Lance Mannion

The power of tiny, undirected changes

Posted Sunday morning, April 11, 2021.

The flowers of most common Magnolia trees are pale and without scent for an evolutionary reason. Magnolias evolved millions of years before bees and butterflies and had to rely on beetles for pollination, and beetles aren’t interested in color or scent. Magnolia tree in blossom, via Wikipedia.

Today’s Sunday sermon is by the late and lamented Oliver Sacks, physician, neurologist, writer, and, he wouldn’t have thought incidentally, atheist who, when dying of liver cancer, in terrible pain but still joyfully at work as a writer, didn’t have to resist a deathbed conversion because he didn’t feel the temptation. It strikes me that the sentence at the end of this passage, “we are made of cells, and cells go back to the beginning of life” is a biologist’s version of Carl Sagan’s “We are star stuff”...

Linus Pauling has said that he read [The Origin of the Species] when he was nine. I was not that precocious and could not have followed its “one long argument” at that age. But I had an intimation of Darwin’s vision of the world in our own garden---a garden which, on summer days, was full of flowers and bees buzzing from one flower to another. It was my mother, botanically inclined, who explained to me what the bees were doing, their legs yellow with pollen, and how they and flowers depended on each other.

While most of the flowers in the garden had rich scents and colors, we also had two magnolia trees, with huge but pale and scentless flowers. The magnolia flowers, when ripe, would be crawling with tiny insects, little beetles. Magnolias, my mother explained, was among the most ancient of flowering plants and had appeared nearly a hundred million years ago, at a time when “modern” insects like bees had not yet evolved, so they had to rely on a more ancient insect, a beetle, for pollination. Bees and butterflies, flowers with colors and scents, were not preordained, waiting in the wings---and they might never have appeared. They would develop together, in infinitesimal stages, over millions of years. The idea of a world without bees or butterflies, without scent or color, affected me with a sense of awe.

The notion of such vast eons of time---and the power of tiny, undirected changes which by their accumulation could generate new worlds, worlds of enormous richness and variety---was intoxicating. Evolutionary theory provided...a sense of deep meaning that belief in a divine plan had never achieved. The world that presented itself to us became a transparent surface, through which one could see the whole history of life. The idea that it could have worked out differently, that dinosaurs might still be roaming the earth or that human beings might never have evolved, was a dizzying one. It made life seem all the more precious and a wonderful ongoing adventure (“a glorious accident,” as Stephen Jay Gould called it)---not fixed or predetermined, but always susceptible to change and new experience.

Life on our planet is several billion years old, and we literally embody this deep history in our structures, our behaviors, our instincts, our genes. We humans retain, for example, the remnants of gill arches, much modified from our fishy ancestors and even the neural systems that once controlled gill movement. As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” We bear, too, an even older past; we are made of cells, and cells go back to the very origin of life.

---from “Darwin and the Meaning of Plants”, one of the essays collected in “The River of Consciousness” by Oliver Sacks.

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Contingently related blogging: "THAT Carl Sagan".

A symbol of the best in all of us

Stone originally rolled away from the notebooks, Easter Sunday morning, April 21, 2019. Resurrected, Easter Sunday morning, April 4, 2021.

Detail from “The Holy Women at Christ’s Tomb” by Annabile Carracci. 1590s. The Hermitage, via Wikipedia.

From the Department of In Search of Lost Time. Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019:

Happy Easter. Shh. We’re at mass. Father Bob’s leading us through a rousing recitation of the renewal of our baptismal vows.

“Do you reject Satan?” he asks at the top of his voice while smiling broadly, knowing we will.

“We do!” we shout back with great good cheer.

“And all his works?”

“We do!”

“And all his empty promises?”

“You betcha!”

Ok, that was me. And I said it under my breath. The rest of the congregation cried out lustily that they do.

Yes, I’m taking notes in church. It’s my form of meditation. You might be surprised that I’m in church and at mass. We’re here with Mom Mannion. We’re visiting the old Mannion Homestead to celebrate Easter with her and my brothers Larry and Lyle and my sister Liz and their families. After mass we’re all going out to brunch. Right now there’s nothing for me to do but pretend I’m still a good Catholic or at least a dependable CAPE one. I have to say Father Bob gives good a good mass. He’s a big barrel-shaped, moon-faced, gray-haired cleric of about fifty-five. Mom Mannion thinks the world of him. Pop Mannion did too. I don’t trust him. But I don’t trust any priests these days. I enjoy his sermons though. I’ve sat through three in the last two months. That makes three masses more than I attended in the year before, and one of those was a funeral mass. Pop’s funeral. Father Bob said the mass and delivered the eulogy. He did Pop proud. He also did the benediction at the dedication naming the town hall after Pop. Last time we were up here Father Bob’s took for his text for his sermon the parable of the Prodigal Son. I got a real kick out of it. I should write a post on that. I took notes. Naturally.

Now he’s moved on to expanding on the baptismal vows.

“Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions?”

Of course we don’t.

He fires off the questions---too fast for me to keep up. I’m writing them down as I catch them, so I’m not putting them in order. I got the first two in order.

“Do you BELIEVE?”

“Do you believe in BELIEVING?”

Here are the ones I caught after that:

“Do you believe in Fairness?”

“Do you believe in Justice?”

“Do you believe in Mercy?”

“Do you believe in Peace?”

“Do you believe that this year our family is going to make a difference?”

Our family is the parish. The difference is that together we’re going the world a fairer, more just, merciful, and peaceful place for everybody.

Father Bob’s turned this part of the mass into a pep rally for Social Justice. This isn’t perfunctory or rote. Father Bob, without being preachy about it, preaches regularly that the point is social justice. Everybody means everybody. As in we’re all in this together. As in nobody gets left behind. It’s implicit in the parish’s mission statement, which is printed on the front page of the weekly bulletin:

We are an Evangelizing
Roman Catholic Community
of Christ’s Disciples that
Welcomes All
Prays Joyfully
Grows in Faith
Proclaims God’s Kingdom Acts
Justly:
This is our Mission

The parish has a dedicated Social Justice Ministry. Its members are busy organizing the parish’s participation in next weekend’s CROP Walk. Father Bob will be leading the parish contingent on the walk.

Today’s gospel was from John, Chapter 20, Verses 1-9. The painting up top, by Annabile Carracci, depicts a scene from Luke’s Easter story. I couldn’t find a painting I liked based on John’s. There’s a great painting by Alexander Ivanov based on John’s story of Mary Magdalene encountering Jesus outside the tomb while Peter and John are taking a look around inside, but it’s not as colorful or joyful as Carracci’s. I like John’s story better than Luke’s. I like what John has Jesus saying to Mary--- “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” ---but I imagine him smiling when he says it and then nearly laughing when she still doesn’t realize it’s him---she thinks he’s the gardener---and he snaps her into focus with an amused and affectionate “Mary!” But he isn’t smiling in Ivanov’s painting and doesn’t look even mildly amused. He looks still mostly dead and as if he spent all day yesterday harrowing hell and it took more out of him than being crucified.

Father Bob gave his usual lively reading. It’s more accurate to say he performs the gospels rather than reads them. Today’s sermon started with the Easter story but he moved on to touch on other things. He told us about a couple of minor frustrations he’d experienced in the past week, Both his chalices broke. One was chipped on the lip, which he discovered when he went to drink from in during the Eucharist. The other sprang a leak. “A chalice is made to do one thing!” he said in mock dismay and irritation, as if he was saying “You had one job!” But he was leading into reminding us what a hard year we’ve been through, in which his frustrations were trivial in the grand scheme of things. Here’s something he said that made me sit up and take notice, which I think made a lot of people around me take notice too:

The Church, he said, had another hard year “mostly brought on by its own doing.”

