Go Down, Moses

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NOTE: I’ve given some thought to posting over Christmas and into the new year and decided not to do so but rather to republish this piece from November 17, 2014 and let it sit at the head of the blog for a while. The context in which I wrote it is clear in the text, I think. If you’re looking for my advent pieces for this year you’ll find them listed in the sidebar.

Oh boys, take me back,
I want to ride in Geronimo’s Cadillac!

These are night thoughts. Looking over the past year I see that I haven’t written much. I could perhaps defend myself by pointing out that I was seriously ill last summer. But besides being a cop-out that doesn’t account for time outside the six weeks or so of my illness and recovery. I’m now thinking the real reason for my relative silence is that I’m more and more persuaded that my country is in a sort of semi-fascist historical trough, the kind we have experienced from time to time in the past, when the worst of us as a people and the worst of our social and political potential are in charge. I’ll not dilate upon this much. The mere fact that here in Saint Louis we are waiting for the Ferguson grand jury verdict like armies on the eve of a great battle says multitudes to me, with the governor provocatively having already called up the National Guard and declared a 30-day state of emergency. I plan to do what I can to help with the sanctuary effort of my church in the event of widespread protest. I’ve already made clear what I think about the murder of Michael Brown; but until the law of the land changes there will be more Michael Browns, and their deaths will continue the procession of wrongs without remedy that our present governing classes seem not only willing but also sometimes eager to inflict upon the rest of us.

Why we tolerate this deplorable state of affairs I’m not certain. But at the end of a long and disappointing summer, I’m proposing to myself as a tentative analytic that it is less a function of our divisions as a people than a sign that we have lost heart. The liberal state in our time has become bogged down in bureaucratic confusion and thralldom to the corporate interests that have been its chief financial underwriters in recent years. It has also fallen victim to a kind of paranoia of which our globally ambitious surveillance effort is one arm and our local epidemic of publicly supported police violence is another. These two phenomena have grown vigorous while and because nobody is steering the ship of state.

And in the absence of governance we have experienced the growth of a spate of power centers, industries if you will, that have developed huge economic appetites and require steady streams of human fuel while producing equally steady streams of human waste. Witness the growth of higher education which now discharges the majority of its clients with burdens of debt that will consign them to the human waste pile from the beginning of their post-college lives (I don’t say their careers because most of these students will not have careers in the way that their parents had them). Or witness the growth of the prison industrial complex, our chief contemporary human landfill.

I think the real significance of the economic crash of 2008 may turn out to be that it was the end of our culture’s ability to meet citizen demand for the means to the good life, or the introduction of permanent scarcity and its accompanying social consequences. We mounted no serious effort to overcome or mitigate the consequences of the 2008 crisis as we did in the 1930s during the great depression. We now experience the same social ills that afflicted us during that terrible period, but we have made no corresponding efforts to cure them. In the absence of governance our chief response to the deplorable state of our republic is helplessness. We have become expert at turning away from cruelty. Some of us wring our hands and cast about for partial and/or inadequate remedies for the suffering we see around us, and others (many of them turning handsome profits from the misery of their fellow creatures) smile, talk about trickle-down economics, and support laws against feeding the homeless.

Several times now I’ve said that I want to write something about why I love my country, but I’ve almost come to the conclusion that one cannot love a country such as ours. One experiences one’s country through its history and one’s small participation in it. That is sometimes very difficult to love. An honest modern person will acknowledge the fear and disgust that political engagement sometimes generates. A more serious person may suspect that patriotism is grounded in a need to escape from that fear and disgust, as Leguin’s Genly Ai puts it, or in the terror of history, to steal from Eliade. More to the point, perhaps, my desire to express love of my country may be a desire of the boy I once was, and still am deep down somewhere. That boy would have written a peroration that quoted Walt Whitman and Robert Frost—God love him. He could love his country for what he thought it might become and bracket his knowledge of the occupied place his country actually was.

But when my now near octogenarian mind plays over remembered experiences in which I have felt the most intense pleadings of love I naïvely associated with my country, I find that these are grounded in particular historical moments and in awareness of being, or having been, imbedded in the complex ecologies of particular places. I have a great love for the plains of West Texas where I did most of my growing up; for the high deserts of northern New Mexico where I was born. I went to school in these places and was loved and fostered by teachers who knew of my father’s death in the war, as I became that boy who loved Frost and Whitman but perhaps lacked some toughness they may have had. For in those environs more than the deer and the antelope played: Geronimo, Cochise, Kit Carson, Charles Goodnight, Sul Ross, William Bonney, Cynthia Ann and Quannah Parker, Lew Wallace, Padre Martinez and Bishop Lamy, my own mother and father, and many another had their day, came and went, loved and hated and sometimes killed one another and one another’s kin.

