The Evolution of the Red-Nosed Reindeer

The Winter Holiday Season is now several months past. This is a good moment to reflect in a rational way upon one of the Season's most beloved tales. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer elicits in many Americans deep spiritual feelings, and it is not my purpose to disparage those feelings. But the toughminded among us must step forward to separate fact from fiction, history from legend, and, above all, science from religion.

Rudolph teaches valuable lessons on perseverance, leadership, and the power of crossgender affirmations of physical attractiveness. But the story is not a scientific account of how the rednosed reindeer came to be as a species. Indeed, the authorial community responsible for the Rudolph narrative (it would be naive to attribute the narrative to a single author) never intended the story to be taken as science. This is a truth that the best scholars of the narrative have long recognized. Rudolph was written for a prescientific society of children who viewed nature mythopoeically. They understood nature as the creation of the variable will of a personal being rather than the inexorable product of unchanging impersonal laws. Hence the Rudolphian narrative tradition takes no interest in how Rudolph came to possess his illuminated red nose, especially given that neither his parents nor any other reindeer in his gene pool had the same trait. This indifference to science--to the questions science asks and authoritatively answers--characterizes the entire narrative.

Meanwhile, scientists are just now beginning to piece together a reliable account of the evolution of the rednosed reindeer. Like every species, this reindeer was the product of genetic mutation and natural selection, just as Charles Darwin's theory predicts. Beginning perhaps 100,000 years ago (the fossil record, though extensive, is admittedly not complete), a series of completely random genetic mutations resulted in a North Pole community of reindeer with bioluminescent noses. The exact mechanism of illumination is not known, as fossils provide no record of soft tissue. But in any case its bright and shiny nose gave the rednosed reindeer a competitive advantage against other reindeer, especially during the cold, winter months when days were shorter and food was harder to come by. Similarly, the male rednosed reindeer more easily attracted females, giving him an additional competitive advantage in sexual reproduction over the nonilluminated males. From both these causes the rednosed reindeer began to predominate in the North Pole. Sadly, its gradual decline and eventual extinction was probably due to global warming.

It is little more than quaint coincidence that the story of Rudolph happens to echo and telescope certain elements of the actual history of poor Rudolph's species. Initially, Rudolph's mutant nose is viewed as dysfunctional, but when its real value is discovered, Santa "naturally selects" it. That the nose is also "cute" readily suggests the sexual advantage rednosed reindeer undoubtedly possessed in the competition for mates.

Could it be that in some inscrutable, almost primordial way, the human species can intuit--even in its unscientific myths--elements of scientific truth? I wouldn't count on it. Let's not give so much credit to our lucky guesses. We should enjoy the story of Rudolph for what it is, no more and no less. Properly interpreted, Rudolph can inspire in us the pluck and adaptability by which all species survive in our constantly evolving world.

Jesus of the Broken Arm

Many years ago my mother had a kind of religious vision. She saw Jesus with a broken arm.

She reported the vision matter-of-factly, but confidently, as though its spiritual value, however minimal or uncertain, could be assumed. She described neither a full-scale apparition nor an image preserved from a dream. No, this was simply a quiet portrait of Christ, hung eye-level in the gallery of her mind. His arm was in a sling.

Christ died for our sins, Christians say. It seems a corollary that our sins killed him. Put even more pointedly, we sinners killed him. The sixteenth-century catechism of the Catholic Church placed responsibility for Christ's death squarely on the Christian people. The sins of Christians put Christ on the cross. Centuries later, in my Catholic elementary-school days, I was told that my sins drove the nails into Christ's hands and feet; each sin, in fact, drove the nails in deeper.

The logic, to be sure, is not airtight. Yes, if we had not sinned, Christ would have had no need to climb upon the cross for us. But He freely chose the cross--we did not actively pin Him to it. We must be eternally grateful for His act, and we would be bound for Hell without it, but we cannot, properly speaking, be blamed for it.

Well, enough.

Jesus of the broken arm, like Jesus on the cross, is an image of divine vulnerability, tangible and intimate. In the gallery of my own mind, the broken-armed Jesus is a friend who gazes at me without rancor or guile, without judgment or expectation. I want Him to tell me how His arm came to be broken. But He does not say. He knows. And He knows that I know, too.

The Man Who Had 60,000 Abortions

Bernard Nathanson died last February. His passing was little noted by our mass media, those sorry guides to all that is true and important. A learned and articulate ob-gyn, Nathanson was a leading architect of the modern abortion movement until he switched sides in the late 1970s. By then he had performed or supervised more than 60,000 abortions, including one on his own child, nestled in the womb of his girlfriend.

Nathanson was the archetypal modern man, his life the archetypal modern life. Like his father before him, he was an ambitious physician who renounced Orthodox Judaism and accepted only the most conventional (and violable) sort of moral code. Both father and son sought salvation in education and career. And like every true modern, Nathanson was enamoured of science and technology--fascinated by their raw power to deliver not only physical benefits but truth itself. During his professional prime, a monstrous devotion to such possibilities grew up in him unbounded. When the Chinese and Soviets perfected the suction method of abortion in the 1960s, Nathanson became convinced that this was the technological "missing link" to make abortion the safe and efficient solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancies. He co-founded the National Abortion Rights Action League in 1968. Three years later, he took over as director of the Center For Reproductive and Sexual Health, New York City's first large abortion facility.

