I have always looked down on people who say that their favorite holiday is Christmas. It’s too obvious. People like the presents, people like the time off, people like the preparatory season. Christmas is like the Disney World of holidays: it’s got its own industry surrounding it, whereas other holidays get maybe a day or two into which to pack their experience. Halloween was my favorite holiday, and not because of the candy (my twelve-year-old self would haughtily add), but because of its unique and beautiful character. The truth is, though, that I had to put in a lot of work to Halloween to help it even begin to approach the assets that Christmas already had: a season, not just a day, traditional rites in abundance, and a feeling of specialness or being set aside.

If I were really honest, Christmas was my favorite holiday, too. I loved our family’s observation of advent for four weeks leading up to Christmas, I loved the Christmas pageants, I loved the season-specific music, and I loved the special services at church. I even loved the particular smells of Christmas: the scents of gingerbread or egg nog give me shivers even in memory. In recent years when I became heavily involved with the Anglican church I attended here in DC, the rituals of the church became the center of Christmas observance, rich as they were with beauty and meaning.

These rites were filled with their own scents and sights and sounds, but artistically unified, binding up the disparate things that made Christmas such a complicated and abundant rush of experiences toward the religious center that motivated them all: the coming of a savior.

Continue reading “Finding Christmas” »

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This XKCD comic provides pretty good material for an illustration of an Aristotelian understanding of the soul and its destructibility. It’s obviously presented in contrast to what is called a Platonic account (at best it’s a Socratic account) of form and the various Christian adaptations of Socratic myths about the soul (not to mention a notion of reincarnation): the arrangement that was the house simply isn’t there any more when its material is disassembled. The house is just gone, and there’s no separable thing that will persist after its destruction. This notion causes the girl to think about the soul’s destructibility and her own mortality.

I’ve recently become a prospective partaker in the form of immortality that the girl falls back on. Almost all humans can take part in this one sort of immortality through having children, and while the idea is a little misapplied by the organ donor example, it’s towards this goal that the girl reaches when she chooses to have her arrangement persist, if only a little bit thereof, past the destruction of her presently whole arrangement. The immortality of reproduction is a powerful and considerable thing, not to be discounted. It has a less potent—and scarcely immortality-bestowing—but still noteworthy cousin, which she choose at that particular moment.*

Continue reading “Souls, I Mean the Destructible Ones” »

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Summer has two Beginnings —
Beginning once in June —
Beginning in October
Affectingly again —

Departing then — forever —
Forever — until May —
Forever is deciduous —
Except to those who die —

—Emily Dickinson

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As I grow older, it becomes increasingly clear to me that I am not automatically getting better. I struggle with the same things I’ve always struggled with, I do the same things I’ve always done, and the only things I get better at are the things involving work. This might seem unsurprising to some of you, but it’s a bit of a revelation for me. Adolescence, I think, fooled me: I woke up one morning and discovered that I was stronger, taller, better looking, and more confident. Hormones had kicked in. And I rode a multi-year rocket toward adulthood, feeling inevitably propelled toward great things. It wasn’t until I was in the Peace Corps, struggling with tremendous insecurity, social anxiety, and all sorts of things I thought I’d left behind in Junior High that I realized: oh—I’m still that kid under here.

Continue reading “The Art of Practice” »

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Malcolm Gladwell has written a terrible article about To Kill a Mockingbird. Its purpose is to obscure far more than to enlighten, and in that it succeeds.

Novels need not present “constructive suggestions” to be good art. Nor need novelists be voices for social reform. In fact, Dickens’s status as one of them interferes with his art. The man was a little too enthusiastic for his own good, and part of the harm it did him was to leave him open to this criticism by George Orwell: “He believed in the power of changing hearts, and that’s what you believe in, Orwell says, if you ‘do not wish to endanger the status quo.’” Orwell’s insistence on seeing Dickens, a different and at times explicitly political novelist, as an advocate of the status quo, does not translate to Lee or her protagonist being such advocates. Gladwell implies as much, however. “But in cases where the status quo involves systemic injustice this is no more than a temporary strategy. Eventually, such injustice requires more than a change of heart.” But that’s a critique of Finch or Lee only if you misinterpret their purposes!

Continue reading “Why even write this article?” »

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Why does Monadology sit idle:

• Twitter killed the Monadology star.
• I ran out of things to say.
• All is nothingness, activity is fruitless, and speech is vanity.
• All of the above.

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Sometimes, during longer meetings, I write work poems. Here is today’s:

The brown-burnt taste of roast coffee
lingers on my tongue like the sharp spice
of woodsmoke from a wooded cottage,
the linger of boiled water and warmed kitchen
and sizzled bacon lending pleasure and verve
to swinging axe or driving plough — work!
toil transformed by fire, by the offering of
leaf limb trunk, bud pit bean
burnt to god Desire: a prayer to want our lot.
How abundantly answered! How daily
it is given to us to want to live—
how miraculously, how joyfully.
The things we burn are holy
rams placed in thickets—Abraham!
Take your hand from Isaac:
God himself has provided
the sacrifice.

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The World’s Most Successful Trade Show: this name, supplied by Mike G, helped me make peace with the Oscars this year. It is a trade show; the Oscars are not a critical body. That said, they’re a damn sight better than democracy, even if frequently, appallingly wrong. And, again, they are in fact a trade show, an attempt by the industry to promote itself and the values it esteems. All in all, I’m not sure they’re doing such a poor job. There are regularly seven to ten movies in a given year that I really love, and the Oscars are frequently the means of getting me to see the year’s best films, such as Entre les Murs (The Class), nominated for best Foreign Film, which I saw Saturday morning and deeply, deeply loved.

