A Tale Of Three Parishes – Prolegomena

Since my family’s Baptism and Chrismation into Holy Orthodoxy in 2006, we have been involved in a number of parishes; OCA, Greek and Antiochian.  Since we are converts ourselves,  we feel most comfortable where there are a lot of other converts, especially those coming from an Evangelical Christian background.

However, this can sometimes lead to a niggling suspicious feeling that I as a  convert am just “playing Orthodox”  I have a bad   self-congratulatory attitude about being in the “true Church” which feeds my ego at both ends; first, for having been an Evangelical Protestant and so understanding the concept of regeneration and enjoying a facility with the Bible, and second, for being Orthodox and knowing about the Saints and the disciplines and all the panoply of historic Christianity.

The Ochlophobist has a friend, Samn!,  that left the following comment on his blog amidst all the flotsam and jetsam concerning the current malcriadez in the Antiochian Archdiocese:

+Philip and his clerical friends are quite anomalous even in their generation of Arab Orthodox because they for whatever reason missed out on the revival that came from the Orthodox Youth Movement and were already in America by the time the Lebanese monasteries like Dayr el-Harf really started bearing fruit. And so, like Jewish actors acquiring waspy surnames, they went out of their way to trade in Orthodox ways for the ways of the perceived American elites of the early sixties, Episcopalians. (I’m glad I’m not the only one who has seen this)

And so, when converts came, they were unable to transmit the heritage of the Church of Antioch to them, but rather allowed a trial-and-error approach to figuring out what a lived Orthodoxy is. The anti-monasticism and the America-firstism that have been signature traits of much of the Archdiocese’s leadership… have served to hinder spiritual bonds and bonds of affection and communication with the mother church. In the aftermath of this current crisis, those are the things that need to be cultivated, regardless of the Archdiocese’s ultimate autonomy, both for the sake of having a healthy and fruitful relationship with Damascus and for the authentic transmission of Antioch’s ancient heritage of lived Orthodoxy to all those who come to her thirsting for it.

And, just in case you are thirsting to know more about Antioch’s ancient heritage of lived Orthodoxy,  Samn! offers his own Arab Orthodoxy blog, and it is first-rate.

Please visit and encourage.

Preparing For The Coming Global Lent II – Christendom, The Empire, and The Revolution

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.

“We do not content ourselves with a pluralist marketplace of gods.  Polyarchy and utter, brawling anarchy are one and the same.  Division is strife, and hastens to dissolution…One is the might of my Trinity, One the knowledge, One the glory, One the power. so again, the Unity cannot dissolve, being greatly honored in the one harmony of Divinity.”

St. Gregory of Nazianzus

The organic body sang together; dialects of the world sprang in Byzantium; back they rang to sing in Byzantium; the streets repeat the sound of the Throne

I’m sorry that this post has languished for as long as it has.  At one point I wanted to make the ever-so-obvious point that the problem of the One and the Many has its reflection in the political sphere, and that an over-emphasis on the One leads to Tyranny, such as that which would obtain were the Islamic Universal Caliphate ever to be instantiated, and that an over-emphasis on the Many leads inevitably to Anarchy.

Over against this I wanted to deposit the idea of the Chalcedonian Commonwealth, of which the most consistent example were the Christian Empires of New Rome and Moscow, with their deeply ingrained idea of synergy, the working together of the Church and the State according to the Chalcedonian formula, although that synergy was honored far more in the breach than in the ideal in Byzantine and Russian societies.  Nevertheless, I believe that something akin to a Christendom, a commonwealth of Orthodox Christian nations, would most closely incarnate the life of the Trinity in the political sphere.

It appears from a reading of history that this state of affairs was beginning to coalesce in the West at the beginning of the fated eleventh century.  The Western Empire, as it was thought of at that time, had moved from Carolingian hands into the Saxon Ottonian dynasty, who with the help of a series of sympathetic popes culimnating in Sylvester II, was moving towards just this sort of Byzantine model of symphony.  The untimely death of the half-Greek Otto III lead to the severing of the two powers, and the development of the monarchial Papacy and the reaction of the development of the secular power as autonomous, and operating in an autonomous sphere.

