JJEROME HAS UNFRIENDED FACEBOOK
Jerry Harkins
There, Jerry! Don’t you feel a lot better now? Well, Doctor, ask me again in fourteen days when my unfriending becomes final and irreversible. That’s when Facebook says it will permanently erase me. Until then I will remain under constant surveillance and my every keystroke will be reported to The Party. But two weeks from now I will be not a has-been but a non-person, possibly a never-was like all those expunged from the Soviet history books. I expect they will denounce me to every man, woman and child I ever met, just as they sang my praises when I enrolled. How proud I was that day. “JJerome has become a member!” I never knew why the two J’s but it did not diminish my pride. Now I will no doubt be disfellowshipped by many, mourned by some and ridiculed by the rest. But the clozapine was not really helping (I think it’s better for schizophrenia than paranoia anyway) and it has several really nasty side effects.
What hath God wrought? (Either Numbers 23:23 is the culmination of a really weird story about Balaam beating his donkey or I dreamt it under the influence of the clozapine.) Facebook has become the universal consciousness [1] through the simple expedient of making all seven billion of us feel guilty if we don’t constantly tune into the trivia of our friends’ lives. Some of these “friends” are actually people you know, love and admire. (That’s how FB gets a hook into you.) Some are casual acquaintances you see once a year and exchange Xmas emails with. Then there are the folks whose names you have to dredge up from the deep recesses of memory. You know, people you met at a Free Paris Hilton cocktail party five years ago. Finally there are the thousands of people Facebook insists are just dying to friend you if only you would press the right button. After all, you have a friend in common and, if you remember the six degrees of separation thing, before long you will have seven billion friends. Every one of them will send you birthday greetings and you will know what they had for breakfast this morning and whether or not they faked an orgasm last night. Oh, joy!
But I digress. Actually God is not responsible for Facebook, Mark Zukerberg is. (I do not deny the possibility that Mr. Zukerberg is God.) He and a bunch of buds were sitting around in a circle in Lowell House one afternoon studying a Girls of the Ivy League feature in Playboy and having a grand old time. In the background, a DVD was playing on the TV. It was the 1984 release of 1984. (The one with the original Dominic Muldowney score rather than the Eurhythmics trash which replaced it a week after it was released in London [in 1984].) (I wrote that last sentence specifically to try out my new emoticon—a grin and a wink. Hope you liked it.) Anyway, Mark got this billion dollar idea and, by the end of the session, they had decided to call it CircleJerk.com. The name did not survive the first meeting with the venture capitalists who proposed inyourface.com and everybody thought that was pretty good but when the sweet-smelling haze dissipated, it got dumbed down to its present form.
Like most things that emerge from Ivy League bull sessions, Facebook is not an unmixed blessing. Think about the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) which emerged full grown from the mind of another Harvard man (Henry Strangeglove Kissinger) during an earlier Lowell House tea party. Dr. Kissinger was the coach of the mixed doubles tiddlywinks team at the time. Since Harvard lacked one of the genders in 1957, they recruited transvestites of whom there was no shortage.
As I say, Facebook has a number of drawbacks. To begin with, Mayor Bloomberg wants to ban it as a public health menace because of the number of people it bores to death. When Mike Bloomberg says you’re boring… Worse still, neo-conservatives see it as a threat to national security because it has exposed America as a nation of vacuous Yahoos. (A Yahoo is a character in a boring novel by Jonathan Swift. A Yahoo! on the other hand is a Yahoo trying to be non-boring by adding an exclamation point. Yahoo! emerged from what passes for a circle jerk at non-Ivy universities, in this case Stanford. The jerks were engineering students studying a beguiling circuit diagram. Enough said!) Don Rumsfeld came out of retirement to propose a surgical strike on Palo Alto which, with a little luck, might take out Sunnyvale and Cupertino at the same time. Of course with Don’s luck the missiles would miss the valley altogether and hit downtown Brattleboro, Vermont.
In addition to being boring, Facebook is ruining the market for talk therapy and the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation by encouraging people to vent their frustrations, complaints, indiscretions, alienations and other banalities to a global audience sure to respond only with a lol or meh. Given my skepticism about talk therapy, I contributed another new emoticon (I’m really good at this). :o stands for “How did that make you feel?” It hasn’t gone viral yet.
Bad enough I needed to reply to that post about your dog’s diarrhea but first I had to spend a half hour figuring out if you were serious. Maybe this was a test of your friends’ loyalty, sympathy or intelligence. Since I only vaguely remembered you from the cocktail party (while we were being introduced, I was probably ogling Paris’ sister, Nicky). I couldn’t be sure. I tell you, bubbula, Facebook was anxiety provoking. So I’m well rid of it even if, like the Ancient Mariner, I am doomed to wonder the world telling my tale:
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns;
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
Scholarly Endnote
1. Otherwise known as the “collective unconscious,” an idea invented by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung in 1919. C.G. wrote a rich description of the fantastical material stored in his new mental construct but Facebook has now exposed this as utter nonsense if not culpable malpractice. The actual material of the collective unconscious is now seen to be nothing but the dregs of the most dreary, humdrum dross of daily life.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Friday, September 30, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Jerry Harkins
BERLIN 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, And The Most Dangerous Place On Earth, Frederick Kempe, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011. 579 pages. $29.95
This is actually two books for the price of one. The first is a carefully researched, beautifully written account of the crisis that culminated in the erection of the infamous wall around the perimeter of East Berlin. The second is a diatribe of revisionist history concerning the intelligence, morality and, in some ways, even the patriotism of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The two books are only barely related. The first one is an outstanding contribution to Cold War Studies if only because it brings together a great deal of new information and contemporary perspective for the first time. The second, blessedly much shorter, is a hatchet job.
Frederick Kempe despises JFK whom he portrays as stupid, indecisive, drug addicted and criminally promiscuous. The President gets 90% of the blame for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Walter Ulbricht is a brilliant strategist with a very understandable problem. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev is a master of psychological warfare whose only objectives are to improve Soviet economic performance and retain his own power. Konrad (Der Alte) Adenauer, Charles (Le Grand) de Gaulle, Lucius Clay and Dean Acheson are poor souls burdened with an inexperienced American President who refuses to allow them to decide how much American blood should be shed in defense of Berlin. All of this is, at best, simplistic.
Kempe is of the zero tolerance school. He has no sympathy whatever for either the overwhelming significance of the decisions that had to be made or for the uncertainty that invariably surrounds momentous events. In every case there is a single right answer and in every case Kennedy chooses a wrong one. Nor is this perfect hindsight. The right answer was always self-evident to all right thinkers. The major mistake was not standing up to Khrushchev’s bullying which was always mere bluffing. But ‘bullying’ is a polite way to describe the Premier’s antics and rhetoric. Like his mentor Stalin, Comrade K was or at least appeared to be certifiably crazy. This is the world leader who came to the United Nations in 1960 and started banging his shoe on his desk to protest a speech by the Philippine delegate. Kempe and many other think he was merely a shrewd peasant. With the fate of the world at stake, however, indecision does not seem beyond all understanding and caution reads as the only sane approach.
The history of the era must proceed from three unarguable facts:
• The erection of the Berlin Wall marked the obvious defeat of Communism as a rational economic system. As Kennedy said in his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech, “There are some who say Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin.”
• Kennedy knew and publicly admitted that he had suffered a serious setback in Berlin. But the lessons were taken to heart and contributed to what was arguably the most important victory of the Cold War in the Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year.
• Ultimately, the Wall came tumbling down in the aftermath of the fall of Communism itself. Much of the credit must go to conservative American presidents, especially Nixon and Reagan. But the global situation that prompted the end of the Cold War was set in motion by Kennedy and furthered by his successors. Kempe thinks the Communist downfall might have come faster had Kennedy not backed down in 1961 but that is pure speculation.