I love and will always love the memory of the serendipitous regions of North Carolina where I lived for fifteen years. There the speech of the people lounges on a great porch crowded with wisteria, its branches sometimes thicker than my arm. There music rises up out of the pine barrens and tobacco fields like the flash of a bug zapper in the night. There Moses still shouts, “Let my people go!” And I now have arrived with a new love in my heart on the banks of this continent’s great river, for the old brick and mortar city where I now reside, named for a not-so-good French king, where great barges push their cargoes up and down river and the progeny of immigrants past and present from Somalia to Bosnia to Italy and Poland to the Sudan to Thailand and Vietnam to Mississippi and Alabama (and Texas) contend for space amongst gangways, bluffs, and caves, where the great silent water flows by in the night, laden now with ice floes to which morning may bring eagles searching for fish.

For many years I sought to love my country thinking the betrayals I experienced, that all lovers of justice have experienced in the past sixty plus years, were aberrations that would in the long run be put right. But guess what, those betrayals are the norm. For all the high-sounding stuff in our founding documents and hymns to our exceptionalism, we Americans are just like everybody else. We rob and rape and steal and kill and cheat our friends, and we hope to get away with it, just as we think we have escaped our country’s genocidal past. Indeed we have become skilled at creating complex abstract denials of that past that proclaim our righteousness in getting away with it (at this moment in our history we are doing a lot of that). For a while I thought I couldn’t love my country because Country (capital C) is another abstraction, but that’s only partly true. I can love abstractions all the way from the third law of thermodynamics to the music of Bach. But there are abstractions and abstractions, depending on the way the knife cuts. Maybe I can love my country’s history but not the hypocrisy of it, just as I love my friends and my kin and their places and mine and the memories they generated, but reject much of our foolishness, like the blackface act that friends and I once performed on my high-school stage. Or maybe I both love and need the hypocrisy too. Or maybe love and despising aren’t that far apart. Clearly I both love and despise memories I, myself, have generated; and perhaps that’s part of it too.

I mention Eliade above. Eliade’s distinction between linear and cyclic time rests on the difference between the historical and the cosmic. One’s engagement in the life of one’s country plunges one into history, into the political, into the constant ebb and flow and strife of events, essentially meaningless in itself, but perhaps touched by love. If in the final analysis, love of one’s country is grounded in the concreteness of places and people and events rather than in their ideological trappings, then one can also love people with whom one disagrees and is sometimes angry, perhaps even people whose ideas one despises, as one loves oneself. These possess materiality. They have existential force and stand out from the stream of experience. There is no taint in loving them. They are real and whole, and one’s love is a response to their reality and wholeness. Love urges us to find meaning in things and sometimes cures anger and the other historical passions. This is what Faulkner meant when he described Old Ben, the bear, as taintless and incorruptible. It requires a cosmic perspective too, to care about land, to struggle against the ruination of land and people and animals. Enmeshed in history there is only the struggle that is today. It is from a cosmic perspective that beauty and the possibility of a deeper love emerge, even love for the terrible darkness of the worst we do, and that is as it must be. There is no place else for us to go.

I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason
For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.
He being sufficient might be still. I think they admit no reason; they are the ways of my love.
Unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft: no thought apparent but burns darkly
Smothered with its own smoke in the human brain-vault: . . .

If one can love speech and voices and music, abstracted from their agents or not, perhaps one can also love history that one deplores. Geronimo lies buried at Fort Sill. He, and the folk he killed, and the folk who made him a prisoner and a caricature in his own place, are all long dead. In his grave and in the memories he generated, Geronimo is timeless. If there is a saving grace in humanity, if there is any real human hope, it is not in prophetic politics as Whitman would have had it. It is in place, in land and water, in the topsoil that Wendell Berry reveres, in song, in the twang of the banjo and the yelp of the coyote, and in the names of things and people, in our clumsy and beautiful bodies, in the gristle and boniness of us, and in our stubborn persistence. Finally perhaps, it is in the peace that may come to us as we contemplate these things at the end of a long day when greed and the other savage hungers have receded. At such times without sleep as new snow stirs the darkness outside one’s window one can, almost surprisingly, find oneself native to the places one has lived in, to one’s times and ways and kinships. In and amongst these things we live and move and have our being. And in and amongst them too, we lie down at last.

Advent IV: How Unto Bethlehem

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Seek we a king, and honor
bear him from afar . . .

Another last Advent, and I stayed home again. The night before the streets iced up, and a frigid south wind swept down them like wrath with darkness in its wake, chasing the cold moonlight towards another winter solstice. I thought of the famous passage from Lancelot Andrewes’ 1622 Christmas sermon:

. . . just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solsitio brumali, the very dead of winter . . .

