The Storms Are on the Ocean

A fairly violent thunderstorm came through my town during the Easter Vigil last night. There had been rain earlier in the evening, but it had mostly stopped by the time the Vigil Mass began. The Mass begins outside the church. A light rain was still falling when we gathered there, and most of the participants, including the priest, stayed under the eaves of the building next door until the last moment. The Easter candle was lit—a bit hastily, it seemed to me—and the words “Christ Our Light” chanted. A few heavy drops of rain began to fall as the priest and acolytes processed back into the darkened church, followed by the rest of us, holding unlit candles.

There was enough light to keep people from tripping over each other, and we found our seats. Acolytes went up and down the aisles lighting the candle of the person in the aisle seat of each row, who turned to the next person, and so on until most people in the church were holding a lighted candle. By the standards of what we are used to, this was still a dim light. The sounds of thunder grew closer and more frequent.

The church was built within the past ten years or so and is fairly “modern” in design, although it’s much less unattractive than many. It’s not ugly but there’s something about its shape and its brick, wood, and carpet that remind me of the lobby of an upscale suburban motel. It has the almost requisite auditorium-style seating, with four banks of pews fanned out facing the altar, so it’s proportionately wider than the traditional style, being closer to a square than a rectangle. The ceiling rises sharply from the sides of the building to a square cupola in the center which has clear windows. Behind the sanctuary is visible most of a large stained-glass Christ, and above that a row of clear windows.

As the Old Testament readings began, the storm arrived. I could see the lightning flashing through the windows of the cupola and those behind the sanctuary, and making the otherwise invisible Christ figure blaze out for an instant. Soon I heard the heavy rain. The somewhat heavily-amplified choir drowned out the rain and thunder whenever they played and sang, but during the readings I could hear them plainly.

During my twenty-plus years as a Catholic I have complained a great deal about the liturgy, as have most of us, especially those of us of a relatively traditionalist cast of mind. I have complained in general, and I have complained in particular about the four or five parishes I’ve attended regularly over those years. My current parish is better than many. The music is very capably done but is hit-and-miss as far as the selection of hymns is concerned—sometimes the Glory and Praise stuff that I mostly dislike, sometimes songs from pop Christian groups, sometimes Latin or traditional English hymns. This night was a hodge-podge of all of them; if it was not particularly conducive toward any consistent effect, it at least included some beautiful moments, such as the Latin Veni Creator Spiritus and Charles Wesley’s good old Jesus Christ is Risen Today. But there’s nothing anyone (anyone local) can do about the flat, insipid, and often banal prose of the current scriptural and liturgical translations, and I’m always a little pained by them.

Yet tonight none of this mattered terribly. I would have preferred that things be better, but far more important was the fact that it, by which I mean everything—the physical church, the universal Church, the Faith itself—was there at all. The storm raged on as the Old Testament readings proceeded. Not too far away, no more than twenty miles as the crow flies, is the Gulf of Mexico, and its waves must have been thrashing and flailing. I love the sea but every now and then I have a dream of being assailed by it on a dark shore, of being swept off into some sort of abyss.

I had a very literal sense of being in the bark of Peter. At the Gloria the lights came up. There we all were, a crowd of ordinary people without a great deal in common other than our presence together in this small bright space, sailing serenely on through storm and darkness toward a promised destination which is both longed for and unknown.

Culture War, or Holland With Nukes?

It’s being said, quite rightly, that the Terri Schiavo case is forcing us to face fundamental questions about the value of human life and the conditions under which positive action may be taken to end it. When I emailed several of my children this excellent piece by Fr. Rob Johansen, I included words to the effect that the matter ought not to have turned into a liberal-vs.-conservative question. Of course that it would do so was predictable enough, but what I was thinking when I made the statement was that there ought to be no reason inherent in liberalism putting it on the side of ending Schiavo’s life. It’s clear enough why religious conservatives would be on the side of preserving life. But why is liberalism on the other side? Why, for instance, have left-wing feminists not taken to the streets to protest this exercise of life-and-death power over a woman by her husband?