A reader can’t be sure that Kempe is even aware of his bias against Kennedy. Like all revisionists, he must take the view that the rest of us were hoodwinked into feeling good about America under Kennedy. Like all revisionism, it’s annoying whether it’s right or wrong. And it surely is bias. In his acknowledgments, Kempe, a son of pre-war German immigrants, says, “It is my parents who instilled in me an indignation both toward those who imposed and those who tolerated the oppressive system that encased seventeen million of their fellow Germans…” My own biases tell me that the Germans had no right to such feelings.
How bad is the bias? At the end of the disastrous Vienna summit, Khrushchev blusters about signing a separate peace treaty with East Germany in December. Kennedy says, “If that’s true, it’s going to be a cold winter.” Kempe snidely remarks, “…he got even that wrong. His troubles would come much earlier.” Even that!
Jerry Harkins
BERLIN 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, And The Most Dangerous Place On Earth, Frederick Kempe, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011. 579 pages. $29.95
This is actually two books for the price of one. The first is a carefully researched, beautifully written account of the crisis that culminated in the erection of the infamous wall around the perimeter of East Berlin. The second is a diatribe of revisionist history concerning the intelligence, morality and, in some ways, even the patriotism of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The two books are only barely related. The first one is an outstanding contribution to Cold War Studies if only because it brings together a great deal of new information and contemporary perspective for the first time. The second, blessedly much shorter, is a hatchet job.
Frederick Kempe despises JFK whom he portrays as stupid, indecisive, drug addicted and criminally promiscuous. The President gets 90% of the blame for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Walter Ulbricht is a brilliant strategist with a very understandable problem. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev is a master of psychological warfare whose only objectives are to improve Soviet economic performance and retain his own power. Konrad (Der Alte) Adenauer, Charles (Le Grand) de Gaulle, Lucius Clay and Dean Acheson are poor souls burdened with an inexperienced American President who refuses to allow them to decide how much American blood should be shed in defense of Berlin. All of this is, at best, simplistic.
Kempe is of the zero tolerance school. He has no sympathy whatever for either the overwhelming significance of the decisions that had to be made or for the uncertainty that invariably surrounds momentous events. In every case there is a single right answer and in every case Kennedy chooses a wrong one. Nor is this perfect hindsight. The right answer was always self-evident to all right thinkers. The major mistake was not standing up to Khrushchev’s bullying which was always mere bluffing. But ‘bullying’ is a polite way to describe the Premier’s antics and rhetoric. Like his mentor Stalin, Comrade K was or at least appeared to be certifiably crazy. This is the world leader who came to the United Nations in 1960 and started banging his shoe on his desk to protest a speech by the Philippine delegate. Kempe and many other think he was merely a shrewd peasant. With the fate of the world at stake, however, indecision does not seem beyond all understanding and caution reads as the only sane approach.
The history of the era must proceed from three unarguable facts:
• The erection of the Berlin Wall marked the obvious defeat of Communism as a rational economic system. As Kennedy said in his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech, “There are some who say Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin.”
• Kennedy knew and publicly admitted that he had suffered a serious setback in Berlin. But the lessons were taken to heart and contributed to what was arguably the most important victory of the Cold War in the Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year.
• Ultimately, the Wall came tumbling down in the aftermath of the fall of Communism itself. Much of the credit must go to conservative American presidents, especially Nixon and Reagan. But the global situation that prompted the end of the Cold War was set in motion by Kennedy and furthered by his successors. Kempe thinks the Communist downfall might have come faster had Kennedy not backed down in 1961 but that is pure speculation.
A reader can’t be sure that Kempe is even aware of his bias against Kennedy. Like all revisionists, he must take the view that the rest of us were hoodwinked into feeling good about America under Kennedy. Like all revisionism, it’s annoying whether it’s right or wrong. And it surely is bias. In his acknowledgments, Kempe, a son of pre-war German immigrants, says, “It is my parents who instilled in me an indignation both toward those who imposed and those who tolerated the oppressive system that encased seventeen million of their fellow Germans…” My own biases tell me that the Germans had no right to such feelings.
How bad is the bias? At the end of the disastrous Vienna summit, Khrushchev blusters about signing a separate peace treaty with East Germany in December. Kennedy says, “If that’s true, it’s going to be a cold winter.” Kempe snidely remarks, “…he got even that wrong. His troubles would come much earlier.” Even that!
Thursday, July 28, 2011
SEX AND DEATH
Jerry Harkins
JOHN WARNE “BET-A-MILLION” GATES (1855-1911) was an American industrialist (U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, Texaco) whose funeral was held in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Plaza Hotel. He was interred in an impressive mausoleum near the Jerome Avenue entrance of Woodlawn Cemetery. The bronze door is graced by a high relief partial nude sculpted by Robert I. Aitken. She is seen from the back in a posture of grief almost as though resisting the closing of the door that has brought home the finality of her lover’s death. In spite of a little strategic drapery, the sculpture has an obvious if muted erotic aspect. We see a strong well proportioned womanly body. She is graceful but not a sylph. She is young but not a teenager. She is vulnerable but not virginal. She is idealized but not unbelievable. Most interestingly, her eroticism is uncommon for an American cemetery. [1] In Nineteenth Century France and Italy, especially, nude or nearly nude women were regular features of urban cemeteries, most notably Père Lachaise in Paris and Monumentale in Milan, and the figures were often less draped than the Gates nude and more explicitly erotic. [2] Often they are, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, “…in a pose of swooned, vulnerable abandon, as if grief were a form of erotic surrender.” [3] Although by no means pornographic, they tend to be considerably more erotic than most sculptural nudes.
Oates also implies that the sculptures and the graves they adorn “belong to the nineteenth century.” Well, of course. Prior to the Nineteenth Century, only major figures built elaborate permanent tombs. These abound in iconic women but few of them are overtly erotic. For example, the tomb of Michelangelo has three grieving women seated around his sarcophagus. All three are beautiful but there is little suggestion of eroticism. The figure on the viewer’s right wears what appears to be a diaphanous undergarment with a shawl on her right shoulder and drapery in her lap. The center figure is fully clothed in a classic pose of grief with her head resting on her right hand and arm. It is sometimes said these figures are allegorical representations—possibly Muses—of painting, sculpture and architecture. [4] If true, then these were the women who attended the artist during life and with whom he might have had a passionate if not erotic relationship. In any event, the story they tell is surely highly charged and it is not inconceivable that they symbolize a relationship that is erotic in Plato’s sense of the human yearning for ideal beauty and finality.
