If, in the course of human events, we face threats on either side, how are we to avoid them both?  How, if one is simply the consequence of existence, and the other is the consequence of striving to go on existing?

The next big idea:  Religion is our salvation.

This idea is reflexively rejected by some, particularly in light of hyper-current events.  Religious extremism – namely radical Islam – is on the rise, and it is hard to see how massacres in the name of Allah can be associated with the common good.

We are going to have to re-establish our removed perspective.  Remember, you are an alien from another planet, or you are from the future.  Observe the world as though it does not immediately threaten you, a state of fear which always distorts reality.  Rather, view it as an art critic, or an economist.

Now:  Even if a religion is false, it can be a net-benefit as long as it is properly ordered.  What does this mean?

It means that, after some distance traveled to the left, in the name of buffering society from the natural order – that is, after a population has become civilized – a powerful social force is needed to prevent further drifting to the left.

It is needed because endless drifting to the left is the road to perdition.  It eventually leads to destruction not by nature, but by man.  It must be avoided just as arduously as destruction by nature.

That is why religion often appears to be a conservative force, because it is restraining the leftist impulse of civilized people.  The paradox is that religion itself is a civilizing force on populations that are far to the right, still close to the natural order.  In that way, it is also liberal.

One of the complaints today is that Christianity is outdated, regressive; one of the complaints about early Christians is that they cared about the pagan poor more than the pagans did.

That is essentially the same Christianity, appearing on both the right and the left of two given cultures.  And this is why I have been fond of saying that Catholicism is neither conservative nor liberal – it is both, in exactly the right places.

So a properly ordered religion is that which will restrain a culture from going too far to the left, or the right, to the point of destruction.  There is one other thing, which separates religion from ideology.

That is, that religion admits a realm beyond the natural.  Ideology is a funny business, because it ostensibly is focused on this world, and the proper values and order that a society should have…but its promises are always unrealistic.  Quite literally.

Religion, on the other hand, does not restrain itself with the natural realm.  Religion sees through it, beyond it, to the essence of reality.

Yes, there is a world all around you – but where did it come from?  Ideology hardly cares.  Mythology barely cares.  Religion cares deeply, out of all proportion to the natural or synthetic order.

That is precisely why it is vital to civilization.  For a society to be sustainable, it must perceive its object as something bigger and better than mere survival, so that the effort of resisting the left and the right is worthwhile.  Don’t believe me?

Take away religion, and all quasi-religions.  This includes the Carl Sagan brand of scientism.

Do that, and you have nothing but nihilism.  You have utter despair, loss of meaning and purpose, on a massive scale.  Mere survival is not enough for the nihilist – indeed, they sometimes take their lives as a result of their nihilism.

With religion, society can achieve a kind of balance in tension between the two forces.  It can even rotate after a fashion, so that it becomes more leftist in certain ways and more rightist in other ways.  It may be that there is no permanent balance – but all that is needed is some balance.*

Further proof – GK Chesterton’s saying that unless man believes in God, he will believe anything.  The critical point is that man must always believe something, because he cannot possibly know everything.  We are always drawing lines of best fit.  Even this series skips over a lot of details in order to present a working model…which itself is a map.

And that is enough to tie off that thread.  From here, we will consider some of the ways in which Catholicism might participate in modern politics, as compared with the present status and view of religion in politics.  Furthermore, I will attempt to offer a few applications of the big ideas in this series, which may be of some use.

**It occurs to me – and surely to the reader – that we could get into some geometrical imaging here.  Perhaps a triangle…a trinity!

No, I’m not ready for that.  Neither is the world.

“Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.”  – Joseph de Maistre

We come to explore why the series is called Politics..and Catholicism.  (Sure, go for a James Lipton voice there).

Earlier I made reference to properly ordered religion.  We will admit, for the sake of discussion, that a plurality of religions might qualify as properly ordered, even though they cannot all be 100% true.

We saw last time that the building and development of civilization just is a move to the left of the natural order.  It is an attempt by a population of humans to buffer themselves against the unrelenting current of the natural order (such forces as entropy and predation, which is entropy at 4x speed).  In so doing, a population can succeed so well that they are capable of swimming beyond stasis, further left, upstream.

This Cthulhu will do, unless there is some compelling reason (or force, or impulse) not to.  Some restraint, some dissonance with the population’s experience and expectations against reality, perhaps.  Or else some overwhelming incentive, worthy of abandoning the promises of swimming further left.*

Before stating the expected thesis…what is so bad about swimming ever to the left, anyway?  Didn’t we say that way lies Utopia?  Even if it is ever receding, doesn’t this indicate the desired and everlasting march of human progress?

(Perhaps you see a river in your mind, and a far-off horizon.  The Utopia is exactly like the horizon, but it is so haunting and alluring – not almost spiritual, but actually so – that the emptiness of the horizon reflects a world where natural dangers are erased, and life is lived tranquilly, with perfect understanding of everything.  Even the present feverish pitch of sexual fixation and exposure is suffocated and vanished, only a means to this godlike end.  Yes, I have tasted and seen…)

The problem is two-fold, and unfolds like proofs for the existence of God.  On the one hand, you have the historical account – every time we’ve tried Utopia, it ends in absolute disaster.  Look to any revolution and the events that follow.  It is easy to point to Stalin’s Soviet Union, but consider the “enlightened” French Revolution, when so many rationalists found themselves enraptured in a murderous frenzy.

On the other, it is a practical impossibility, which is why it so often ends in bloodshed.  People cannot be depended on to act with perfect virtue, no matter what traits are called virtuous.  You can call stealing good, or murder innocent – and people will violate them.  In order to silence the signal of human discord and rebellion, those humans must be exiled…or exterminated.

It is not only discord, but it is also the human inability to completely comprehend everything, which is necessary for controlling all variables in an environment (including an artificial one).  Ask a film director how difficult it is to make a movie exactly according to his vision – and then he has no control at all over the theater, or your living room.

Such a paradise cannot be achieved on this side of Glory.  It is utterly opposed to Glory, moving ever to the left, where men are made into gods, and all the natural order is destroyed, terminating in the abyss.

In other words, that way lies irreversible damnation.  Once walk through the gates – leave all hope behind.**

What shall it be, then?  The primal, fearsome end of the natural order, which is death?  Or the everlasting oppression of one man, or some men, dominating all the others, destroying that which conflicts with their designs?

Enter religion.  And you thought they invented “Hell” just to scare you.

*Here we have an understanding why suffering typically provokes a move further to the left – over time a population will inevitably lose members.  The reflex – not the reason, mind you – is to swim further away from the danger, not to live in harmony with it.  Therefore, a wealthy country experiencing relative peace will come to find smaller and smaller losses as intolerable as the great losses it once suffered.  If we have swum this far upstream, the rhetorical question goes, we can surely swim further and provide comfort/security/wealth to even more of our population.

