Humans are by nature cultural animals: we necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture. But our way of life—whatever it is—is vulnerable in various ways. And we, as participants in that way of life, thereby inherit a vulnerability. Should that way of life break down, that is our problem. …
We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world—terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes—have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. I suspect that this feeling has provoked the widespread intolerance that we see around us today—from all points on the political spectrum. It [is] as though, without our insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse. Perhaps if we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better ways to live with it.
peeing
ODE TO THE URGE
Urination is the major accomplishment of engineering
at least insofar as drainage is concerned.
Furthermore, to urinate is a pleasure.
What’s there to say? One takes a leak
saluting love and friends,
one spills himself long into the throat of the world
to remind himself we’re warm inside, and to stay tuned up.
All this is important
now that the world’s emitting disaster signals,
intoxicated hiccups.
Because it’s necessary, for pure love of life, to urinate
on the silver service,
on the seats of sports cars,
in swimming pools with underwater lights
worth easily 15 or 16 times more than their owners.
To urinate until our throats ache,
right down to the last drops of blood.
To urinate on those who see life as a waltz,
to scream at them, Long live the Cumbia, señores,
Everybody up to shake his ass,
until we shake off this mystery we are
and the fucked-up love of suffering it.
And long live the Jarabe Zapateado too,
because reality is in the back and to the right,
where you don’t go wearing a tux.
(Nobody’s yet gotten rid of TB by beating his chest.)
I’m pissing down from the manger of life:
I just want to be the greatest pisser in history,
Oh Mama, for the love of God, the greatest pisser in history.Ricardo Castillo
(Translated from Spanish by Robert L. Jones)
a thousand little coercions
Marilynne Robinson, in 1998:
Trivial failures of courage may seem minor enough in any particular instance, and yet they change history and society. They also change culture.
To illustrate this point, I will make a shocking statement: I am a Christian. This ought not to startle anyone. It is likely to be at least demographically true of an American of European ancestry. I have a strong attachment to the Scriptures, and to the theology, music, and art Christianity has inspired. My most inward thoughts and ponderings are formed by the narratives and traditions of Christianity. I expect them to engage me on my deathbed.
Over the years many a good soul has let me know by one means or another that this living out of the religious/ethical/aesthetic/intellectual tradition that is so essentially compelling to me is not, shall we say, cool. There are little jokes about being born again. There are little lectures about religion as a cheap cure for existential anxiety. Now, I do feel fairly confident that I know what religion is. I have spent decades informing myself about it, an advantage I can claim over any of my would-be rescuers. I am a mainline Protestant, a.k.a. a liberal Protestant, as these same people know. I do not by any means wear my religion on my sleeve. I am extremely reluctant to talk about it at all, chiefly because my belief does not readily reduce itself to simple statements.
Nevertheless, I experience these little coercions. Am I the last one to get the news that this religion that has so profoundly influenced world civilization over centuries has been ceded to the clods and the obscurantists? Don’t I know that J. S. Bach and Martin Luther King have been entirely eclipsed by Jerry Falwell? The question has been put to me very directly: Am I not afraid to be associated with religious people? These nudges would have their coercive effect precisely because those who want to put me right know that I am not a fundamentalist. That is, I am to avoid association with religion completely or else be embarrassed by punitive association with beliefs I do not hold. What sense does that make? What good does it serve? I suspect it demonstrates the existence of a human herding instinct. After all, “egregious” means at root “outside the flock.” There are always a great many people who are confident that they recognize deviation from group mores, and so they police the boundaries and round up the strays.
This is only one instance of a very pervasive phenomenon, a pressure toward concessions no one has a right to ask. These are concessions courage would refuse if it were once acknowledged that a minor and insidious fear is the prod that coaxes us toward conforming our lives, and even our thoughts, to norms that are effective markers of group identity precisely because they are shibboleths, a contemporary equivalent of using the correct fork. These signals of inclusion and exclusion, minor as they seem, have huge consequences historically because they are used to apportion the benefits and the burdens of collective life. The example of coercion I have offered, the standing invitation to sacrifice one’s metaphysics to one’s sense of comme il faut, has had the effect of marginalizing the liberal churches and elevating fundamentalism to the status of essential Christianity. The consequences of handing over the whole of Christianity to one momentarily influential fringe is clearly borne out in the silencing of social criticism and the collapse of social reform, both traditionally championed by American mainline churches, as no one seems any longer to remember.