The faint eroticism of Michelangelo’s tomb and even that of the Gates mausoleum are subtle compared to the abandon discussed by Ms. Oates which appears to have been a short-lived vogue related perhaps to the cataclysmic social and political upheavals of nineteenth century Europe. Overt eroticism was much less common in the United States, in part because of our Puritan heritage and in part because we were preoccupied by more mundane distractions. [5] Early American grave markers were often quite ghoulish and those erected in the nineteenth century might be ornate but rarely played on the sex and death theme. Their descendants have generally sanitized all such emotions to the point that even such sex symbols as Mae West and Marilyn Monroe are interred in utterly simple wall crypts. Even when an attractive figure adorns a grave, there is no suggestion of eroticism. For example, Daniel Chester French’s Mourning Victory, the centerpiece of the Milmore Memorial in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, is a beautiful but hardly erotic woman. [6]
The tension between Eros and Thanatos is one of the great themes of human culture, noted and discussed long before it became a central subject for Freud who associated the former with the life instinct and the latter with the desire for stasis. Freudian theory postulates that life is a constant struggle between these forces. It is fair to say that succeeding generations of philosophers and psychologists have found this notion intriguing but ultimately not compelling. It lacks a dynamic principle that allows the healthy person to resolve the conflict and lead a productive life as, in fact, most people do. Perhaps that missing element is a kind of spirituality as represented by Bacchus (Dionysus) who is often conflated with Eros even though they are distinctly different. [7] It is true that both invoke ecstasy as a means of encountering the divine. They share the epithet Eleutherios, Liberator, the one because of the liberating quality of wine, the other ecstatic sex. But Bacchus speaks for all the joys and passions of life. Sir James Frazer refers to him as the God of life-death-rebirth and alludes to the obvious parallels with the story of Jesus. Joseph Campbell, too, writes of Bacchus as the son of Persephone, Goddess of Death: “the ever-dying, ever-living slain and resurrected son, Dionysus-Baccus-Zagreus.” [8] Almost surely, this derives from the more ancient archetype of the Green Man known in more recent times in England and Ireland as John Barleycorn who represents the giving of life to others from the sacrifice of his own. Eros, then, would be a subsidiary theme in the service of this all-embracing motif. He is explicitly and sharply focused on sexuality, in some cases, homosexuality. Interestingly, he is usually depicted as a pre-pubescent child or an adolescent and his childishness is an important element of many of the stories about him. In the earliest of these, he is the son of Chaos and Gaea who embodies the force of their erotic love which is nature’s fundamental creative urge or life force. In other words, he is the product of eroticism, not its originator. Although his origins were attenuated in later versions, his primordial nature never completely disappeared. Plato proposed that he was the son of Poros and Penia, Wealth and Poverty respectively. Still later, he was said to be the son of Aphrodite and Ares, love and war. In all these incarnations, there are intimations of great force, even compulsion, and great pleasure.
It might seem that Bacchus would make a better foil for death than Eros, the totality of life vis a vis the finality of death. Actually, whenever Eros or Cupid is invoked in anything more literary than a greeting card, there is often the subtext of exactly the Bacchanalian revelry Pope Benedict XVI was complaining about in his first encyclical (see Note 7). This is evident in many funeral rituals where Eros is involved. In rural Ireland until recently it was a custom to adjourn from a wake for a death-defying interlude of heavy drinking, fighting and fornication al fresco. This custom was obviously a ritualistic way of defying death and also almost certainly a re-enactment of the symbolic sexual union of the new king with the land, a renewal ceremony in which, once again, ecstasy is a bridge between death and rebirth. Thus it would be wrong to focus on the Bacchanalian aspects of such doings which, I suspect, are a cover for the erotic undertakings. And Eros represents more than sexual release. Frazer notwithstanding, he is the symbol of rebirth, not necessarily the physical rebirth of the individual but the spiritual renewal of the community.
Rebirth and renewal are subtle ideas. In most versions of the John Barleycorn song, for example, no mention is made in the lyrics of his resurrection but in the associated dances he always springs up at the end bigger and stronger than ever, just as the barley plant did after being harvested and looking barren through the winter. Ancient and medieval farmers may not have understood the biology involved but they were awed by the annual reappearance of the crop. In some stories, Barleycorn was the king who mated with the earth, ruled for a year and was then killed so his blood might fertilize the earth. [9]
It is reasonable to suggest that the association of sex and death is not so much about either as it is about hope. We are used to hearing Hamlet’s lament, “But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / no traveler returns.” But in the First Folio it is not “dread.” The line is, “But for a hope something after death?” and the question mark seems important. For a very brief moment in the nineteenth century, cemetery art was enlisted in the service of this hope. Then, perhaps as the garden cemetery movement grew, people became embarrassed at the prospect of explaining swooning angels and ecstatic nudes to children. We will never know why it arose and why it vanished so soon. But it was not merely a passing fetish. It was an expression of one of our species’ most fundamental ideas.
Notes
1. She: erotic imagery is almost always in the form of a female figure and almost always adorns the tomb of a man. The most famous exception is the full length effigy of Victor Noir on his tomb in Cimetière du Père-Lachaise sculpted by Jules Dalou. Although M. Noir is depected as quite dead (i.e., complete with the entry wound of the fatal bullet) he nonetheless has an impressive erection which has been the object of the ministrations of successive generations of Parisian maidens hoping to find a husband. (The author is grateful to Dr. Caterina Y. Pierre for calling this story to his attention. See her article “The Pleasure and Piety of Touch in Aimé-Jules Dalou’s Tomb of Victor Noir.” Sculpture Journal, 19.2, 2010, pp. 173-85.)
2. See: Robinson, David, Saving Graces: Images of Women in European Cemeteries, W.W. Norton, 1995.
3. Ibid, p. 10.
4. There were no Muses of these arts in the classical world although later artists often contrived them. The Michelangelo sculptures were executed by three different sculptors following, perhaps, an overall plan developed by the architect Giorgio Vasari. The three figures each hold something that could be an emblem of the art they symbolize. The standardization of such emblems was a preoccupation of the period.
5. Compared to Europe, America in the nineteenth century was both a simpler and a more stable society. In addition to the Gates sculpture, there are fully clothed mourning women adorning some American grave sites, notably in the South. For example, two very female angels in the eroticized swoon described by Joyce Carol Oates stand atop the Aldigé memorial in Metirie Cemetery in New Orleans. Another example is the elaborate memorial to James “Diamond Jim” Fisk at the Prospect Hill Cemetery in Brattleboro, Vermont. Four lovely young women in various states of undress circle the base, each holding a symbol of one of his earthly interests in the manner of Michelangelo’s tomb. Fisk’s muses seem to have been money, railroads, steamship lines and the theater. The last-named was not an artistic interest but the source of most of his mistresses.
6. The Milmore Memorial is not a grave marker. The actual family plot is at a different location in the same cemetery. The woman is the angel of death who is shown interrupting the sculptor Martin Milmore at work. It is one of French’s most emotional works. She reaches out gently to stay the sculptor’s hand as if to say, “Come, it is time to rest from your labor.” A marble copy of the bronze original is prominently displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
7. I believe Pope Benedict XVI conflates Eros and Bacchus when he complains of the “divinization of eros” by which he means “…a divine madness which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness.” (See his encyclical letter God Is Love: Deus Caritas Est, U.S. Conference of Bishops, 2006.)
8. There are several accounts of Bacchus’ origin. His mother is generally said to be the mortal woman Semele who was seduced by Zeus. In another version, Bacchus was conceived through an indirect, unusual and gruesome union of Zeus and Persphone. Zeus impregnated Semele in the usual way and she gave birth to Zagreus who was then killed by agents of the jealous Hera. Zeus then created mead out of the dead infant’s heart and gave it to Semele to drink which is how she became pregnant with Bacchus.
9. Frazer refers to this king as “Corn King” and it is not clear whether he is using an abbreviated form of Barleycorn or has made a typical nineteenth century mistake. Corn, of course, was not introduced into Europe until the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Friday, July 01, 2011
SING GOD A SIMPLE SONG
Jerry Harkins
People don’t sing as much as they used to. My mother was always singing. When she was a child—she was born in 1908—most middle class families had pianos. Friends and neighbors would frequently gather for “singings” in the evenings. That year, Victor Herbert was advising young swains to “Ask Her While the Band Is Playing” and the Ziegfeld Follies pleaded “Shine on Harvest Moon” so boys and girls could enjoy one more round of outdoor spooning before winter set in. (I suspect that that the meaning of spooning has changed since 1908.) In a similar vein, the swains of the day sang, "Cuddle Up A Little Closer" to the girls they fell in love with "Down By The Old Mill Stream." The older generation, tired of songs about "moon and spoon and June," urged the youngsters to "Stand Up And Sing For Your Father An Old Time Tune." Of course, the big song that year was Norworth and Tilzer’s “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” It was the beginning of the golden age of Tin Pan Alley during which sheet music became a billion dollar industry that eventually centered on West 28 Street in New York. That same year, 364,545 new pianos were sold in the United States, a record that has never been surpassed. Also that year the piano industry held a convention in Buffalo and agreed on an 11¼ inch, 88 note standard for the new player piano rolls which became the home entertainment centers before the advent of electric “Victrolas” in the mid-1920’s. But it was all downhill from there.