**Yes, Hell is real.

Bring yourself back to the early days of humanity.

For all of us, even the experts, this is going to be a guess.  There is a saying that the least educated person in a historical period is more an expert of his time than the best scholar today.  This seems obviously true, and more true the more one thinks about it.

As little as we know about a culture within history, so much less do we know about a culture prior to history.  The densest and most surely communicated channel just doesn’t exist – that of language.

The first human population had to be focused on survival (what else was there?) and build from there.  Build what?

It appears that they built a system of the division of labor – hunters and gatherers – as well as migratory patterns in response to environmental stressors (eg. availability of food and weather patterns).  All of these practices are very much aligned with the natural order – as far to the right as humans get, if you will.  In fact, taken as pure concepts – which they surely weren’t in practice – you have virtually no subjugation of nature happening here.  Rather, you have nature leading the dance, and human beings following her lead.

I say they surely weren’t pure concepts, because toolmaking in human predecessors dates back a couple million years.  This would certainly be an imposition of human design on nature, the first small step in subduing the earth.  Such artifacts are the earliest signs of leftism (if you will).

One might persist that innovations like knifes and spears simply brought humans onto a level playing field with their would-be predators.  Indeed, other animals also demonstrate rudimentary toolmaking.  Moreover, a spear is surely not a gun, which seems to give greater advantages to the human over the animal.

All such debate ends, then, with the dawn of agriculture.  Somewhere between 13,000-11,000 BC, we find evidence of cultivation, even seedless figs!  Farm animal domestication occurred around the same time, all of which enabled the development of permanent settlements.

This imposition of human design upon plants and animals, I maintain, is a leftist impulse.  I am just a guy thinking, of course, you may call it whatever you wish.  But I think you will begin to see some phenomena explained the longer you entertain this idea.

Now these are the first great leaps of humanity.  Writing developed +/- 10,000 years later, and this enabled the communication across space and the transmission across time of incredible amounts of information.  This accelerated learning and innovation, as there was a steady and growing foundation of information to build from.

Skip ahead +/- 3,600 years, and you have the printing press (notice the diminishing time between major advancements).  Gutenberg’s invention is credited with all manner of advances, including a higher literacy rate, the faster spread of more information, and the wider spread of that information.

The more disparate innovations are shared, the more they accelerate innovation.  One mind makes a leap forward; another observes it and has some mental door unlocked for him.  He enters the next room and makes another leap forward.

Along the way, and directly related to these innovations, are advancements in science and technology.  And these too, according to our earlier big idea, are leftist moves in human activity.  Simple knowing – as in science – is arguably neutral, but you see how easily “and technology” follows.

And technology is certainly an imposition of human will on nature.  Look around you!  Subdue the earth, indeed.

These innovations occur in other areas of human endeavor, as well.  We have not plumbed deeply at all, and I will scarcely mention such others – law, politics, economics, culture.  They read like the headings of an old newspaper, things which might change over time, which people like to know about.

The sum total of these is what we call civilization.  The impulse to impose our will on the existing order is a leftist impulse, while the impulse to accept and preserve the existing order is a rightist impulse.  The leftist impulse drives toward utopia, which is always receding in the distance; the rightist impulse drives toward the natural order, which took us tens or hundreds of thousands of years to escape from.

We all know, in our basic instincts, that we prefer civilization, the imposition of human order, upon the natural order.  But the natural order just is the ruling order – if you do not resist it, or build against it, you are pulled back into it.

Does any bridge or dam last forever, unattended?  Have you ever seen a building which was abandoned 100 – even 20 – years ago?  The natural order is always pressing on us, always driving on.

So, Cthulhu is ever watchful of that looming eventuality, and ever swimming left against the current to escape it.  That just is what civilization is.  As long as Cthulhu – the collective human population – desires this protection from the pure natural order, it must swim left.

But Cthulhu is not intelligent enough, being a great beast acting on drives and impulses, to know when it has swum too far to the left.  Without some respect for the natural order – which is all we have, there is no other natural order – without some understanding of it, we do not understand how to order our civilization at all.

Remember, a constant and pure drive in only one direction is the road to destruction.  You only have to choose your destroyer – nature to the right, humans to the left.

To avoid this, we need some corresponding power which holds civilization in tension, which honors the rightist impulse and respects the leftist impulse, and appropriately restrains them both.  This we call religion.

Let’s take another important point:  Everyone is rightist about certain things, and everyone is leftist about other things.*

To thoroughly embrace either rightism or leftism, to the exclusion of the other, is a form of inhumanity.  Consider that the very first humans – indeed, one of the key ways we identify a hominid as human – were making tools.

A rock in the natural order is not a knife.  But it can be subdued, fashioned for that human purpose.  As soon as you start acting on any human design – anything not already found in nature before we arrived – you start acting on the leftist impulse.

This is not a sin.  Conservatives, you will not lose your soul by admitting it.  Indeed, conservatives are often innovators!  …exactly because they are willing to be leftists in certain areas.

The converse is also true.  Since Cthulhu – society – is always swimming left, yesterday’s liberals will often find themselves today’s conservatives.  That is because they were fixed on some cultural norm – say civil rights – which was to the left of the mainstream culture.  They were part of the push, the swimming to the left, until they accomplished their objectives.

Many of them, having pushed the culture left for their own ends, were surprised when the cultural momentum continued to the left – when sexual orientation and gender identity were added to civil rights – so that they soon found themselves more conservative than liberal.

There is even a name for this – neoconservatives.  Nor should they lose heart.  The shift does not mean they have gone to the dark side of politics.  Rather, they were fixed on some objective good, which had a subjective relation to the culture.  It didn’t matter whether the culture was to the left or the right of that good – they would have pushed for it either way.

Thus the…relative…futility of defining oneself as liberal or conservative.  That ground is always shifting.  So we will have a general idea of your positions today – but less idea tomorrow.

The truth is, if you tell me you are a Progressive or a Reactionary, I might have a better idea of your positions – because those are both off the map.  They are not subject to the volatility of the present day.  We know that they would have the map dramatically altered.

But a real human being will typically find themselves all over the map.  Perhaps they have been to some remote corner of the landscape, and they can say with confidence that any modification to the map would be disastrous to travelers there.  Or they might say the opposite, that the map needs to be modified, because everyone traveling there is getting killed.

More typically, they have visited a number of places themselves, and discerned where the map ought to be changed (so strict conservatism is false, for them) and where it really cannot be changed (so strict liberalism is false, for them).

Most typical of all, or so is my opinion – few have been anywhere at all.  The map has afforded them the luxury of having an opinion without having the experience – the authority gambit.  Here you have priests and pundits alike, soothsayers and celebrities, all of those who ply their trade in the immaterial.  These types you tend to find more thoroughgoing in their leftism or rightism, seldom switching sides.

