.

This realization crystallized for me over the past year or so. In the almost four years since I started the Sunday Night Journal, I have renewed my acquaintance with half a dozen or so people with whom I’d had little or no contact for many years, as long ago as high school (which is now quite long ago). In a couple of cases this was because the person happened across my name somewhere on the web. In a couple it was an actual meeting in which the question “Have you been doing any writing?” was asked. And I said, “Well, yeah, a little—I have this web site where I post things…” and gave them the URL.

Some of these people are not of my mind on politics and culture, and I think at least one or two were pretty well put off by some of my views, and that I became in their eyes an ideological opponent, someone to be argued with or ignored. It’s bad enough that this distancing occurs in everyday interactions, but I don’t want it to get in the way of my being heard on matters that are more important than the sloganeering and divisions of American politics.

I have to suppose that from time to time people who don’t know me happen across this blog. I don’t want those who might disagree with me on social and political questions to take flight because they detect unpalatable views. Nor do I want people whose minds are not dominated by politics to think that mine is, and that my writing is just more of the same rhetorical warfare that can be found in a million other places. Whether a reader finds my writing to be attractive or repellent, I want that reaction to come from a more fundamental level, where ideological divisions fade in the presence of the common things that matter to every human being—or, less grandly, everyday things whose enjoyment carries no ideological charge.

I know, too, that even the culture wars are not going to be settled by argument, but by the action of deeper currents in human affairs. And most of all I find that a declaration of non-combatancy serves an even more important purpose, one I mentioned in my journal some months ago (here).

Postscript: Greg Wolfe of Image magazine came to a similar conclusion some years ago and published a statement called “Why I Am A Conscientious Objector in the Culture Wars”. Re-reading that statement now, I find myself very much in agreement with him, though my concerns as an individual are a little different from his as a publisher and editor

Sunday Night Journal — September 23, 2007

Nature’s Indifference?

I think every person has a sense that he is at the center of a world which exists mainly in relation to him, that he is the main character in a novel or play. And that’s because he is. We understand that a human author imbues, as far as possible, everything in his composition with significance for its limited set of characters, and that the same event will have a real but different meaning for each of them. So it shouldn’t be difficult for anyone who believes in the infinite creator God to accept that our lives are filled with significance, even at the most mundane level; that we are constantly being spoken to by everything around us.

I don’t mean, of course, that we should try to get a specific message or a bit of instruction out of every little thing that happens. That’s a bad idea, partly because we are likely to hear what we want to hear, as when someone says something like (and I’ve heard this) “God wanted me to have that parking space.” And partly because our minds are too small, our ignorance too great, and we get caught up in trying to unravel things that we simply can’t know—why was this person killed in the airplane crash, while another was briefly delayed by a telephone call, missed the flight, and lived?

Moreover, very little that life is telling us, great or small, is comprehensible till after the fact. Mainly, I think, and most of the time, we’re invited first of all to attend to existence of so much that is not ourselves, and to enjoy our contemplation of it. It’s not just your imagination; the great show really is being put on for your sake—only not for yours alone.

Last night it was nearly midnight when I walked the dogs down to the bay, and I ended up staying there longer than usual. The very bright and nearly full moon was in the southern sky, to my left, just beginning to descend. In spite of the fact that we had been under a tropical storm watch, there was almost no wind, and the soft ripples coming in to the shore did so at a slight angle away from the moon, so that as they rose onto the sand their faces were painted silver by the moonlight. Directly across the bay, in the west and low in the sky, a heap of anvil-shaped clouds rose from the horizon, growing smaller toward the top in a sort of rough pagoda shape, their upper surfaces glowing in the moonlight. Now and then there was a very faint flash of lightning, so far away that I couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from and never heard the thunder. Very thin fast clouds were blowing in from the east, from the direction of the storm, trailing across the moon. Otherwise the sky was mostly clear and when I looked straight up I could see a few stars, in spite of the moon and the lights of town. There was enough moonlight that I could see gulls flying out over the water. The great dark silhouette of a heron came gliding silently into the branches of a nearby magnolia tree, then glided away again a few moments later.

In short, it was hypnotic, and that’s why I stayed so long, even though the little dog, who has to be kept on a leash because we haven’t trained him very well, grew impatient to move on. It was as if the picture was being painted for me. And it was—but not for me alone.

It’s a familiar rhetorical tactic of materialists to point out the indifference of nature to suffering and any human concern whatever—which only serves to show how much one’s philosophy determines what one makes of the facts of the world. We often speak of natural beauty as a sign from God. I’ve begun to think it’s something more: not so much a sign, which implies a distance, as his very voice and face, shown to us in a form that we can see and understand, perpetually speaking to us of who and what he is.

