WHAT A RESURRECTION REALLY FEELS LIKE: Some thoughts about a particular moment in philosophical and spiritual struggle where many people seem to get kind of stalled. I hope I can write about this without sounding like I think this describes everyone who considers himself or herself to be seeking and not finding. This is more like, "What I describe here may resonate with some of you," not, "I know why you haven't Seen the Light yet."

So: Sometimes, especially when very philosophically-minded people talk about God or their hypothetical future-tense conversion, I think they may be confusing faith and spiritual consolation. They talk as if they accept the Catholic (I feel like I mostly see this with Catholic-symps) anthropology, the Catholic view of human nature and purpose. They talk, in fact, as if they're pretty sure that the Catholic picture of human life would explain and add to their understanding of the world in a way which no merely secular philosophy could match. And yet they don't "have faith," which, the more they talk about it, sounds like it means that they haven't had a direct experience of God's presence. They haven't had an encounter with the living God, at least not when they could recognize Him. So they are stuck, wandering around with this kind of zombie worldview, thinking maybe it will be brought fully to life one day by a bolt of God-lightning.

But a felt sense of God's close, tender, sublime presence isn't faith. I think the Catholic jargon for it is spiritual consolation, but I'm certainly open to correction there! A sense of total abandonment by God, total aloneness, is entirely compatible with unflinching faith. So is spiritual anomie or boredom or simple anticipation of a more visceral encounter with God.

I'd say that if you accept the Catholic anthropology, and you accept that if there is no God that anthropology doesn't make sense, then you believe in God, even if you've never experienced anything you recognize as His presence.

One difficulty, of course, is that Catholicism, or any actual existing Christian tradition rather than the Buddy Jesus I make up in my head, is an ornate, shaggy, thoroughly weird religion. Because the Church corrects everyone, even the saints, She doesn't fit entirely into anyone's preexisting moral beliefs. So you may believe what you consider to be the biggest elements of the Catholic anthropology but not all the details, or you may entirely accept some major aspects of that anthropology and reject others. I think the goal then is to figure out which parts of your worldview do in fact require God, if any, and go forward from there.

A related difficulty is that reason and introspection necessarily intertwine here, because you're often trying to figure out which of two or more alternatives you believe in most. To take an obvious example, I had to ask myself, in converting, whether I was more sure that gay sex was morally neutral or that the Catholic Church can teach authoritatively on matters of sexuality. Bizarrely, I was more sure of the second thing!, and so I accepted the Church's teaching even though I didn't (and often still don't) understand it. On a less brass-tacks level, you might be asking yourself whether you're more sure of your God-requiring anthropology, or that God doesn't exist. If you're more sure that God doesn't exist, something is askew in your worldview. Here's George Orwell on this very dilemma, though he tries to handwave it because for once he's insufficiently hardcore.

If you do this introspection and find yourself shying away from an anthropology (or metaphysics, etc) you thought you held really firmly, that may be a sign of fear of commitment. It might not! You'll know your own motives much better than I will. But I do think there's a certain attraction in being always almost Christian: always Quizás Quizás Quizás.

I should note that this isn't how I personally became Catholic. I did a lot of this "working on my underlying worldview through philosophy until I realized that the Catholic Church was scarily plausible," and then I prayed for a couple of weeks, and then I had, in fact, a strange and tipsy spiritual experience which was essentially an encounter with God the Creator. I had a felt experience of objects in the world as words spoken by God. This was what I needed in order to get serious about starting RCIA. It was a fairly ramshackle and humiliating spiritual encounter (probably past the legal BAC, going all T.S. Eliot over a stain on a Yale bathroom wall) but it was an experience of the created world as infused with God's presence.

So I do know that faith is more like a spectrum than an on-off switch, and someone can be moving toward deeper faith due to philosophy while still hanging back from full commitment because of uncertainty and a lack of felt experience of God. That's basically what I did for a time. But I want to clarify that you can have genuine faith even in the absence of an "encounter"-like experience. I mean, your thoughts are also things you experience! Your practice of philosophy is experience. God may be encountering you through your friends (since philosophy is always best practiced among friends) rather than burning a bush at you or something. Let yourself believe what you believe, even if you don't feel like a Christian.