* * *
The present dominance of aspersion and ridicule in American public life is a reflex of the fact that we are assumed to want, and in many cases perhaps do want, attitude much more than information. If an unhealthy percentage of the population gets its news from Jay Leno or Rush Limbaugh, it is because they are arbiters of attitude. They instruct viewers as to what, within their affinity groups, it is safe to say and cool to think. That is, they short-circuit the functions of individual judgment and obviate the exercise of individual conscience. So it is to a greater or lesser degree with the media in general. It is painful to watch decent and distinguished people struggle to function politically in this non-rational and valueless environment. …
Cultures commonly employ the methods of cults, making their members subject and dependent. And nations at intervals march lockstep to enormity and disaster. A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. In a democracy, abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candor, and disrupt thought.
weak victories
The pro-life movement was an always-marginal and embattled cause, and in [1992] it did seem defeated.
Yet 30 years [after Roe], here we are. And for all the contingency involved, future scholars of mass movements will find in the pro-life cause a remarkable example of sustained activism against substantial odds, of grass-roots mobilization in defiance of elite consensus — of “democratic virtues,” to borrow from the political scientist Jon Shields, that would be much more widely recognized and studied if they had not been exercised in a cause opposed by progressives and the left.
But the story doesn’t end here. While the pro-life movement has won the right to legislate against abortion, it has not yet proven that it can do so in a way that can command durable majority support. Its weaknesses will not disappear in victory. Its foes and critics have been radicalized by its judicial success. And the vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.
I would at least add that, more significantly, the pro-life movement does not command any sort of durable moral or integrity-filled support, which is far more important than majority support.
But here’s David French:
The culture of political engagement centers around animosity. Church and family life is being transformed, congregation by congregation, household by household, by argument and division. The Dobbs ruling has landed in the midst of a sick culture, and the pro-life right is helping make it sick.
Writing in the New York Times, Ross Douthat rightly cautioned that “the vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.”
That’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough. The vicissitudes of politics haven’t just linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right, they’ve transformed parts of the anti-abortion movement, making many of its members as toxic as their “libertine and hyperindividualist” allies. […]
…the Republican branch of the American church is adopting the political culture of the secular right. With a few notable exceptions, it not only didn’t resist the hatred and fury of the MAGA movement, it was the MAGA movement. And this is the culture that’s going to lead the effort to heal our nation, love the marginalized, and ask young women to face an uncertain future and endure a physical ordeal for the sake of sacrificial love?
It’s worth emphasizing that French has consistently sought and now celebrates, if cautiously, the undoing of Roe. But, as he points out, that doesn’t mean that the situation on the ground is worth celebrating. As French aptly summarizes that situation, “A movement animated by rage and fear isn’t ready to embrace life and love.”
I think not only is the movement not ready, but, more pointedly, regardless of legal “victories,” that movement cannot offer, foster, or encourage what it does not possess.
good God the winter
GOOD LORD THE LIGHT
Good morning misery,
goodbye belief,
good Lord the light
cutting across the lake
so long gone
to ice—There is an under, always,
through which things still move, breathe,
and have their being,
quick coals and crimsons
no one need see
to see.Good night knowledge,
goodbye beyond,
good God the winter
one must wander
one’s own soul
to be.
ffs, Jason
Nick Cave, responding to a guy named Jason, who tactfully commented, “For fuck’s sake, enough of the God and Jesus bullshit!”:
As so to Jesus, dear Jason. Jesus roamed the land expressing what were, at the time, considered dangerous and heretical ideas. He was literally the embodiment of the terrifying idea. He was followed around by a nervous coterie of muttering scribes and Pharisees whose purpose was to catch him out – expose not just His dangerous ideas, but to lay bare and persecute his uniqueness. They, of course, succeeded and Christ was cancelled upon the Cross. These impossible, dangerous ideas – to love your enemy, to love the poor, to forgive others – were terrifying and unconscionable and forbidden in His day, but became, in time, the better ideas that underpin the society in which many of us are lucky enough go live today. It is worth remembering that. I think we must be careful around our assumptions of what ideas we think are right and what ideas we think are wrong, and what we do with those ideas, because it is the terrifying idea – the shocking, offending, unique idea – that may just save the world.
This then is the gospel that Jesus seems both to have proclaimed with his lips and lived with his life, not just preaching to the dispossessed of his day from a high pulpit, but coming down and acting it out by giving himself to them body and soul as if he actually enjoyed it—horrifying all Jericho by spending the night there not with the local rabbi, say, or some prominent Pharisee but with Zaccheus of all people, the crooked tax collector. When Simon the Pharisee laid into him for letting a streetwalker dry his feet with her hair, Jesus said, “I tell you her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.” It is no wonder that from the very start of his ministry the forces of Jewish morality and of Roman law were both out to get him because to him the only morality that mattered was the one that sprang from the forgiven heart like fruit from the well-watered tree, and the only law he acknowledged as ultimate was the law of love.
reaping and sowing, etc
Ross Douthat, with a crucial summary description:
Religious power wielded wisely and mildly and indirectly, with due respect to liberty and diversity and a focus first on the faith’s internal health and zeal, can sustain a religious ascendancy for many generations.