Orthodoxy requires a fall-of-the-West story.  At one time I considered this a defect in the Orthodox narrative.  Papal Catholicism, after all, does not appear to require a fall-of-the-East story to complete its narrative, but its narrative does not have, to me, the compelling nature of the Orthodox narrative.  The post-schism history of the Christian West makes better sense in the context of a gradual Dying-Of The-Light, a thousand-year  summer twilight in which the memory of the Kingdom of God is replaced by the Kingdom of Man, first in its ecclesiastical, then it its secular, and finally in its radical form.

Empire is the exterior of Church.  Church is the interior of Empire.

Neil Gaiman Nails The Neo-Pagans

For an Orthodox Christian, I sometimes think I have altogether too much sympathy for other religious expressions, especially Taoism or Sufi’ism and others of that stripe  which concentrate on the immanence of God.   Pantheism is a continual temptation for me, so you can see where I would find neo-paganism attractive in the abstract; first, neo-paganism purports to be eco-friendly, venerating the biosphere, that Web of Exchange which is the living, breathing skein of our planet.  Then, neo-paganism purports to honor Tradition and Ancestors, and I have always believed that anything built up by increments over millenia as a result of mostly unconscious impulses has to contain something of value, and anyway  is always to be preferred to a system created by a group of Really Smart People using their brains to Figure Things Out.   As an aside, Arturo Vasquez deftly captures something of what I want to say in a post of his, The Modern War Against Folk Religion. Take what he has to say to heart, all you people with the highly developed frontal lobes, the next time someone passes you on the highway with the Virgin of Guadalupe garishly splashed all over his back window, and remember the Wahabi.

However, on the ground, I am finding that “neo-paganism” is becoming a favorite feint of the “spiritual-but-not-religious” crowd, a means to continue their undiluted worship of their own reflections while avoiding the inevitable demands a god would make on them.

Now, Neil Gaiman strikes as close as any living writer I have read to the mythopoetic spirit of the Inklings (I haven’t yet read Tim Powers or Gene Scott).  OK, so he’s a horror writer.  To anybody who isn’t sufficiently anesthetized, our age must seem an unending horror. Indeed, I don’t think you could possibly write mythopoetic literature, have it accurately describe our present spiritual circumstances, and not descend into horror.

Nevertheless, Mr. Gaiman deftly dispenses with modern American Wicca/neo-paganism in this scene from American Gods. Please forgive the format.  My daughter borrowed my copy and there obviously isn’t a soft-copy version of a best-selling current novel available for cutting and pasting.  But thank God for books.google  and FastStone Capture.

Mr. Gaiman, if you stumble across this insignificant blog, I invoke the Fair Use clause, and want to thank you for a fascinating and thought-provoking read.

Also, if you are a neo-pagan who has wandered in here and are offended, leave a message and let’s try to be friends.

The Mythopoesis of America – Visionary Realism

On the coast they put up a few ramshackle huts
and slept uneasily. This, they claim, in the Riachuelo,
but that is a story dreamed up in Boca.
It was really a city block in my district – Palermo**.

Jose Luis Borges – The Mythical Foundation of Buenos Aires

Nothing is true or false until it is properly enstoried.

It can be handy  to think of our hemisphere as three distinct ethnospheres; Euro-America consists of most of the US and Canada, and the Southern Cone of South America, which were relatively empty (or quickly emptied) and where the indigenous peoples were displaced by  populations from Europe.

Afro-America consists of the Caribbean basin, some parts of the old Confederacy in the United States, and the northern parts of Brazil, where the same vacuum was filled by settlers from Africa.  Finally, Chthonic America consists of the heartlands of the old native American high cultures of Meso-America and the Andes, where the indigenous inhabitants were not eliminated so much as creolized, and where the underlying thought patterns are still very much Inca, or Maya, or Toltec.

The mythopoetic process, the digestion of Chthonic America, I believe, can be found in what is called the literature of “magical realism”, about which I know little, but at whose fountain I have tasted sweet waters and want to learn more.  Miguel Angel Asturias, of Guatemala, whose master-work Men of Corn I have yet to read but the portions which I have read burn like lava.