Andrew Sullivan is getting strangely dismissive about the enterprise. I can’t help but wonder: did he even see The Reader?

The Reader has been the subject of at least mild controversy. Ron Rosenbaum of Slate writes:

This is a film whose essential metaphorical thrust is to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution. The fact that it was recently nominated for a best picture Oscar offers stunning proof that Hollywood seems to believe that if it’s a “Holocaust film,” it must be worthy of approbation, end of story. And so a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that “ordinary Germans” were ignorant of the extermination until after the war, now stands a good chance of getting a golden statuette.

I’d like to zero in on one part of this statement: “…a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer…” (italics mine). Many of Rosenbaum’s other claims are straightforwardly dispensible via remotely responsible textual analysis, but what are we to make of Rosenbaum’s emphasis on empathy? The strangest thing about The Reader is how many people insist on calling it redemptive, a phenomenon that I think is rooted in this idea of feeling for another human being.

We humans have many stories of redemption, but The Reader is not one of them. Not remotely. It is, however, undeniably full of the subject of empathy, of fellow-feeling. Kate Winslett’s Hanna Schmitz is clearly and unarguably guilty of the particular crime recounted in the film; not only does she not seek forgiveness for it, she willfully accepts the blame and punishment for a greater responsibility in the crime than she actually had. The story does not in any way ask us to forgive Schmitz, but it does challenge us to feel with her. This is, I believe, what most people believe redemption to be.

If you can feel with a person, you do not morally censure her. If you acknowledge a villain to be a human being, you deny her evil.

This is a troubling, Manichean view of evil, as if evil is a substance that is incommensurate with humanity and feeling. It places sympathy as the standard for good, a troubling enough assertion. What bothers me most, though, is the way it places evil so profoundly outside of our own experience. We are, by definition, in sympathy with ourselves: what does it mean that this formulation of good and evil makes it impossible to see our own actions as evil, to feel all the complexities of our own experience without the possibility of that result being ultimately wrong?

The Reader deals with these ideas more subtly, more truthfully, and wrestles with issues of cross-generational guilt that are too relevant to us as Americans and inheritors of the legacy of American-Indian genocide and African slavery. It is in no simple way just another Holocaust movie, nor is Winslett’s performance in it anything less than astonishing. She deserves to be taken seriously, as does the film.

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Having been asked by a friend to give some recommendations on which movies of Ingmar Bergman to see, I decided that 140 characters weren’t quite enough. I don’t want to be too wordy, though, a wont that often prevents me from actually posting the things I get started on writing (there’s about a dozen now), so I’ll constrain myself to two sentences about each. I don’t have Nate’s pith. To be clear, I’m only just working my way through Bergman and can speak only based on the few movies I’ve seen (unlike my wife, who despite her movie aversion these days, watched nearly the entire Bergman corpus in high school).

• Most St. John’s folks have seen The Magic Flute, and for a general introduction to a guy who used some crazy cinematic techniques to talk about some pretty esoteric topics, I think you can’t do much better than this (unless you don’t like good operas, in which case screw you). An unapologetically goofy presentation of Mozart’s pretty goofy opera shows us the humor and good nature of both artists.

Continue reading “Ingmar Bergman Movies Are Awesome” »

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In the slipstream of thoughtless thoughts:
The light of all that’s good, the light of all that’s true.
To the fringes, gladly, I walk unadorned,
With gods and their creations,
With filth and disease.
Porcelina, she waits for me there,
With seashell-hissing lullabies
And whispers fathomed deep inside my own
Hidden thoughts and alibis:
My secret thoughts come alive.

Without a care in this whole world,
Without a care in this life
It’s what you take that makes it right.

And in my mind I’m everyone,
In my mind I’m everyone of you.

Before I began attending my church—Ascension and St. Agnes—I couldn’t have given you a proper definition of the word liturgy. I had a vague sense of its high-churchiness, something I was both attracted to and repelled by. I was drawn to the beauty of churchly pomp, but hostile to the perception I had of its lack of authenticity, of its focus on form over substance.

Slowly, ASA began to redeem the notion of rite for me. Even the first Mass shook me with a particular, repeated phrase: Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof, but speak the words only and my soul shall be healed. These words were directly before communion itself, acknowledging the insufficiency of our efforts and intentions in approaching the eternal mystery, making that infinite gap a part of the rite.

At the first church leadership retreat I attended, the facilitator, Father Martin Smith, talked about ritual in a way I’ll never forget. There are three tiers of religious experience, he said. In the first tier, we have the source: Truth, Good, and Beauty. In the second tier, religions attempt to point to, or recreate, the experiences of these first-order things. They try to point to truth with doctrine, to good with morality, and to beauty with ritual. The shadow side of this second tier, however, is the third: doctrine, severed from its proper orientation toward the first tier, becomes dogma; morality, severed from its proper orientation, becomes moralism; ritual, wrapped up in itself, becomes ritualism.

This articulation reconciled and redeemed much of religious practice for me: it articulated much of what repelled me about religion and connected it to things that are healthy and human. Rite, in particular, became a powerful word for me: the recreation of beauty, making a vast, abstract thing into activities, into dances and stories and songs and poems that can be performed and delighted in and lived in.

The Smashing Pumpkins are, for me, fundamentally liturgical: their songs are pathways to elevation, rites of transcendence that are filled with irrepressible insistence upon paradoxical combinations of the fleshly and the spiritual. I can describe the experience of seeing them in concert last year best by pointing you to my church’s Mass. Porcelina of the Vast Oceans is my last gospel.

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