I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason
For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.
                                                        —Robinson Jeffers

Yesterday I awoke with strains of Blake’s “Jerusalem” turning over in the back of my mind. Later, I checked in with Melissa Harris-Perry reporting from the Mall on the beginning of festivities celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. As I drifted around the house making breakfast, seeing my beloved off to a celebration of Women’s Equality Day, I thought of Dr. King’s peroration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that day fifty years ago, now almost as famous as the Gettysburg Address, and how easy the commerce seemed between the ideal of equality as we understood it then and that great preacher’s evocation of God Almighty in the words of the then familiar spiritual “Free at Last.”

A couple of days before, my beloved and I had watched Lee Daniels’ powerful new film, The Butler, whose evocation of the civil rights movement turned me inside out, pushed hard against whatever barrier it is that prevents me from weeping, so that I was forced to wipe my eyes as we left the theater. It was not nostalgia but something else that film stirred in me. I have been thinking of late about the complexes of memory and present experience that seem to ground my perception of the world and connect my sense of myself and the course of my life with the larger rhythms of history and spirituality. I was privileged to participate directly in some of the large-scale events of the last century. Images of those events, of things I experienced directly, float to the surface of my memory now amongst fragments of poetry and song, but there’s a deeper emotion underneath, a sort of memory aquifer in which part of me remains immersed. More about that later.

In the midst of these reflections I read through an essay posted by Joseph Bottum yesterday at Commonweal. Entitled “The Things We Share: A Catholic’s Case for Same Sex Marriage.” The piece, which Bottum calls a personal essay, makes a pretty good case for why proponents of same sex marriage seem to be winning the legal argument in today’s world. But when Bottum gets into the area that seems to be most important to him, a discussion of why the “thin” arguments from natural law that are being used to defend Catholic opposition to same sex marriage fail and should fail, some deep loyalty to those same thin arguments seems to dominate in the end. The essay falls into a long digression to the effect that the entire sexual revolution has been anti-Christian, which to Bottum seems to mean anti-Catholic, that serves to obscure the thought (to which Bottum devotes only a few sentences) that the Summa Theologica, while it finds what is sometimes now called traditional marriage to be morally superior to other forms of human cohabitation, does not condemn other such forms. There’s a conclusion to be got from Bottum’s evocation of Thomas, but instead of drawing it, Bottum drifts off into a nostalgic paean to a formerly enchanted world that it seems to be the Church’s present mission to reenchant.

I found this essay offensive in many ways, from its glaring homophobia (linked, I think, to an expressed distaste for the personal that undercuts the essay’s main story thread) to its lavish praise for Robert John Neuhaus and its glib dismissal of mainline Protestantism. I also found its primary argument incoherent. As a supporter of same sex marriage I can’t find anywhere in Bottum’s essay a Catholic case for same sex marriage aside from the claim in its subtitle. Nor can I find any real appreciation for “things we share,” a phrase that alludes to a broken friendship between Bottum and a secular gay friend, with whom Bottum formerly shared “a bit of old-timey Americana, the stuff we all still share,” at informal weekend hootenannies. Still, I’ve spent enough good time at informal weekend hootenannies that I liked Bottum’s story about his former friend—indeed it seemed to me the most honest part of the essay—and we do share the stuff of old-timey Americana. All us Americans share that. But it’s a rich, thick mixture of stuff. We constantly get it all over ourselves, like barbecue sauce at a pig picking. And Bottum is after something real when he speaks of the enchantment of the world. We lose something important to us as humans when we lose the ability to apprehend the gods in things.

Bottum’s failure in this essay, it seems to me, is that dogmatism gets in the way of his humanity. An enchanted world doesn’t have to be a Christian world, much less a Catholic one—something Professor Tolkien demonstrated with his stories of Hobbits, devout Catholic that he was. We can read of the enchantment of the world of pagan antiquity in Vergil and Ovid and alike in Hesiod and Homer and the tragedians. When the gods leave, as gods inevitably do, the real work of human being and understanding begins, in the need to save the phenomena, the need that gave rise to Greek philosophy, and perhaps to Christianity (or at least to confessional Christianity) as well. The way of ideological dogmatism sets up orthodoxies and their built embodiments, seeking to maintain by force the authority of past belief and practice. But there is also a way of prophecy. That is the way of Blake in the poem with which I began. It is also the way of Christians who are exploring ways to create marriage liturgies for same sex unions and who believe they are being led by the Holy Spirit in their work.

And it was the way of Dr. King, whose uneasy relationship with Bayard Rustin probably reflects his own homophobia, something he and A. Philip Randolph and others had to rise above as they designed and carried out the events of August 28, 1963. We are now far from that day, further from it spiritually than the fifty years we traverse in remembering it. Dr. King is now a cultural saint, but I can imagine any number of scenarios in which he would make a cheap target for today’s right-wing racist attack machine were he alive today, just as he was a cheap target for J. Edgar Hoover at the time of his assassination. If, like Ivan Karamazov’s Jesus, Dr. King were to return to the streets of Washington, DC, or to Memphis, today—he would likely not be assassinated. Instead, he would be talked to death in the public media, ground to bits by the celebrity industry until nothing was left but a series of tabloid howlers. It would be the vindication of an old friend who stormed into church choir practice on the evening of April 4, 1968, jubilant, with the words: “Hurrah, we’ve killed that son of a bitch!” The only good prophet, or at least the best one, is a dead prophet.

I am seventy-six years old today. As my memory swims in that deep aquifer that opens when I think seriously of the past fifty years, I find a plurality of enchantments, an ollo podrida of enchantments. Among them rests the idea of catholicity (small c), but it commands no more allegiance in that imaginary than the sound of one hand clapping. I’m glad my country has chosen to honor the memory of August 28, 1963, an innocent time, relatively speaking, before the dreadful march of killing that ensued in its wake. We might remember as we congratulate ourselves for having made progress towards a better world that it took the death of a president to overcome the forces of entrenched catholicity that stood against equality in the world Dr. King addressed in 1963, that our initial attempts to create a more nearly just society in law unleashed an orgy of violence that hardly spent itself for a decade, and that powerful forces demanding reinstatement of all the old injustices have reassembled in the world King’s legacy addresses fifty years later. Indeed I feel more solidarity with Charles Blow than with Dr. King today.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech keeps ringing in my head, an aching, idyllic, rhetorical masterpiece that envisions a future free of discrimination and filled with harmony and equality. But I wonder whether the day he imagined will ever come and whether many Americans have quietly abandoned King’s dream as a vision that can’t—or shouldn’t—exist in reality.

At seventy-six I don’t want to live inside anybody’s dogmatic catholic hierarchy, not even that of my own church, but I’m proud to be an inheritor of the revolutionary idealism that gives Dr. King’s rhetoric its profound resonance down through the years, an idealism both spiritual and secular that takes as its exemplars figures as disparate as Gandhi and Bob Dylan, who stole his name from a Welsh poet. I think of the songs we all sang as though they were our property in those days: “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “We shall Overcome,” “Abraham, Martin, and John,” “Kumbaya,” and the wonderful words of Julia Ward Howe’s that almost became the national anthem of the sixties. What enchantment did we see in the watch fires we imagined as we put our arms around one another on the quads and streets of those years, as we sang in our chains like the sea, to paraphrase that same Welsh poet. Was it a world free at last from bigotry, dogmatism, inequality, and starvation? I hope it was. For that would be the Jerusalem of randipole Billy Blake, as he was sometime known by his best fictional disciple, Gulley Jimson.

Glory, Hallelujah!