Along the same line, the mythopoetic impulse in Euro-America, I believe, can be found in what I like to call “visionary realism”, except that the seminal works are not fiction, but non-fiction.  Let me explain.

About 15 years ago, before moving to Miami, Florida, I read a book by a remarkable woman, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, The River Of Glass. Yesterday, I began another book by an equally remarkable woman, Mary Hunter Austin, The Land Of Little Rain. These two books are so similar they almost appear to have been written by the same mind. Certainly, they partake of the same spirit.

Both books were written by women of powerful character who, despite being early feminists and agitators for “women’s rights”, kept their husbands’ names.   Both of them endured a rocky and tempestuous marriage that ended in divorce.  Neither of them was native to the place she wrote about;  Mrs. Douglas grew up in Minnesota, but moved to South Florida in 1915,  and she lived there until 1998.  Mrs. Austin moved to the Mojave Desert in 1890 and remained there for the next 17 years.

Mrs. Douglas wrote about the Florida Everglades, and Mrs. Austin about the Inyo valley on the leeward of the Sierra Nevada range, and both of their masterpieces share a common structure.  Both begin with the geography and the flora of the region, then they discuss animal and bird life, noting peculiarities caused by the singular environments, overly wet in the case of the Everglades and overly arid in the case of the Inyo valley.

After this, they describe in considerable detail and with great sympathy the lives and customs of Native Americans that lived, and continue to live,  in these areas.  Only after all of  this are the stories of white settlers introduced.  At first they are the stories of solitary, furtive men, miners or trappers, who wander into the region hoping to find some kind of quick economic salvation from a region that at first sight has very little to offer.

Only towards the end of the books are the stories of  “smart men” introduced,  well-connected men, who can systematically exploit the scarce resources of the region efficiently.   This then draws the region into the larger American narrative, dominated by a nearby large city;  Miami in the case of the Everglades and Los Angeles in the case of the Inyo valley.

I think I would call the writing style of both The Everglades: River of Grass and The Land Of Little Rain “visionary non-fiction”.   Think of Annie Dillard’s  Pilgrim  At Tinker Creek or Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams, both of which have been recommended to me and both of which I have tried to start.  It is possible that I have an antipathy to Dillard and Lopez in the same way that I have an antipathy to the very derivative Tolkien imitators that so abound these days.

This visionary realism may just be the essential Euro-American way of mythopoesis.    It attempts to “get inside” a place, to show how the contours and characteristics of  the land work their way into the consciousness of its settlers, and how the consciousness of the human agents affects the land.   Both River of Grass and Land Of Little Rain are spiritual histories of a particular place, at the margin of the easily habitable and easily “developed” parts of the country.  Yet they are far from tedious.

Both Mrs. Douglas and Mrs. Austin accept a  responsibility for their respective territory that leave you feeling as though they had become, through their artistry, almost a familiar spirit or a guiding genius.  Mrs. Douglas, in particular, living in South Florida until her 108th year, was continually referred to in the press as a spokeswoman “for the Everglades”, or for “the cause of Everglades conservation”, whereas, truth be told, she felt every unnecessary subdivision and short-sighted, self-serving political decision impacting her beloved River of Grass as a personal affront.   I heard that she didn’t die a happy woman.

It may very well be that the project for the Church for the next millenium will be to drop the Imperial Church one-size-fits-all fantasy and begin to develop what Father Stephen Freeman refers to as Orthodoxy Where You Live, what I would like to call the Orthodoxy of Right Here, Right Now, and what Mark Thomas Hoyer calls, following Mrs. Austin, Local Christianities.

To be certain, embracing sectarianism is not the idea. Each square inch of ground has to have a tutelary spirit, a guiding ideology. I want it to be Orthodoxy, the Faith Once Delivered, but it may very well be that an Orthodoxy lived out and developed in a particular place wouldn’t “work” 50 miles down the road.

Maybe we need to find out.

God, the Spider

Watching the recent movie War, Inc. I saw another example of a cinematic cliché  which, as far as I can tell by extensive Googling,  I am the only film fan who has ever noticed.   Now, if I am the only film fan who is aware of a cinematic cliché, can it possibly be a cliché?    Since  it appears I have few, but loyal readers, I will let you all be the judges of this.