To close us out, here's a poem by Denise Levertov, which I think speaks to the situation. Via Wesley Hill.

It was getting late
with the warm fuzz
of the wine
well worked into our minds
when the first sign
of the Kingdom of Heaven
occurred
in a back room
with only the paid help
as witnesses
and the quality
of the gift
passing unnoticed
because of our
intoxication.
--"The Jesus Poems: Cana," by this guy

The memory of the martyrs has historically played an important role in the Christian imagination. It is extremely important that the martyrs not be sentimentalized. They are not always especially good, virtuous, or innocent folk. Ironically, to idealize the martyrs, or victims generally, is to rob them of their common humanity. What makes murder so terrible is not that the victims are virtuous, but that it is murder, the taking of human life in contravention of the law of God. By analogy, we might also say that what constitutes a martyr is not necessarily possession of the Christian virtues, although many martyrs have possessed these in abundance, but rather his or her witness to Jesus Christ. Indeed, William Cavanaugh argues that it is not so much a person’s subjective intention that makes him or her a martyr — motives may well be ambiguous — as simply the church’s recognition of a life that shows forth the reality of Jesus. Paradoxically, the death of the martyr serves as a confirmatory sign that the world belongs not the principalities of the present age, but to God.
--Joseph Mangina, but I found it here

[O]ne should not so romanticize the process of moral and spiritual struggle that the Lukan depiction of Jesus as one who maintains apparent serenity and trust amidst suffering is downgraded; as though an anguished and in some ways vacillating struggle for faith is intrinsically superior to a steadily trusting faith; or as though a steadily trusting faith did not involve its own kind of moral and spiritual struggle.
--Walter Moberly, The Bible, Theology, and Faith: A Study of Abraham and Jesus, via Wesley Hill

DUBNER VS. DUBNER:

...First, the Dubner story is a reminder of the critical importance of how we – as Christians, and as humans – understand death. For both Stephen and his mother, the spark that led to their respective rejections of their families’ religious views and their own conversions was the way in which death was dealt with by these families. As a child, Florence Greenglass wanted to understand why her family feared death so deeply that they never talked about it – indeed, never told her that her own grandfather had died – while their Catholic neighbors marked the house of the dead with a ribbon and their children freely discussed whether the newly deceased had gone to heaven or purgatory. In becoming a Catholic, she embraced Christ’s victory of death, pinning her hopes on the joys of heaven: death no longer needed to be feared. But ironically, it was a very similar frustration that led Florence’s reflective and intelligent son away from Catholicism. When his father died, the ten-year-old Stephen was deeply uncomfortable with the way in which his death was treated almost as a joyful occasion in the family, with much talk of the happiness of the deceased in Heaven – and little room for the living to grieve on earth.

It’s worth noting that Stephen did not know – at the time – that his father had been profoundly depressed, struggling for days to get out of bed; he thus could not understand what must have been very genuine feelings on his mother’s part that the long-suffering Paul was indeed in a better place. At the same time, his Catholic household failed in the same way that Florence’s secular Jewish one did: forgetting – in the adults’ resolute decision that death was, respectively, either a terrifying evil or almost a non-event – to make room for a child to make inquiry of the reality of death and to come to terms with it.

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PUBLIC FEARS IN PRIVATE PLACES: After that New York Times piece on me was published, the best and cattiest response I saw was the comments-box punchline, "She should join a silent order." Perhaps the characters in Next Fall should also take that advice!