The end of home-made singing came swiftly with the Depression and the rise of radio and the phonograph which turned America into a nation of enthusiastic listeners. In succeeding generations, transistor radios, Walkman tape players, boom boxes and iPods of every description unleashed a global passion for songs of all kinds. But the actual singing is now left mostly to people who do it for a living. Every once in a while, there’s a do-it-yourself revival. A natural song leader like Pete Seeger comes along to remind people how much fun it is to sing together. But, by and large, the songwriters don’t bother trying to write for ordinary people anymore. There is still a fair amount of solo singing out there, or at least a fair number of young people who want to sing and think they can. Between 3 and 3.5 million guitars are sold in the U.S. each year which means about one in every hundred Americans buys one. For those with more modest goals, Guitar Hero is a best selling computer game. Karaoke is a popular entertainment. And there is an entire sub-genre of reality television devoted to singers and their bands. But the last redoubt of amateur choral singing is the Christian church and the state of that art is pretty pathetic. [1] Even as choirs have gotten better and better—which is to say more “professionalized”—congregational singing has become virtually extinct.
As an art form, song is a strange and not always comfortable hybrid of words and music. In non-classical categories alone, there are hundreds of genres and subcategories differentiated primarily by the styles in which they are meant to be sung. There are styles of musical architecture the most important of which in popular music is probably the 12-bar blues. But performance trumps everything else as a listener will sense from the different interpretations of a song as sung by different vocalists. It is hard to say exactly what makes a song a good song. The music, of course, must be “catchy” which basically means it must be easily memorable. There is also the broader quality of “singability.” Left to professionals, songs tend to become too complex for untrained singers. Even contemporary blockbuster Broadway musicals are hard for audiences to get their ears and their vocal cords around. Wicked, for example, is a wonderful show but its songs demand highly trained, almost operatic, voices. Whereas anyone can sing the songs of Oklahoma or My Fair Lady.
Lyrics are a different story. The truth is it has never been essential for songs, including hymns, to make sense. Even as important a hymn as “Tantum Ergo,” written by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, has a lyric like, “Praestet fides supplementum / Sensuum defectui.” Let faith provide a supplement / For the failure of the senses. A supplement for a failure? Tom probably meant substitute (vicarious) or replacement (reponendus), both of which have four syllables like supplementum but neither of which rhymes with sacramentum or documentum. When you’re looking to complete a clever rhyme scheme, you take whatever the Muse lays on you.
He has trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. When I was a kid, I wondered what that meant. I had an image of Jesus in a warehouse where “grapes of wrath” were kept, crushing them with his feet to make a bitter wine. Now I know better and the truth is even stranger. Julia Ward Howe [2] a Unitarian, had been raised in a strict Calvinist home so it is not surprising that she was familiar with and took inspiration from the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Revelation, the part that describes the Last Judgment. It begins by discussing the first 144,000 souls that are saved, implying that they are all celibate males. As Verse 4 tells us, “These are those who did not defile themselves with women, for they kept themselves pure.” [3] Verses 14-16 describe the first harvesting of the earth, possibly but by no means certainly, the harvesting of the elect. There follows the harvesting of those presumed damned. One angel tells another: “Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth's vine, because its grapes are ripe.” Then,
"The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God's wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses' bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia." [4]
Apparently Mrs. Howe did not like the image of the winepress so she changed it to the almost comic one of Jesus crushing grapes with his bare feet. She also attributed the wrath to the grapes rather than to God, thereby turning it into an even more obscure metaphor than the Bible’s evil grapes formulation. Part of the problem is the rhyme scheme she chose: A A A B, (lord, stored, sword, on). This is at least twice as hard to create as a scheme requiring only two rhyming words. The same problem St. Thomas had. Part may also be the fact that the first five verses were written in a few hours while the author was in some sort of trance.
Mrs. Howe wrote her lyrics to a popular 1856 tune, “Canaan's Happy Shore” by William Steffe which had been borrowed in 1860 by Thomas Bishop for his even more popular marching song, “John Brown’s Body.” She heard that version at a military review on November 18, 1861 and wrote the first five verses the next morning before dawn. The dominant imagery is the horror of war: his terrible swift sword, his righteous sentence, his fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel, the trumpet that shall never call retreat and, finally, let us die to make men free. To one raised with the songs of World War II—songs like “Lily Marlene,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and the “The White Cliffs of Dover”—it is hard to imagine soldiers or civilians embracing this sort of imagery but “Battle Hymn” was the most popular song of its time. As we approach its 150th birthday, it is still hugely popular but today it is more often sung in sad, reflective arrangements. Artists as different as Marilyn Horne and Judy Garland have recorded such versions. Dionne Warwick though treats it as a gospel hymn with a touch of joy and an even more joyous vocal backing. Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic play it as though it were a rousing Sousa march while the magnificent Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings it as though it were a dirge. But it is first and always a hymn even if its lyrics are bloodthirsty to the modern ear. Is anyone paying attention?
Maybe it is best not to parse the logic of hymns. What, for instance, is a “round yon virgin mother?” [5] Or why is a “mighty fortress” a suitable metaphor for a loving God? “Change and decay in all around I see.” Why associate change with decay? Is the author referring to some sort of moral entropy law? But worse is the treacle that passes for petition. For example: “From war’s alarms, from deadly pestilence,/ Be Thy strong arm our ever sure defense;/ Thy true religion in our hearts increase, / Thy bounteous goodness nourish us in peace.” Daniel C. Roberts wrote those lyrics which were chosen by George W. Warren, the organist at St. Thomas Church in New York City, to be the new “National Hymn.” [6] The music Warren wrote for them is memorable and easy to sing but how would you like to sing those lyrics before every ball game? In fact, it is still sung often by congregations as “God of Our Fathers” although the third verse quoted above is omitted as often as not. Or how about the hymn called “O Sacred Head Now Wounded?” Most of it is a maudlin translation of a maudlin text used by Bach in the St. Matthew Passion. But modern translators have made it even more embarrassing by adding verses with lines like, “Can death thy bloom de-flower” and “Thy beauty long desired…thy power all expired.”
Worst of all is when the theology gets muddied. There is a beautiful Shaker hymn called “Simple Gifts.” In 1963, the great British hymnist Sydney Carter provided a new set of lyrics based on the insightful image of Jesus as the Lord of the Dance. This is actually a fairly common medieval image first put to music in 1833 in a hymn titled “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day.” All dance is metaphor and in this case it refers to religious ecstasy, the universal archetype also represented by Bacchus as the Liberator. The idea appears to disturb Pope Benedict XVI who commented on it at length in his first encyclical, Deus Est Caritas. Still, “Lord of the Dance” is one of the most frequently sung hymns in Christian, including Catholic, congregations in the English-speaking world.