To ask the question is disingenuous; we all know the answer, which is that liberalism’s commitment to abortion rights has superseded its commitment to the sacredness of human life. And with the whole question of “what’s so special about human life anyway?” standing silently in the wings, the two sides step into their familiar opposition.

But there’s another question involved here, one that is further in the background but even more fundamental and even more muddled: the question of how we know what is right and wrong, and of how or even whether this knowledge is embodied in law. This is a question from which we as a nation would prefer to avert our eyes. We don’t want to face it because we know we are deeply and perhaps fatally divided over it.

As I write this, Terry Schaivo’s feeding tube has been removed and there is no hope of intervention from any state authority; therefore an effort is underway to pass emergency legislation in that would allow her parents some sort of opportunity to argue their case in a federal court. For the past couple of days much of the argument has been over whether this intervention is wise or constitutional. Liberals are indignant that conservatives are attempting, in defiance of their natural instinct, to override state authorities with a clumsy intervention. This is not much of an argument; since the left in general is more than happy to extend federal power, the complaint amounts to nothing more substantial than a charge of hypocrisy.

But the posturing about federalism misses the crucial point entirely. No one believes that a state has the right to do anything that is in flagrant violation of the Constitution. Pull a conjecture out of the air: suppose a state passes a law—observing every legal nicety in the process—which establishes capital punishment as the standard penalty for insulting the governor. Such a law would not stand for ten minutes, and no reasonable person would question the federal government’s right and indeed duty to set it aside as a violation of the Constitution’s protection of free speech, which in turn is protected because it was deemed by the framers to be a fundamental right. The argument in the Schiavo case is not about whether the states can violate fundamental human rights protected by the Constitution. It’s about whether this particular case involves or at least may involve such a violation—which leads right back to the substantive question of the definition and meaning of human life, and the conditions under which it may be ended.

When the Constitution is silent or ambiguous, we have to turn to first principles. We have to ask “what is right?” And we can’t answer that without asking how we know what is right. The instinctive answer of the contemporary American to questions like this begins with “Well, I think…” followed by a list of very subjective likes and dislikes. For many Americans, there are two types of moral judgment: those which are held instinctively by everyone (with the possible exception of Nazis and serial killers) and those which are matters of personal taste. They have no means, no vocabulary, with which to discuss the foundations of matters in the first class, thus no means of responding to a challenge to their beliefs on those matters, and therefore no reliable means of resisting the slow drift of many moral questions from the first class into the second. That is one way of looking at the sexual revolution.

Religious people who have a very clear set of first principles which includes sexual morality are not so easily moved. That is one way of looking at the culture war. The latter is a terrible thing which may prove to be our undoing. But if the condition of arguing fruitlessly and often incoherently about these things, of being deeply divided about them, is bad, think how much worse it will be if a consensus emerges around the wrong answer. Even those of us who believe the USA to be in general and on balance a force for good in the world are dismayed, to say the least, by the prospect of a union of American power with the emerging secular moral consensus. Better a culture war than “Holland with nukes,” to borrow a term used by James Freeman in a comment on Amy Wellborn’s blog a few days ago.

Local Heroes

I once heard a music lover who lived in Manhattan say that he no longer bothered to go to concerts very often. Regarding the New York Philharmonic he said that it was more trouble than it was worth to get to Lincoln Center to “listen to Mehta do another pedestrian run-through of standard repertoire.”

How sadly jaded, I thought. I’ve been in New York City maybe three or four times in my life, only once for more than a night or two. I never have and probably never will hear the Philarmonic live. This man’s “pedestrian run-through of standard repertoire” would be a rare treat, quite possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience, for me. And he could easily have it a dozen times a year or more. Still, though I was slightly shocked, I didn’t really blame him; it’s human nature to lose the sense of wonder and appreciation for anything we can take for granted. And I suppose it’s good for music that connoisseurs refuse to let even the best performers get away with less than their best effort. But there’s something to be said for naïve appreciation as well.

Last night I heard Mahler’s 1^st performed by our local symphony orchestra. Like most such orchestras in medium-sized cities, it’s small, its instrumentalists are not full-time employees, and it struggles to stay in business. Even to my untrained and forgiving ear, the performance had technical defects. Nevertheless, it was a delight to me.