Next Fall--playing at the Round House Theater in Bethesda until 2/26--is a play in which the subtlety of what goes unspoken is almost drowned out by the shallow, stereotype-laden dialogue. It's about a gay couple, generic atheistic Adam and blithely evangelical Luke; when Luke is involved in a serious car accident and falls into a coma, Adam has to deal with his parents, who never knew that their son was gay. (Luke at one point said that he would tell them "next fall," when his younger brother was out of the house and in college, so the title of the play itself alludes to something unspoken, unaccomplished, something left unresolved due to fear.)

There are a lot of problems with the play, especially in the more cartoonish first act. I saw it with two friends, both of whom liked it more than I did; at the intermission I wondered out loud whether it would just be two hours of self-centered people feeling their emotions. They're just all so American in the worst way!--they know that they're right, and they're proud of their opinions. I mean, look: This is the second play I've seen in a row in which not knowing the meaning of the word "tchotchke" marks a character out as gauche, clueless, and generally Not Our Kind, Dear.

Meanwhile the religious arguments seem to start and stop almost at random. The content will be familiar to anyone who has ever made the mistake of reading the comments: What about really nice people who aren't Christian, do they go to hell? What about Jeffrey Dahmer, if he accepts Jesus will he be allowed into the pearly-gated community with respectable homos like Luke? Don't we all have our own beliefs, what about the Jews, and--most poignantly, and least fleshed-out--isn't it a sin for Luke to sleep with a man? The disputes themselves are so brief that they feel chintzy. Adam comes across like he's constantly trying to pick a fight but never willing to finish one. Luke comes across like he thinks Jesus is magic, and if you just say you believe you can do whatever you want; but if you call him on any of the many ways he takes the easy way out, he gets upset (understandably, given how blatantly Adam is baiting him most of the time, but still!).

The key moment in their arguments might come when neither of them can sleep one night. Earlier, Luke had compared accepting Christ to taking a pill which could cure one's cancer, and said that some people are so angry to have cancer in the first place that they're not willing to just take the cure. So then later they're sleepless and dejected, and Adam says that he's going to take a sleeping pill. "Make it two," Luke says. He reminds Adam of their earlier conversation and takes the pill, looking up hopefully at Adam--who looks back at him with total exhaustion and says, "If it were that easy, everyone would swallow it." Adam walks back into the bedroom with the pill still in his hand.

More interesting than the spoken arguments, though, are the character notes which go unmarked. For example, there's Brandon, a repressed Christian. (He only wears tightly buttoned-up clothing, because why even have a costumer if you don't want obvious metaphors?) He doesn't say much, and in his one big scene, a lot of what he does say is just exasperatedly agreeing with the words Adam puts in his mouth. But he's there. He's a constant presence in the hospital waiting room, steadfast, quiet, immovable. There's a solidity to him, a doggedness which is manifested both in his blunt, unimaginative dogmatism and in his silent loyalty. (He's played by the really excellent Alexander Strain, whom I saw as Spinoza in this play. He'll be reprising that role this season!)

All the play's religious questions are framed in terms of the afterlife: Is there a Heaven? Will I get there, will you? I've already written about why this is not a good way to understand Christian life! But it does draw out the deep undercurrents of fear which run through the play. Luke is creepily cheerful, and professes not to fear death at all; Adam longs for that fearlessness. In day to day life Luke is terrified that his parents will find out about his relationship with Adam, and at night he's sometimes haunted enough that he will pray after they have sex, but he still manages to project a sense of sunny confidence which the neurotic, hypochondriac Adam picks up on. Their relationship makes Adam a bit more free and less fearful, even as it causes Luke anxiety.

I like a lot of things about this setup. I like that faith doesn't actually free Luke from fear or distress--it changes his questions and challenges, so it changes when he feels fear and why. I like the framing of Christian faith as hospital and cure, something you can only receive if you're willing to admit that you're sick, and I like that Adam the hypochondriac is deeply resistant to admitting any spiritual neediness or infirmity. (Luke's evangelical parents are recovering addicts; his mother Arlene, thoroughly inhabited by the terrific Kathryn Kelley, was the only character I genuinely liked. Even if she doesn't know what a tchotchke is!) I like the suggestion that Christ the rock can give inherently weak and silly people some depth, solidity, and insight.