Carter begins with a verse establishing the image. He follows with: "I danced for the scribe and the pharisee / But they would not dance and they wouldn't follow me / I danced for the fishermen, for James and John / They came with me and the Dance went on." This is unsettling because it is vaguely anti-Semitic. And wrong: James and John themselves were certainly Jewish and almost certainly Pharisees. But the third verse continues: I danced on the Sabbath and I cured the lame / The holy people said it was a shame. / They whipped and they stripped and they hung me high / And they left me there on a Cross to die. The implied “therefore” between the second and third lines is more than vaguely anti-Semitic. [7] The incident of the Sabbath curing is described at the beginning of Mark 3 and does indeed end with the Pharisees plotting how they might kill Jesus. But the plotting came to naught. As the gospels make perfectly clear, the high priests later accused Jesus of blasphemy in claiming to be the son of God and, for Pilate’s consumption, of rebellion against Caesar. [8]
Most hymns are, of course, unobjectionable and many are both musical and intellectually appealing. But times and sensibilities change. The muscular Christianity of the Nineteenth Century may strike modern listeners as bellicose blustering. “Christ, the royal Master, / Leads against the foe; / Forward into battle, / See His banner go!” Indeed.
The title of this essay is taken from the first aria in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. In performances, it follows a quadraphonic recording of a short, wild, cacophonous Kyrie for soprano and soloists. The score is marked “Tranquillo” and it is exactly that: a quiet, pensive, tonal solo for bass. The lyrics for the first section are:
Sing God a simple song: Lauda, Laude.
Make it up as you go along, Lauda, Laude
Sing like you like to sing.
God loves all simple things,
For God is the simplest of all.
In Judeo-Christian theology, God is said to be infinitely simple as opposed to composite. God does not have component attributes such as knowledge and goodness but rather is these attributes. As with every other part of Mass, there is a profound and quite orthodox point being made about the role of religion in disturbing times and the music perfectly complements this. The Times, though, was having none of it. On September 9, 1971, its senior critic Harold Schonberg called Mass pretentious and thin, cheap and vulgar. The following Sunday, he added superficial and said it was, “…the greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and marshmallow sauce.” Ten years later, the paper’s dismay was unrelieved. On September 14, 1981, Donal Henahan wrote that the piece, “…finds no time to say anything worth hearing.” Moreover, “…much of the evening would sound [sic] as it were being improvised by the cast of ‘Saturday Night Live’ except that the humor is vapid and superficial.” Forty years later, it is finally being recognized as a masterpiece. “A Simple Song” has been frequently recorded and is even sung in worship services because congregations like it and because its message of simplicity provides a rich wellspring for homilies.
Hymns are important for many reasons not the least of which is the fact that these are the songs most sung and perhaps most enjoyed by ensembles of non-professional singers. They are by no means alone in being burdened with lyrics that are often bathetic or worse. Think of the mileage Paul McCartney and John Lennon got out of the line, “I wanna hold your hand.” Dumb, dumb, dumb, but, in fairness, it should be remembered that their manager, Brian Epstein, told them he wanted a song that would appeal to the American market. Did it ever! Elvis could make a line like “Y’ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog” immortal and a fellow named Oscar Rasbach could produce a lovely song out of Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” The first line of that poem is arguably the most memorable line of poetry ever written and is certainly an esthetic triumph compared to “I wanna hold your hand.” It exemplifies the virtue of simplicity. The problem arises in the eleven lines that follow. Most interesting is what appears to be an unintended subtext. Both tree and the earth are clearly identified as female and it is hard to avoid the metaphor of them as lovers. Kilmer almost surely meant to signify the love and nourishment of mother and child but he does not shy away from sexual imagery which suggests he is celebrating a lesbian love affair. Nonetheless, “Trees” was enormously popular as a poem and became even more so as a song set to music in 1922. Modern critics tend to despise the poem and the poet, seeing them both as simple and sentimental rubbish but, in the context of the times, “Trees” was a major accomplishment.
For really ghastly lyrics you need to turn to contemporary singer/songwriters, including Michael Jackson, the King of Pop who was widely regarded as the greatest entertainer in the world. Two of his many platinum songs are “Bad” and “Beat It.”
Because I'm Bad, I'm Bad-
Come On
(Bad Bad-Really, Really Bad)
You Know I'm Bad, I'm Bad-
You Know It
(Bad Bad-Really, Really Bad)
You Know I'm Bad, I'm Bad-
You Know It, You Know
(Bad Bad-Really, Really Bad)
Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It
No one ever questioned Jackson’s musicality. Both “Bad” and “Beat It” are important contributions and the choruses quoted above drive both songs forward. They fail not as lyrics so much as English rhetoric. They do not fail because they are repetitious. Mozart used the word Alleluja thirty-three times in a row in his motet Exsultate, jubilate and Handel used Hallelujah thirty-six times in the soprano line alone of his famous chorus. “Bad” and “Beat It” fail because they lack meaning. Many classical composers encountered similar problems, especially when they looked to the Bible for inspiration. Arguably, the soprano aria "I know that my Redeemer liveth" from Handel’s Messiah is one of the greatest hymns ever written. But its attempt to link Job’s act of faith (“Yet in my flesh shall I see God” (Job 19:25) with Paul’s assertion that the risen Christ is, “the first fruits of them that sleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20) is dubious at best. [9] In Samson, "Let the bright Seraphim" which is sung just before the final chorus is a showstopper which gained worldwide popularity when Kiri Te Kanawa sang it at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. The music is sublime, the lyrics less so:
Let the bright Seraphim in burning row,
Their loud uplifted Angel-trumpets blow:
Let the Cherubic host, in tuneful choirs,
Touch their immortal harps with golden wires.
These words are a slightly edited version of lines taken from John Milton’s "At a Solemn Music," published in 1645 but written much earlier. He is describing heaven:
Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
Their loud up-lifted Angel trumpets blow,
And the Cherubick host in thousand quires
Touch their immortal Harps of golden wires,
This is not a train wreck even if seraphim being immolated at a row of stakes while blowing angel trumpets is hardly an edifying image. In the context of the bizarre Samson story recorded in Judges 13-16, it is only a minor aggravation. What should bother people is that while this is being sung, the stage is littered with dead Philistines and, of course, Samson himself. Why such a song was thought suitable for a royal wedding—even in England—must remain one of life’s mysteries.
Handel had a habit of celebrating events that might appeal to eighteenth century British nationalism but which strike the modern progressive ear as horrific. Another of his great arias, Oh, had I Jubal's lyre, is from the final section of the oratorio Joshua. It is a song of thanksgiving sung by Achsah whose father Caleb has just given her to his nephew (her cousin) Othniel as a reward for driving the Canaanites out of Kiriath Sepher, a town near present day Hebron (Joshua 15:13-17). Achsah sings to Othniel:
Oh, had I Jubal’s lyre,
Or Miriam’s tuneful voice!
To sounds like his I would aspire,
In songs like hers rejoice.
My humble strains but faintly show,
How much to Heaven and thee I owe.
Now this is a well read young lady. True, Miriam is of her parent’s generation and, as Moses’ sister, she would be famous. But Jubal, seven generations removed from Adam in the line descended from Cain, is obscure, mentioned in only a single line (Genesis 4:21), identified as the son of Lamech and “…the father of all who play the harp and flute.” Achsah owes exactly nothing to Othniel whose achievement was conquering a small town in the Negev desert. She is a mere pawn in her father’s empire building strategy and you are being asked to believe she was utterly delighted by it. Perhaps. Maybe, were she a twenty-first century Middle Eastern princess, she would still be delighted to be thought of as a prize for an honored warrior. But why would Handel celebrate such views?