I call the cliché “the paralyzed totalitarian”.  I have seen him now in four movies.  In Terry Gillam’s Brazil, Sam’s father’s colleague (and Sam’s mother’s lover?) Helpmann has enormous power, orders Sam to be tortured, but is confined to a wheelchair.

Also wheelchair-bound is José Lewgoy as the warden of the prison in which are being detained William Hurt and Raul Julia in Kiss of the Spider Woman.  Together with the secret policeman, he cunningly positions  the homosexual Molina to weave his way into the confidences of the suspicious political prisoner Arregui, yet he is incapable of any independent motion and is dependent on an attendant for everything.

In the recent War, Inc.,  Walken, the “viceroy” of sad Turaqistan, which has been the object of yet another American preemptive invasion, wields enormous power from his wheelchair, and the very earliest movie I in which have ever seen this “paralyzed totalitarian” figure is Abel Gance’s silent masterpiece Napoleon, in which Marat, Robespierre, and Louis St. Just plot together to eliminate enough Frenchman to usher in the new day of la Republique Juste et Belle.   The actor portraying the arch-Jacobin  St. Just fidgets about in his little wooden wheelchair nervously planning the death of thousands and misery for uncounted others.

The image sticks with me, I believe, because it portrays those of a totalitarian cast of mind  as victims of their own machinations.   In gathering more and more power to themselves, they lose that which make them human, becoming in their turn as powerless as their victims.

One of the emotional objections I had to Calvinism as a system was that I always had a niggling in the back of my mind that the system would eventually  eliminate the freedom of God.   If man were not free, then I couldn’t see how God could possibly be free.  Some great awful necessity, some dreadful immutable ἀνάγκη, whether internal to God or external to Him, would demand the damnation of men.

I know there are a thousand qualifications I would have to make, and I take a great risk in mentioning this.   After all, the Christian blogosphere is about 94% Calvinists of  disputatious temperament.  I hope my obscurity saves me.

Borges says it better than I:

Lejos de la ciudad, lejos del foro
clamoroso y del tiempo, que es mudanza,
Edwards, eterno ya, sueña y avanza
a la sombra de árboles de oro.

Hoy es mañana y es ayer. No hay una
cosa de Dios en el sereno ambiente
que no le exalte misteriosamente,
el oro de la tarde o de la luna.

Piensa feliz que el mundo es un eterno
instrumento de ira y que el ansiado
cielo para unos pocos fue creado

y casi para todos el infierno.
En el centro puntual de la maraña
hay otro prisionero, Dios, la Araña

“Far from the city, from the clamorous forum and outside of Time, which is Change, Edwards, now eternal, dreams and walks forward under the golden trees.

Today is tomorrow and is yesterday, and in the serenity there is nothing of God which does not mysteriously exalt Him, the gold of the afternoon, or of the moon.

He meditates happily upon the world as an eternal instrument of wrath, and that the anticipated heavens were created for a very few,

and Hell for nearly everybody, and that at the absolute center of the maze waits another prisoner, the Spider, God.”

By the way, the movies are all  good.  War, Inc. is the weakest of them, maybe a C+.  Brazil is a B+.  Kiss of the Spider Woman is a solid A, and Napoleon is one of the best movies ever produced.

A Day Late and A Dollar Short

It has been interesting to see the turmoil occasioned in what remains of the once-vibrant Christian blogosphere by self-proclaimed “post-evangelical” Internet Monk Mike Spencer a couple of weeks ago (ancient history in the BS) when he proclaimed the inevitability of the Coming Evangelical Collapse in a three-shot salvo over the bow of the Good Ship Evangel. The first post alone garnered 192 responses.

Now, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t resent the fact that an identical prophecy on my own blog went completely unremarked upon. But, Michael has been blogging far longer than I have, and he irritates more people in a week that I will probably ever be able to do in a lifetime. He is too Librul/Catlick for half of his readership and too Fundy/iggerant for the other half, which if you know anything about Chesterton, just means that he’s right where he needs to be.

He offers a lot of reasons for the impending implosion in Evangelical belief, most of which are The Usual Suspects;  the Babylonian Captivity of the Evangelical Church in RonnieReaganLand,  Disney-fication, theological superficiality, but I loved his final conclusion.