I just wish any of that had been pushed to its limits! I want to see Luke's faith get really tested, not just harried. I want any backstory whatsoever for Adam, whose background is basically a cardboard cutout labeled, "White gay man who came of age in the '80s." Overall it felt like this play pulled all its punches because the playwright didn't know how to portray more intense religious conflict or more uniquely-articulated faith. So all the characters' religious beliefs seemed to deflate to the level of their self-comforting American emotions, rather than their emotions rising to the level of the exalting or devastating Christian faith.

SOME SMALL THOUGHTS ON REPETITIVE PRAYER: I know it's easy to criticize repeated prayers because they can seem rote, dissolving into jabberwocky. But having just finished a prayer in which I really did forget my place and get kind of mixed up, I was struck by how apt that experience is--how well it fits our experience of long-term spiritual life and struggle.

I mean, we forget parts of our pain, too, or get mixed up about which parts go where. They sometimes become rote parts of our lives, acknowledged but barely recognized. And then we're suddenly startled by some fragment of self-knowledge and it glints like broken glass. This happens with repeated prayers as well. Some previously-overlooked phrase will suddenly envelop me like wings, or hit hard on a bruise. Repetition is a way of allowing ourselves to be surprised by what arises in the course of what might seem like an ordinary night's prayer.

It also keeps us from thinking that spiritual problems get "solved," finished. The struggle may feel rote one day, mumbled through quickly and gotten over with, but it in fact does have to be repeated in all its manifold forms, this day and the next and the next.

(Somewhat more coherent thoughts from me on repetitive prayer here.)

UNCONVENTIONAL: I couldn't sleep after Black Caesar, so I decided to just throw on The Nun's Story and watch until I decided to go to bed. I ended up watching, totally engrossed, until the entire huge long movie was over.

Audrey Hepburn plays a Belgian girl who enters a religious order, hoping to be sent to the Congo as a nurse. The movie follows her deep spiritual struggles, mostly but not entirely revolving around questions of pride and obedience. The harshness of the religious regime under which she lives isn't prettified, but this story goes far beyond easy "individualism vs. repression" conflicts. This comes out most clearly when World War II breaks out--the nun's obedience is tested even more deeply, but at the same time she's also struggling with vengefulness and refusal to forgive her enemies.

The major flaw of the movie is that the racism of the Belgian Catholics isn't just portrayed, but basically embedded in the movie's narrative. The easiest example is the way in which all of the supporting characters are vivid and memorable except the one Congolese character with a speaking role, who is a pious cartoon. But that example is just the most obvious sign of a problem which really runs throughout the Congo sequence, even though the culture of the people is presented with quite a bit of affection and some respect.

Hepburn is fantastic. Like I said, I'd assumed that I would watch maybe an hour and then hit pause. I just couldn't. I couldn't stop watching her. Many of the supporting actors are as vivid as their characters, but this is really a one-woman show.

While engaged in a dispute as to the existence of a God, Henry Shanks stabbed Adam Weimer to the heart and escaped arrest. TX1883
--Tweets of Old offers further evidence that Texas is partly Russia

THE MOST RUSSIAN HEADLINE EVER. Via AC.

HAVE YOURSELF A SCARY LITTLE CHRISTMAS:

...In the same way, the greatest Christmas film of all time -- It's a Wonderful Life, directed by the Catholic Frank Capra -- takes our hero George Bailey through an odyssey of terror, too. It's interesting that fear seems to attend the story not because George is deeply wicked like Scrooge, but because it is a Christmas story; and Christmas stories, like the Easter story, properly take us from the joyful mysteries, through the sorrowful mysteries, to the glorious mysteries. George is not at all the tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, nor the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner that Scrooge is. He is generous, kind, filled with a spirit of adventure, and willing to bear the responsibility for the Building and Loan and his family. He resists temptation to become the protégé of the Scrooge of Bedford Falls, Mr. Potter. So why does he have to undergo a baptism of fear and suffering?

the wood of the cradle is the wood of the Cross

AND PRETTY GIRLS MAKE...: Having just seen House of Gold, the JonBenet Ramsey play, I am not convinced that it adds anything to that one chapter from The Brothers Karamazov other than exploitation. Please do argue with me if you think differently, but for right now, I don't know why this needed to happen.