On the other hand are many hymns based on great poetry which are still less than satisfactory as liturgy. A prime example is the lovely but now infrequently sung Christmas carol “In The Bleak Midwinter” with a text by Christina Rossetti and a tune by Gustav Holtz. The poem addresses the question of why Jesus was born in a manger and proposes that it was “Enough for him,” the eternal God whose mother worshiped her beloved with a kiss. In the second verse, however, brilliant poetry is imposed on nightmarish theology: “Heaven and earth shall flee away when he comes to reign.” Still, it is a wonderful hymn. If pastors and ministers of music are troubled by its theology, musicians of every description are attracted to it. The current catalog lists more than 50 covers including those of Julie Andrews, Allison Crowe, Cyndi Lauper, Annie Lomax, Sarah McLachlan, James Taylor, Jars of Clay and the Crash Test Dummies.
Both popular and sacred music are often denigrated because the lyrics are thought to be simple and simple is equated with simple-minded. Such high criticism misses the point of song which is to engage the imagination rather than the intellect. In his recent book of collected lyrics, the songwriter Stephen Sondheim compares two songs with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from Oklahoma and “All the Things You Are” from Very Warm for May. The former is an eminently simple sentiment set to light, airy music by Richard Rodgers. The latter is sophisticated poetry set to the sophisticated music of Jerome Kern. [10]
You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long.
You are the breathless hush of evening
That trembles on the brink of a lovely song.
You are the angel glow that lights a star,
The dearest things I know are what you are.
But Mornin’ is the more successful song because, as Sondheim argues, poetry and lyrics are very different. “Poetry,” he writes, “is an art of concision, lyrics of expansion…Music straitjackets a poem and prevents it form breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric.”
The difference is often clearly evident in nineteenth century art songs. Take, for example, Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise based on poems by Wilhelm Müller. The third song is Gefrorene Tränen. The German poetry does not translate well but here is a more or less literal rendition:
Frozen tear drops
fall from my cheeks:
Can it be that, without knowing it,
I have been weeping?
O tears, my tears,
are you so lukewarm,
That you turn to ice
like cold morning dew?
Yet you spring from a source,
my breast, so burning hot,
As if you wanted to melt
all of the ice of winter! [11]
The lover is crying without realizing it. To make sense of this, the reader must ponder the metaphors carefully, leisurely. The forced tempo of even the most sublime music prevents this and leaves the listener with the image of tears coming from the poet’s burning breast which are nonetheless frozen because they are lukewarm. Contrast this with a popular song of the 1960’s, Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
This is not going to win the gold medal for rhetoric even if it makes a lot more sense than “Beat It.” The image of a white dove sailing is nonsensical. The notion that manliness is somehow related to walking down roads or that either is related to the central peace message of the song is far fetched. And what was Mr. Dylan thinking of when he wrote the answers are blowing in the wind? But this song was ranked Number 14 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. (Number One, the absolute greatest song of all time, bar none, was said to be Mr. Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” But that’s another story. [12])
As all right-thinking people know, the greatest song of all time is the hymn “Amazing Grace,” a poem by John Newton published in 1779 and set to various tunes until it was finally joined with the tune “New Britain” 56 years after he wrote it. [13] The tune is engaging and readily singable and the words are meaningful and accessible. The language, like that of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, is or sounds as though it should be biblical. The cadences are familiar and comfortable, the message is uplifting. The melody is a simple one based on the pentatonic scale common in folk, gospel and rock music. Hear it once and you can hum it on the way home.
Simplicity is often but not always the soul of a great song. Cole Porter and the Gershwin brothers, for example, often wrote songs with highly sophisticated words and music. Porter’s “So In Love” from Kiss Me Kate is a good example. It has been covered by virtually every major jazz singer and new recordings have been released every year since it was written in 1948. Millions of people recognize it instantly. Everyone likes it. But no one sings it in the shower even though they may occasionally hum the first three bars, “Strange, dear, but true, dear.”
Whenever someone notices anew that “The Star Spangled Banner” is not very singable or that its lyrics are a bit bellicose, there ensues a debate about possible replacements. No one understands “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and it would hardly appeal to southern ears. “America the Beautiful” sounds like a tourist guide. “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” uses the music of the British national anthem. “This Land Is Your Land” was written by Woody Guthrie and “God Bless America by Irving Berlin, one a Communist, the other a Jew. We must be sensitive to the delicate feelings of the right wing. In any event, “God Bless America” is, in its own words, “a solemn prayer” which might offend the left wing. Otherwise it has everything a great song needs. In fact, there was a strong movement in the 1930’s to use it in place of the Star-Spangled Banner and it is still widely used before sporting events because it is so easy to sing.
There is nothing wrong with listening to a song. When you hear Joan Sutherland sing about seraphim on fire or Kathleen Battle waxing humble about her vocal talent, you can give yourself over to euphoria without obsessing about the logic of the lyrics. But listen also to babies babbling and observe that they are (a) singing and (b) having fun. We are born to sing. You don’t have to be a medieval philosopher to know the world is made of music.
Notes
1. This is something of an exaggeration. Practically every high school and college has at least one glee club, the barbershop movement remains strong with more than 30,000 participants in the United States, and there are amateur choruses throughout the country. But these activities are highly structured and strive to sound as polished as possible. It’s like the difference between a suburban Little League and a pick-up game of stickball.
2. Mrs. Howe was one of the most accomplished Americans of her time, an abolitionist, feminist, essayist and poet of distinction who is less appreciated today than she should be. Her husband was an archetypical male chauvinist who opposed her every public action. With all she accomplished outside the home, she also raised four children who went on to distinguished careers of their own.
3. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are from the New International Version®. Copyright © 1984 by the International Bible Society.
4. One stadium equals 185 meters or about 607 feet. A typical horse would be about 5 feet (15 hands) at the withers, so the bible is talking about 1.8 million cubic feet of blood, about 11.5 million gallons. At 1.5 gallons per adult, that’s 7.6 million people.
5. There is nothing even close to a round yon virgin in the original German, the first verse of which is:
Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!
Alles schläft. Eynsam wacht Nur das traute heilige Paar.
Holder Knab’ im lockigten Haar,
Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!
Which translates:
Silent Night, Holy Night,
Everyone is sleeping. Only the faithful and holy couple keeps watch.
Lovely child with curly hair
Sleep in heavenly peace.
6. Modern hymnals include this under a title taken from its first line, “God of Our Fathers.” All the lyrics are undistinguished but only the third verse is truly bilious.
7. Sydney Carter (1915-2004) was many things—poet, scholar, pacifist and theologian, and he was certainly not an anti-Semite. The analysis presented here would never have occurred to him when he was in the process of exploring one of his favorite metaphors. In an early poem which many thought of as a fitting epitaph, he wrote, “The dance is all I am, the rest is dust. / I will believe my bones and live by what / Will go on dancing when my bones are not.” There is evidence in the form of a note from his friend Rabbi Lionel Blum that when he realized the problem, he set out to modify several lines in the poem. Sadly, the Rabbi writes, "...before this could happen, Alzheimer's took over." See Blum's Introduction to Lord of the Dance and Other Songs and Poems, Stainer and Bell, 2002.
8. In demanding the death penalty for blasphemy, they were only following the mandate of Leviticus 24:14 which says, “Anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord must be put to death. The entire assembly must stone him. Whether an alien or native-born, when he blasphemes the Name, he must be put to death.” Obviously, Mr. Pilate would not have been impressed by Leviticus so they had to suggest a Roman crime and call for a Roman punishment.
9. Messiah and a great deal of Christian exegesis are full of such efforts to see the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy in some New Testament event. “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son” (Isaiah 7:14) is seen as a prediction of Matthew 1:24 which quotes it. But the Hebrew of Isaiah actually is better translated as, “a young woman has conceived,” referring to a sign from God to King Ahaz.