Perhaps we will return to them.  You may wish to know why I would lump priests in there.

Where we really must go next is to the next important truth.  Why civilization itself is the primary reason Cthulhu always swims left, and why an enduring civilization is one that finds itself held in tension – which is why religion will never go away.

*I might as well say everyone is conservative about some things and liberal about other things.  But I want to shift into more precise language, because conservative and liberal are positions relative to some center, which could be almost anywhere.

Last time I was well into my second glass of wine, and I said something that I scarcely believe.  My second glass finished, I am now ready to defend it.

Subduing the earth is a liberal impulse.  Observing the natural law is a conservative impulse.

Let’s be a little more precise:  The leftist impulse is characterized by subduing the earth. The rightist impulse is characterized by observing the natural law.  Since the words liberal and conservative are more familiar, I’ll continue to make some use of them in this post.

If you are hung up on these characterizations at all, it is because of the present day alignment of environmental conservatism with – well, liberalism.  Progressivism, even.  And the apparent alignment of political conservatism with industry, big business.

Bring out the bugaboo – Global warming is a leftist cause.  Denial of global warming is a rightist cause.

Now, let us be painfully clear:  I am not attempting to say anything about the reality or unreality of global warming.  I do have an opinion, but it does not matter.  Global warming is only a litmus test for us.

Really, you can’t go on reading if you’re going to keep saying to yourself, “Yeah, but it’s totally a hoax.” or “Yeah, but it’s undeniably true.”

Quit arguing for one damned second.  We’re trying to say something important.  (Yes, I’m trolling.  But now I’m done).

First of all, denial of global warming is not equivalent to a hatred of the environment.  It can be based on the failure of predictive models, or indifference to the human plight (because, as you must know, something will survive global warming, even if we don’t).

So, the rightist tendency to deny global warming is not explicitly a denial of the natural order.  It is skepticism of the claims, and opposition to the proposed solutions.  What about those?

The proposed solutions vary widely.  The goal is to reduce greenhouse gases, which might be achieved by one of two means:  Either by advancing technology toward clean energy, or by taking current energy production off-line.  Ideally both.

Notice:  The tendency to develop advanced technology is form of subduing the earth.  We have subdued coal, and found it undesirable.  We will now subdue something else.

Since I have identified subjugation of the earth as a liberal impulse, this solution fits with your current understanding.  It is a liberal cause to advance clean energy by subduing more earth.  (A LOT more earth, in the case of solar power!)  Even people who are typically conservative will often agree with this direction.*

What is the conservative hesitation with clean energy?  Well, it changes the status quo, which is really pretty good.  (Can I get an amen, or are you reading this via brainwaves?)

Remember –  a conservative wants to conserve the order that exists.  He sees the value in it.  This is why he is doomed to failure.  In the meantime, he usually has a good point if anyone will listen to him.  If you go introducing novel energy – and worse, if that clean energy has not proved itself out – you are going to trigger his opposition.

You are drawing all over his map, and he’s pissed.  You’d be pissed, too, if it were your map, and someone was constantly renaming the roads and drawing in details and information that had not been verified.

What about the second general solution, to reduce greenhouse gases by reducing consumption?  Isn’t this a return to the natural order, by removing synthetic production?  Two points.

First, yes.  Who is further to the right – the Amish, or any given citizen of New York City?  The Amish have conserved their culture, by and large, and they are closer to the natural order.  And you would not hesitate to say they were further to the right.

Why aren’t the conservatives rallying against fossil fuels, then?

You start to see why conservatives always lose.  American Conservatives, you have to understand, have accepted a map further to the left of the Amish.  But they have defined this (relatively) more liberal map as THE map, the new foundational order, and thus they wish to preserve it.  Meanwhile, liberals have begun to modify THAT map, and Progressives are in the process of creating yet another new map…

Fossil fuels, then, are part of the old liberal map, which became the new conservative map.  Then conservatives (up to the present day) attempted to conserve that map – including the liberal modifications – while the liberals moved on, seeking other fuels which might be better than fossil fuels.

The full issue, of course, is far more complex.  There are economic implications, self-interested implications.  If you want your head to spin, consider whether nuclear energy is a liberal or a conservative cause.  (Pun intended)

We have left one thing out, which exaggerates the whole situation, and made my (very reasonable) opening assertion seem ridiculous.  What about the back-to-the-earth, primitive living Progressives?  Isn’t that a return to the natural order, and aren’t they very clearly leftists?

Short answer:  No, it is not a return at all.  It is a utopian vision, which is the end goal of leftism.

Longer answer:  Relatively few people actually pull off the return to earth, for one thing.**  For another – even if they do labor heavily, and subject themselves to the elements, and endure (or enjoy!) the solitude of nature, and suffer the inconveniences of primitive life – they almost invariably depend on the modern economy at some point.  Even the Amish accept US currency.

On the contrary, it turns out that the Progressive desire to return to the earth is something of a synthetic fabrication.  It is a romance, a thing not actually based in reality.

Reality is brutally difficult.  The vision is not.  Thus, the vision is a human invention.  If it were attempted, it would rely disproportionately on subduing the earth in visible and invisible ways.  All utopias do.

Perhaps you are not upside-down, only a little dizzy.  In any event, this is one of the big ideas:  That leftism tends toward subduing the earth, and rightism tends toward obeying the natural order.  The implications tend to turn some of our assumptions upside-down, but then, that’s because we had them backwards in the first place.

*Humans are both, liberal and conservative.  When we lock up one way or the other, the trouble starts.  But don’t get distracted.

**Many return, quite thoroughly, to the earth, never to be heard from again.

Let’s have it.

The two primal directives of our race are to obey the natural order and to subdue the earth.

Take the latter first.  I define it as imposing one’s own design on the raw material of reality.

If you build a house, you are subduing the earth.  For that matter, if you build an earthen hut, you are subduing the earth.

If you are a modern farmer, you have subdued many acres of earth.  If you have planted even a small garden, you have subdued some square footage of earth.  That earth would have done something else, something according to the natural order, if you hadn’t acted.

So, subduing is something of a neutral term, I would suggest.  One might read their own values into the industrial farmer while praising the backyard gardener.  Very well.  For our purposes, they both are subduing the earth.

Now take the former:  Observe the natural law.  Do you see how this is potentially at odds with subduing the earth?

The natural law says, for example, that there are seasons with the tilting of the earth’s axis.  Growing takes place above freezing temperatures, usually well above.  Subduing the earth is to make strawberries grow in the winter.