Andrewes spoke here of the Magi, those legendary kings from the east whose powerful appearance in the Christmas story we celebrate during Epiphany; he might have spoken as well of the holy family and their lonely journey to Bethlehem as the story has come down to us. But yesterday’s gospel lesson comes from Matthew “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise . . .” (I like to quote the KJV because its periods are lodged in my memory.)

And you may remember that Matthew’s gospel opens with a series of “begats” proclaiming the lineage of Jesus the Messiah, an interesting passage to say the least in that it gives Jesus a political lineage stemming from King David and Father Abraham, but an ontological lineage stemming from the Holy Ghost. Then into the middle of his account, Matthew inserts a further claim:

Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, “Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.”

Jennens and Handel quote the prophecy’s source in Isaiah, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive,” which I always hear in the background; and that mental hearing reminds me that Messiah is both liturgical and biblical, both a rehearsal of the liturgical year and an epitome of Christian salvation history. Behind the two is one tradition whose typology was perhaps first articulated by St. Augustine: “The New Testament lies hidden in the Old, and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New.” And perhaps the best known general explanation of the working out of the typologies of scripture is Eric Auerbach’s:

Under the term figura—defined in the essay of that title (1938) and developed in the opening chapters of Mimesis Auerbach defined a view of reality, at work in Christian thought and biblical narrative, whereby one historical personage or event prefigures or signifies a second, later one. The latter will, effectively, fulfill the former such that while the two remain distinct historical realities, their full significance is to be sought in the figural relationship between them. Developing this concept from the hermeneutics of St. Augustine and the exegetics of the fathers, Auerbach deploys it most effectively, and with the greatest subsequent critical impact, in his reading of Dante. (Seth Lerer, article on Auerbach in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism [2005]).

Auerbach terms this relationship a process of ‘completing the figure,’ and if Augustine stands somewhere near its beginning (though one can find traces of the same logic in the writings of St. Paul—“for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive”), St. Thomas stands at one terminus—“Types and shadows have their ending, for the newer rite is here,” that is the Eucharist, not a memorial as Thomas understood it but the true body of Christ. (Aquinas’ great hymns to the Eucharist may be found in many hymnals.)

I must have been very young, third grade at most, when I was taken to a Christmas concert at Albuquerque High School. It featured the high school choir, whose performance of “Unto Us A Child Is Born” from Messiah was my first introduction to Handel’s masterpiece via live performance. I think I had been introduced to some recordings at school and knew the story of the King’s standing for the Hallelujah chorus. But “Unto Us a Child” in the same room with me, with live human voices, was an amazement (though the voices must have been young, and the performance surely must have lacked the panoply of Handel’s orchestration). I have never forgotten the experience. I left that concert with those great choral phrases filling my mind—“And the government, the government, shall be upon his shoulder!” Even at that age I recognized a high serious metaphor for what it was, though I couldn’t have articulated what was a felt thought that was mostly feeling. It is recorded now in my memory along with a performance of “Comfort Ye, My People” by a young tenor about whom I have written before, though I can’t locate the place right now. From there my Messiah experience joins with a veritable river of rehearsals and performances of parts and the whole. In the summer of 1956 I sang the Hallelujah chorus so many times (almost every day all summer) as one of the first group of Lake Junaluska singers (whose future seems to be in jeopardy), that I was burnt out for a while on that great work. To this day I resist certain ceremonial Messiah gestures but love the whole. Some years back I learned Handel’s refiguring of the refiner’s fire aria for bass, the original (which I had sung forever) having been rewritten by Handel for the celebrated castrato, Gaetano Guadagni. These experiences, and many like them, so many, give me a stake in the mythology of the Christmas story. I’m there to reenact it on Christmas eve, during the twelve days and Epiphany, all through the pensive time of Advent. I’m there, but there’s more.

For me this Advent IV, these multiple empressions, memories, intertextualities, have about them what Professor Tolkien has termed “the ‘inner consistency of reality.'”

There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath

It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be primarily true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed. . . . But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused (On Fairy Stories).

For me, as (I think) for Professor Tolkien, the issue of the naive truth of the Christmas story, so important for some, simply doesn’t exist, allowances being made for the fact that Professor Tolkien is dead and can’t defend himself. We moderns have invented a standard of truth of which the ages before the Enlightenment knew nothing. For Matthew, the truth of the Christmas story is referred to biblical prophecy. For Augustine and Aquinas, the same truth is referred to the beauty and coherence of the body of the faith.