Remarkably, Nathanson credited his conversion to the pro-life cause to another technology, ultrasound, which for the first time enabled one to see the living fetus in utero. He even believed that technology offered a way out of the moral impasse of the abortion debate. At a lecture at Princeton University in the late 1980s, he would insist that the controversy could be resolved by the development of technologies to transfer an unwanted embryo (the "alpha," he called it, in an attempt at moral neutrality) from the womb of the mother to the womb of a more willing woman. His postmodern audience, subject to a different set of enchantments, was not persuaded.

Ultimately, Nathanson's own self-cast spells were broken. After many years in the pro-life movement, he finally converted to Catholic Christianity. His autobiography, The Hand of God (Regnery, 1996), is an as-yet unacknowledged religious classic. Here he relentlessly unpacks his own moral and spiritual history with the same kind of analytical detachment he had once practiced in a contrary cause.

Nathanson's life reflects the cruelest inclinations of the modern era. Since the close of the Second World War, the nations of the West have turned their destructive tendencies inward. Political peace has settled over Western Europe and America, but it is a peace to end all peace, as the violence inherent in fallen human nature finds fresh direction. "Blood will out," Robert Frost said, "it cannot be contained."

But the life of this modern man also gives grounds for the highest hopes. That Nathanson managed to rise from the depths of the darkest technological amoralism; that to do so he made use of the fundamental tendency he had acquired in that darkness; and that having helped create the abortion monster he managed not only to avoid being devoured by the beast but to also deal it a few blows--all are testament to the enormous power of divine providence, in this or in any age.

The White Market

When we lived in the northeast and had to fly back to Texas to visit family, we typically took a taxi to and from the airport. The airport was miles from our home, and the drive required a major commitment of time. We were reluctant to call upon friends to take us. In most American metropolitan areas, a ride to the airport is the sort of arduous service that only family or very close friends ("like family") can normally be expected to provide. The use of the taxi added nearly $100 to our cost of travel. Had friends or family taken us, we would have saved $100. Put another way, a trip to/from the airport was worth about $100, even if we had gotten it for free.

The provision of free goods and services within families and among friends I term the "white market." This market is very large, surely larger than any black market and quite possibly larger than the market of monetized exchanges we normally call "the economy". For if a monetary value were attached to all of the goods and services performed and received for free by, say, a small family, we would clearly see that a household of even modest monetary income is actually close to being a million dollar operation. Consider just the variety of goods and services generated by the family: meals are prepared, tables set and cleared, laundry washed and folded, finances maintained, bathtubs scrubbed, lawns mowed, children dressed, watched, tutored, and disciplined. Fragile psyches are lovingly shored up over a cup of coffee or a bowl of ice cream. Friends are hosted. Aging grandparents are driven to doctor's appointments. Information is conveyed--sometimes of professional grade, such as medical advice, and sometimes of more pedestrian value, such as the best place to get your muffler replaced.

Is it even possible to complete the list? We only know that virtually everything family and friends do for each other for free, is done among strangers for a price and often, sad to say, not nearly so well. If we must make the dollar the measure of wealth, then let us attach a dollar-value to everything and see exactly how much we take in, and give out.

We certainly hope that the goods and services flow about evenly in all directions, or at least in directions where they are not wasted. But in any case we cannot deny that vast amounts of wealth are being generated that are never properly accounted for by our present lords of coin. The very word "economy" originally meant the maintenance of the household, but economists confidently track the world of monetized transactions, which is quite another thing.

If the truest measure of wealth must include the vast network of in-kind goods and services generated in the white market, then two conclusions must follow:

1) One's monetary income is only a part of one's total income, and likely not the larger part; and

2) True poverty is not so much the lack of money, but the lack of family and friends willing to provide goods and services for free.

Taxi, anyone?

Democracy's Mockingbird

It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird, said Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s famed novel, because all it does is make music for us to enjoy.

We very much want to believe that democracy is as innocent and sonorous as the mockingbird. We know that it is not. Democracy has been the willing instrument of vicious majority preference and mass self-delusion. Early on it affirmed and protected, though it did not create, slavery. The coming of the Civil War has sometimes been attributed to an "excess of democracy." Democracy certainly proved ill-equipped to prevent its own dissolution, and our whole political structure had to be reassembled by force of arms. In more recent times, democracy has casually ratified, through numerous acts of legislatures and voters at referenda, an ongoing judicial death sentence on the unwanted unborn. Pope John Paul II often warned of the dangers of democracy unhinged from truth. Democracy is by far the best form of government known to the human race, but the competition is not strong.

Now, though, after the brutal shooting in Tucson, we are offered the smiling countenance of Gabrielle Giffords. She softens democracy, makes us forget its coarser realities. Her biography suggests an upbeat, energetic public servant, ready to listen--but also grounded, anchored, a taker of no bull. A beloved wife and friend, she seems to make democracy sing again.