The natural law says our bodies were made for travel on foot.  Subduing the earth means riding on horseback, or driving cars, or flying airplanes.  There is danger in these things, as our bodies were made for speeds topping out around 20 mph, and that only in quick bursts.  When you drive at 70 mph, you are not always able to stop yourself in time before colliding with a fruit truck delivering strawberries in February.

Personal anecdote:  I do electrical work.  Whenever I have accidentally shorted a circuit, my reaction time was far too slow to effectively avoid the shocks and bursts.  (I have not suffered any serious injuries).  Electricity travels near light speed.  With electricity, we have subdued the earth – but the risks are increased.

Conversely, I would have no trouble escaping a forest fire caused by natural means – even by electrical lightning strikes.  The evidence says nearly all animal life escapes forest fires.  Our bodies are built to react to this danger, it is within our capacity.  That is the natural order.

There are, of course, other dangers in the natural order.  There is predation, for one, and exposure to the elements.  These are reasons we have sought to subdue the earth, so as to avoid these dangers and discomforts.

Thus there is a tension between the two drives, one to subdue the earth, and the other to heed the natural order.  They might both be appeased, say, by farming without the use of pesticides.  Or building with lumber from sustainable forests.

Let us add depth to our terms, then.

Subduing the earth is a liberal impulse.  Observing the natural law is a conservative impulse.

You will surely think I have this backwards.  Next time I will attempt to turn your world upside-down.

In the last post I alluded to the phenomenon that leftism typically triumphs over rightism.  In some circles, this is denoted by the saying, Cthulhu always swims left.  I repeat it here because I find it compelling.

Cthulhu, I was recently informed, is not an ancient creation, but a more modern one; the general idea is significantly older and goes like this.

Society – a large population of people – taken as a whole acts something like a great beast.  Very powerful when determined, and often consuming and destructive in action.  Motivated almost entirely by the appetites, guided all too lightly by a rudimentary reasoning process.

Again, a figure of speech.  We’re not going to press it too hard.

Now, assuming the socio-political spectrum is symmetrical, there would be no reason to think that Cthulhu would swim left or right.  One might reasonably suggest the beast swims both ways, depending on its impulses.  If it swam more to the right than the left, this would just be happenstance, an accident of history rather than any underlying trend.

Yet it really does appear that Cthulhu always swims left, wherever it appears.  There may be convulsions to the right, but the general trend is always left.

In broad strokes – the Ancient Greeks and Romans followed this pattern.  They rose to prominence and power by the natural order – military might, individual discipline, strong national identity – and fell by the synthetic order – political innovations, decadence, decay of borders.

Many of the European powers of the middle ages moved from monarchy and feudalism eventually to democracy and capitalism in the modern era.

This does not mean that every nation moves inexorably to the left, in a linear fashion.  Sometimes there are resets, what Christians have called revivals.  I suggested a convulsion.  In any case, a sudden and dramatic shift to an earlier map,* which return is believed to lead to prosperity and well-being.

Here is the question:  At the conclusion of the revival, which way does Cthulhu swim?  Does it continue to the right, or steer again to the left?

Let me quickly add that this is not necessarily a pejorative against all leftism.  Leftism is mercy to the Right’s justice.  As a Catholic, I believe there is a necessary tension between the left and right as the two sides of our nature, as the two primal directives of our race.  This will come in soon.**

No, my interest at the moment is not in judgment, but in curiosity – why is it that Cthulhu always swims left?  What, if anything, should be done about this?

*Chronology is not the critical fact here, but that is typically the direction, in time, toward which one finds the natural order.

**If a people will not remain in tension, they will cycle through endlessly.

We need not multiply explanations beyond necessity.  Here is the rule:

The conservative impulse is to preserve the existing order.  In our analogy, they desire to preserve the map as it is.

The liberal impulse is to modify the existing order as needed.  This occurs when certain conditions are met.

The exception is the condition of an existential threat, which tends toward a conservative reaction.

Now, what of the Progressive and the Reactionary?

From the far-left and the far-right, respectively, these are people who would just as soon scrap the whole map as try to alter it to their liking.  That is because, according to their liking, the society would present itself much differently.

Much is made of labels such as fascist and nazi, or terms such as gulag or communist.  As just a guy thinking, I won’t dwell much on these.  I am interested, instead, in real impulses, in the forces behind our movements and actions.

So – instead – when someone goes all the way to the left or the right of the political spectrum, what exactly does that mean?  Here was a revelation for me…

First, the spectrum is not symmetrical.  The reason is that it continues indefinitely in one direction, but has a fixed end in the other.  This is the means by which Leftism typically triumphs…but we’ll come back to that.

Second:  To the right is the natural order, and to the left is the synthetic order.  Thus it can be, for example, that from a representative democracy, one finds a centralization of power in both directions, left and right.  To the right, monarchy; to the left, central planning.  Again, more later.

The corollary here is the point of this post:  That a representative democracy is actually abhorrent to both the far-left and the far-right.  Since it is the current norm, it also appears to be the center.  But one could easily revise this view, with a little mental dexterity, and see it a representative democracy as both a far-left and a far-right bugaboo.

This may do some funny things to your political orientation.  Let’s take one example, and show how this is more an idiosyncrasy of our age rather than a fault with the overall forces.

In 21st century America, environmental conservatism is typically seen as…well, liberal.  Progressive even, if you consider vegans.  Yet that’s exactly where the fault line lies.

Start by observing that you can’t believe the popular narrative.  As a matter of fact, most conservatives believe in the conservation of the environment.  They may not agree with the same means of doing so as liberals might, but the end goal is roughly the same.  The quintessential narrative buster is the avid hunter – naturally, they want to preserve nature.  Or else they would have nothing to hunt.

Moreover, both liberals and conservatives understand that environmental protection is something of a balance.  If we never introduced any synthetic substance or pollutant into the environment, we would never have advance to our present sophistication.  Seldom is anyone looking for a return to the Paleolithic, except in diet.

Nor do they typically advocate for runaway pollution, or no-holds-barred resources stripping.

So much for the chasm between liberals and conservatives on the end goals for the environment – but what about Progressives?  And… vegans?*  Well, what happens in the natural order?

“Nature is red in tooth and claw.”  Lord Tennyson

It is simply not the case that anything which could eat meat would refrain from doing so, voluntarily.  Try the experiment with your dog – put a piece of broccoli on the floor next to a steak.  Full stop.

Yet I do retain my ostensible neutrality:  This does not mean the vegan is wrong.  It only means that veganism is a move to the left of the natural order, because it is an artificial proscription, and not the way anything in nature behaves on its own.

The more the natural order is manipulated and modified, the further you move to the left.  And if you can understand the physics at play here, you can readily see why the spectrum is not symmetrical…

*Forgive me – have I broken my promise of neutrality?  Or have you lost your sense of humor?