But religious power wielded too much against pluralism, with political ambition substituting for real faithfulness, will corrupt and enervate and bring about its own reward
caught off guard
The thing about consciences is, “we don’t get to choose when to lean on them.”
If there is anything I learned during my time as an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, it is the importance of a well-formed conscience. Too seldom do we use periods of ease to ready our souls for the great challenges each of us must face. I certainly didn’t, and I wish I had. […]
Recently I found a description of how conscience functions, one that reflects my experience at Guantanamo, in the book by Ida Friederike Görres, Die leibhaftige Kirche. Görres asks, “And do we imagine this ‘conscience’—piecemeal, unstable, difficult to control, subject to many subliminal forces—would be able to find the hidden will of God from within itself at any time, right away?” She continues, warning against any assumption that conscience is available on-tap, fully formed, just waiting for us to flip a switch and activate it. Instead:
“What practice and depth of prayer, what clarity of character, what sharpness of self-reflection, what strength to take on difficult things you assume if you expect that everyone, just when it matters, that is, in confusing situations, amid conflicting duties, caught off guard, during depression, under the pressure of a threat, discerns, recognizes, draws out, and asserts his own most secret tentative intimation of the good against all other impressions and impulses!” […]
Görres, writing in reference to a passage in Sigrid Undset’s novel Ida Elisabeth, describes conscience as “the fearful cry of a petite female teacher who is supposed to shout over a schoolyard full of mutinous boys.” When I read that image for the first time in the winter of 2021, my mind was immediately back at Guantanamo in the dumpy trailer that served as our office. Conscience itself is often just a small voice shouting to be heard over a cacophony of conflicting demands. And in my case, this was not only figuratively but also quite literally so. […]
What I learned from my time at Guantanamo is that the time to deliberate, seek advice, and reflect for long periods of time in prayer so that we have a conscience that can stand on solid footing “just when it matters” exists only ahead of time, when one can’t foresee the curveballs. Conscience is, after all, not a rabbit one can suddenly pull out of a magic hat. It is something that must be cultivated and developed over time so that it is available and ready to go when one of those “just when it matters” moments comes our way.
“a light unutterable”
Again each of us must speak for himself, for herself. We must, each one of us, remember our own lives. Someone died whom we loved and needed, and from somewhere something came to fill our emptiness and mend us where we were broken. Was it only time that mended, only the resurging busyness of life that filled our emptiness? In anger we said something once that we could have bitten our tongues out for afterwards, or in anger somebody said something to us. But out of somewhere forgiveness came, a bridge was rebuilt; or maybe forgiveness never came, and to this day we have found no bridge back. Is the human heart the only source of its own healing? Is it the human conscience only that whispers to us that in bitterness and estrangement is death? We listen to the evening news with its usual recital of shabbiness and horror, and God, if we believe in him at all, seems remote and powerless, a child’s dream. But there are other times—often the most unexpected, unlikely times—when strong as life itself comes the sense that there is a holiness deeper than shabbiness and horror and at the very heart of darkness a light unutterable. Is it only the unpredictable fluctuations of the human spirit that we have to thank? We must each of us answer for ourselves, remember for ourselves, preach to ourselves our own sermons. But “Remember the wonderful works,” sings King David, because if we remember deeply and truly, he says, we will know whom to thank, and in that room of thanksgiving and remembering there is peace.
Then hope. Then at last we see what hope is and where it comes from, hope as the driving power and outermost edge of faith. Hope stands up to its knees in the past and keeps its eyes on the future. There has never been a time past when God wasn’t with us as the strength beyond our strength, the wisdom beyond our wisdom, as whatever it is in our hearts—whether we believe in God or not—that keeps us human enough at least to get by despite everything in our lives that tends to wither the heart and make us less than human. To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.
And what does that mean about the future? What do we have to hope for, you and I? Humanly speaking, we have only the human best to hope for: that we will live out our days in something like peace and the ones we love with us; that if our best dreams are never to come true, neither at least will our worst fears; that something we find to do with our lives will make some little difference for good somewhere; and that when our lives end we will be remembered a little while for the little good we did. That is our human hope. But in the room called Remember we find something beyond it.