10. The melody is said to be, “one of the loveliest in the American repertory by no less an authority than James R. Morris, former head of the Smithsonian Institutions Division of Performing Arts. See Six Decades of Songwriters and Singers, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984.
11. Trans. Arthur Rishi, www.recmusic.org/lieder/assemble_texts.html?SongCycleId=47
12. The lyrics are misogynist claptrap. Even the central metaphor is absurd: “How does it feel / To be on your own / With no direction home / Like a complete unknown / Like a rolling stone?” Such a stone surely has a direction—down—and is derived from the aphorism “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” It was coined by the Dutch theologian Desiderius Erasmus who clearly meant that we have to live active lives lest we get rusty.
13. The essence of both music and poetry is meter which is defined by stress patterns in both. Thus, it is not uncommon to find poems and tunes whose meters complement each other. Francis Scott Key wrote a poem which he entitled “Defense of Fort McHenry.” Several days later, his brother-in-law noticed that it “fit” the music of a popular ditty, “The Anacreontic Song” by John Stafford Smith. Eight days after the poem was written, the words and music were published together as “The Star Spangled Banner.” Similarly, there are many poems that “fit” the “New Britain” tune, among them Samuel Taylor Colderidge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Robert W. Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”
Jerry Harkins
People don’t sing as much as they used to. My mother was always singing. When she was a child—she was born in 1908—most middle class families had pianos. Friends and neighbors would frequently gather for “singings” in the evenings. That year, Victor Herbert was advising young swains to “Ask Her While the Band Is Playing” and the Ziegfeld Follies pleaded “Shine on Harvest Moon” so boys and girls could enjoy one more round of outdoor spooning before winter set in. (I suspect that that the meaning of spooning has changed since 1908.) In a similar vein, the swains of the day sang, "Cuddle Up A Little Closer" to the girls they fell in love with "Down By The Old Mill Stream." The older generation, tired of songs about "moon and spoon and June," urged the youngsters to "Stand Up And Sing For Your Father An Old Time Tune." Of course, the big song that year was Norworth and Tilzer’s “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” It was the beginning of the golden age of Tin Pan Alley during which sheet music became a billion dollar industry that eventually centered on West 28 Street in New York. That same year, 364,545 new pianos were sold in the United States, a record that has never been surpassed. Also that year the piano industry held a convention in Buffalo and agreed on an 11¼ inch, 88 note standard for the new player piano rolls which became the home entertainment centers before the advent of electric “Victrolas” in the mid-1920’s. But it was all downhill from there.
The end of home-made singing came swiftly with the Depression and the rise of radio and the phonograph which turned America into a nation of enthusiastic listeners. In succeeding generations, transistor radios, Walkman tape players, boom boxes and iPods of every description unleashed a global passion for songs of all kinds. But the actual singing is now left mostly to people who do it for a living. Every once in a while, there’s a do-it-yourself revival. A natural song leader like Pete Seeger comes along to remind people how much fun it is to sing together. But, by and large, the songwriters don’t bother trying to write for ordinary people anymore. There is still a fair amount of solo singing out there, or at least a fair number of young people who want to sing and think they can. Between 3 and 3.5 million guitars are sold in the U.S. each year which means about one in every hundred Americans buys one. For those with more modest goals, Guitar Hero is a best selling computer game. Karaoke is a popular entertainment. And there is an entire sub-genre of reality television devoted to singers and their bands. But the last redoubt of amateur choral singing is the Christian church and the state of that art is pretty pathetic. [1] Even as choirs have gotten better and better—which is to say more “professionalized”—congregational singing has become virtually extinct.
As an art form, song is a strange and not always comfortable hybrid of words and music. In non-classical categories alone, there are hundreds of genres and subcategories differentiated primarily by the styles in which they are meant to be sung. There are styles of musical architecture the most important of which in popular music is probably the 12-bar blues. But performance trumps everything else as a listener will sense from the different interpretations of a song as sung by different vocalists. It is hard to say exactly what makes a song a good song. The music, of course, must be “catchy” which basically means it must be easily memorable. There is also the broader quality of “singability.” Left to professionals, songs tend to become too complex for untrained singers. Even contemporary blockbuster Broadway musicals are hard for audiences to get their ears and their vocal cords around. Wicked, for example, is a wonderful show but its songs demand highly trained, almost operatic, voices. Whereas anyone can sing the songs of Oklahoma or My Fair Lady.
Lyrics are a different story. The truth is it has never been essential for songs, including hymns, to make sense. Even as important a hymn as “Tantum Ergo,” written by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, has a lyric like, “Praestet fides supplementum / Sensuum defectui.” Let faith provide a supplement / For the failure of the senses. A supplement for a failure? Tom probably meant substitute (vicarious) or replacement (reponendus), both of which have four syllables like supplementum but neither of which rhymes with sacramentum or documentum. When you’re looking to complete a clever rhyme scheme, you take whatever the Muse lays on you.
He has trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. When I was a kid, I wondered what that meant. I had an image of Jesus in a warehouse where “grapes of wrath” were kept, crushing them with his feet to make a bitter wine. Now I know better and the truth is even stranger. Julia Ward Howe [2] a Unitarian, had been raised in a strict Calvinist home so it is not surprising that she was familiar with and took inspiration from the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Revelation, the part that describes the Last Judgment. It begins by discussing the first 144,000 souls that are saved, implying that they are all celibate males. As Verse 4 tells us, “These are those who did not defile themselves with women, for they kept themselves pure.” [3] Verses 14-16 describe the first harvesting of the earth, possibly but by no means certainly, the harvesting of the elect. There follows the harvesting of those presumed damned. One angel tells another: “Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth's vine, because its grapes are ripe.” Then,
"The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God's wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses' bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia." [4]
Apparently Mrs. Howe did not like the image of the winepress so she changed it to the almost comic one of Jesus crushing grapes with his bare feet. She also attributed the wrath to the grapes rather than to God, thereby turning it into an even more obscure metaphor than the Bible’s evil grapes formulation. Part of the problem is the rhyme scheme she chose: A A A B, (lord, stored, sword, on). This is at least twice as hard to create as a scheme requiring only two rhyming words. The same problem St. Thomas had. Part may also be the fact that the first five verses were written in a few hours while the author was in some sort of trance.
Mrs. Howe wrote her lyrics to a popular 1856 tune, “Canaan's Happy Shore” by William Steffe which had been borrowed in 1860 by Thomas Bishop for his even more popular marching song, “John Brown’s Body.” She heard that version at a military review on November 18, 1861 and wrote the first five verses the next morning before dawn. The dominant imagery is the horror of war: his terrible swift sword, his righteous sentence, his fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel, the trumpet that shall never call retreat and, finally, let us die to make men free. To one raised with the songs of World War II—songs like “Lily Marlene,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and the “The White Cliffs of Dover”—it is hard to imagine soldiers or civilians embracing this sort of imagery but “Battle Hymn” was the most popular song of its time. As we approach its 150th birthday, it is still hugely popular but today it is more often sung in sad, reflective arrangements. Artists as different as Marilyn Horne and Judy Garland have recorded such versions. Dionne Warwick though treats it as a gospel hymn with a touch of joy and an even more joyous vocal backing. Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic play it as though it were a rousing Sousa march while the magnificent Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings it as though it were a dirge. But it is first and always a hymn even if its lyrics are bloodthirsty to the modern ear. Is anyone paying attention?