When a country – or a person – faces an existential threat, they will typically become more conservative.

Take an example of September 11, 2001, which unified a great deal of the country.

It goes without saying that neither the attacks on 9/11, nor everything al Qaeda has mustered since then, posed an actual existential threat to the U.S.  But it approximated an existential threat, because attacks are virtually unheard of on our homeland, and because the magnitude of the attack was so staggering.

One of the effects of this attack was a return to unmitigated patriotism – there was bipartisan support behind the premises that we needed to unite and retaliate.  Another was a return, at the citizen level, to faith.

There was one story after another of churches and synagogues and other places of worship filled up with pray-ers.  When many millions of people felt suddenly vulnerable, they turned to their childhood faith for assurance.

There was a renewed sense of pride in our civil servants and in each other, simply as Americans.  With a legitimate common enemy, we all returned to our common ground – which is fundamentally a conservative movement.

Let’s consider the map.

Consider our hypothetical country with their map (worldview).  A legitimate enemy is one which wishes our harm, and also wishes to replace our map with their own.*

Of course, if an enemy attacks, it is because our map does not produce the results they desire.  Our willingness to fight back means two things:  One, that we love our map, as it is, enough to risk injury and death.  Two, that we oppose theirs, at least enough that we do not want it to become our own.

The decision to fight back is often a result of both of these reasons, at maximum strength.  You might conceivably only love your own map, or only oppose the enemy’s map – but either way, you direct your actions toward the preservation of your own map, as it now stands.  You fight for your map, in its current edition, to continue to exist.

This is conservation by preservation from extermination.

In the swell of this movement, it will often happen that conservative edits are made to the map.  Our hypothetical country might recently have increased funding to the arts; in time of war, they return to a more spartan budget.  The country may have been attempting a new social program; in time of war, all things must be conserved, including attention and effort.

If all of the novel efforts and funding is thus restricted, what patterns of behaving and spending will the country favor?

Quite naturally, they will favor whatever they had been doing before.  They will undo any costly edits, they will make straight any winding paths, and they will highlight only the practical, necessary elements of the map, and perhaps scratch out others or redraw them as they were before.

This movement is just what the individual body does, writ large.  When facing down a hungry lion, one does not spend any energy worried about the pain in his toe or the new pants he was going to wear.  It’s time to survive, as you are.

*You will sometimes hear the question, “What if the Nazis had won World War II?”  The terrible thought, in addition to further suffering, is that we would all be indoctrinated into their worldview.  Their map would replace ours.

Last time I suggested that there are five or so conditions which prompt a group of people to break from moderation – from basic acceptance of their worldview map – toward liberalism (typically) or conservatism (occasionally).

The first condition was Suffering.

I have avoided, for five or so posts, getting into any details or value judgements against liberals or conservatives.  I intend to continue doing so throughout the series.  It doesn’t matter which way I lean, or which way you lean – we are simply observing these leanings from an alien point of view, to better understand them.  It may be that we learn something.

So, we will continue our observations via the analogy of the map.

Map = worldview.

Map =/= reality.

Therefore, worldview =/= reality.

A large population comes together, and by voice or by force they all come to accept a single map, which depicts reality.  It depicts reality, but is not equivalent with reality.

After the initial period of acceptance and adjustment, life begins to hum along.  Most everyone seems to find the map useful, and this young country develops a bit of confidence in itself.

It is soon found, however, that people occasionally traveling to a remote corner of the country – where the map is a bit unclear, to be honest – are falling off a cliff.  This happens many more times than anyone likes to admit, and soon the official cartographers are called together to discuss revising the map.

It is straightforward matter.  Everyone agrees that death is bad, especially death by splattering, and since the map was unclear anyway, it makes good sense to study the area and depict it accurately on the map.  This is done, and the revised map is published.  Life goes on, and no one can reasonably blame the map for any further deaths at that cliff.

Let’s step back.

My suggestion will be that it is a liberal impulse to want to modify the map, and it is a conservative impulse to want to conserve the map as it is.  Those are impulses, not people.

Observe:  In a case like this, everyone is both liberal and conservative.  That is, everyone senses the need to change the map, because of the obvious suffering it is causing.  At the same time, no one is suggesting that the map be scrapped – it generally works well, so they want to conserve the integrity of the map.  One might liken this to an amendment, both in purpose and need for consensus.

Neither impulse is categorically evil or good.  It is well that they both exist in balance.  If one dominated the other, we would have a never ending cycle of change (liberalism) or a societal rigor mortis (conservatism).

There is a condition which can prompt a conservative change:  Existential threat.  We’ll look at that next time.

The faith is a demanding thing, and the way may well be impossible.

You are a creature, in the flesh, and subject to the stresses and demands of physical survival.  You can no more extract yourself from the natural world than you can leap off the Earth and land on the Moon.

We will ever be at odds with the world, and if we are not, that shall be a warning to us.  As it is, the more one is faithful, the more he will be hated.

The darkness is always closing in.

The world then, with its powerful and mighty, its famed and fortunate, has an appeal the faithful can never capture.  There is enmity and it cannot be bridged.  The advantage, so long as we are in the world, belongs to the worldly.

So you may find yourself beaten down.  In a world upside-down – as it will ever be – your virtue is a drag on your success, your kindness is weakness, your modesty is a limit beyond which your competitors race to defeat you.

You may come to think that, despite the echoes of your dreams, dreams from a far-off place, you are destined to a middling life.  Gray and sluggish, commoditized, leaving no impression by which you will ever be remembered.

But you’ve got it all wrong;  You have swallowed the lie.

I am your brother, listen to me:  You have closed yourself off from God.

God – does not – permit mediocrity.  He will spit you out, and perhaps He has.

Here is how you will find the moment of expectoration:  When did you last avoid a good action because of fear?   It is that simple – in your family, in your business, in your spiritual life, when you have found something good to be too much, or too dreadful, you assumed the temperature of the room.  You were no longer pleasing to the taste, giving satisfaction to the thirst.

The lie is that, as a child of God, you are bound to defeat.  No need to begin fighting, it will all end in flames and ashes.

The enemy is no fool.  He knows that if he can demoralize you before you’ve begun to fight back, he’s already won.

The game is rigged against you, he says.  He holds all the cards.  Go ahead, make a run at it – see how easily you are slapped down?  And what are you resisting sin for, after all?  If it is all for God and the ultimate victory, why does God not win right now?  Why does He make it all but impossible for you to succeed?

Now, do you see how you have been poisoned and duped?  Do you see how the world has trampled upon your God-given dignity, and has stifled the mighty works God meant to work through you?  It is time to go in, whips in hand, and throw the tables over.

The truth is, you have not trusted God enough.  You have accepted, from fear or disappointment, that He will not come through for you.