I suppose I’m as jaded with regard to recorded music as my Manhattanite was to live music. I have Mahler’s 1^st on an old LP and could listen to it more or less anytime I want to, but haven’t done so in years. No orchestral recording is quite as vital and engaging as a live performance, even a less than perfect one. This was as enthralling a musical experience as I’ve ever had. It had been so long since I’d heard the symphony that it sounded fresh, and I found it to be even better than I remembered. Mahler originally saw the work as depicting an artist’s innocent exuberance, rejection, disillusionment, suffering, and rebirth, but I hear something else. From my vantage point in the early 21^st century I hear this late 19^th century work as a prophecy of what the next hundred years would bring. The third movement in particular, Frere Jacques transmuted into a funeral march that turns slightly deranged as it goes on, seemed a window opening onto the distant vista of Germany’s impending madness. And the putative triumph of the fourth movement seemed overwrought and unsound, a victory likely to prove temporary.

Afterwards, the heroism that struck me was not that of Mahler’s melancholy artist on his quasi-divine mission, but that of the people who made this performance. It’s no small thing to bring concerts like this, season after season, to small cities where resources and public interest are limited at best. And it required no small amount of nerve for this group to take on such a large and demanding work.

The Mobile Symphony gets some amount of help from the National Endowment for the Arts. Some conservatives have been on a sort of vendetta against this agency, based mainly on its use by the political left as a source of subsidies for junk art with no real point other than to stick a finger in the eye of the public it despises. But most of the grants have apparently never gone to that sort of thing, and the agency is now under the direction of the very reasonable and gifted Dana Gioia. If conservatives want to make an argument from principle that the government should not be funding art at all, let them. I’ll listen more sympathetically to that argument when they show an equal appetite for eliminating government payments to corporations. If we’re going to have an enormous government with its fingers in everything, I’m not going to object to a little of its money going to keep the greatest achievements of Western civilization alive to those members of the public who care, even, or especially, out here in the sticks.

Sunday Night Journal — March 13, 2005

I once heard a music lover who lived in Manhattan say that he no longer bothered to go to concerts very often. Regarding the New York Philharmonic he said that it was more trouble than it was worth to get to Lincoln Center to “listen to Mehta do another pedestrian run-through of standard repertoire.”

How sadly jaded, I thought. I’ve been in New York City maybe three or four times in my life, only once for more than a night or two. I never have and probably never will hear the Philarmonic live. This man’s “pedestrian run-through of standard repertoire” would be a rare treat, quite possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience, for me. And he could easily have it a dozen times a year or more. Still, though I was slightly shocked, I didn’t really blame him; it’s human nature to lose the sense of wonder and appreciation for anything we can take for granted. And I suppose it’s good for music that connoisseurs refuse to let even the best performers get away with less than their best effort. But there’s something to be said for naïve appreciation as well.

Last night I heard Mahler’s 1^st performed by our local symphony orchestra. Like most such orchestras in medium-sized cities, it’s small, its instrumentalists are not full-time employees, and it struggles to stay in business. Even to my untrained and forgiving ear, the performance had technical defects. Nevertheless, it was a delight to me.

I suppose I’m as jaded with regard to recorded music as my Manhattanite was to live music. I have Mahler’s 1^st on an old LP and could listen to it more or less anytime I want to, but haven’t done so in years. No orchestral recording is quite as vital and engaging as a live performance, even a less than perfect one. This was as enthralling a musical experience as I’ve ever had. It had been so long since I’d heard the symphony that it sounded fresh, and I found it to be even better than I remembered. Mahler originally saw the work as depicting an artist’s innocent exuberance, rejection, disillusionment, suffering, and rebirth, but I hear something else. From my vantage point in the early 21^st century I hear this late 19^th century work as a prophecy of what the next hundred years would bring. The third movement in particular, Frere Jacques transmuted into a funeral march that turns slightly deranged as it goes on, seemed a window opening onto the distant vista of Germany’s impending madness. And the putative triumph of the fourth movement seemed overwrought and unsound, a victory likely to prove temporary.