ETA: The preceding should not be taken as a slam on the actors (or the director except insofar as I question the decision to stage this at all), who were all serviceable to excellent. Kaaron Briscoe as JonBenet was exceptional.

CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN MUSIC: In which I ramble about three adaptations of, respectively, "The Little Match Girl"; Revelation; and the Gospel of Luke.

First, a disclaimer which is actually an apology: I know nothing about this kind of music whatsoever. I have no vocabulary for it. I will be throwing out random analogies and metaphors and people who actually know what they're talking about here will probably laugh until they cry. On the other hand, that means that if you are also not well-versed in this kind of music (what is it even called? It comes up on iTunes as "classical" but that seems silly) maybe this post will give a sense of whether you might like these discs!

David Lang, The Little Match Girl Passion (and some other things). The difficulty with adapting this story, I think, is that when you're reading it in the solitude of your skull it's easy for the sublimity of the tale, the fever-dream intensity, to shiver into your consciousness. But music makes it somehow public and touchable in a way which my instinct says might emphasize the sentimentality which is also a real part of the story. I'm still not convinced that Lang works against the sentimentality enough (and there's one very on-the-nose use of bells which I found distracting), but a second listen convinced me that there's more cold rapture in this music than I'd thought at first.

Lang opens very strong, with a haunting chorus of overlapping voices calling, "Come, daughter," chilly and doomy. Then he begins to alternate between clipped, precise storytelling ("It was terribly cold and nearly dark on the last evening of the year") and a sort of penitents' chorus which offers aching soliloquies from the point of view of someone watching, or remembering watching, the little girl's suffering. I still think that some of the girl's visions and stations of the cross could be given a greater edge of hysteria, a greater sense of the music spiraling out of control. But overall this is a really memorable and poignant piece of music. I'd play it for kids who like Andersen as well as adults.

The other, short pieces on this disc (an adaptation of the Song of Songs, a Yiddish folk song, a riff on Genesis, and a sort of paraphrase of Ecclesiastes) didn't move me, but might work better for you. I still felt like there was too much control here, too much deliberate, intellectual, maybe even self-consciously poignant pacing.

Phil Kline, John the Revelator. It's wild to listen to this right after The Little Match Girl Passion, because the rhythm and emotion of the music is so different! We open with a terrific hymn or marching song--I really don't think it's just the "Glory, hallelujah!" chorus which put me in mind of Civil War songs--and from then on we alternate between relatively straightforward adaptations of the Mass in Latin, and deeply shaken, crisis-and-rapture songs in English. I loved "Alone" and "The Unnamable," and also the take on "What Wondrous Love Is This?" which closes the disc. This is a fierce, tough piece of work which offers its broken heart up on a platter.

Krzyzstof Penderecki, St. Luke Passion. This one might be the hardest for me to talk about, in part because the parts which strike me and how they strike me keep changing. (I've listened to it three times in the past two days.) One thing I really love is how it captures so intensely three of the sharply-contrasting moods of an actual Palm Sunday or Holy Week Mass: the matter-of-fact statements of what went down; the scuttling, hissing chatter of the crowd, who can only agree and come together when they're baying for Christ's blood; and the agony and isolation of Christ.

The first time I listened to this, I remember thinking somewhere around maybe "Deus meus" that Penderecki really does convey the hysteria, alienation, the horror of the Passion narrative. "This music sounds the way Carnival of Souls looks," I remember thinking. I haven't had quite that reaction the other two times, but each time I've found something else which worked. The pacing really helps here, as you're taken very naturally from one of the three moods to another, never quite allowed to settle in and get comfortable with any one way of relating to the music and story. And the setting of "Into your hands I commend my spirit" shakes me every time.