Perhaps you are inadequate (you are).  Perhaps you are imperfect (doubtless).  Yes, you have failed, and you have shamed yourself, and you have given every earthly reason to any worldly power that you are not up to the task.

Do you see the lie?  You will see it when you hear the truth:  You do not answer to a worldly power.  You answer to the Almighty.

Therefore!  It does not matter if you have failed by worldly measures, over and over again.  It does not matter if you have showed yourself inadequate for the task, lacking in perseverance, intelligence, skill.

Fool!  IT. IS. NOT. ABOUT. YOU.

Do you wonder why Adam and Eve ate of the apple?  First, clean your lips of that bitter sweetness… you have sunk your teeth into the lie and devoured it whole.

Let’s put it starkly, written in a flame against the blackness of night:  The Devil has isolated you from God, and proceeded to devour you.  This is why you are demoralized, beaten down, perpetually inadequate, in motion and going nowhere.

The Devil is virtually a god and has convinced you that you must face him under your own power.  Every failure, every weak moment, every grasp at evil is one more victory for him, and one more defeat for you.  And you have no hope of overcoming him…

…alone.

But of course he has lied to you.  He rigged the game, he set you up for destruction.  Now, you know better.

You, as always, must call on the Almighty.  You must call on Him with all of the desperation of a drowning man, because truly you cannot defeat the waves.  You must call on him as though the enemy came fully armed, has you surrounded, and is counting down to your annihilation.  Because you cannot defeat death.

But He can.

And there it is, my brother, my sister.  Look to Him, always.  Pray to Him, at every moment, for every good thing – especially in your need.

Then, simply hold on.  Work and strive and fight with everything you have, reinforced by the power of God.  One day you will barely be able to stand, and the next you will be lifting mountains.  First, you will strain to walk, then you will race with all speed to the ends of the earth.

Many will doubt, and then you will succeed beyond all of their expectations.

Many will forecast doom, and you will deliver victory.

It is difficult to capture the miracle of the Resurrection.

On the one hand, we all experience it every day, arising from our sleep.  On the other, none but a small child believes he goes to sleep for the last time when he lays down his head.  (Is it a terror of existential darkness that causes young children to avoid bedtime?)

The finality of death is a cleft in the mind, the pit into which all fall and none recover.  What one makes of this creates a divide, while there is no division about waking up each morning.

What happens after we die?  Many guesses.

Whether death is an end, whether it just is the observed failure of the body to persist, whether it is the excising of a very particular person and presence from the world in the way she was commonly known?  Yes, no one argues this.

Put it this way:  Say you believe a loved one lives on, and well he might.  Now you observe him in little signs, a serendipitous word from a stranger, a rare species of flower where one does not ordinarily find it, an annoying thing he always did that comforts you now.  Here is the test:  Would you rather have these little signs for another 10 years, or one more day with him, in his fullness?

Death forces your hand, leaves you the scraps when you crave the feast.  It is a savage compromise, but that is the Universe we are in.

So much for the true and severe loss of death.

Now Good Friday is the collapse, the utter devastation and lifeless plummet into the pit.  It is the heavy-weight fight, the clash of Titans – Life vs. Death.  And Life, as expected (though recklessly hoped against) staggers and falls from unimaginable height to unimaginable depth.

One loses his breath.  Of course he does – he watches the Source of that breath, breathing His last.  He goes under, lost, never to return.

Easter Sunday is the unfathomable resurgence, the great inhale, the impossible gasp.  It is the cure of all depression, it is cause for an old man to leap to his feet and run like a child, it is fire and purpose to accept, stare down, … praise God for a torturous death.

Or become child-like again.  If the night brings terrors, what does the day bring?  What irrepressible joy comes with the dawn of a new sun?  What verve of anticipation passes through your bones just to think of Christmas morning?  (And why Christmas morning, and no other?)

Run, and never grow weary.

Easter is our great Hero finding the bottom of a bottomless pit.  It is saving the souls of the irredeemably lost.

It is slipping into darkness, clawing to stay awake, alive…the sheer terror of all joy, all love, all of everything being ripped away…

…and then you wake up, and there are no more tears, and all you know is love and joy and the thrill of existence.

See – It is death that is impossible.  You will live.

Happy Easter.

I write this at peak Christmas.

Peak Christmas does not happen on Christmas Day – it happens the night before.

All of the preparation, the carols, the extra coins in the red bucket at the grocery store, the stories of good will toward perfect strangers, the re-focusing on just what Christmas is all about, the magic of the nighttime, the anxious awaiting of dawn…

It reaches a head just before bedtime on Christmas Eve.  You could stride along, atop the sheer anticipation.

There are those universal moments – the story of a stranger pulling over to help someone stranded on the side of the road, or a famous person discreetly providing toys to poor children, or a church getting together to feed the homeless a hot meal – which elicit the lament, “Why can’t every day be like this?”  Or you sometimes hear it declared, ambitiously – “Make every day Christmas day!”

It would be nice, wouldn’t it?  A universal disposition toward concern for others, finding satisfaction in bringing joy to others, making impossible things happen – even the gaiety of spirit one experiences, alone, driving along a dark road with Christmas lights shining brightly.

Why can the people in darkness not see a great light, every night?

In the classic carol, “Little Drummer Boy,” there are two lines which go:

Little Baby, pa rum pum pum pum 

I am a poor boy too, pa rum pum pum pum 

This verse presents the Incarnation in a striking way.  A boy who is weathered by the elements, who knows hunger, who is always only days away from wasting away – this boy empathizes with the King of Kings, because the King has so completely relinquished His power.

He has arrived utterly powerless, utterly impoverished, an infant lying among beasts.  Of course a shepherd boy could relate.

What’s more, a few lines later – “Then He smiled at me.”

This can be our Lord’s simple pleasure at a shepherd boy’s humble song.  Then again, if you hold in mind the shared poverty, something else emerges:  It is a blessing.

The baby to the boy:  Your humble station, your poverty, are not the shackles you think they are.  You are here before the Almighty, aren’t you?  Did you not see the heavens open up, and angels arrayed like a mighty army, singing my praises?  And with Me, what will be impossible for you?

Of course, on the one hand, we cannot have our own birthdays every day.  Even if you tried to celebrate every day this way, it would – very quickly – exhaust your body’s ability to feel pleasure and your mind’s ability to call it happiness.

So that is the first answer:  Celebrations stand out from ordinary time, and require the experience of ordinary time in order to create the contrast, the novelty, the superlative atmosphere for which they are known.

See it another way – our ordinary experience in the modern world is Christmas-like for those from another place or time.  That the ordinary is no longer special is not only tautological, but part of the human condition.

The second answer rides aloft upon the first:  We are not home yet.

The Incarnation was a rescue mission, an invasion by God Himself to save His children when nothing else would work.