Evangelicalism is going to run out of money.  In these straightened times, nobody is going to throw good money into a dying enterprise.

Now, that’s good as far as it goes, but a week after finishing his tirade and disturbing the peace of just about every practicing Christian on the Internet, he featured an interview with a former Evangelical journalist who, in my opinion, nailed it down.

It’s sex, pure and simple.

The disconnect between Evangelical (and Catholic, and Orthodox) teachings on sex and the sexual behavior of young people in Evangelical (and Catholic, and Orthodox) churches has become so wide and so unbridgeable that it has come to the place where young people are going to have to choose between the Church and the possibility of ever having sex.  Not surprisingly, the majority of them are going to be opting for sex.

Now, follow me here, as I outline the change in the sexual constitution of American society as it has changed over the last fifty years.  There are three versions of the sexual constitution I would like to investigate – The Old Double Standard, the Interim Compromise, and the New Double Standard.

The Traditional Double Standard was very much in place during my adolescence, despite the swingin’ sixties rhetoric that innundated the movies and television at that time.  It was still very much the job of a man to compromise a woman’s virtue as it was the job of women to preserve it.   Most of the weddings announced in my little Midwestern town were the result of an impending unexpected arrival, and nobody was surprised.  At the time the unspoken rule for women was, if you let him sleep with you, he better at least be on the road to matrimony.  For men the unspoken rule was, if you get her pregnant,  you do the right thing and marry her.

What was revolutionary about the Sexual Revolution was not that it gave men permission to be promiscuous.  Men always had permission from the larger society to be promiscuous.  Giving permission to be promiscuous to women, which is what was truly revolutionary about the Sexual Revolution, had some unintended consequences.

If you give a man permission to sleep around, he wants to sleep with every woman he meets.  If you give a woman permission to sleep around, she wants to sleep with the same man all the other women want.  Some men unashamedly begin to gather  harems.  For the less shameless, serial monogamy becomes the order of the day, and no one considered it unusual for one man to commandeer the reproductive capacity of more than one woman.

So, the Sexual Revolution actually resulted in less sex, and less quality sex, for the poor chump at the bottom of the Darwinian pecking order than the old Double Standard.  At least under the old constitution, everyone roughly paired off at their own level.  Now, the idea was that the poor, boring stable guy had to wait until his future wife was through making the rounds before settling into domesticity.

The Interim Compromise, which was in place from about the mid seventies until just recently, meant that young people were to “get promiscuity out of their system” in their twenties and thirties, then marry.  You see it all the time in dating columns; young men complaining that women their age are only attracted to  “edgy, exciting men”, overlooking the traditional sober and sensible (read: boring) potential mate.  Young women, on the other hand,  complain constantly that it is nearly impossible to keep their man from cheating, that other women are “hitting on him constantly”.   The conventional wisdom given to the young men that the steady, boring guy should wait until the girl  “comes to her senses” and learns to appreciate his sterling qualities over the more exciting, superficial guys she is attracted to now while she is “young”.

The trouble is, it usually the case that the superficial, exciting guys get tired of the now-not-so- young woman before she has any epiphanies about the desirability of boring, everyday, faithful men.  So she grabs herself a pack-animal while she still can.   I wonder how much of evangelical church membership is comprised of these “born-again” ex-virgins and their to-some-degree reluctant mates.

But the Interim Compromise is breaking down.  As internet porn and the glorification of slut-culture locks young women into an “arms race” for the gutter in an attempt to snare the flagging attention of the most desirable young men, other young men are walking away from the prospect of marriage and family altogether.

I read an eloquent explanation of this on the Internet on a website that appears to have disappeared.   You can read it here.  Just page through the remarks until you find the excerpt from “Hook-Up Culture: Why There Is No Longer Someone For Everyone”.

The new Double Standard exalts female promiscuity, even outright whorishness, as  “being in charge of her sexuality” , while excoriating men who do the same as being “Peter Pans” who are “afraid of commitment”.  Add to this a hostile political atmosphere where women have every advantage in an increasingly aggressive “divorce industry”, and it becomes apparent why men are becoming more and more reluctant to step up to the plate.