Giffords's survival and ongoing recovery may or may not be a miracle. But it is certainly a great grace from God to the whole nation. Just by surviving, Giffords has set bounds to the emotional and cultural undertow generated by the shooting. One can scarcely imagine the result had she died. America could hardly have borne the killing of democracy's mockingbird.

The Day I Dyed

Like all humiliations, this one caught me unawares.

It began as a holiday joke, really, a lark. A certain member of my family was dyeing his or her hair, though he or she really has little grey to hide. I breezed my way into the bathroom and glanced at the mirror. I was feeling festive, even playful. Christmas break was at hand. A long hard semester of teaching was drawing pleasantly to a close. Days of ease and good cheer stretched out enticingly before me, distorting my perception of more permanent realities. So I piped up: "Maybe I should dye my hair, too!"

Exactly what transpired next, and why, is a matter of some dispute. It can be said with certainty, however, that the next couple minutes or so were moments of great psychological subtlety. The dark brown dye found its way into my hair, even onto my scalp, without my explicit consent, but also without my overt resistance. I vaguely recall phrases--"cheap dye"..."just four bucks"... "grey hard to cover"--before the calamitous final instruction, "Let it set a while."

Sometimes cheap products work. Soon my hair, which had begun to grey in the Clinton era, was indeed dark brown, with just a little silver left untouched at the temples. My daughter's pleasure was instantaneous. Cecilia was thrilled to see time overthrown. I suddenly became the dark-haired dad she had never known, a man in the full vigor of early fatherhood. Next day, she reported the news gleefully to her little girlfriends. "I told them you said you were a 'walking fraud,'" Ceci explained, "but it's OK because none of us knows what that means!"

The day after the day I dyed was not one of placid domestic retreat. Some work duties remained. I had to see and be seen. My first professional encounter was a meeting with a student. Her words were uttered literally at the threshold of my office: "Did you do something to your hair? - It looks darker." I was grateful for the opportunity to reveal my shameful open secret, and to exonerate myself in the revelation--"just a joke, a lark, won't do it again, believe me..."

Later, a holiday luncheon brought colleagues and me together, around intimate, white linen tables. No one said a word about my new look, no one probed, even gently. Some eyes did seem to rest higher upon my countenance than they normally do. Meanwhile, I drank more or less continuously from the cup of humiliation. Oh, to be caught in such a patent act of vanity! I used to be incredulous to see women putting on makeup in public. Had they no desire to preserve and protect the great cosmetic ruse they were part of? Were they not like magicians divulging their secrets before the first rabbit was pulled from the hat? But surely I was now even more exposed. My darkened hair was as patent a fiction as if I had dyed it right then and there, with the brown fluid dripping pathetically onto the white linens and grilled chicken salad.

Like all humiliations, of course, this one has not lasted, will not last, forever. And some good has come of it. I have served, if only for a spell, as liberator of men's vanities. For if a man can dye his hair and be detected, he can certainly dye his hair so as to avoid detection.

Still, I look forward to my old self. Godspeed the grey.

Obamaball

A twelve-stitch cut on the presidential lower lip will heal quickly. But I feel an obligation to inform my vast readership of the hazards of midde-aged men playing pickup basketball, especially when one of those men happens to be the Leader of the Free World. If he is prudent, our president will repeal Obamaball.

The problem does not lie in the game of basketball itself, which carries the risk of bumps, twists, and bruises but is otherwise quite safe. What gives Obamaball its danger is the presence of men whose reflexes have slowed but whose desire to shine on the court remains as strong as ever. No referees are present to discourage overaggressiveneness, limit fouls, and restrain tempers. Obamaball is the one presidential policy that suffers from a lack of regulatory intervention.

In pickup basketball, too, the absence of permanent teams, leagues, and championships makes the standard of success a very personal one: If on any given day you can beat your guy to the basket, you have triumphed and you can exult all the way to the showers. If that guy happens to be the President of the United States, well,...you finish the sentence. I do not charge the player who busted Obama's lip with doing so willfully. I do say that he was not in his right mind. No one in his right mind would do anything remotely likely to bust the lip of an American president. But a middle aged man playing pickup basketball is not in his right mind. He is in a mental zone where normal considerations of prudence have long since been expelled.

Injuries in such an environment, including serious ones, are not uncommon, to the dismay of the friends and loved ones of the injured. A former colleague of mine badly gashed his tongue at our noontime contest. Another player, a regular from off-site, was notorious for throwing extraordinarily fierce passes at the most unexpected moments. More than once I narrowly escaped a broken nose. A neighborhood friend, meanwhile, did break his nose at a local parish gym. My wife happened to see him at the hospital with his nose shifted laterally in a most unpleasant manner. Two other competitors bumped head to brow, producing cuts and blood. That encounter was apparently similar to the one that busted Obama's lip. The offensive player claimed a space being occupied by the defender.