We all knew what he was referring too. Even the Pope has trouble bringing himself to be that self-accusatory.

But Father Bob left that to sink in. He worked his way to his main subject.

Notre Dame.

“A symbol of the best in all of us.”

Symbol. That’s the key word. Symbol. Not totem. Not icon. And of all of us. The Church first, but only as the starting point. All of us.

Then he conjured up for us the image---the altar with its gold cross still standing, looking almost untouched by the fire amid the burnt wreckage and scorched ruins. Another symbol. Not a miracle. A piece of luck giving us something to focus on and think about: that no matter the trouble and the suffering and the difficulty we go through, some good can still be left standing inside us and from that and around that we can rebuild.

Mass is ending. We’re going in peace.

Reuters.

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Correction: My brother Luke pointed out that Father Bob didn't deliver Pop's eulogy. He did. And he did a beautiful job of it too. Technically, what Father Bob did was give the sermon----in the church missal it's called the homily---devoted to Pop.

Of motes and beams

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Wednesday, November 11, 2020. Posted Sunday morning, December 13.

Detail from a painting, “The Sermon the Mount”, attributed to Gustave Dore, circa 1860s, but possibly an original work by an anonymous artist based on Dore’s black and white engraving. Various sources.

Three ways of making the same point. A short sermon for liberals:

"If you are wrong, does that make me right? If you are bad, does that prove I am good?"---Thomas Merton, "The Seven Storey Mountain".

"...simply because Trump's moral compass is broken does not mean that yours unerringly points north. There is a difference between being righteous and being right."--- Carlos Lozada, “What Were We Thinking”.

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"---Matthew 7:3

"Happy Day of the Dead! Have a drink!"

Posted on All Souls' Day, the Day of the Dead, Monday morning, November 2, 2020.

Dancers in a Day of the Dead procession in Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo for Paul Theroux's “On the Plain of Snakes” by Steve McCurry. HMH. Via the Los Angeles Times.

Growing up Catholic in upstate New York State, I knew today as All Souls' Day. And I knew it as a holy day, although not a holy day of obligation. I did not know it as a holiday. When I was an altar boy, I went to mass, but those masses were solemn and often sad because families of the departed would request the masses to be said in their loved one's memory. I didn't think of it as a celebration of life by way of a mocking Death. Something I wish the nuns had taught us...

Each evening, on the days from before Halloween through All Saints’ Day (also called Dia de los Angelitos, Day of the Dead Children) on November first, and the Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos), on the second, Oaxaca is transformed. The comparas---troupes of masked marchers and musicians---subverted the order of the city, asserted their marching multitudes, pushed forward along the cobbles, and sprawled, taking over the streets, thrusting everyone else aside, turning them into spectators. Then the city belonged to the processions of skull-faced children and ghouls and drummers, and trumpeters and the Angel of Death.

...As the processions grew larger, more people, more banners, so did the images they carried---a queen, a clown---much taller, the costumes becoming fancier, the masks more elaborate, the music louder, until (as local parades often do) they too over the whole street, filling it all the way to Zocalo, creating a spectacle. Where there had been pop music and karaoke issuing from balconies and bars, now there was the blare of a brass band.

…

...Outside the Panteón, Oaxaca’s walled-in cemetery, there was a carnival---food, games, rides, beer---and the niches on the high interior walls, where bodies were filed away and labeled, were lighted by candles. At each tombstone inside, at the crypts, vaults, and tombs that were like villas---with roofs and columns---a family was gathered, drinking and eating. I was welcomed: “Have a drink?” “Are you hungry?”

The parades in daylight were jovial, with prancing monsters and the effigies of ghouls and beauties, but when night fell on All Saints’ Day...the vigils began, and I went to the old cemetery in Santa Cruz Xoxocotlan, a center of Day of the Dead activity, where I saw that a vigil was a drinking party or a family picnic or, for some, a solemn, prayerful veneration. The drinking and shouting in a cluster of hearty masked celebrants is so odd you take it to be transgressive, but it is fitting, because the Day of the Dead embodies elements of insult and protest, in the cause of grieving and satire, which is a form of grieving---as well as binge eating.

…

The protest, the rebellion, was a tonic. In the parades, using the freedom of pandemonium, many of the masked and costumed marchers chanted against the government...or carried signs boldly lettered MUERRA A MALGOBIERNO! [Death to Bad Government!]

…

The images of death, of Santa Muerte, or bony Catarina, are not mournful, because the mood is festive with a subtext of anarchy. The celebrants are people who work and live humbly all year, then seize this chance to make noise, to protest, to drink themselves silly.

…

Memento mori--remember you must die---is the subtext of Mexican life...The medieval theme was “Death comes to all and makes a mockery of us all.” And in the street theater and cemetery crapulosities---borracheras---of those days of the dead, the Mexicans return the compliment: they dress as skeletons, they parade in skull masks, they make gifts of sugar skulls, they engage in macabre dances, they mock death.

---from “On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey” by Paul Theroux.

Marilynne Robinson on the bookish roots of the Protestant Reformation

Sunday night, October 25, 2020.

"Caxton Showing the First Specimen of His Printing to King Edward IV at the Almonry, Westminster: With Edward are his wife, Elizabeth Woodville, and their children, Elizabeth, Edward, and Richard" by Daniel McLise, 1851. Via Wikipedia.

Robinson doesn’t get into it here, but the irony is implicit: the inheritors of the Protestant Reformation in the United States are the liberal descendants of New Englanders who populated the blue states and the blue islands along the Mississippi and the coasts of the West and the South, while the brand of Protestantism running wild across the political landscape is anti-book, anti-reading, anti-professor, anti-learning, anti-science, anti-intellectual all around, and its tribes of believers are enthralled by a would-be tyrant who is all those things too but for whom language isn’t poetic or meant to inspire, for whom it has no beauty or dignity, only the power to confuse and distract. He is, in effect, anti-understanding and anti-language as anything other than slogans, catchphrases, and mottos:

The history of the Reformation is very largely a history of books and publication, a response to the huge stimulus given to intellectual life by the printing press. It was in considerable degree the work of professors, men of exceptional learning who were intent on making the central literature of the civilization accessible to the understanding of the unlearned, those who could not read or understand Latin. Luther made his profoundly influential translation of scripture, which became the basis of the development of German as a literary language. Calvin did not make a translation of the Bible into French---that was done by a cousin, Pierre Robert. For the purposes of commentary, Calvin made translations from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. But he also wrote and preached in French. His work was read so widely that he was credited with creating French as a literary and discursive language, and an international language as well. His influence and Luther’s are both very comparable to the impact on English of the Bible in English, generally credited to the Authorized or King James version. So one immediate and remarkable consequence of the Reform movement was the emergence of the great modern languages out of the shadow of Latin, with their power and beauty and dignity fully demonstrated in the ambitious uses being made of them.

---from “Reformation” by Marilynne Robinson, collected in “The Givenness of Things”.

Second Amendment solutions to democracy and religious freedom

Posted Friday morning, October 16, 2020.

“Come and take them!” Gun rights advocates including members of militia and extremist groups carry signs and flags near the Virginia Capitol in Richmond to protest Virginia’s new gun control regulations, January 20, 2020. Photo by Julia Rendleman for the Washington Post.

The novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson wrote this before you know who descended that gold elevator. The arms-bearing folk have been irked for a long time:

It seems these days as if the right to bear arms is considered by some a suitable remedy for the tendency of others to act on their freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, and especially of religion, in ways and degrees those arms-bearing folk find irksome. Reverence for the sacred integrity of every pilgrim’s progress through earthly life seems to be eroding. The generosity to the generality of the people who gave utmost of our best institutions would be considered by many pious people now to be socialistic, though the motives behind the creation of many of them, for example [fine colleges like Oberlin, Grinnell, Knox, and many others], was utterly and explicitly Christian. If I seem to have strayed from my subject, it is only to make the point that forgetting the character of the Reformation, this is, the passion for disseminating as broadly as possible the best of civilization as the humanist tradition understood it, and at the same time honoring and embracing the beauty of the shared culture of everyday life, has allowed us to come near to forgetting why we developed excellent public libraries, schools, and museums.

---from the essay “Reformation” by Marilynne Robinson in “The Givenness of Things”, 2015.

Trump's triumphant entry into Bethesda

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Monday, October 5, 2020. Posted Sunday morning, October 11.

"Man does not live by bread alone." Detail from “Jesus Tempted in the Wilderness” by James Tissot. 1886, 1894. Brooklyn Museum, via Wikipedia.

Is the pastor blaspheming?

President @realDonaldTrump is the only person on earth that can turn a hospital stay into a rally. He’s also the only person on earth that would have the idea to take that drive around the hospital.---Pastor Darrell Scott on Twitter, this past Monday, October 5, 2020.

Scott isn’t any ordinary Right Wing backwoods bible-thumper with a small congregation of yahoos. His Twitter profile describes him as Pastor of the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland; CEO WCCD Radio, a regional religious and gospel music station run by the New Spirit Revival Center; CEO National Diversity Coalition for Trump---Yes, there is one.---CEO Urban Revitalization Coalition; and a member of Trump’s Presidential Transition Team. In his tweet, he was hosannaing over Trump's irresponsible joyride outside Bethesda Naval Hospital four days after he was admitted to be treated for Covid-19. If he'd been there himself he'd have spread palm branches in front of Trump's motorcade. It’s bad enough the religious Right excuses Trump on the grounds that he's a “flawed vessel”, like Cyrus, God is putting to use to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. But to use language that calls up images of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday?

And when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Beth′phage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village opposite you, and immediately you will find an ass tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If any one says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord has need of them,’ and he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet, saying,

“Tell the daughter of Zion,
Behold, your king is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on an ass,
and on a colt, the foal of an ass.”

The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the ass and the colt, and put their garments on them, and he sat thereon. Most of the crowd spread their garments on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him and that followed him shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” And when he entered Jerusalem, all the city was stirred, saying, “Who is this?” And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee.”

I don’t know, maybe it’s just the former altar boy in me reading too much into it, or maybe it’s the devil in me looking to quote scripture for my purpose.

By the way, this passage from Matthew [Chapter 11, Verses 1-21] of Jesus’ riding into Jerusalem are followed immediately by the story of Jesus driving the money changers from the temple.

Here’s another bit of scripture the good pastor’s idolatry called to mind. It includes the actual devil quoting scripture for his purpose:

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written,

‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’”

Then the devil took him to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written,

‘He will give his angels charge of you,’

and

‘On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Begone, Satan! for it is written,

‘You shall worship the Lord your God
and him only shall you serve.’”

Matthew 4:1-11.

I wonder if when Pastor Scott preaches a sermon on the temptation in the desert he tells his congregation that Jesus should have taken up Satan on his offer.

 

What they want from their "flawed vessel"

Mined from the notebooks, June 14, 2020. Posted Tuesday morning, September 29, 2020.

Then presidential candidate Donald Trump (top row center, his face lit as if by divine light) “praying” at a service at the International Church of Las Vegas, October 30, 2016. AP photo by Evan Vucci, via WBUR Boston.

Amy Coney Barrett’s conveniently applied Catholicism, in which the only teaching of the Church that truly matters is the one against abortion, shouldn’t figure as the primary reason for opposing her. If anything, it’s of tertiary importance. The first is that she is a political conservative who would be ruling on issues of secular importance. It would be interesting to hear her explain why as a good Catholic she could reconcile her faith with her being on the side of her fellow conservative justices who are anti-immigrant, against the granting of asylum and refugee status to would-be Americans who happen to be brown and from shit-hole countries, anti-environment, anti-marriage equality, anti-labor, anti-health care, pro-letting the police get away with murder, and pro-letting sick people including children suffer and die of treatable diseases, all things she can be presumed to be herself on the basis of her being appointed to the Supreme Court by a president who has proved himself to be all of those things and has done his damnedest to carry out policies that inflict those things on the United States and the world and has never done anything that hasn’t advanced his political and financial interests. It would be interesting to hear her explain how as a good Catholic, which means as a good Christian, she could align herself with the politics of the most unchristian and immoral of men who have held the office of President. Interesting but, like I said, not of primary importance here.

Of primary importance is how her ultra-conservative legal principles---her self-professed "originalism"---would influence her rulings on immigration, asylum, refugees, the environment, labor versus corporate interests and the rights of workers versus the privileges of owners, the right of cops to do whatever they want to whomever they decide needs “policing”, and, of utmost importance to millions and millions of Americans, whether good health care should be, rather than a right belonging to all, a privilege and a luxury to be enjoyed by only those who can afford to pay top dollar, which is to say, who gets to live and who gets to die so that insurance companies make even more money. Those questions can be asked and answered without reference to the Catechism.

But if religion is going to be an issue, it’s not her Catholicism that’s at question. It’s the brand of Protestantism of the people who are most enthusiastic about her ascension to the Court, for whose support her nomination is a reward, and whose near unanimous votes Trump and the Republicans are counting on this election and beyond---the Right Wing Evangelicals.

The question is what their “faith” tells them to demand, what she makes of those demands, and how many of their demands she will grant and to what degree she will grant them.

Came across this entry from the summer of 2018 when the news of the day was full of what turned out to be of no consequence: that some Right Wing evangelicals weren’t happy with Trump for caging and separating children from the families. The blue wave was building and the political media seemed more concerned with whether this might cost Republicans in November and not so much what it was costing those children. It appears that despite their supposed misgivings they stuck with the Republicans, and it was the loss of college-educated white suburban women who helped propel the Democrats to control of the House and several state houses. The media’s fascination with voters they consider “regular Americans’ always gets in the way of their reporting of just who really are regular Americans and what they want.

At any rate, I hope you won’t mind if I quote myself:

Evangelicals aren’t hypocrites for voting for Trump. Some of them may sound like hypocrites in their excuse making and the way they dance around flat out admitting their real reasons for voting for him. They voted for him for the same reason anybody votes for any candidates for any office---because those candidates promise to give them what they want. Right Wing Evangelicals want abortion outlawed and women denied control over the own health, bodies, and lives. They want “religious liberty” for themselves which is their right to end LGBT+ people their rights or at least permission to treat them as if they don’t exist and have no claims upon them as fellow citizens and taxpayers, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. They want unwavering U.S. support for Israel so that it will be around to play its biblically ordained role in Armageddon, the Apocalypse, and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. They want to ban the teaching of established science in public schools. They want to ban public schools. Overall they want the country governed according to what they call “scriptural principles”. (If Donald Trump can name the four evangelists, it’s about the limits of his knowledge of scripture.) They want it affirmed that the United States is a “Christian” nation, as if the Constitution was written by divinely inspired bigots and know-nothings like themselves instead of the Enlightenment era rationalists the rest of us take the framers for. In short, they want the country remade in the image of themselves, with all the rights and benefits of citizenship belonging only to themselves.

Fighting with the Fighting Irish

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Saturday morning, September 12, 2020. Posted Saturday morning, September 19.

Notre Dame sophomore running back Kyren Williams running for daylight in Saturday's game against Duke. Williams ran for 205 yards and the Fighting Irish beat the Blue Devils, 27-13, and, hopefully, with the luck of the Irish, everyone on the field and in the stands beat the odds of catching the Covid virus. Courtesy of Notre Dame Athletics.