I’m not going to buy into the old Evangelical mantra;  “That’s the way the worldlings act.   They don’t know any better.”  I would be more likely to believe if there was a nickel’s worth of difference between the behavior of unchurched kids and the kids in Evangelical (or Catholic, or Orthodox) churches.

At this point in the game, voluntary chastity , especially for young women,  seems more and more likely to become permanent celibacy, and that’s why the churches are going to empty like a high school keg party when the state police show up.

I’m sorry, this post kind of got away from me.  My prescription for fixing this is surprisingly not the resurrection of female chastity but of male chastity, but that for another time.

Some Things You Can’t Make Up

My son had a history assignment to take photos of a historical site. Most of his colleagues had chosen something closer by, but I decided to hijack him and take him to the site of the Andersonville prison, where 43,000 Union soldiers, among them my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandfather, were held captive during the American Civil War. 17,000 of these soldiers died while incarcerated under conditions so severe that they rivaled those of Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen or the Soviet Gulag

The site was about 26 acres in size, and completely devoid of any sign of the prison that had once held tens of  thousands of prisoners of war on this tiny plot of Georgia soil. There were a few small reconstruction at the extreme north end of the field, and near the spot where the gate was located, but everything else was gone, just the open field with the sluggish gate stream still flowing through it, at one time the only source of water for all those  sick, starving men.

Viewing the prison site from the vantage point of the Confederate commander’s post, I was meditating on the vast amount of human suffering that had transpired on this poor piece of ground, that of my ancestor mixed in amongst it. I felt moved, made the sign of the Cross over that empty field, and offered a brief prayer, asking the Lord to have mercy upon any souls who after 145 years, may have been bound to that area still by resentment and desire for revenge.

As soon as I finished, my son tugged at my sleeve. “Look up there, Dad!” He pointed to the sky. Above the field of the prison, an immature bald eagle was flying. We watched as he circled the field, then flew into the sun.

I remarked about this to one of the park workers. He confirmed to me that there was a family of bald eagles in the woods surrounding the park site. “They don’t come out very often, but they’re in there,” he said.

The Christian Artistic Ghetto

My favorite Christian artists are the ones who could care less about the label.   They are kind of yesterday’s news, but the Irish progressive rock band Iona has been making outstanding music for fifteen years that is unabashedly Christian and drop-dead beautiful.  Try to buy one of their CDs in a Family Bookstore ®,  though.  The clerk will give you a blank stare and ask you what kind of music they play.  If you describe Iona’s music you will probably be steered towards Caedmon’s Call or Rebecca St. James, both of whom are to Iona as a lightning bug is to a lightning bolt.

Ditto for Steven Bazan of Pedro the Lion, or Sufjan Stevens, or Danielson Famile, all of whom are wildly creative and deeply Christian. You get the feeling that their art isn’t a matter of “letting their light shine”, but of letting out a force that might do them irreparable damage if suppressed.

I’m trying to remember how the Christian ghetto got started. When I was a child and a young adolescent, we were all of us “Christians” and most of us Sunday School kids. Our churches were very nice places and had music by Bach, Mendelssohn, or Schubert as introits. The sermons were twenty minutes, timed, and usually contained references to racial integration, or neurosis, or existential anxiety. Those were the days of the hegemony of the Seven Sisters of the National Council of Churches, liberal Protestantism at flood-tide, the inheritors of Christendom, and, along with the Academy and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, guardians of the high culture of the West

We had friends who went to other churches, a little more thread-bare. The music wasn’t as elevated. Some of them couldn’t afford an organ and got by with a piano, or a guitar. The preaching (never a sermon, mind you) was embarrassingly direct and personal. There were bookstores in my town that catered to those churches, full of books that didn’t appeal to anybody who didn’t go to those churches. Most of the books were about the Bible; how to understand the Bible, or what the Bible said about this or that subject, about the errors of evolution or “the problems of youth” as seen in the light of the Bible.

Now, this was the status quo circa 1964.   The President had just been assasinated, and the Beatles had just appeared on the Ed Sullivan show.  The deceptively placid fifties were about to plunge headlong into the ferocious whitewater rapids of the mid to late sixties, and the whole brave liberal Christian experiment just evaporated like a morning fog.  Most of my Sunday School colleagues lost themselves in the drugs and sexual libertinism of the sixties and the seventies, and emerged as secular entities, with little or no connection or allegiance to Christ or Church.