That He arrived as a baby was a profound stratagem, one that brought Him deftly behind enemy lines.  He evaded the princes and principalities, and He softened the guard each of us keeps on our hearts.

That the Almighty became frighteningly vulnerable; that the all-knowing became ignorant of His own name; that He who is Holy, Holy, Holy was tempted to sin…

All of this was done, to save you.

Nothing could be more extraordinary.  “Christmas every day” could never capture it, and it is undesirable in any case – because it would be a fraud.

What Christmas gives us is a flickering light through a dark glass.  It is nostalgic, like the memory of a long-deceased father who loved us very much.  It is one frame per second of the memory we wish could play over and over again.

It is, in short, a reminder of our true home.  Not even Christmas – not the best, most magnanimous, most inclusive, most abundant moment of Christmas – can truly accomplish what is longed for when we ask for Christmas every day.

That is achieved when God remakes the heavens and the earth – this world, the darkness, will pass away.

Everything else is a paltry imitation, and even the holy day itself merely points to this.  You will know it is really Christmas when you hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

The Pharisees made an art and a science out of observing the Law of Moses, cowing many followers into observing the endless minutiae and machinations they had devised.  It was indeed a heavy burden – was God really like this?

Or should the commandments of God liberate us from sin, and cut a path to His love and mercy?

Along comes Jesus, who earlier permitted his disciples to pick grain to eat on the Sabbath, and now was healing on the Sabbath.  How could he explain this over and above the endless strictures concerning the day of rest?  -which strictures certainly appeared to take the command “Keep holy the Sabbath” as seriously as possible.

Jesus’ justification is two-fold:  First, a man is more valuable than a sheep (and the Pharisees would certainly rescue their own sheep from harm on the Sabbath).

Second – of course it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.  The whole point – of all God’s commands – is that we ought to do good.  But we sin, so we require God’s mercy and guidance to do good rather than to sin.  The commandment regarding the Sabbath was directed toward being holy – not toward following a rule.

The commandments are not for nothing.  They are the pattern of behavior, the focus and discipline of a man’s spirit toward the will of God.  If you follow them because you love God, you will do well!

If you follow them because you love power and influence, because you leverage them so that men will grovel at your feet or struggle to be conformed to your image, now that you have sufficiently misshapen the Law…

Right then, it is time to turn back.  Immediately.  Turn around – you’ve gone far, far off the path.

But take heed… a viper would be found far off the path.

See it again, one more time:   If there had been no Fall, there would be no Law.  We would be inclined toward the Good, and thus “all things are permissible.”

As it is, there was a Fall – and therefore we are profoundly broken.  We see good, and perceive that it is evil.  We see evil and imagine it is good.  It is an honest mistake, or it would be a diabolical one.

To counter-act this, God established rules-laws-patterns of behavior that would settle all disputes within the will (and the community).  My fallen nature urges me toward an illicit act.  But it is powerful and feels genuine – why not act on it?

There might not be any reason to avoid doing so, except the Law.  Of course, even that was violated, but at least we could then recognize we had sinned, and were in need of a Savior…

Therefore, the Law was good – profoundly good, so that not one iota would be altered until heaven and earth disappear.

And it was this profound good that the Pharisees had appropriated for their own gain.  The promise of God, that one would find true peace and prosperity and joy in following the commandments (“Lord, I love your commands!”), became a long chain of shackles hammered together by men too small to let their brothers live free.  It became an admixture of their neuroses and scruples, their leverage from a distance of a great weight upon their brothers.

This weight they attempted to foist upon and trap Jesus, the Messiah.  As if to anticipate the old atheist riddle, they burdened the Son of God with a weight they imagined he could not handle.

Notice, though:  There is a rock so big that God cannot lift it.  That is, of despair.   And with so many laws, and laws upon laws, and consequences of laws that must be addressed by still more laws, one could easily find, say, lepers and paralytics and tax collectors laden with such an impossible weight.

For love of them – the lost – Jesus flares up with indignation.  His Law – an instrument of liberation – bent back upon itself and sharpened into an instrument of condemnation.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.”

No – the purpose and the end are God.  They always were.  It was always – dimly – the Beatific Vision, the “well done, good and faithful servant!”  The Fall was a happy fault, because God would not, even then, abandon us.  He would find a still more incredible way to point us back to Him, and deliver us.

And we might say – He’ll be damned if His own rules are going to be used against Him.  How true.

Adam and Ed start their deep dive into The Beatitudes.

Ed continues his Reasoning to God series with part 2.

The Triduum series concludes with Holy Saturday.

Another great example of a natural metaphor to explain a supernatural phenomenon is evidenced by the manifold answers to the following question:

What, exactly, did Jesus accomplish on the Cross?

It is cast as ransom for a prisoner, as redemption of a slave, as rescue from behind enemy lines, as a jailbreak from the gates of Hell, as vicarious suffering of a punishment, as repayment of a debt, as a lamb being led to slaughter, as a new Passover (itself somewhere between physical/historical and spiritual)…and this is just off the top of one’s head.

What is interesting is that one is often taught that no single metaphor captures it.  In fact, some are downright scornful for some scholars, except that they appear in Scripture, and so must be addressed.  The redemption of a slave received this treatment recently.

I am personally of the view that we should not be so quick to judge Scripture, and that whatever the case may be just is the case.  If God Himself would tell us to imagine we were slaves (to sin) and that He came to redeem us for a price (His suffering and death), what exactly is my objection?  That He did not order the Universe properly so as to avoid a slave analogy?  That He did, in fact, redeem me?  Nonsense.

Anyway, this great spiritual reality strains all analogies, which is a lesson that the spiritual realm is truly a different realm.  Just as new formulas and rules govern 2D geometry and 3D geometry (and beyond), so are there new rules in the spiritual which we can hardly begin to imagine by way of the physical.

One of the more acute ways of demonstrating this point follows:  Imagine you are speaking to a man who has been blind since birth.  How would you describe a beautifully cut, flawless diamond?

You could approach it – perhaps some exquisite smell, like a rose, with an almost geometric perfection – or perhaps by means of heat and texture, as well as construction that might be conveyed by touch.  You see the point, though.

In no way have you shown this man the diamond.  And we left you the benefit of four senses.

Likewise, in no way do we really understand what Jesus accomplished by His Passion and death.  Yet even a child can understand it was marvelous, miraculous work, and precious to possess.

Nota bene:  Naturally, these metaphors do not refer to purely physical phenomena.  The social construct of slavery, for example, does not appear to have any parallel in the animal kingdom, and relies on abstractions such as dignity (or lack thereof) and power.  The spiritual analog is, therefore, a next-level abstraction.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

– John 1:1-2, 4-5

Supposing you had a real but indescribable experience – how do you go about sharing it with a friend or confidant?