There’s a priest I follow casually on Twitter---not Father Martin, not even a Jesuit, so there’s no danger his tweets are going to tempt me into returning to the Church, but he’s often amusing, usually pithy, and routinely exasperating in a forgivable way in his contrarianism, which makes him hard to peg as a liberal or a conservative---something I think he takes too much pride in, and pride, as he would know, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins---and he’s on the faculty at Notre Dame.

I have a sentimental attachment to Notre Dame. Mrs M’s brother went there. My brother Lyle earned his M.A. in theology there. When I was a kid I thought that as a good Irish Catholic I was required to go there for college. I thought everybody who went there and taught there and played football there was Irish or at any rate Catholic. I thought this even though Ara Parseghian was their coach at the time and not only was he not Irish, he was famously not Catholic. He was Presbyterian. And then of course, there’s Joe Montana.

So, this priest posts this anecdote this morning and for those sentimental reasons and because it brought out the old altar boy in me I laughed out loud and immediately RTed…

First Saturday of football and I walk out of my office to this traditional gameday conversation: A Senior explaining to a Sophomore how to pray the Liturgy of the Hours with the breviaries we have in our chapel

Story also appealed to me as a former college professor who misses his students. So like I just said, I retweeted it immediately.

And immediately regretted it.

Because I could see the scene too clearly. And what I saw was that those students weren’t maintaining their social distance and neither one was wearing a mask.

I called the priest on this, in a less than tactful way…

I'm assuming they were wearing masks and maintaining social distance and if not you reminded them, otherwise this isn't quite the amusing anecdote it would be

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I’m usually more politic than this. And I knew why he’d left the masks and the social distancing out of the anecdote. It would have wrecked the flow of the story and ruined the joke. But I was feeling grumpy and impatient because I was waiting at UrgentCare for a checkup and Covid test and I took it out on him. He, naturally, took umbrage at my tweet.

Everyone was, of course [he replied]. Very strange comment.

I blundered on…

There's no "of course" about it. Or aren't you aware of what's going on at many other schools? And what do you think is going to go on in the stadium?

He retorted with an implicit “Excuse me!”...

I think it was an odd comment because it suggested I might be indifferent to doing my job. I would not be highlighting a situation that was dangerous--I'm well aware that here and at other places it requires constant vigilance. But that doesn't mean I expect that a wholly separate observation needs the skew line of "but did you do your job?"

To which I replied by pointing out that...

My followers don't necessarily follow you so they aren't going to automatically give you the benefit of the doubt

But they're really unlikely to give the benefit of the doubt to a pair of college guys even if they are good Catholics

I have to confess I was getting sardonic pleasure out of being rude to a priest. In 2002, my by then tenuous relation with the Church ended with me being rude to a priest, for which I offer no penance, because he deserved it and then some. I was looking forward to more but the good father was willing to let it go. He had a game to get to, after all. And I was being called in for my checkup.

But I wasn’t willing to let it go. I don’t have to let things go. It’s why I have a blog. So here I am, not letting it go.

For the record, I’m fairly certain this priest doesn’t read my blog.

Anywho…

Like I said to the priest, there’s no “of course” about it. Colleges that opened for classes last month are already shutting down because of outbreaks of infection among the students who---here’s a shocker---aren’t wearing masks and maintaining social distance. SUNY Oneonta here in New York has closed for the semester. Ken Mannion’s classes at SUNY New Paltz are all online by his choice, but he won't risk going up to campus even though it's practically a ghost town to use the library, the cafeteria, or the gym. My sister Laura’s daughter is back at SUNY Geneseo but she went back reluctantly. She’s a dance major and her dance classes aren’t offered online. The protocols in place make it practically like she’s in prison. Students are pretty much confined to their dorm rooms when they’re not in class. She and her roommate and floormates are being diligent, but they’re girls. The worry is that some maskless, self-believingly immortal, invulnerable guy will burst in the door some night to yell, “We’re having a party! Come on down!” Another niece, my sister Linda’s daughter, is aghast and appalled and frightened by the recklessness of students at her college out in Texas. She lives in her own apartment off campus, but when she walks to class she has trouble avoiding other students, maskless, traveling in bunches, convinced they have nothing to worry about because they’re young, and young people are immune, and, besides, it’s Texas---Covid only affects old brown and black people in Blue States and where did you get those numbers, Yankee? Notre Dame is in Indiana, a state full of idiot, Trump-loving Republicans of the type who make up most of the crowds at football games.

But there’s one more thing I wanted to remind him of, if he and the nurse waiting for me to gather up my effects and follow him into the examination room had given me the time to tweet.

Lou Holtz, arguably the greatest football coach in Notre Dame’s history, had just been given the Medal of Freedom by you know who. And you know who gave it to him as a political reward for speaking at the Republican convention where mask-wearing and social distancing were conspicuously not only discouraged, they were treated as cowardly and un-American.

What did he suppose students at Notre Dame made of the sight of those gleeful, maskless supposed adults sitting shoulder to shoulder in folding chairs on the White House lawn? Hopefully, the same thing most kids their age make of adults in general. But even if they know better, the adults in their sphere probably don’t. The crowds at college football games aren’t made up of students or even alumni. They’re made of average middle-aged, middle-class chuckleheads for whom college football is a tenet of their personal religion and an expression of their patriotism. Fans of the Fighting Irish come to South Bend from all over the Hoosier state---all over the country really---to worship and wave the flag.

And not incidentally watch young men risk life and limb for their amusement.

The fans are there by choice.

The players have to be there or else.

If that priest had been willing---and foolish enough---to get into it with me, I’d have liked to argue theology with him.

See, in my religion, holding a football season during a pandemic is a sin.

A bad man

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday afternoon, May 24, 2020. Posted Tuesday morning, May 26.

Our most godly President, leading a prayer in praise of himself at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, February 6, 2020. AP Photo by Evan Vucci.

He’s a bad man. We all know it. The general tendency is not to say it directly. We call him a sociopath, a malignant narcissist. He’s destructive, divisive, vindictive, malicious. Corrupt. He’s a thug. He’s a bully. A con artist. A grifter. The Criminal-in-Chief. He’s worse than racist. He’s far more than merely sexist. He’s vicious and cruel. We use political terms that carry the heaviest moral judgment---fascist, tyrant, traitor. We should flat out call him evil except evil implies intent and intent requires consideration and forethought and he’s too lazy to bother with either---he allows himself to be governed by appetite, ego, and whim. But the word for him is bad. Just plain bad.

The trouble with calling him that, though, is it almost lets him off the hook. It confuses the issue. It suggests he’s simply a bad President, which he is, arguably the worst at the job we’ve ever had, but it doesn’t emphasize he’s a rotten human being to boot.

Bad men have been President and proved good at the job of presidenting, Several exemplary men were less than successful Presidents. Some very good men did terrible things as President. But none of them did as many bad things---immoral and incompetent---in the course of an average day. None of them were as bad at the job and as bad an individual.

Which makes it such a bitter irony that he’s “ordered” the states to let the churches re-open, confirming for his Right Wing Christian voters that he’s the most godly President we’ve ever had.

There’s really no point in arguing with them that he’s far from godly and not by the least measure Christian.

He was raised to worship money. The only divine eye he’s ever cared is watching him is the camera’s eye. He rarely goes to church. He doesn’t know how to comport himself when he does.