Any sensible American man will carefully weigh the risks of pickup basketball to himself and his family. In most cases, he will give up the habit, or make himself absolutely certain of the unnaturally mild intentions of every single player who joins him on the court. As for the President, it is a fair bet that if he continues his hooping ways, he will get hurt again.

Obamaball has gone on long enough to prove to the world that Barry the Bomber has got game. Time to end it, Mr. President, or join a league.

The Longest Loneliness

On November 29, 1980, thirty years ago yesterday, Dorothy Day died, just a few weeks after the election of Ronald Reagan. Day was one of the twentieth-century architects of the Catholic Left, which in 1980 was not yet implicated in its current ménage à trois with the pro-choice movement and the Democratic Party.

Day's 1955 autobiography, The Long Loneliness, is a classic to those who still love her, and a quite respectable feature film based on the book was released in 1996, under the title Entertaining Angels. By "long loneliness" Day meant the basic but often unsatisfied human need for community. Her own long loneliness was remedied by a life of service to the poor and membership in the Catholic Church, which, not coincidentally, she considered the church of the poor.

But that solution had not come quickly to her. She experienced inklings of religious belief in childhood, but by her early 20s Day lived a Bohemian, free lover's existence, inspired by the message of the early birth control movement and predisposed to embrace the causes of the unbelieving radical left. She quickly demonstrated painfully bad taste in men. Compelled by a sharp, acquisitive love for a writer, Lionel Moise, she practically forced her way into his life—into his apartment, into his bed. He forewarned her that if she became pregnant, he would abandon her. When they conceived, she aborted the child to keep the man, but lost both. She then married a strange loser on the rebound, dumped him after a year, and pursued Lionel to Chicago, where she failed to recapture him.

Only later did Day find familial happiness when she settled into a common-law marriage with Forster Batterham, a man of no particular distinction except to be the undeserving recipient of her love. She conceived again and this time her unborn child brought her great happiness. She began to return to thoughts of God and to pray. As a leftist, she wondered whether she was simply swallowing the opiate of the people. But Marxist theory, she realized, did not fit her situation. She turned to God not as one oppressed but as one who, like C.S. Lewis, had been "surprised by joy." She had her infant daughter baptized into the Catholic Church and then became a Catholic herself. Forster, an atheist and anarchist who had rejected even a mere licensed union, could never accept sacramental marriage with a Catholic. They broke up. Shortly thereafter, at the height of the Great Depression, Day found her calling when she began offering food and shelter to the poor of New York City. The ministry was quickly imitated elsewhere and persists to the present day, in one form or another.

Almost seamlessly, Day integrated her secular political philosophy with Catholic social teaching. She absorbed the Catholic esteem for distributism—widespread ownership of the means of production—and united it with her pre-existing taste for anarchism. For Day, anarchism was not the absence of all government. It was local self-government. She envisioned a society of small businesses and farms directed by individuals in small communities. She was opposed to the dominance of both large corporations and expansive centralized governments. She appealed to the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which states that the most local unit of society capable of handling a matter should do so. She had a Franciscan regard for instantaneous, unmediated aid to the poor. She had far too little faith in the state to keep easy company with American liberals.

Sometimes Day seems caught in an ideological time warp. Is she conservative? Is she liberal? Today it is hard to peg someone who distrusts both the state and the corporation, and who does so in resolutely Catholic language. Our vision sharpens somewhat when we follow her into the 1960s. As the Sexual Revolution unfolded, Day refused to go along with it. She was now too steeped in the full range of Catholic teaching to be enticed by calls for a loosening of Catholic moral strictures on birth control, divorce, premarital sex, and abortion. She set herself firmly against the claims of homosexuality. She instinctively recognized that the openness to human life represented by concern for the poor was equally represented by respect for the procreative power of sex. Despite her own libertine past, she does not seem to have feared the charge of hypocrisy. She viewed her own history with shame and sorrow. She believed the youth of the '60s were sinking into the same sexual mistakes she and her peers had made in the '20s. Some of the young liberated volunteers in her ministry began to see her as something of an old hag.

Although Dorothy Day lived a long, full life, I still think it worthwhile to ask what would have become of her had she survived beyond 1980. Her traditionalism on sexual morality would have left her with few ardent friends on the Catholic Left, which has tacitly agreed with the Secular Left not to make too much of a fuss about such things as abortion and homosexuality. The Right, meanwhile, would have penalized her for her anti-capitalism. She would have been isolated, intellectually and perhaps socially. For a woman intent on merging ideas with action in a community of true believers and doers, this would have been the longest loneliness of all.

Say A Prayer...For the Pretenders

It is an undeniable fact of life that pretenders succeed. Pretenders create the impression that they know more than they do know, and that they have achieved more than they have. A long chain of such impressions, crafted for small cliques as much as large audiences, and fortified among persons who count, creates a reputation, which results in job offers, promotions, awards, and opportunities for genuine achievement, which, to be fair, pretenders use to actually become the persons they have pretended to be. If all goes well, the pretense eventually diminishes, the smoke and mirrors are stored away, and something authentic emerges.