It is the mythical and allegorical significances of the story of the birth of Christ that give the tale its character of primary truth, as Tolkien reads it, and it is these mythical and allegorical significances that resonate down through the centuries in the encyclopedia of tropes that surround us here as Advent draws to a close, the shepherds, the babe in the manger, the angels’ song:

Such musick as ’tis said
Before was never made
  But when of old the sons of morning sung, . . .

“Unto us a Child is born,” will always be true.

Advent III: rocked by the Infinite

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Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete.

Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, rejoice

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad . . . ; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.

Advent customs vary. In my parish church we have honored the third Sunday in Advent as Gaudete Sunday for many years, though this year we gave the theme of rejoicing no special emphasis, and we kept to violet colors except for a rose candle in our advent wreath. Just as well—I’m having a solemn advent too this year. As St. Paul instructs, I rejoice alway, liking the locution from the KJV—and I like it that Gaudete Sunday connects me with centuries of of catholic practice.

Do you love the world? I do. To be a Christian humanist, as I am, is to love the world and one’s fellow creatures as the gift of God. As the old hymn says, “All the world is God’s own field.” I’ve just been rereading a poem I love by Stanley Kunitz. It’s called “The Long Boat.” You can find it here. I first found “The Long Boat” on the wall by the elevator at Prairie Lights in Iowa City. It was first published as a broadside, a little larger than ‘double folio’ size. Framed, it is larger still. I initially thought it was a Prairie Lights broadside, but it was published by Norton in 1995. Reading it for the first time was a religious experience. I have passed it many times since, reread it, rather like touching a mezuzah. We don’t see God, but sometimes we know that we’ve been seen, known perhaps—the knowledge and its memory remain fearful and joyous at the same time.

And maybe one has to be almost eighty, as I am, to understand how one can rejoice in being reminded so of one’s love of the world as one anticipates leaving it. It has not been meny years since a student asked, ‘If we’re not rational actors who are supposed to maximize our utility, what are we?’ I gave him an answer he may not have expected, ‘How about creatures made in the image of God?’ I asked him later in the conversation if he thought economics provided a total explanatiion of the world and our human place in it. His reply was, ‘No, but I wish it did.’ I think his point may have been that our human choices might be simpler for us if economics taught us all we need to know.

A small digression: I have to say that I loved this student and thought highly of him as well. I’d never have asked him such a question otherwise. But we were in a Jesuit classroom after all, and besides, there are times when one is given a large teaching moment. I seized that one, and of course I didn’t press for a defense of, I wish I did. He already knew what he meant, and his classmates knew as well. It was a thing for them to ponder in their hearts. What occasioned the conversation was Wendell Berry’s essay, “The Two Economies,” which opens with Wes Jackson’s claim that only the Kingdom of God is a truly comprehensive economy.

The last lines of Stanley Kunitz’s poem land me square in the middle of the Kingdom of God for the same reason that Wes Jackson evoked it in the conversation that Berry reports. When I think that I love the world so much that I don’t want to leave it I’m not expressing a triviality. When Socrates gets to a point like this in Plato’s dialogues, he too resorts to myth making, as does Jesus. I love the the anglo-saxon word for parable; It is bigspell, a distant cognate I like to think, to German Beispiel, meaning “example.” I love the homeliness of it, the use of the soft power of storytelling when argument reaches the end of its tether.

As the writer of Hebrews says, we may not see the world brought into subjection to us—indeed it will never answer to our wishes—but we see Jesus. Orthodox Christians make a gesture of respect at the mention of the incarnation in the creeds and in the eucharistic prayer. This is the part to which the writer of Hebrews alludes when he describes Jesus as having been made “a Little lower than the angels.” Whatever may be true about worlds beyond this one, it has always seemed to me that a substantial part of Jesus’ mission was to reprove a particular sort of worldliness in the here and now, the very sort to which the writer of Hebrews alludes when he admits we do not see the world at our feet. Indeed, the world addressed by the writer of Hebrews was a terrible place, full of violence and grevious injustice, ruled by petty tyrants and an emperor who aspired to be a god. But in the midst of that terrible politics, Jesus advised those who listened to him that they feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick—following his example, another use of soft power.

As I’m finishing this, Gaudete Sunday has passed. I’ve had an opportunity to rejoice in the Lord, albeit to do it slant, as Emily Dickinson said we poets should tell the truth. I am resolved again to cease striving to subdue the world, but rather to live within it as a brother to the sun and moon, as St. Francis put it. I am disheartened by the election of Donald Trump, but I do not share the hope of fellow Democrats that Trump can be denied the presidency by the electoral college—nor should he be. The Trump presidency is what our political system has given us in this historical moment. Our response as Christians who disagree should be to continue our work for social and economic justice using all means of soft power at our disposal and to undertake a work of persuasion that will seek to restore good will in a society that has for the present, at least, by intention or default: embraced neo-fascism.