The photo is from last June. He barged into MacLean Bible Church in Vienna, Virginia coming right in from the golf course still in his cleats. He stayed for eleven minutes. And the service he interrupted was dedicated to the twelve people who’d died in the mass shooting in Virginia Beach a few days before. He didn’t pray for them. He let the pastor pray for him. Look at him smirking. It’s like he thinks he’s getting an award. And he was, wasn’t he? Better to say a reward. The same one the hypocrites do when they pray in public. On Easter last year, asked what Easter means, he gave the impression he’d never heard of the Resurrection. He’s unclear about the Crucifixion too. This year he wished us all a Happy Good Friday. At the National Prayer Breakfast in February where the President traditionally leads the gathering in prayer, his “prayer” was a self-pitying jeremiad full of spite and vituperation aimed at the sinners who’d brought about his impeachment. In place of a Bible, he held up the front page of the Washington Post with the headline “ACQUITTED”.

Supposedly he has a spiritual adviser. More like a coach. Paula White. She’s a grifter too, like most everyone who goes to work in the Administration or sets themselves up as his advocate, apologist, or unofficial aide. Her job is to help him crib for moments when he’s supposed to sound like the leader of a “Scripture-based”---read White Christian---nation his religiously minded voters expect him to be. He probably pays as close and sustained attention to her as he does to all his advisers.

Try pointing all of this out to any of the Right Wing Evangelicals who make up the real majority of his voters and the ones who don’t meet you with blank stares will tell you he stopped sinning when God made him President. Others, who are more honest with you and themselves, will tell you he in himself and as himself doesn’t matter, the Lord has often used broken vessels for His purpose. Look at David. And if you look, you can see where they’re coming from.

Donald Trump, the idiot who would be President, is often viewed by the fanatical Christian right as delivered by God. Yes, a man who has had three wives, cheated on all three of them, five kids total (well, and possibly another one out of wedlock), paid off a porn star and a stripper, lied, cheated, stolen and conspired with a foreign adversary to cheat his way into the White House - he is their moral compass.---Red Painter, Crooks and Liars, June 2, 2019.

You can write a reductive biography of David yourself that almost matches that. In fact, you have to leave out a couple of details to avoid making David sound worse, like arranging to get one of his own soldiers killed in battle so he could sleep with the man’s wife. On the other hand, to make the comparison work, you have to ignore that David was punished for his sins. That he repented and begged for forgiveness. Trump has cavalierly confessed he’s never asked for forgiveness or seen any need to. And you have to ignore that David was a warrior and hero, a good king---as in competent and successful, along with, for the most part, wise, just, and answerable to his people and attentive to their needs and concerns. But if you add this to the discussion, and you’re not met with more blank stares or insistence that Trump is a good president, you’ll get reminded that it doesn’t matter what he is personally. What matters is he’s doing the work God wants done. And, you know, as a former Catholic, I half-see the point.

One of my early and favorite lessons on the value Catholics place on good works as the ticket into heaven is the story of the mean-spirited and cold-hearted miser who is nonetheless a philanthropist and dies beloved by the people in general and celebrated and mourned by the nation even though his family is not the least bit sorry to see him go. His dead soul is surprised to find itself welcomed into heaven and even makes the case to St Peter that there must have been a mistake. He was a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner, worse than Scrooge before Scrooge’s reclamation, and if anyone deserved damnation it was himself.

St Peter reminds him of his philanthropy and of all he gave and did to help people in need and make the world a better and happier place.

The miser says, “But I only did all that to spite my greedy relatives and do them out of the money they expected to inherit!’

To which St Peter answers, presumably with a smile broadening his tear-scarred face, the reminder of his own damnable sin of denying Jesus three times on the night of Jesus’ arrest and his repentance and forgiveness, “It doesn’t matter why you did it. It matters what you did and you did the world a great good.”

The “good” Trump does is in hurting THEM, Those Others! Like appointing hack judges who will rule to ban abortion and to make America great again by making it a white Christian nation where only straight, white Right Wing Christians can claim to be real Americans, no others need apply.

But the why he’s doing something is inseparable from what he’s doing. What he’s doing is trying everything he can think of to get himself re-elected, which includes pushing for churches to re-open their doors on Sundays. He’s doing exactly what he means to do---trick his own most loyal voters to march out and get sick and die to save his political skin.

Most churches remained closed to in-person worship. Ones that had already re-opened their doors have closed them again as it’s turned out they were tempting their Lord and God and their ministers and congregants came down with COVID-19. It’s all God’s will, right?

Fortunately, polls are showing that the vast majority of Americans, including many of his voters, are far more sensible than he gives them credit for. We’re more inclined to listen to our doctors, local health officials, local newspapers and TV station news, to our families, friends, and neighbors, and our own common sense than to him and the idiot Right Wing Republican Governors aping his reckless political skin-saving.

Still, it’s infuriating. It’s even gotten to Father James Martin, the popular Jesuit priest, author, and theologian. Martin is usually close to saintly in his mild-manneredness, as anyone (like me) who’s been watching his daily live Faith Sharing video chats on his Facebook page can tell you. Friday, though, he wasn’t as characteristically mild-mannered in his post reacting to Trump’s “order” that states allow churches to open their doors. You can almost see his jaw-clenching as he typed:

The President said today that he will "override the governors" and force states to allow churches to open. Churches should not be opened (or closed) by order of a president, but because it is safe to do so. To open churches before it is safe would needlessly put more lives at risk. And that would be the opposite of pro-life. Governors and religious leaders should follow the advice of public health experts and epidemiologists to help prevent the spread of infection and preserve life. Everyone wants to go back to church, including me, but not at the risk of increased infection and death, especially among the most vulnerable.

Churches are indeed essential for Christians, and the desire to worship together is a holy desire. But holy though your desire may be, it's not just about you and your desire. It's about protecting the other person, especially if you are, like many people, asymptomatic. Wearing masks, maintaining social distance and even not gathering in churches protects the other person…

I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand. If you have the measles and a doctor says, "Don't go to church because you might infect a woman who is pregnant," you don't rail at your doctor for "impinging on your freedom." You listen to the doctor, make the sacrifice, and stay home, as a way of protecting the other person.

All these preventive actions are ways of caring of the other person--that is, ways of loving.

You can read Martin’s whole post and watch his videos by following the link to his page.

By the way, Sunday was an important Holy Day in the Church calendar: the Feast of the Ascension. (I’m betting Paula White didn’t get that into Trump’s head. I’m betting she didn’t even bother to try.) But in most dioceses Catholics weren’t obligated to go to church to attend mass. In most dioceses they still couldn’t.

Needless to say, Trump doesn’t care that there are other kinds of houses of worship besides Christian churches, congregations of believers other than Christian, and they all don’t meet for services on Sundays. He doesn’t seem aware that even at Christian churches the faithful don’t need them only on Sunday and for things other than singing a few hymns, muttering half-hearted prayers, and trying not to fall asleep during the sermon.

And even more needless to say, he didn’t go to church Sunday.

Differing views of two young women on religion

Posted Sunday morning, May 17, 2020.

Detail from “Prayer” by John Phillip. 1859. Courtesy of the Royal Academy, London, via the Victorian Web.

Lara was not religious. She did not believe in rites. But sometimes, in order to endure life, she needed it to be accompanied by some inner music. She could not invent such music each time for herself. This music was the word of God about life, and Lara went to church to weep over it.

---from”Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak.

______________________________________________________________________________

It seemed strange to the young woman that they said grace before meals in this house. She wasn’t going to bother with all that God-in-Heaven stuff and say prayers, not she. Of course there was a higher power, Fate or Providence, whatever you liked to call it...but so far as she was concerned the church was just big business…

---from”All for Nothing” by Walter Kempowski.

Today's reading is from the Book of Common Sense

Lifted from the album, Friday morning, April 17, 2020. Posted Sunday morning, April 19.