Meanwhile, however, the honest, naive ones who never claimed to know what they did not know, who as freely revealed their failures as their triumphs, who never confidently proferred a dubious answer in the expectation that it would do no harm, or that it could be corrected easily enough later---the fate of such innocent souls is to fill out the lower reaches of their chosen occupations and courses of life.

On the whole, I have no quarrel with the pretenders. Perhaps nine-tenths of the practical good done in this world is done by them. And I may be a pretender myself. In the spiritual realm, however, the pretender's course does give me pause. For God cannot be impressed as humans can. His view of us will never be molded by the quiet little press releases we launch heavenward. He will not spread word of our faux excellence to His angels and His saints, there or here below. The pretender, being too-practiced in his arts, is in constant danger of getting ahead of himself, and of being painfully drawn back to who he truly is, by the one true God.

In the end, of course, all shall be well. In God's kingdom, the first shall be last, and the last first. This prophecy is often misunderstood. It does not mean that the last shall replace the first and that the first will be relegated to the back of the pack. It means that the very ordering of first and last shall be obliterated. All will stand and thrive together on a single, happy plain.

In the meantime, though, say a prayer...for the pretenders.

Two Rivers

Many of my thousands of readers have asked about the title of this blog.

The River Floss is the topographical center of George Eliot's classic English novel, The Mill On the Floss.

The central characters of this story are Maggie and Tom, children of a mill owner who loses his mill in a legal dispute. Tom vows to regain the lost mill (he succeeds) and remain forever the enemy of the family that took it away. After their father's death, Maggie, in disturbing contrast, renews and deepens her long friendship with the son of that very family.

Imaginatively, the River Floss is a place of unresolved tensions. Tom's purely utilitarian approach to education confronts Maggie's authentic love of learning. Tom's unyielding regard for a merely conventional morality, which compels his hatreds as much as it restrains his vices, confronts Maggie's desire for true moral virtue, for the "more excellent way." As the story approaches its climax, brother and sister are deeply alienated from each other.

In the end, the tensions between Tom and Maggie are resolved only by death. They drown during a flood, swept away in the engorged Floss. There is an implied reconciliation, as they die in each other's arms. But Eliot was unable to imagine a fuller resolution. In this respect the moral imagination of Mill on the Floss, for all its poignancy and richness of expression, has a kind of quiet poverty at its core. Human lives not only turn out imperfectly, but the imperfection defines the outcome rather than qualifies it. It is the difference between wearing a somewhat worn shirt and wearing that shirt inside-out.

I can recommend Mill on the Floss for showing that the desire to be authentically human inevitably leads to conflict. But Eliot does not show a way through that conflict. Ultimately, the river does not give the victory to those who struggle; it only ends their struggle. The river neither forgives nor redeems. It merely terminates. It is the River Floss, not the River Jordan.

Our prayer can only be that the river running through this vale of tears is the Jordan, not the Floss.

My Two Mothers

Yesterday the Catholic Church celebrated the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, mother of the Church. When Mary's life on this earth ended, her soul was not separated from her body, nor did her body begin to decay. Rather, she was taken up to heaven, body and soul. So the Church believes.

The Assumption of Mary is a fitting complement to the teaching that Mary was sinless from the moment of her "immaculate" conception. The unbelieving will quarrel as to which teaching is the more incredible.

I myself do not find the sinlessness of Mary so difficult to believe. Certainly the God who created the universe can lead a single human being through her short run on earth without a single moral misstep. And I need not believe that Mary never made a mistake, only that she never sinned. For there are many mistakes that are not sins, and Mary may have made them. Perhaps she accidentally slammed the door on Jesus' finger when he was a toddler. Perhaps she burned Joseph's supper and, with no choice but to eat it, he became ill. Perhaps she then resorted to the treatment of bleeding to cure him. Such actions would have been flawed and harmful but not sinful. I grant that true moral virtue strives for due care and correct judgment. And one can often bore down from a "mistake" to a sinful intent that gave rise to it. But errors resulting from unavoidable imperfections of body and mind are not sins.

The only person I have known who seems to come close to the sinless state of Mary was my other mother, Virginia Cerna Joseph, who died in 1982 at the age of 54.

The effort to find fault with this mother might yield some results. She was not much of a disciplinarian. Her efforts to spank her seven children with the wooden paddle my father had made were greeted with laughter. Perhaps there was some sinful laxity at work there, and we would have turned out better had she kept us on a tighter leash. She worried a lot. Perhaps that could have been the result of a lack of complete trust in God's providence.

On matters of sex and marriage, her judgments could be exacting. When a female friend of my brother's asked to stay a night at our house as she hitchhiked across the region, my mother resisted the prospect of a girl of such evident loose morals setting foot in our home. She had a low view of Martin Luther King, Jr., solely on account of his sexual dalliances as reported by J. Edgar Hoover. In the days before annulments became common, she did not support divorce as a solution to the problem of a spouse who seemed incapable of fulfilling the basic obligations of married life.