...And now, having exhausted the possibilities of the present, I'm listening to the Essential Tallis Scholars, which I cannot recommend highly enough!

I CAN'T LET THE CLOCK STRIKE MIDNIGHT without noting that this is the feast of St. Job. I spent it at the pregnancy center, where I will also spend the Feast of the Visitation, because every day is self-parody day!

"LIVE THROUGH THIS": My column at Inside Catholic. The Catholic Church is not a box of answers.

(Also, "goon" is not a typo!)

His silences were enough like my father's to fill me with grave anticipation. But he himself was completely different--as thin as my father was fat, as deferential as my father was overbearing, as open to new ideas as my father was closed to them.
--Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty. Not the best prose in the book so far--which I'm very much enjoying--but I like that he draws out this familiar connection between deference and intellectual openness. We seem to understand that an overbearing person is likely to be unwilling to consider new ideas, but for some reason we don't work the equation the other way and acknowledge that deferential and/or reverential casts of mind are often so willing to engage with and be reshaped by intellectual challengers.

ALIEN SHE: I'm loving Fragmentation and Redemption, but the first essay does have one premise I'd like to challenge a bit. Bynum writes, "If one looks with women rather than at women, women's lives are not liminal to women--but neither, except in a very partial way, are male roles or male experiences."

That might be entirely true of the medieval women's narratives she's discussing. I certainly don't know enough to challenge her there! But she does seem to be implying that it's true per se--women aren't liminal to women because we are women--and that I think is false.

One of the facts of women's lives in what you can call patriarchy (although I think that term's focus on fatherhood is misleading, both because women-as-mothers do an immense amount to shape and transmit culture and because you can have male domination of culture despite a severe diminution of fathers' status and presence--anyway, let's move on) is that women are alien to ourselves and "other" to ourselves.

There are obvious disadvantages to this fact of emotions. There are perhaps less-obvious spiritual advantages. Self-alienation can be a strong source of insight, self-questioning, and Christian submission. (This possibility is really important w/r/t Bynum's essay, because she's arguing that medieval women's religious narratives generally rested on continuity of identity rather than radical conversion of identity: Because they already identified with Christ-the-suffering or Christ-the-lowly, they could imitate Him without a radical transformation or "reversal" of identity.)

My own perspective on this stuff is really weird because of being lesbian--I talked about gay alienation as a precursor to Catholic conversion here and here, and alluded to it here. I don't know to what extent my personal focus on the benefits rather than the (real, obvious, and painful) drawbacks of self-alienation and viewing women as Other are related to my sexual orientation, and I'd be interested in any comments you all have there. But on the more basic point about women's self-alienation (and therefore, although I know these aren't synonymous terms, self-liminality), I've heard lots of straight women support my position.

Where this goes, I don't know. It does, at least, complicate Bynum's final call to "stand with" women when doing history; how do you "stand with" someone who doesn't entirely stand with herself? (Should we seek to "stand with" ourselves?)

"Will you speak falsely for God,
and speak deceitfully for him?
Will you show partiality toward him,
will you plead the case for God?
Will it be well with you when he searches you out?
Or can you deceive him, as one deceives a man?
He will surely rebuke you
if in secret you show partiality.
Will not his majesty terrify you,
and the dread of him fall upon you?
Your maxims are proverbs of ashes,
your defenses are defenses of clay."
--Job rebuking his "comforters," Job 13:7-12

"DEFINING THE RELATIONSHIP": My new piece at Inside Catholic. Quick summary: "Do you have a personal relationship with God?" is a reductive and kind of cloyingly Hallmark question; but it might still help us understand times when we're angry at God, when we feel abandoned by God, and when we feel an ironic distance from God.

TODAY IS THE FEAST OF ST. THOMAS. Celebrate by pouring out your doubts in prayer before the Eucharist!