Another subset of us were harvested by the so-called “Jesus Revolution” in the last gasp of the ’sixties and the early ’seventies.  This was an outbreak of revivalistic Evangelical Protestantism among young people that injected countercultural memes into the marginalized Evangelical Protestant culture of that era, and it was wildly successful as a marketing ploy, if not so much as a spiritual movement.  When I was a student at a Pentecostal Bible School in the mid ’seventies, there was a sharp division between the “Church Kids” and the “Teen Challenge” ex-hippies, even though we composed about one third of the student body.

The music though, was always marketed to us “just like Led Zeppelin, or Jethro Tull, but its about Jesus, man!”  We lapped it up, rejoicing every time a mainstream musician like BJ Thomas or Bob Dylan “accepted Jesus” and came into our increasingly isolated little bubble, until their record sales improved and they left.

It never dawned on us that the reason to listen to Ian Anderson and John Fischer was the same; that they were competent artists with something to say. The shame is that once you disappeared into the ghetto, anyone outside of it wasn’t hearing you, unless, like Sixpence None The Richer or Evanescence, you managed a crossover success story that allowed you to escape the youth rally circuit and appeal to a wider audience. Usually, though, the tradeoff was that you’d forgo using that awful J-word.

Which brings me full circle to Iona, to Sufjan, to Daniel Wilson and his wonderful family. They are so talented, or so quirky, or so lovely, that they command attention by appealing to our common humanity, but they speak or sing openly and directly about Jesus as if He were the most natural thing in the world to talk or sing about.

Which, of course, He is.

And to Rebecca St. James’ credit, I heard that she spent a whole night at a CCM conference with her skirts lifted dancing on a table top to the tunes of Catholic merrymakers Ceili Rain . You go, girl.

Successors To The Inklings

In one sense, its a little misleading to speak about “successors” to the Inklings. The Inklings were not a self-conscious literary movement,  and as far as I know, l there are no little coteries of academics gathering in a tavern on Saturday nights to drink and read excerpts from their works-in-progress. Would that it were so. Also, I think it is hard for us to appreciate how counter-cultural Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams were, writing and publishing tales of the fantastic when the literary world was dominated by modern realists, by the likes of Lawrence, Hemingway, and Joyce.

These days, though, writing fantastic literature appears to be a lucrative pursuit., and the bastard children of the Inklings  appear to have swept the field.  “Fantasy and Science Fiction” occupies a healthy percentage of my local Barnes and Nobel bookshop, even more if you add the two or three shelves of “graphic novels”/manga with which it is customarily bundled.

What hath Tolkien wrought? There is so much fantasy on the shelves that I wouldn’t know where to begin. Trilogies abound, of course, and a lot of them take place in a pre-Modern setting where the red iron of brutish trolls and tragic High Elves clash on darkening plains. There is so much of this that I haven’t read because I don’t know where to start. In the ’seventies I read the Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin and found them engaging. I yawned my way through the first Shanarra book by Terry Brooks and the first Thomas Covenant trilogy and found both of them tedious and uninteresting.

Nor do I think that the self-consciously Christian fantasy works that have belatedly crawled out of the Evangelical presses in Wheaton or Grand Rapids to sulk on the shelves next to Janette Oke’s prairie romances or the horrid Left Behind series will beget much in the way of mythopoeia.   Sure, there are plenty of brutish Shadowghouls clashing with High Lightbearers on the Iron Plains of Bethania, but there is always a Lost Book of Hidden Wisdom that restores the Balance, or even worse, smites the agents of Darkness with the light that pours off its pages.

I think the problem with “Christian” fantasy is that Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien operated in the jagged edges of Christendom, whereas the modern Evangelical lacks that framework.  “Christendom” as a political and geographical substance is great mythopoeia in its own right, and the fantastic works of  Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien don’t make much sense apart from it.

There are three series I feel bad about not reading. The first is the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. I have heard much good about this series, but also I have heard that it rambles badly. If I read something that requires that much patience and effort,  I’d prefer to start with the Gormenghast series by Melvyn Peake.