But that's all I can think of in the way of possible wrongs. And it's just the stringy backside of the tapestry. On the front lies her good cheer; her openness and sympathy towards others (she softened toward the hitchhiker); the impossibility of imagining her deliberately harming anyone; her abiding faith in God and her love for the Church. A priest who knew us both once said he saw some of her qualities in me. This is the highest compliment I have ever received. I am grateful to him for seeing things as they aren't.

When I think of my two mothers, I must confess that the image of one merges with the other.

If, meanwhile, there is a Mary-shortage among the rest of us, I am comforted in the knowledge that nearly everyone I have known possesses at least one virtue that is truly noble and excellent. Most of us are probably closer to becoming like Mary than we imagine.

Guest Blog: Two Singers

I'm 8 so it's kind of embarrassing writing a blog. I wanted to clear that up. Anyways...I want to tell you about my favorite singers, Ingrid Michaelson and Regina Spektor.

I think that Regina Spektor is just a little bit better than Ingrid Michaelson, but that may be because Ingrid Michaelson is less, kind of, experienced, I should say. I think that I like Regina Spektor a little bit better because she is more creative with her songs.

But Ingrid Michaelson is good, too, because I like how she puts the very few instruments she has into very good work.

Whenever I go to the stereo I have to really think a long time about which one I'm going to play. I like hearing the songs and singing them to myself while doing hand and body gestures that match the song. Also, the way I memorize songs is by hearing them a lot of times while I'm cleaning the table or I'm just getting bored. I have to listen to them a couple times before I memorize them but it's very fun to memorize them because I feel like I helped the writer of the songs write the songs. I feel I have something special to do with them.

-Cecilia Joseph

Friday Night Slights

Friday Night Lights, an NBC drama that airs, cutely, on Friday nights, has been a favorite of mine since my wife and I discovered it on Hulu a few years ago. In fact, FNL is the only TV show I watch regularly. I am not sure FNL merits this singular honor, but perhaps in some mysterious way the show and I are about made for each other.

FNL depicts a small, hard-livin', football-lovin' fictional Texas town called Dillon. The central characters are high school football coach Eric Taylor and his wife Tami, high school principal. A small set of appealing characters surround the mostly loving and sensible couple. Many of the student characters from the show's first seasons are now gone. They graduated and left Dillon. Few shows have dispatched central characters with such aplomb.

FNL insists on that kind of realism. For unlike so much else on TV, FNL actually believes in realism as a mode of artistic expression. The outlandish plots of the crime and doctor shows, the far-out intrigues of the superpower dramas, the absurd scenarios and extreme characters of the situation comedies--you will find no attempt at such things here. Scenes are filmed documentary style, and the actors are permitted to ad lib lines as they see fit. Cast and crew work on location in the Austin area. Even the football team at fictional Dillon High, the Panthers, suit up in imitation of the real-life Pflugerville Panthers nearby.

Of course, such techniques are no guarantee of realism. The producers of FNL seem to believe that small town life in Texas consists of a thin, tepid religious conservatism laced with heavy dosages of moral transgression. I cannot pronounce them to be definitely wrong, but realism would seem to favor the depiction of at least one reasonable, thoughtful Christian on the show, at some point.

The Taylors are churchgoing, and want their daughter to be, too. But neither they nor any of the other characters has ever indicated a more than passing acquaintance with the Christian faith and its possible implications for the travails of daily life. In a previous season, the lovely and talented Lyla Garrity briefly got religion but then collapsed into the arms of a new beau, football star Tim Riggins. She kissed Tim hello and God goodbye. In truth, FNL associates intense Christian commitment most often with emotional pathologies. The sensible people are either not religious at all or discreetly leave their faith on the Church steps after Sunday service.

Dillon is big enough to include a state champion high school football team, cutting-edge educators, a brilliant artist, homosexuals, rich people, and an Applebee's. But for some reason the place cannot quite accommodate even one thinking, committed Christian.

I can't say the omission hurts my feelings, exactly. There is a quaintness and naivete to FNL's secularism that I almost want to leave untouched. But this Texas Christian does claim the right to feel slighted.

The Form Of An Architect

Now showing, one city at a time, and at very select venues, is a documentary film on the life and work of Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), the great Chicago architect of the Gilded Age. The documentary is written, produced, and directed by Mark Richard Smith, of Whitecap Films. A first-edition DVD can be pre-ordered here.

Louis Sullivan is sometimes called architecture’s “father of modernism.” From him came the principle "form follows function," a mantra of twentieth-century modernists. Sullivan believed that design (form) should reflect a building's structure, use, and setting (function). He wanted to stop in its tracks the tendency in America to impose historic architectural styles--classical, Gothic, Italianate, etc--on buildings whose actual functions were alien to them. He called for an aesthetic sensitivity to the unique conditions that characterize each building. He wanted architects to use their heads and hearts, not just their styles.