"Social distance from others as you would have them distance from you...": Community Reformed Church of Colonie. Colonie, New York. Friday morning, April 17, 2020.

James Baldwin reflects on his early theater career

Posted Tuesday morning, February 11, 2020.

Detail from “Family Friendship Baptist Church" by Ernie Barnes, 1994. Copyright the Ernie Barnes Family Trust. Photo by Victoria L. Valentine via Culture Type.

I am still about twelve or thirteen. I can be fairly certain about all this, because my life changed so violently when I entered the church, and I entered the church around the time of fourteen. When I entered the church, I ceased going to the theater. It took me awhile to realize I was working in one.

---James Baldwin, from “The Devil Finds Work”.

Prayer is mysterious...

Posted Sunday morning, February 2, 2020.

Detail from “The Heavenly and Earthly Trinities” by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. Circa 1675-1682. The National Gallery via Wikipedia.

Another very short Sunday sermon, illustrated, from one of my favorite novels about baseball, actually...

Prayer is mysterious. God is even worse…

---David James Duncan, “The Brothers K”.

Prisoners' Round

Posted Sunday morning, February 2, 2020.

Detail from “Prisoners’ Round” by Vincent Van Gogh. 1890. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art. Moscow, via The Guardian.

On why you should never make fun of someone who's been arrested: a short Sunday sermon with guest preachers Irving Howe, Ignzio Silone, and Vincent Van Gogh. Howe takes the pulpit first to cite Silone, chapter and verse...

And here is an anecdote in which the Italian writer Ignazio Silone remembers an incident from his childhood. He saw, in front of his house, a “pitiful, farcical sight,” a little man, a prisoner , being dragged away by two enormous policemen.

“Look how funny he is,” I said to [my father] with a laugh.

My father looked severely at me, dragged me to my feet and led me to his room. I had never seen him so angry at me.

“What have I done wrong,” I asked him, rubbing my injured ear.

“Never make fun of a man who’s been arrested! Never!”

“Why not?”

“Because he can’t defend himself. And because he may be innocent. In any case, because he’s unhappy.”

---from “The American Newness”, by Irving Howe.

Weather Report. Sunday morning, December 8, 2019: All the weather and everything I'm reading must converge

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday morning, December 8, 2019. Posted Sunday morning, December 29, 2019.

Flannery O'Connor, short story writer and novelist, and Catholic intellectual, on the front steps of her home in Midgeville, Georgia, in 1959. Photo by Floyd Jillson of the Atlanta Journal Consitution, via AP, via the New York Times.

Sunday: 8 a.m. 7 degrees! Correction: 9 degrees. Much better. Productive day so far. 1 mug of hot chocolate, 2 cups of coffee downed. 1 bowl of oatmeal, raisins and spice. 2 stories about last night’s Knicks game read. Knicks lost a heartbreaker to the Pacers, 104-103. Knicks could have tied it up and sent the game into overtime but Julius Randle missed a free throw with 0.1 seconds left on the clock. 3 poems by Charles Wright read---”Deep Measure”, “Thinking of Winter at the Beginning of Summer”, “Jesuit Graves”. “Jesuit Graves” begins with a weather report from the Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, Ireland, July 3, 1995:

Midsummer. Irish overcast. Oatmeal-colored sky. …

Glasnevin is the final resting place of many long-dead Jesuits, including the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The poem ends with what I took as a reference to one of Hopkins’ poems…

Whatever rises comes together, they say. They say.

The they that say are paraphrasing the line "Everything that rises must converge" and I took them to include Flannery O’Connor and I thought, “That’s where she got it. Of course.” O’Connor was a fiercely devout Catholic with a contrarian bent that sometimes bent toward the border of the heretical. She’d have made a good Jesuit. Hopkins would have been a source of inspiration. Turns out the title of her story and the collection that contains it were taken from “The Phenomenon of Man” by the Jesuit priest, philosopher, and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard’s writings helped persuade the Catholic Church to come around on the theory of evolution. I read “The Phenomenon of Man” when I was in college and understood about every third word. I still can’t tell you what the noosphere is exactly. I think his Omega Point, the point towards which everything that rises converges, is kind of like entropy but with intelligence. I think. He took the word from the Book of Revelation: "I am the Alpha and the Omega." Flannery O’Connor went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s one of the reasons I went there. So Wright’s they includes Teilhard and O’Connor. And himself, and, I guess, me.

Teilhard reached his Omega Point in 1955. O’Connor reached hers in 1964. She died of lupus. She’s buried in Memory Hill Cemetery in her hometown of Midgeville, Georgia. Teilhard’s Jesuit grave is not far from here in Hyde Park. It’s on the grounds of what was St Andrew’s-on-Hudson Jesuit novitiate. The Jesuits closed shop there in 1968 and sold the property in 1972 to...the Culinary Institute of America. If you go there and ask they’ll give you the key to the cemetery and you can visit Father Teilhard’s grave. Next time we’re in Hyde Park, I’ll stop and ask.

Somewhere in the house is a copy of “The Phenomenon of Man”. On a nearby shelf is “Everything That Rises Must Converge”. On another shelf is "The Oxford Book of English Verse". I should dig one or the other or all three out and do some reading. But weather reports shouldn’t require that sort of homework. I’m just going to have another cup of coffee and re-read Wright’s poem. Here it is...

Midsummer. Irish overcast. Oatmeal-colored sky.
The Jesuit pit. Last mass
For hundreds whose names are incised on the marble wall
Above the gravel and grassless dirt.
Just dirt and the small stones---

how strict, how self-effacing.

Not suited for you, however, Father Bird-of-Paradise,
Whose plumage of far wonder is not formless and not faceless,
Whatever you might have hoped for once.
Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, 3 July 1995.
For those who would rise to meet their work,

that work is scaffolding.

Sacrifice is the cause of ruin.
The absence of sacrifice is the cause of ruin.
Thus the legends instruct us,
North wind through the flat-leaved limbs of the sheltering trees,
Three desperate mounds in the small, square enclosure,

souls God-gulped and heaven-hidden.

 

P. Gerardus Hopkins, 28 July 1844-8 June 1889, Age 44.
And then the next name. And then the next,
Soldiers of misfortune, lock-step into a star-colored tight dissolve,
History's hand-me-ons. But you, Father Candescence,
You, Father Fire?

Whatever rises comes together, they say. They say.

---"Jesuit Graves" by Charles Wright, collected in "Oblivion Banjo: The Poetry of Charles Wright".

Filed under How the Weather Was.

A life of neither praise nor blame: Marco Rubio's place in hell is not actually in hell

Adapted from the Twitter feed and mined from the notebooks, Sunday, October 27, 2019. Posted Monday morning, November 18.

“The Barque of Dante” by Gustave Dore.

Florida's Republican Senator and virtual lay preacher Marco Rubio has me inspired to read Dante and the Bible for reasons he probably wouldn’t like.

Early this past summer, Rubio, unbidden and not followed by me, began showing up in my Twitter feed to tweet bible verses at me and anybody else unfortunate enough to wander into the shadow of his virtual sidewalk pulpit. He seemed to prefer King James versions of the Psalms. I’m a Revised Standard Version citer of scripture myself. The tweeted passages of chapter and verse I saw were short and without commentary or annotation. I’m not sure what he was up to. Probably just being a good Christian by his lights, beginning the day with a prayer and doing his praying in public the way many American Christians do---the way many Americans do even if they’re not believers. We make prayers of many things. Listen to the callers on sports talk shows the morning after a game. Read the tweets in your TL without focusing on the specifics. Pay attention to what your co-workers are saying as they settle in at their desks. Listen for the tone of people in any workplace use when they greet each other, their clients, customers  as they take up their stations on the line or step up to their counters and cash registers, climb into the cabs of their trucks, call in their first patients, open their briefcases, or pick up their tablets, grade books, or tools. “Hot enough for you?” can be as much of a prayer as a Hail Mary. We’re all hypocrites certain of our reward, although I prefer not to think of us as hypocrites. I think of us over-sharers. It’s like Saul Bellow said, we can’t resist the opportunity of doing acquaintances the favor of cheerfully brow-beating them with bits of well-intentioned advice and helpfully offered if unasked for opinion. Bellow would know. A great chunk of his writing is advice and opinion, not always cheerfully given but usually, at least when he was in good form, funny enough to let pass without argument. We seem to take it for granted that whoever we’re talking to, even a perfect stranger, has been waiting all day to hear what we think. But Christians, especially of the conservative variety, seem to believe it’s their duty to let us know they’re doing us a favor by sharing what they regard as good news---the Good News. 