Nature is for all of us; it ought to be unaffected by the fortunes of any one of us. Suppose something bad had happened to me while I stood by the water last night. It’s extremely far-fetched but not utterly implausible that I could have stumbled upon a fifteen-foot alligator and been dragged into the water and drowned, or perhaps just had a limb torn off, or that I could have been bitten by a cottonmouth, or simply fallen dead of a heart attack. Why should the beauty of the night have been spoiled because something bad happened to me? It was entirely possible that a couple of hundred yards downshore, in the city park that also borders the bay, two lovers were enraptured almost as much by the moonlight and the water as by each other. Should my pain have spoiled their delight? Should the moon have vanished from the sky because I was suffering?

No. What we call nature’s indifference is its constancy in beauty, intended to represent that of God himself, a reminder that no matter what happens to us as individuals his presence never fails and his nature never changes, and that beauty is a part of the very deepest fabric of what is. It would be dreary, in fact it’s almost frightening, to think that my own pain could undo it. Where then would be my hope of escape? No, I want nature to be untouchable by my mind, the vast space and time of the cosmos to remain utterly independent of me, and all this imperturbable persistence a promise of eternity and infinity. I’d like to think that if I should die at such a moment as the one I’ve described some corner of my consciousness would, in spite of the pain and fear, still know that I was in the presence of beauty as the darkness came on.

Sunday Night Journal — September 16, 2007

Five Books Everyone Should Read

Someone asked me a couple of weeks ago to name five books I think everyone should read. As an habitual maker of pop music lists (see the movie High Fidelity) I was intrigued, but the scope of the charge was really impossibly broad, so I had to narrow it somewhat by adding the reason why the books should be read. I couldn’t pick five books as being the best or most important (why else would they be books one should read?) without any further qualification of “best” or “important.” And it seemed that the reason should be the most important I could think of. So here are five books I think everyone should read for the purpose of becoming wise in this life and, by practicing the wisdom so learned, saving his soul in the next.

The New Testament. What could be more important than the discovery of what life is for and how it is to be lived, and why it matters? This book contains the answers, with the Resurrection as proof of its authority. If you want to know what happens after death, who better to tell you than the one who had the power to enter it and then return to us? And the historic truth of the Resurrection has far more support than the casual materialist usually imagines. My first thought was to name the Bible as a whole, but I think it would be somewhere between difficult and impossible to understand the Old Testament in isolation from the religious traditions which regard it as Scripture. Almost the same could be said of the New Testament, but I think one could get the general idea from reading it in a way that one could not with the Old.

Walker Percy: Lost in the Cosmos. Here you can find an account of what the New Testament is talking about in terms that bring it home to the modern mind in a striking way. It is, essentially, a diagnosis of the Fall of Man, a description of original sin—the catastrophic flaw in human consciousness that so reliably makes both the external world and every human spirit such a very troubled place. One aspect of the book that makes it so useful for our time is that Percy is not particularly concerned with the specifics of how the Fall occurred—the Garden, the temptation, the fruit—but with the psychology of it. It’s also one of the funniest books I know.

C. S. Lewis: The Great Divorce. Read this one to learn what is at stake in the choices we make throughout our lives, to understand how our own free will can determine whether our lives end in an eternity of bliss or of misery. And to learn something important about the nature of good and evil.

Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov. The list should include one great novel in the realist tradition that shows the big ideas working themselves out in individual lives. That sounds too philosophical: what I mean to say is that we need to see that the ideas are not merely ideas, that they operate powerfully in determining how we live. It’s been many years since I read The Brothers K, but if my memory is reasonably accurate it fulfills this purpose as well as anything ever written.

Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings. And here is a great novel in the non-realist tradition that is not only one of the most enchanting and powerful stories ever written but also a profound meditation on time, providence, fate, free will, love, and virtue.

I could have made the fourth item a list from which to choose one title. Other possibilities: Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the stories of Flannery O’Connor. I can imaging others nominating, say, Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene, although to my thinking they don’t quite come up to these others in wisdom.

The Screwtape Letters might do just as well for the third item.

Why not include Dante and Shakespeare? For one thing, I found myself thinking of the person to whom such a list would be recommended, and I could only think of this person as a citizen of our times: intelligent and interested but only superficially educated, spiritually both naïve and cynical—or, more accurately, naïve because cynical without really understanding the object of the cynicism. So I had also as a mental guideline that the books be ones that such a person might be willing and able to read without too much difficulty presented by archaic language and culture. Dante, I think, almost has to be taught to one—at a minimum you need a certain amount of support in understanding his cosmology and theology. Shakespeare suffers less from this, but presents also the very practical question of what constitutes a book for this purpose. One play? Impossible to pick one. All the plays? Too broad and wide-ranging for the stated purpose.

And this is not a list of the books I consider greatest from the literary point of view. For that list, I might well include something by Faulkner, but as great as he is at his best he does not possess the deep wisdom that these others do. Likewise for Joyce, and many others. I really wanted to work T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in there; it might do in place of The Lord of the Rings, but is much less accessible.