Sullivan applied his philosophy most famously to the skyscraper. In the late nineteenth century, buildings taller than four or five floors were just beginning to be constructed. The development of steel framing removed the need for enormously thick masonry walls at the ground level and allowed for unprecedented height. But architects considered that height an aesthetic problem, to be solved with one or more styles from Europe, and mainly an old Europe at that. Thus a building devoted to business offices might be adorned like a palace. Portions of these buildings evoke today the silly castle that appears at the beginning of every Disney movie. Height was frequently underplayed through varying the styles of the successive floors and including plenty of horizontal lines, as in the New York World Building below.

NEW YORK WORLD BUILDING, 1890


Sullivan, by contrast, insisted that the problem of the skyscraper, like every problem, “contains and suggests its own solution.” As though dressing a tall woman in high heels, he designed facades that accentuated the skyscraper’s height rather than downplayed it. In his seminal design, the Wainwright Building (St. Louis, 1890), uninterrupted vertical lines draw the eye ever upward. Ornamental flourishes along the way make the eye's journey a pleasant one without slowing it down. The repetition of windows faithfully reflect the interior space, which was dedicated primarily to a host of equally sized offices. Though only ten stories high, the Wainwright Building set the standard of “vertical organization” characteristic of the modern skyscraper. Sullivan's successors, of course, would often abandon the ornamentation he was so fond of. He cannot be blamed for the plain, dull, and cheap boxiness that followed him.

THE WAINWRIGHT BUILDING, 1890


Sullivan quickly achieved recognition, but after the 1890s his career underwent a stunning, progressive financial collapse. He approached his craft with evident dedication, honesty, and brilliance. But while the accolades poured in, the commissions did not. His wife, whom he married when he was 42 and she 20, left him after nine years--exhausted, presumably, by the grinding downward economic spiral which Sullivan had put her on. And by his drinking. His last marital act was to give her $1,000 of the $1,100 he had made selling off his possessions at auction. After that he breathed a sigh of relief to be alone again, and then resumed his downward course. In the years before his death in 1924, Sullivan needed money from friends, including Frank Lloyd Wright, his former draftsman and protege.

History has well known its unrewarded prophets, its impoverished geniuses, its abandoned beautiful minds. But the decline of Louis Sullivan is almost too stark for explanation. Certainly his most damaging trait, as Mark Smith's documentary emphasizes, was his unwillingness to take on clients whose expectations differed substantially from his own artistic vision. Early on, Sullivan's partner, Dangmar Adler, softened the impact of this tendency, but the economic depression of the 1890s led Adler to take a well-paying job with an elevator company, and Sullivan henceforth had to go it alone. With no wife for most of his professional life, and no children for all of it, he was under relatively few pressures to conform to market demands.

For a single man who creates beautiful buildings, there are certainly worse fates than to die broke. At the same time one cannot help but chide this solitary genius with a failure to exemplify his own famous dictum. Sullivan's form as an architect never quite followed the function of his world.

The Last of the Wine

TV reruns filled many of the wasted summer hours of my youth. What's more regrettable, I never watched the Dick Van Dyke Show, though it was then in syndication. Now, Hulu.com offers online all five seasons. The show ran from 1961-1966 and totaled 159 episodes. In retrospect, Dick Van Dyke stands for all that was appealing in secular, liberal America during the mid-20th century.

This was a truly charming show. The wit flows like good wine among friends. As Rob Petrie, a comedy show writer, the young Dick Van Dyke is funny without being abnormal. Mary Tyler Moore, who plays his even younger wife, Laura, is pretty, articulate, precious. Both actors possessed genuine comedic gifts that the remorseless passage of years has long since obscured.

The plot lines are often trivial. As with Seinfeld, this is a show "about nothing." Yet the social backdrop is about everything. Here is a middle class American family. It is small--only one child appears. It is secular--little talk of God surfaces. Above all, it is liberal--not so much for its political commitments as for its habits of being. The authority of the husband is real, but heavily tempered by the reasoning prowess of his wife and by his own foibles. High culture receives deference, if not love. Articulateness in speech is valued. There is a taste for the bon mot. Food (speaking of taste) is enjoyed, but in moderation, and almost never alone. Van Dyke's lean frame predates the food revolution that now packs the guts even of small children.

All this is to say that while the show is funny, humor does not entirely account for its charm. For the humor is embedded in a social setting that is itself winning and attractive. The humor flows from the virtues of the people and the relationships those virtues enable them to have. And those virtues are liberal virtues.

Unwittingly, the show hints at the coming dissolution of this liberal world. There is banter, and some plot lines, regarding marital infidelity and divorce. An old flame of Laura's comes into town, a pretty young singer flirts with Rob. There are winks and playfully raised eyebrows. The influence of such incidents does not survive the episodes in which they occur, and the Petries have a good marriage--a strong one, even. Yet there is no acknowledgment of the sacred and moral underpinnings such a marriage must have, nor of the vulnerability of freefloating unions that lack them.

After Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore went on to star in her own show. But by then the liberal world represented by the Petries had begun to alter and to unravel, and Moore's new show quickly reflected the change. Her character, Mary Richards, was single--the producers had wanted to make her divorced but considered that too "advanced" for the viewer. None of the eligible men in Richards's life were ever of the Rob Petrie grade. Typically, they would appear at her apartment door in their silly '70s garb and their artless manners and their dubious intentions. Even the best of them compare unfavorably to the sleek coat-and-tie'd Van Dyke. One could argue that The Mary Tyler Moore Show was funnier than Dick Van Dyke. It certainly had a larger, more versatile cast. But no one could claim that the lives of Mary Richards and the men at her door were more refined, more attractive, or even more interesting than the lives of the Petries.

And so I want to lift, and tilt, my glass to The Dick Van Dyke Show. This was the last of the liberal wine, poured out by men and women who, though unknown to me, I feel compelled to call friends.

A Good Public School In A Great Neighborhood

A few days ago I had the privilege of attending a talk by Dr. Fred Freddoso, professor of philosophy at Notre Dame. He spoke at the University of St. Thomas, in Houston. The text of Dr. Freddoso's talk is available here. Dr. Freddoso is a witty and resilient veteran of the theo-cultural wars that have been sputtering on among the Fighting Irish for several decades now.

Last spring Notre Dame awarded President Obama an honorary doctor of laws degree. President Obama's understanding of law is sharply anti-Catholic, as he believes doctors have a legal right to kill unborn children so long as their mothers consent. But Dr. Freddoso was not surprised by the award. In his reading, Notre Dame's Catholicism has been equivocal since the 1950s. At that time, Notre Dame became impatient with the pace of intellectual development in Catholic America and began to adopt secular models of education, even at the expense of its Catholic identity.

Dr. Freddoso laments the loss of that identity. But he knows that once one gives up the idea that Notre Dame is a Catholic university, the place looks fairly helpful from the Catholic point of view. Think of Notre Dame, he says, not as a Catholic school but rather as a "public school in a Catholic neighborhood." And indeed, the neighborhood does help shape the school. Notre Dame famously claims that over 50% of its faculty is Catholic. While Dr. Freddoso acknowledges--and wants it to be known--that many faculty who check the "Catholic" box on the form have not darkened the door of a church since childhood, he also notes that Notre Dame has a sizable number of genuinely Catholic faculty.

At bottom, Notre Dame is a secular university in which Catholicism has a more than average degree of influence. Whatever its past, this appears to be Notre Dame's present, and its future, as far as the eye can see.

A Lady In Spain

I confess to being enchanted by the music of Ingrid Michaelson. She is a young singer-songwriter in the pop/folk mode. Her songs are exquisitely crafted, emotionally compelling, and beautifully performed.

This is generally light music, lifted by the strummed guitar, the plucked ukelele, and a clear, lilting voice. It is easy on the ears and easy on the mind. Yet the songs possess an imaginative undercurrent that carries us to places we may not have visited in a while. When I first heard "Far Away" I found it so evocative that I felt sure this was some old classic tune Michaelson had pulled from the vault:

"I will live my life/As a lobsterman's wife
On an island in the blue bay.
He will take care of me/He will smell like the sea,
And close to my heart he'll always stay."

Listen for yourself here, here, and here.

A lifelong Bob Dylan fan, I am determined to overplay my hand by mentioning Ingrid Michaelson in the same sentence with him. She is one of our most gifted songwriters. To be sure, she falls far short of the baroque lyrical abundance of Dylan in his prime. But this is a less literate age, and she must be judged accordingly. Michaelson's songs instinctively recognize that brevity, clarity, and simplicity are in. ("I want to say a lot with as few words as possible," she explains.) And her best lines, even when attached to near-cliches and borderline juvenalia, as they sometimes are, seem to me as rich as anything Dylan has offered in a comparable number of words:

"I am a lady in Spain,
I'll sing a haunting refrain.
I am a lady from Mars,
And I can unscrew the stars."

The M Word

Last Sunday I heard a homily on the Feeding of the Five Thousand (Luke 9:10-17), the only miracle of Jesus recounted in all four gospels.

But this homilist avoided any mention of the word "miracle." He explained that in offering the gathered masses five loaves and two fish, Jesus encouraged them to share the food they already had in hand. The Five Thousand were fed not because Jesus miraculously multiplied the loaves and fishes, but because his exemplary act transformed the gathering from a collection of isolated individuals into a generous community.

I have encountered this interpretation before, but the homilist made the best case I have yet heard for saying the Feeding was not a miracle. In the end, however, the case does not stand. The whole premise of the Gospel story is that as "the day began to wear away" the people lacked food. The Apostles suggested to Jesus that He dismiss the people so they could get provisions for themselves. Jesus initially directed the Apostles to give them something to eat. It strains belief to suppose that Jesus and the Apostles did not know what was in the pockets of the people, while we, two thousand years away, do.

I recall hearing the "no miracle" interpretation back in the mid-1990s, at St. Joseph's Pro-Cathedral, in Camden, NJ, before a congregation of poor families who might have preferred to know a Christ capable of genuine multiplication. On that occasion, the homilist felt obliged to mention that the Gospel account was normally considered a miracle story.

Now, it appears, the rhetorical setting has changed. The Feeding of the Five Thousand can be explained without even mentioning the M word, much less embracing it.