Afterwards, the heroism that struck me was not that of Mahler’s melancholy artist on his quasi-divine mission, but that of the people who made this performance. It’s no small thing to bring concerts like this, season after season, to small cities where resources and public interest are limited at best. And it required no small amount of nerve for this group to take on such a large and demanding work.

The Mobile Symphony gets some amount of help from the National Endowment for the Arts. Some conservatives have been on a sort of vendetta against this agency, based mainly on its use by the political left as a source of subsidies for junk art with no real point other than to stick a finger in the eye of the public it despises. But most of the grants have apparently never gone to that sort of thing, and the agency is now under the direction of the very reasonable and gifted Dana Gioia. If conservatives want to make an argument from principle that the government should not be funding art at all, let them. I’ll listen more sympathetically to that argument when they show an equal appetite for eliminating government payments to corporations. If we’re going to have an enormous government with its fingers in everything, I’m not going to object to a little of its money going to keep the greatest achievements of Western civilization alive to those members of the public who care, even, or especially, out here in the sticks.

Self-Anointed Solomons

Always ready to detect any alarming trend, I must say that one of the more alarming was in evidence this past week, in the form of the Supreme Court’s decision finding it impermissible to impose capital punishment for crimes committed when the perpetrator was under the age of eighteen. I have no quarrel with the result of the decision, but the reasoning by which it was reached, and still more its reception, are discouraging for the future of self-government.

Some ten years ago I wrote what I consider my best essay for Caelum et Terra, “Nothing at the Center” (which thanks to my gift for procrastination is not to be found in the online C&T archive). The essay was a sort of rambling rumination about the absence of any fixed moral center in our form of government; the founding fathers left us a wonderful machine for self-government, but had little to say about first principles, and so we, having lost our consensus about first principles, are not sure what we ought to be doing with the machinery and are casting about for guidance. In our confusion we are pushing the Supreme Court into a role it was never meant to have, that of final arbiter of right and wrong—of principles, not just of law.

If my own hasty reading of the opinion and much of the commentary on it are accurate, some members of the Court, particularly Justice Kennedy, have settled comfortably into this new role. In that C&T essay I had some sarcastic things to say about Justice Kennedy’s now-famous declaration that everyone has the right to “define [his] own concept of existence.” He continues his dreamy approach to the law in this new decision, stating of the under-eighteen murderer that “the State cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity.”

This is the sort of decision that, like the age for voting or for military service, should be made by legislatures (whether state or federal), if it is not made in the Constitution (or its amendments). Kennedy and the four justices who concur with him have simply taken it upon themselves to make a personal judgment on the matter—to call it a moral judgment is to give it more weight than it really has—and their judgment law. Their reasons are not all bad by any means, but they make little meaningful reference to the Constitution, and none to any objective standard of right and wrong. The closest they come to the latter is the invocation of “evolving standards of decency.” It seems unnecessary to point out the folly and even crimes latent in that approach.

But people have been talking about judicial usurpation for a generation now, and this instance is no more striking than many others. What interests and alarms me most is the public reaction. Almost everyone whose reaction I’ve heard—the exception being certain conservative journalists—has talked of it entirely in terms of whether the result is correct. Almost no one seems to consider the implications of the Court’s claim to have the power to make it.

I think most Americans have now, as the psychological term puts it, “internalized” the idea that the Supreme Court is our ultimate moral authority. They, and at least five justices, see the Court’s role as being like that of King Solomon: they are the wise rulers to whom the people bring their disputes for resolution. The appeal to shared objective moral principles is disallowed or at least suspect, and the appeal to the actual text of the Constitution is made moot by the idea that its meaning is infinitely malleable. But order must be preserved, and so we look to what is in essence a committee of lawyers whose passing opinions become law, beyond which there is no appeal.

Rule by King Solomon was all very well when Solomon listened to God. What should we expect of a small group of self-anointed Solomons whose final allegiance seems to be nothing more than their own sense of what is, to use the word favored by those who do not want to admit that they are making moral judgments, inappropriate? And who will call them to account for their own inappropriate behavior?