Consider an epiphany you’ve had.  There was some problem, some riddle of existence which you could not answer.  Perhaps for days, perhaps for years, you sought the answer and could not find it.  (We are already speaking in metaphor, but hang with me).

And then, quite unexpectedly, you had it.  The answer.

Now the physical phenomenon of an epiphany might be described as a new neuro-pathway, the literal (physical) firing of synapses across particular neurons in a particular order which rendered the new thought to your consciousness (whatever that is).

For one thing, this is a quite dull and tedious way of telling the story of your epiphany, but let it pass.

For a second thing, it is anything but clear that thought is, our could be, a purely physical phenomenon.  Never mind this, too.

The salient point is that the truth discovered, the object of the epiphany, the objectiveness of the truth, is non-material.  Insomuch as we engage with it, then, we are operating in the abstract/spiritual realm.

So when you say something like, “And then I saw it…” or “That’s when the light bulb came on…” – which functionally mean the same thing – you are pulling an abstract experience through the filter of a physical experience.

Or, you are reaching up to understand the abstract by means of the physical, which is the thesis here.

Now what if (literally) God came to Earth and became (literally) man, and dwelt among us?  What if this God-man taught and demonstrated a doctrine which corrected our moral and intellectual (spiritual) deviancies, healed and exalted our wounded bodies (literally) so that we might transcend them to a greater reality?  How would you describe this experience?

You might call Him the Light of the world.  You might describe Him as irresistible, unassailable, like a light in darkness – in no way can the darkness overcome the light.  Just so, in no way could evil overcome Him or His mission.*

And if you’ll accept the Gospel and believe in Him, that same invincibility – on the spiritual level – is conferred upon you.

Next example…

*Arguably, even mission is a metaphor.

We have laid out three ways of knowing the spiritual realm, which is further proposed as the true realm.  The physical realm is but an echo.

The difficulty remains that – ordinarily –  we know the physical realm with a higher degree of confidence than the spiritual.  It feels more real because it is more obvious and less deniable.

There is a reason, after all, that apostates are made by imprisonment and torture.

So if there are three ways of knowing the spiritual, which are nevertheless nebulous to the populace; and if we have a systematic and reliable way of learning about the physical; what could ground us more firmly in true knowledge of the spiritual?

Here is my thesis:  The spiritual realm is the source of the physical.  It is often analogous to, but not an exact emanation of, the spiritual.

In some ways this sounds like Plato.  I said before – honestly – that I don’t know whether the world of Forms is real.  Nevertheless, we are not saying that there are forms, per se.  We are saying that, if one imagines that forms exist, it gives us a useful way of learning about the spiritual from our experience of the physical.

Indeed, suggesting that humans have a spiritual sense captures what we’re about here – that one’s physical senses are analogous to one’s spiritual sense.

But what if your spiritual sense is dull, or inoperative?  Or what if you simply don’t trust it?

What if you think Plato is interesting, but he’s mostly talking ho-bunk?

If, still, you wish to learn something about the spiritual realm, I suggest you can learn it by a careful study of the physical realm.  We’ll take some examples next time.

There is a reason, after all, that saints are made by imprisonment and torture.

This post may teeter on the brink of cheesiness.  You have been warned.

There’s a song by Ne-Yo called “Closer.”  ($250 to the winner of the wager, “Will Ne-Yo’s ‘Closer’ ever be referenced on www.twocatholicguys.net?”)

Stay with me.  I know I’m not helping.

Here’s a link to the music video.  Be warned, the lyrics and video are very suggestive.  Alright, time to talk myself out of this hole I’m digging.

My thesis might run something like this:  There seems to have been whole centuries when the most talented artists were rendering works to the glory of God.  Some still do.  However, the glorified artists (who may or may not be terrifically talented) of our time are not doing this, and it is a shame.

I take part of that back.  Some of them will point upward and thank God when they win an award.  It’s not nothing.

In the case of Ne-Yo, I am not arguing that his lyrics should be “explicitly” Christian, or theistic.  This isn’t like taking Bryon Adams’ “Everything I Do” and imagining the lyrics declare the love of God (except for the lying part).  Anyway, the best possible conversion of that song has already been achieved.

I am arguing that sex, while beautiful and powerful, is not worthy of worship.  And I am arguing that such songs could be very suggestive of the glory of God, rather than sex (or through sex).

I am not arguing that such art should be always and hopelessly optimistic, either.  We pray a whole set of sorrowful mysteries, and there is no obligation or recommendation to immediately follow with the glorious mysteries.

Imagine, for instance, that Ne-Yo decided to perform a take on a Psalm.  Or retold the story of David’s temptation and sin with Bathsheba (in the proper context, of course).  Or simply put his “Closer” song in some kind of context which would at once demonstrate the power of sex and, idealistically, its proper place.

I’ve made myself sick wishing for things like this to happen, in the past.  Still, one can hope.

“Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.  They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”                                                                  -Isaiah 40:30-31

Marcy and I recently took a vacation to Grand Rapids, MI to celebrate our 10th anniversary.  While there, we visited several breweries, a garden-sculpture exhibit, and generally made a tour of the area while enjoying each other’s company.  We also attended Mass at a local parish on Saturday evening.

I have said elsewhere that I am seldom taken in by an especially earnest song or homily; it is more the Creed, or the readings, or even some of the responses, which grab at my heart.  And here it was especially true because – if I may be forgiven for saying so – the music was awful.

This effect was certainly magnified by high expectations.  As we entered, the choir was warming up, and they sounded promising.  Very promising.

They were almost harmonizing on some breathy hymn, something like a chant on one of the stalwart songs of our faith.  But as the opening song broke, I realized we were in for an uncomfortable rendering of 1970’s music by way of clumsy orchestration.*

All the better to make my point.

In the front row – two near us, and one across the sanctuary from us** – were three women in wheelchairs.  The opening song, Marty Haugen’s “Canticle of the Sun,” broke in like a drunken roommate.  The procession began, and I wondered (uncharitably) how I was going to endure this.

I looked up, and I noticed each of those women singing.  Then the lyric, “…come dance in the forest, come play in the fields!  And sing, sing of the glory of the Lord!”

And I thought of the passage above, and the promises of God, and the thought of each of these women, born into eternity, rising up out of their wheelchairs and overcoming their afflictions, running faster than I could ever manage on Earth…

Well, it was lights out for me.

It’s not the song – see, the direct emotional appeal of the song was utterly rejected.  But there was enough truth in it to point to greater things, and those things…you almost have to sit down to hear them.

Or else, fall to your knees.

*I’m not, but lest you think I’m over-critical of the era, enjoy this perspective.

**The church is laid out in a cross, so that two sections of seating are facing each other and just in front of the altar.