“Remember the wonderful works that he has done,” goes David’s song—remember what he has done in the lives of each of us; and beyond that remember what he has done in the life of the world; remember above all what he has done in Christ—remember those moments in our own lives when with only the dullest understanding but with the sharpest longing we have glimpsed that Christ’s kind of life is the only life that matters and that all other kinds of life are riddled with death; remember those moments in our lives when Christ came to us in countless disguises through people who one way or another strengthened us, comforted us, healed us, judged us, by the power of Christ alive within them. All that is the past. All that is what there is to remember. And because that is the past, because we remember, we have this high and holy hope: that what he has done, he will continue to do, that what he has begun in us and our world, he will in unimaginable ways bring to fullness and fruition.
“Let the sea roar, and all that fills it, let the field exult, and everything in it! Then shall the trees of the wood sing for joy,” says David (1 Chron. 16:32–33). And shall is the verb of hope. Then death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning or crying. Then shall my eyes behold him and not as a stranger. Then his Kingdom shall come at last and his will shall be done in us and through us and for us. Then the trees of the wood shall sing for joy as already they sing a little even now sometimes when the wind is in them and as underneath their singing our own hearts too already sing a little sometimes at this holy hope we have.
The past and the future. Memory and expectation. Remember and hope. Remember and wait. Wait for him whose face we all of us know because somewhere in the past we have faintly seen it, whose life we all of us thirst for because somewhere in the past we have seen it lived, have maybe even had moments of living it ourselves. Remember him who himself remembers us as he promised to remember the thief who died beside him. To have faith is to remember and wait, and to wait in hope is to have what we hope for already begin to come true in us through our hoping. Praise him.
“With only the dullest understanding but with the sharpest longing…”
every high note of anguish
Barbara Kingsolver, reflecting on 9/11:
It’s probably only human to admit that a stranger’s death is more shattering when we can imagine it as our own. We all began to say, that week, “This is the worst thing that has ever happened.” To us, I know we should have added, for worse disasters have happened—if “worse” can be measured solely by the number of dead—in practically every other country on earth. Two years earlier an earthquake in Turkey had killed three times as many people in one day, babies and mothers and businessmen. The November before that, a hurricane had hit Honduras and Nicaragua and killed even more, buried whole villages and erased family lines; even now, people wake up there empty-handed. Some disaster’s are termed “natural” (though it was war that left Nicaragua so vulnerable), and yet their victims are just as innocent as ours on September 11, and equally dead. Which end of the world should we talk about? Only the murderous kind? Sixty years ago, Japanese airplanes bombed U.S. Navy boys who were sleeping on ships in gentle Pacific waters. Three and a half years later, American planes bombed a plaza in Japan where men and women were going to work and schoolchildren were playing, and more humans died at once than anyone had ever thought possible: seventy thousand in a minute. Imagine, now that we can—seventy thousand people dead in one minute. Then twice that many more, slowly, from the inside.
There are no worst days, it seems. Ten years ago, early on a January morning, bombs rained down from the sky and caused great buildings in the city of Baghdad to fall down—hotels, hospitals, palaces, buildings with mothers and soldiers inside—and here in the place I want to love best, I watched people cheer about it. In Baghdad, survivors shook their fists at the sky and used the word evil. We all tend to raise up our compatriots’ lives to a sacred level, thinking our own citizens to be more worthy of grief and less acceptably taken than lives on other soil. When many lives are lost all at once, people come together and speaks words such as heinous and honor and revenge, presuming to make this awful moment stand apart somehow from the ways people die a little each day around the world from sickness or hunger. But broken hearts are not mended in this ceremony because really, every life that ends is utterly its own event—even as in some way every life is the same as all others, a light going out that ached to burn longer. Even if you never had a chance to love the light that’s gone, you miss it. You should; you have to. You bear this world and everything that’s wrong with it by holding life still precious, every time, and starting over.
In my lifetime I have argued against genocide, joined campaigns for disaster aid, sent seeds to places of famine. I have mourned my fellow humans in every way I’ve known how. But never before have their specific deaths so persistently entered my dreams. This time it was us, leaving us trembling, leading my little daughter to ask quietly, “Will it happen to me, Mama?” I understood with the deepest sadness I’ve ever known that this was the wrong question to ask, and it always had been. It has always been happening to us—in Nicaragua, in the Sudan, in Hiroshima, that night in Baghdad—and now we finally know what it feels like. Now we may learn, from the taste of our own blood, that every war is both won and lost, and that loss is a pure, high note of anguish like a mother singing to an empty bed.