Sunday Night Journal — September 9, 2007

Prepared to Love

If I am not at least prepared to love God, I cannot “see” him.

—Roman Guardini

“Prepared” can mean “willing” or “able” or both. In context, Msgr. Guardini’s remark has more to do with “willing,” but taken alone it is equally applicable to “able,” and in fact it is difficult to separate the two where love is concerned. (I think “see” is in quotation marks because Guardini is referring first to the ability to recognize God’s existence.)

It appears that in the end there are only two sorts of people: those who respond to God with joy, as the fulfillment of all their hopes, and those who respond to him with hatred, as the fulfillment of all their fears. The question springs to mind: is it possible to see God and not love him? We all know that many people have false and ugly ideas of God and think that in rejecting these they are rejecting God. But we must suppose that in the end every soul will be given some way to get past this error, to see God as he really is, and then to choose freely. If it is possible to choose, it is possible to choose wrongly, and so it must be possible for a person to see God and not love him. Or would it be more precise to say that such a person has chosen not to see?

Is it possible to love God and not see him? I think not. To love him is to see him, or at least to begin to see him. I think in fact it is impossible to love anything or anyone at all and not begin, if ever so dimly and partially, to see God (I mean genuine love, of course).

Of this I’m sure: the heart that is prepared to love God must also be prepared to love its companions in human life, and the world in which God has placed us all. To a young heart love may come easily and quickly; for an old and wounded one it may be difficult, requiring conscious effort. Either way, love in this world is rarely unaccompanied by pain: at the very least there is always the pain of time, of knowing that the person or thing one loves is passing away, either as a result of its death or decay, or one’s own. And this is the heart of Christian faith, the paradoxical secret hidden in plain sight: to recognize, as the old song says, that love hurts, and yet insist that we must love anyway, and in fact that it is only by entering into this pain that we can ever be healed of it. Only by accepting the pain of love can we attain its joy, the greatest pleasure of which we are capable.

We know that there are some people who suffer greatly and still seem able to love easily, and some who suffer greatly and seem unable to love. Is there some secret movement of the will that makes the one or the other?

There must be. It seems impossible that, as some Christians have said, there are some souls that are so constructed that they will hate God and must be lost, that it is God’s will that they be lost. It must be that thousands of tiny choices made over the course of a lifetime, choices of unlove over love, choices of self over everything else, can so corrode the soul that when it sees perfect love and light it sees only an enemy, something which intends to take away everything it thinks it must have.

This is probably true, but haven’t we also known people who, even as children, were mean, in both senses of the word: closed, petty, unseeing, uninterested in anything except their own will and their own pleasure? Were they born unable, or at least unwilling, to love? We can’t know the answer to that, or how they will end. But we know that God is good, and so we know that he must somehow, at the end, make the choice to love possible for everyone. We say that faith is a gift and a mystery, but those are only ways of resisting the temptation to believe we can fully understand the secret and subtle movements of the soul in its relationship to God.

There’s a passage in Prince Caspian where Aslan romps through a country and every person he meets either sees him with delight and wants to go with him, or sees him with distaste and wants to get away from him. The most interesting thing about this passage (if I’m remembering it correctly) is that they have never seen him before. They simply know, instantly, either that they want to be with Aslan or that they want nothing to do with him.

I think it will be something like that one day for all of us. Though we may seem to make our choice in a heartbeat, we will have been making it all our lives.

Sunday Night Journal — September 2, 2007

A Few More Notes on the Question of Doubt

This is a follow-up to the journal of August 5 on the mixture of doubt and faith which I, and apparently quite a few others, experience. In passing: it seems to be happening to me more often than usual lately that a spiritual matter that’s on my mind pops up everywhere; so it was with this question, which was followed in a day or two by a great deal of publicity about Mother Teresa’s dark night of the soul—not, I hasten to add, that my anxieties should be given that name. As Francesca said in the comments on one of those posts, most of us have not reached that level—have not, so to speak, known the daylight upon which that night can descend. We are, rather, to borrow again from the comments, this time from Daniel, only muddling around in the murky twilight of the flesh.