The Harry Potter books I haven’t  gotten around to yet either, although I did read the first volume in His Dark Materials. From a philosophical point of view, Christians should be far more concerned about Pullman, who definitely has a bitter axe to grind, than they are about Rowland, who just wants to tell a good story.

Finally, I think Steven King as a mythopetic writer has been woefully underappreciated.  I haven’t yet read his Dark Tower series but I believe I shall have to.  I believe King,  along with such writers as William Vollman, Walker Percy, Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy,  and even William Burroughs are participating in a project of which the Inklings would be proud; the mythopoesis of America.

Neil Gaiman, in American Gods, stumbled upon the main theme of this project; America is poor breeding ground for the supernatural.   We have no myths.  Our country is an abstraction, based not on blood or belief, but on a sort of least-common-denominator secular frame of exchange, and we don’t know our hills and our rivers from the inside yet like the Germans know the Rhine, the British the Thames, or the Central Europeans the Danube.  The strength of the hills is not yet in us.

Charles Williams’ Use Of The Tarot

The tarot has always fascinated me.  I bought a Waite-Smith deck when I was 16 and entertained people by giving a number of accurate “readings” .  I  would not now recommend this, even to non-Christians. There is too much power and too little certain knowledge for Tarot readings to be safe.
However, even at that time, I was puzzled by the amount of Christian imagery in the Waite-Smith deck. So much so, that non-Christians, ex-Christians, or anti-Christians prefer to use other decks with less overt Christian symbolism.

Now, I am not a Tarot scholar, and the only other tarot deck I have ever held in my hand resembled  the Marseilles deck, which dates from the 17th Century.   The imagery of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck is in the same tradition. This is important because, I believe, Charles Williams describes the Waite-Smith  Tarot deck  in his novel, The Greater Trumps.

“Time enough,” he said. “Listen, among them is not the Chariot an Egyptian car, devised with two sphinxes, driven by a Greek, and having on it paintings of cities and islands?”

“It is just that,” the other said.

The Greater Trumps is a the best example of William’s plundering of occult themes to make an overtly Christian point.   Some of his other plot devices are too obscure, like his use of Neo-Platonic Ideal Eminations in  The Place Of The Lion, or too downright weird, like whatever is the ascetic exercise used by Nigel Considine in Shadows Of Ecstasy. The Tarot, however mysterious it may have been in the 1930s when Williams wrote the novel, enjoys a high profile now.

I have to admit I stand in awe of Williams’ effortless use of occult themes in his novels.   He never dismisses  occult power out of hand,  nor does he associate it strictly with the diabolical.  You get the sense reading Williams that there is only One source of power, and all subsequent exercises of power through whatever mediation is either a discharge of rightful duty, or a theft.

The occultists  in The Greater Trumps, Henry and his uncle Aaron, enter as thieves, attempting to obtain and exercise power that doesn’t rightly belong to them.   Through the bequest of a distant relative,  Lothair Coningsby has come into possession of the original deck of Tarot cards.  These cards can be used not only to predict events, but to cause them;   not just to interpret reality, but to generate reality.  The occultists first try outright theft, but when this fails, as it must in Williams’ cosmos, they fall back on Henry’s legal and emotional relationship with Nancy, Lothair’s daughter, to effect a loan of the cards, and from this all the conflict in the novel ensues.

But it is not Lothair’s legal claim on the cards that ultimately foils the occultists, but the seemingly inconsequential claims of his sister, the aptly named Sybil, whose only claim on the cards or the characters is that she loves them indiscriminately and without condition.  This love supports her brother’s legal claim to the cards, strengthens Henry’s and Nancy’s love until it becomes something apart from the lever that Henry (and Nancy) wished to make of it, and undoes all the mischief released by the cards as a result of the manipulation of this love.

All of Williams’ novels portray the only story there is;  the struggle between the Empire and the City, between those who would illegitimately place themselves at the center and beggar the periphery in order to glut themselves upon the surplus and those who receive from the true Center, add their poor, derivative contribution, awaiting the day when the fissures are repaired, and the whole fabric is awash with light and power.