And there are many other things that starting the day with a prayer might mean. It’s a way of offering the fruits of the day to God. It’s a way to ask for his help getting through whatever life dumps on you during the course of the day. It’s a way to remind yourself that there’s more to life than work and making money. It’s a way to compose yourself, order your thoughts, tame your emotions, and get both your mind and body in gear. It can be any combination of all of those things or all of those things. On the other hand, it can be hypocrisy, an attempt to fool God or yourself or your voters into thinking you are a good and pious Christian and deserve your office and to continue in it just for that.

How many psalms contain lines that are versions of “Lord, save me from my enemies and curse them to pieces while you’re at it!" Invoked by politicians, they might as well translate as “Vote for me and to hell with my opponent!”

Like I said, I don’t know what Rubio was up to, but I pretended to think he was confessing to a guilty conscience. Those lines from the Psalms, I wrote, weren’t prayers of penance, they were cries of lamentation and despair. Rubio was crying out in terror as he felt his soul being pulled down to hell. I fancied he was feeling the guilt all supporters, enablers, and kowtowers to Trump ought to be feeling. And I quoted a passage from Canto XXXIII of Dante’s “Inferno” in which Dante and Virgil encounter the damned soul of a priest Dante thinks is alive and well back up on earth. The priest’s spirit explains that hell has a good share of damned souls among its population whose bodies are still walking around up top inhabited by demons making mischief and doing evil in their names---Dante’s version of zombies, walking dead but sentient and with personalities. 

Rubio’s Twitter prayers were showing up in my timeline in late spring and early summer. Sometime in mid-summer they stopped---well, I stopped seeing them. Given the vagaries of Twitter and changes in my own schedule that changed the times of day when I looked at my feed, I was probably just missing them. For all I know he tweeted out all of Leviticus and the whole book of Numbers when I wasn’t looking and had moved on to Dueterotomy. Recently, however, he’s started appearing regularly again.

These days his tweets are more prosaic and explicitly political. He’ll still throw out the occasional bible verse, but more often I’ll see something like this one:

Two things are true

There’s only been ONE man EVER who was always right & deserves blind loyalty & his name was Jesus;

And

No matter what a Republican does the left will never be fair to them. What they want is Republicans who will douse themselves in kerosene & light a match.

I’m not sure Jesus himself felt he deserved blind loyalty. After all, he did choose the apostle most prone to questioning him and who is famous for having denied him three times as the rock upon which to build his church. Never mind. The point is that Rubio’s trying to have it both ways here: taking an allusive swipe at Trump loyalists in the Republican ranks but then, as if frightened that even that weak bit of dissent would get him in trouble, turning right around to lash out in no uncertain terms at Democrats. 

Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, a Republican political strategist without portfolio and a regular conservative commentator for various TV bobblehead shows who has never been fondly disposed toward the villain in the Oval Office, has been seeing the same tweets. She was a supporter and friend of Rubio’s. Not so much anymore. She’s angry and disappointed with him, and she’s expressed it on TV and on Twitter. Here’s a good example:

My God.

Trump turned the talented guy once lauded as the “Republican Savior”, into a caricature of his former self. He hides behind Bible verses to defend a man who eviscerates Christian & American values daily. Marco could have been a contender. Now, he’s just a pretender.

Broadcast journalist and news show producer Soledad O’Brien is more than angry. She’s furious, and not the least bit circumspect about it. @-ing right at him, she’s called Rubio a coward, a coward again, a cowardly senator, an American Coward, a “Profile in Courage”, and a man without a moral compass,

Then she gets mad.

You are horrible.

She's been the opposite of an amen-choir.

Rubio:

"Did you fail to rescue those who were being dragged off to death,those tottering, those near death, because you said, 'We didn’t know about it'? Surely, the Searcher of hearts knows and will repay all according to their deeds" 

Proverbs 24:11-12

O’Brien:

Yes, Senator, the Lord is noticing these failures of yours.

Rubio: “LORD, be gracious to us; for you we wait. Be our strength every morning, our salvation in time of trouble!

Isaiah 33:2

O’Brien:

Yes Lord, we wait.  For Senator @marcorubio to grow some courage and stand up to corruption. We wait as Little Marco shrinks even smaller to Tiny Marco, because he lacks bravery and lacks ability. We wait for him to stand up for those values he likes to talk about.  Amen.

And responding to the tweet that got to Navarro-Cárdenas, she tweeted back with the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

. A Senator so cowardly he won’t stand up to President Trump nor name him in this tweet. Surely there’s a biblical verse about cowards that would apply here?

There probably is, but I can’t call one to mind at the moment. There is a passage from Dante, however, that fits the bill.

It’s routine now for Democrats and liberals to call Republicans cowards for refusing to stand up for the country by standing up to Trump. I don’t think they’re cowards. Most of them. I think they’re Republicans. The most representative Republicans. The party is rotten with racists, know-nothings, bigots, hypocrites, sexists---male and female---bullies, authoritarians, moneygrubbers, status-seekers, grievance-collectors, resentment-mongers, revenge-seekers, ignoramuses, and fools, and they send people just like themselves to Congress, and a great many of those who are not truly representative are cynical and corrupt and willing to pretend for the money and the power that it earns them. There are plenty of cowards among them. They aren’t afraid of Trump himself so much as his voters though. They’re afraid of losing their jobs. Almost all of them, even ones from the reddest of red states and districts have to worry about being primaried from the Right. Marco Rubio, however, would seem to be in pretty safe position compared to a lot of the rest of his caucus.

Rubio was re-elected to the Senate in 2016. He doesn’t have to worry about his job for another three years. And he won with over 200,000 more votes than Trump got in Florida, 4,835,191 to 4,617,886 or 52 percent of the vote to Trump’s 49. 

But I think Rubio is afraid of something else.

He’s afraid of spoiling his own future Presidential hopes.

Rubio is only forty-eight. He can run in the next five presidential elections after this coming one and still not be as old on the fifth go-round as Trump, Bernie, or Biden are now and Warren will be next fall.  But at least for the next few cycles he’ll need the votes of the base to win the nomination. And to have a chance of securing those votes he has to at least appear to be with them in their loyalty to their hero-king. It must gall him though. He knows he’s a better person than Trump. He knows he’s more deserving of his office. He knows what Trump is and what the base wants. And he has some pride. He must hate it that he has to crawl before the bully and idiot who humiliated him in 2016. And he’s shown signs of having a conscience and a heart, particularly in his dealings with the students who survived the shootings at Parkland. 

But to show it---let alone act on it---would cost him votes among the hideous men and women he needs. So he’s stuck, trapped between principle and ambition, afraid to do the right thing, afraid to go all-in for Trump like the weasel Lindsey Graham. Neither hero nor villain except by cowardly default, he lives a life of ineffectiveness and inconsequence, a life that earns him neither praise nor blame, and Dante assigns a place for such timid souls. 