First, a clarification. A couple of people wondered whether the degree of doubt to which I confess implies the absence of genuine faith. Someone on the Caelum et Terra blog quoted this from the Catechism:

Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie. To be sure, revealed truths can seem obscure to human reason and experience, but “the certainty that the divine light gives is greater than that which the light of natural reason gives.” (157)

And I finally troubled myself to look in the same source, and found this, which I posted in a comment there, and which would have saved some confusion had I included it in the original piece:

Voluntary doubt about the faith disregards or refuses to hold as true what God has revealed and the Church proposes for belief. Involuntary doubt refers to hesitation in believing, difficulty in overcoming objections connected with the faith, or also anxiety aroused by its obscurity. If deliberately cultivated doubt can lead to spiritual blindness. (2088)

So: involuntary doubt is what I’m talking about, although none of the three formulations of the concept seems perfectly precise as a description of my own experience, which I think can be summed up as anxiety that the faith might not in fact be true. I find in myself, on what I hope is an honest appraisal, no voluntary doubt at all. What I’ve been calling “doubt” is not an intellectual act contrary to faith, but an emotion that accompanies it. Anthony Esolen, at the Touchstone blog, says it well (as usual):

Dubiety is inseparable from the human condition. We must waver, because our knowledge comes to us piecemeal, sequentially, in time, mixed up with the static of sense impressions that lead us both toward and away from the truth we try to behold steadily. The truths of faith are more certain than the truths arrived by rational deduction, says Aquinas, because the revealer of those truths speaks with ultimate authority, but they are less certain subjectively, from the point of view of the finite human being who receives them yet who does not, on earth, see them with the same clarity as one sees a tree or a stone or a brook.

It does sometimes seem that this doubt, or this anxiety, is especially strong in the modern world (meaning the world of the past two hundred years or so), the world which has been rearranged intellectually by science. It certainly seems to be more prominent in Catholic art: the stereotypical literary Christian of our time is a Graham Greene or Walker Percy character. I think there are good reasons for this. It was never the case that people in general saw the truths of the faith “with the same clarity as one sees a tree.” But science has made it more difficult (or perhaps only created a different sort of difficulty?) for at least two reasons.

One reason is that the relation of the scriptural account of history to the truths of the faith has been rendered complex and difficult by the replacement of the straightforward Genesis story with a scientific picture of evolutionary development over billions of years. Those who accept Genesis as literally historical can only do so as a conscious choice and with constant struggle. Those who are willing (like me) to take Genesis as symbolic have to live with a level of skepticism about the literal truth of scripture which did not much trouble people five hundred years ago. We have accepted the introduction of the principle that scripture may not always be factually accurate about the physical world and human history, and suffer an inevitable anxiety that the assignment of “merely symbolic” to key components of the story might not stop there (as, indeed, it has not among many theologians). This anxiety may be slight, almost nonexistent, for many of us, but I think it’s there in everyone, as one can demonstrate to oneself by spending a few minutes in the psychological experiment of imagining that one has no doubt whatsoever that human history is literally and exactly described in scripture.

The other reason is the presence in our consciousness of the scientific approach to truth. This, I’ve realized in the course of these reflections, is very strong in my own mind. I’m not a scientist (I’m far too undisciplined) but I’ve always admired it and loved its elegant method of arriving at truth by hypothesis and experiment. The truth so arrived at is objective, available to everyone, and demonstrable. Anyone who doubts it can (at least in principle) prove it for himself. And contrary to a misapprehension one sometimes encounters, facts arrived at in this way are rarely proven wrong except on the basis of procedural or technical mistakes in the experiment. They may be refined and made more accurate and precise—this is the relation of Einstein’s work to Newton’s—but they are not disproved. (Hypotheses, on the other hand, and to a lesser extent theories, are disproved regularly, and it’s sometimes the over-eagerness of scientists to state a strong hypothesis as fact that leads to the perception that science is constantly undoing its own findings. And I’m not talking about the areas of science, such as cosmology or evolution, which are more a matter of reasoning from observation than of experiment.)

When a group of scientists set out to start a science humor magazine they couldn’t think of anything funnier to call it than The Journal of Irreproducible Results. Faith, of course, offers us only the irreproducible result, from any perspective we can measure. No two people can pray for the same thing and be certain—or even reasonably hopeful—of obtaining the same response. No one person can expect the same response twice. This makes perfect sense, because every person’s relationship to God is unique and constantly changing. But it only serves to highlight the greater level of confidence we have in the facts proved by science. Against that standard, the persuasive claims of faith appear relatively weak, at least in the abstract. It doesn’t really help much to state the obvious, that spiritual reality is not subject to the same sort of interrogation that science performs on the physical.

In the personal realm, of course, faith has at least as much power as it ever has, perhaps in part to a certain clearing of the air, aided by science, which has aided us in seeing more clearly the difference between genuine religion and magic. But we’re left with that gap between the psychologically and the scientifically plausible.

Although many or most of us may have to resign ourselves to a certain amount of involuntary doubt, of anxiety about the faith, we shouldn’t be too passive or too accepting of it. It should be not merely endured, but questioned as vigorously as it questions faith, and used in that way it can press the latter to become stronger and more profound. Resignation can go too far, relinquish too much. As someone in Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest says (quoting from memory): “Resignation is a dreadful thing when by slow degrees it prepares the soul to live without God.”

(By the way, you can find The Journal of Irreproducible Results here.)