It’s just inside Hell’s gate, on the bank of the River Styx. Here they spend eternity, despised by the saved and the damned, ignored by the angels and the devils. Their punishment is to know what they might have done, could have done, should have done, and will never be able to do...

Here sighs and lamentations and loud cries
were echoing across the starless air,
so that, as soon as I set out, I wept.

Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements,
accents of anger, words of suffering,
and voices shrill and faint, and beating hands—

all went to make a tumult that will whirl
forever through that turbid, timeless air,
like sand that eddies when a whirlwind swirls.

And I—my head oppressed by horror—said:
“Master, what is it that I hear? Who are
those people so defeated by their pain?”

And he to me: “This miserable way
is taken by the sorry souls of those
who lived without disgrace and without praise.

They now commingle with the coward angels,
the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.

The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them—
even the wicked cannot glory in them.”

And I: “What is it, master, that oppresses
these souls, compelling them to wail so loud?”
He answered: “I shall tell you in few words.

Those who are here can place no hope in death,
and their blind life is so abject that they
are envious of every other fate.

The world will let no fame of theirs endure;
both justice and compassion must disdain them;
let us not talk of them, but look and pass.”

---from Dante's "Inferno", Canto III, translated by Alan Mandelbaum.

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First Reading: "Little Marco crying out in terror as he feels his soul being sucked down into hell".

Second Reading: "From the letter of St Plum to the Cuthberts".

In place of a Psalm: "The Eager Damned".

And today's Communion song: "Dante: Figures in a Landscape".

Filed under Sunday Sermon.

Blind fools!

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Sunday evening, November 10. Posted Monday morning, November 11. Slightly revised Monday afternoon.

“Woe Unto You, Scribes and Pharisees” by James Tissot. Circa 1890. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, via Wikipedia.

Scribes. Not lawyers. Scribes. It’s “lawyers” in the song from “Godspell”. Scribes in both Matthew and Luke. The composers of the song needed the two syllables. Jesus needed only the one. Don’t these God-botherers ever read their bibles?

A 3-year, coordinated effort has been underway to remove [Donald Trump] from office.

Jesus warned us — watch out for the lawyers

—-Trump toady, apologist, and Scriptural illiterate Republican Senator from Tennessee Marsha Blackburn on Twitter, Sunday, November 10, 2019.

The gospel Blackburn thinks she’s alluding to is probably Matthew’s. But it might be Luke’s. Likely it’s a conflation of both vaguely remembered from her Sunday School days. The key word in Matthew, and in Luke, and in “Godspell” is “hypocrites” and the important line is “they do not practise what they teach.”

Yep. It’s teach not preach, he says pharisaically and aware of the irony.

I wonder if Blackburn saw that her fellow hypocrite and even more embarrassingly toady Rand Paul tweeted this the other day (The link is to Howard Dean’s response, so there’s a cushion.):

From law professor and Chairman of the Board of the Federalist Society Steven G. Calabresi: House Democrats Violate The 6th Amendment By Denying Trump A Public Trial

Luke has Jesus chastising the “experts on the law”. This Calabresi qualifies, at least in Rand Paul’s view—-and keep in mind Rand Paul himself is an expert on nothing except eye glasses paid for by Medicare which he purports to want to see trashed—-as an expert on the law.

There I go again, citing scripture for my purpose. Jesus was disputing with the experts on religious law, you know, the people who scolded others on the proper way to be Jewish the way Right Wing Christians like Blackburn scold their fellow Americans on the proper way to be Christian—-which is their way. Those would be the “lawyers” Blackburn’s warning us Jesus warned about. Those are the “lawyers” Jesus said don’t practice what they teach, the “lawyers” who “on the outside look righteous to others, but inside...are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”

Blackburn, you won’t be surprised to hear, is a classic ladder-puller. She boasts of being the first woman from Tennessee to serve in the United States Senate without acknowledging the role feminism played in getting her there and while voting to deny other women the rights and benefits that would give them the opportunities to make their own way in life. She's anti-abortion but hardly pro-child and pro-mother. She’s also anti-LBGT rights, a climate change denialist, a rejector of evolution, a staunch supporter of Trump’s anti-immigration policies—-she’s not about to invite any strangers in—-and a Second Amendment absolutist. She joined in nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for his handling of North Korea. As a member of the House of Representatives she voted to repeal the ACA every chance she got. No comfort for the sick there. Children have to suffer and die so the rich can store up even more treasure on earth. A typical Right Wing Republican.

There’s another phrase that appears in Matthew, Luke, and “Godspell”.

Blind fools!

A reading from the letter of St Plum to the Cuthberts

Adapted from the Twitter feed and posted Saturday morning, November 9, 2019.

Our godly president working on his swing at his golf course Trump International Golf Links near Aberdeen Scotland back in 2011 before he was either godly or president. File photo by David Moir/Reuters via the Washington Post.

Marco Rubio, senator from Florida and virtual lay preacher, is still at it, tweeting out bible verses as far as I can tell at random that he either hasn't thought through the implications of, are mea culpas and cries for help and forgiveness as he feels his soul being sucked down into hell, or are implicit criticisms of our most godly president he doesn’t have the courage to voice offline and directly. It might just be he’s praying in public as the hypocrites do. Here's one that turned up in my timeline last night:

The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.

That’s from the gospel according to Luke, Chapter 16, Verse 10. Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development who served as Director of the USAID’s office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance under President Obama and appears to know his Bible, retweeted Rubio, providing this exegesis:

Basically this is the Bible warning us that someone who lies about inauguration crowd size will also lie about Ukraine.

But I think Wodehouse might have put it better:

Golf... is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well.

Our godliest president, of course, cheats at golf.

Filed under Your Not So Daily Wodehouse.

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Passing the collection plate: The Wodehouse quote is from “The Clicking of Cuthbert” which is available without red-letter annotation as a handsome hardcover, a thrifty paperback, and a free kindle downloadable edition at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

I’m an Amazon associate and earn a (very small) commission for books etc. bought through the blog.

Dante: Figures in a landscape

Posted Sunday morning, October 27, 2019.

“Dante and Virgil in the Ninth Circle of Hell” by Gustave Doré. 1861. Musée de Brou, via Wikipedia Spain.

I’m working on a post about Marco Rubio and Dante’s “Inferno”. Don’t worry. It works. In the meantime I thought you’d like this. Embedded throughout The Divine Comedy are passages of short naturalistic descriptions of life back on earth. They’re there for comparison’s sake and especially in “Inferno” to remind readers what the damned have lost forever. I think they’re also there to provide emotional relief to readers and to Dante himself. In the passage below from Canto XXXII, Dante conjures up chilly scenes of winter along the Danube and Don Rivers that almost make me want to go to those places. That’s the point though. It’s still hell and the wanting is part of the damnation...

When we were down below in the dark well,
beneath the giant’s feet and lower yet,
with my eyes still upon the steep embankment,

I heard this said to me: “Watch how you pass;
walk so that you not trample with your soles
the heads of your exhausted, wretched brothers.”

At this I turned and saw in front of me,
beneath my feet, a lake that, frozen fast,
had lost the look of water and seemed glass.

The Danube where it flows in Austria,
the Don beneath its frozen sky, have never
made for their course so thick a veil in winter

as there was here; for had Mount Tambernic
or Pietrapana’s mountain crashed upon it,
not even at the edge would it have creaked.

And as the croaking frog sits with its muzzle
above the water, in the season when
the peasant woman often dreams of gleaning,

so, livid in the ice, up to the place
where shame can show itself, were those sad shades,
whose teeth were chattering with notes like storks’.

---Dante, “Inferno”, Canto XXXII, translated by Alan Mendelbaum.