Maybe it is best not to parse the logic of hymns. What, for instance, is a “round yon virgin mother?” [5] Or why is a “mighty fortress” a suitable metaphor for a loving God? “Change and decay in all around I see.” Why associate change with decay? Is the author referring to some sort of moral entropy law? But worse is the treacle that passes for petition. For example: “From war’s alarms, from deadly pestilence,/ Be Thy strong arm our ever sure defense;/ Thy true religion in our hearts increase, / Thy bounteous goodness nourish us in peace.” Daniel C. Roberts wrote those lyrics which were chosen by George W. Warren, the organist at St. Thomas Church in New York City, to be the new “National Hymn.” [6] The music Warren wrote for them is memorable and easy to sing but how would you like to sing those lyrics before every ball game? In fact, it is still sung often by congregations as “God of Our Fathers” although the third verse quoted above is omitted as often as not. Or how about the hymn called “O Sacred Head Now Wounded?” Most of it is a maudlin translation of a maudlin text used by Bach in the St. Matthew Passion. But modern translators have made it even more embarrassing by adding verses with lines like, “Can death thy bloom de-flower” and “Thy beauty long desired…thy power all expired.”
Worst of all is when the theology gets muddied. There is a beautiful Shaker hymn called “Simple Gifts.” In 1963, the great British hymnist Sydney Carter provided a new set of lyrics based on the insightful image of Jesus as the Lord of the Dance. This is actually a fairly common medieval image first put to music in 1833 in a hymn titled “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day.” All dance is metaphor and in this case it refers to religious ecstasy, the universal archetype also represented by Bacchus as the Liberator. The idea appears to disturb Pope Benedict XVI who commented on it at length in his first encyclical, Deus Est Caritas. Still, “Lord of the Dance” is one of the most frequently sung hymns in Christian, including Catholic, congregations in the English-speaking world.
Carter begins with a verse establishing the image. He follows with: "I danced for the scribe and the pharisee / But they would not dance and they wouldn't follow me / I danced for the fishermen, for James and John / They came with me and the Dance went on." This is unsettling because it is vaguely anti-Semitic. And wrong: James and John themselves were certainly Jewish and almost certainly Pharisees. But the third verse continues: I danced on the Sabbath and I cured the lame / The holy people said it was a shame. / They whipped and they stripped and they hung me high / And they left me there on a Cross to die. The implied “therefore” between the second and third lines is more than vaguely anti-Semitic. [7] The incident of the Sabbath curing is described at the beginning of Mark 3 and does indeed end with the Pharisees plotting how they might kill Jesus. But the plotting came to naught. As the gospels make perfectly clear, the high priests later accused Jesus of blasphemy in claiming to be the son of God and, for Pilate’s consumption, of rebellion against Caesar. [8]
Most hymns are, of course, unobjectionable and many are both musical and intellectually appealing. But times and sensibilities change. The muscular Christianity of the Nineteenth Century may strike modern listeners as bellicose blustering. “Christ, the royal Master, / Leads against the foe; / Forward into battle, / See His banner go!” Indeed.
The title of this essay is taken from the first aria in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. In performances, it follows a quadraphonic recording of a short, wild, cacophonous Kyrie for soprano and soloists. The score is marked “Tranquillo” and it is exactly that: a quiet, pensive, tonal solo for bass. The lyrics for the first section are:
Sing God a simple song: Lauda, Laude.
Make it up as you go along, Lauda, Laude
Sing like you like to sing.
God loves all simple things,
For God is the simplest of all.
In Judeo-Christian theology, God is said to be infinitely simple as opposed to composite. God does not have component attributes such as knowledge and goodness but rather is these attributes. As with every other part of Mass, there is a profound and quite orthodox point being made about the role of religion in disturbing times and the music perfectly complements this. The Times, though, was having none of it. On September 9, 1971, its senior critic Harold Schonberg called Mass pretentious and thin, cheap and vulgar. The following Sunday, he added superficial and said it was, “…the greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and marshmallow sauce.” Ten years later, the paper’s dismay was unrelieved. On September 14, 1981, Donal Henahan wrote that the piece, “…finds no time to say anything worth hearing.” Moreover, “…much of the evening would sound [sic] as it were being improvised by the cast of ‘Saturday Night Live’ except that the humor is vapid and superficial.” Forty years later, it is finally being recognized as a masterpiece. “A Simple Song” has been frequently recorded and is even sung in worship services because congregations like it and because its message of simplicity provides a rich wellspring for homilies.
Hymns are important for many reasons not the least of which is the fact that these are the songs most sung and perhaps most enjoyed by ensembles of non-professional singers. They are by no means alone in being burdened with lyrics that are often bathetic or worse. Think of the mileage Paul McCartney and John Lennon got out of the line, “I wanna hold your hand.” Dumb, dumb, dumb, but, in fairness, it should be remembered that their manager, Brian Epstein, told them he wanted a song that would appeal to the American market. Did it ever! Elvis could make a line like “Y’ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog” immortal and a fellow named Oscar Rasbach could produce a lovely song out of Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” The first line of that poem is arguably the most memorable line of poetry ever written and is certainly an esthetic triumph compared to “I wanna hold your hand.” It exemplifies the virtue of simplicity. The problem arises in the eleven lines that follow. Most interesting is what appears to be an unintended subtext. Both tree and the earth are clearly identified as female and it is hard to avoid the metaphor of them as lovers. Kilmer almost surely meant to signify the love and nourishment of mother and child but he does not shy away from sexual imagery which suggests he is celebrating a lesbian love affair. Nonetheless, “Trees” was enormously popular as a poem and became even more so as a song set to music in 1922. Modern critics tend to despise the poem and the poet, seeing them both as simple and sentimental rubbish but, in the context of the times, “Trees” was a major accomplishment.
For really ghastly lyrics you need to turn to contemporary singer/songwriters, including Michael Jackson, the King of Pop who was widely regarded as the greatest entertainer in the world. Two of his many platinum songs are “Bad” and “Beat It.”
Because I'm Bad, I'm Bad-
Come On
(Bad Bad-Really, Really Bad)
You Know I'm Bad, I'm Bad-
You Know It
(Bad Bad-Really, Really Bad)
You Know I'm Bad, I'm Bad-
You Know It, You Know
(Bad Bad-Really, Really Bad)
Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It
No one ever questioned Jackson’s musicality. Both “Bad” and “Beat It” are important contributions and the choruses quoted above drive both songs forward. They fail not as lyrics so much as English rhetoric. They do not fail because they are repetitious. Mozart used the word Alleluja thirty-three times in a row in his motet Exsultate, jubilate and Handel used Hallelujah thirty-six times in the soprano line alone of his famous chorus. “Bad” and “Beat It” fail because they lack meaning. Many classical composers encountered similar problems, especially when they looked to the Bible for inspiration. Arguably, the soprano aria "I know that my Redeemer liveth" from Handel’s Messiah is one of the greatest hymns ever written. But its attempt to link Job’s act of faith (“Yet in my flesh shall I see God” (Job 19:25) with Paul’s assertion that the risen Christ is, “the first fruits of them that sleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20) is dubious at best. [9] In Samson, "Let the bright Seraphim" which is sung just before the final chorus is a showstopper which gained worldwide popularity when Kiri Te Kanawa sang it at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. The music is sublime, the lyrics less so:
Let the bright Seraphim in burning row,
Their loud uplifted Angel-trumpets blow:
Let the Cherubic host, in tuneful choirs,
Touch their immortal harps with golden wires.
These words are a slightly edited version of lines taken from John Milton’s "At a Solemn Music," published in 1645 but written much earlier. He is describing heaven:
Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
Their loud up-lifted Angel trumpets blow,
And the Cherubick host in thousand quires
Touch their immortal Harps of golden wires,
This is not a train wreck even if seraphim being immolated at a row of stakes while blowing angel trumpets is hardly an edifying image. In the context of the bizarre Samson story recorded in Judges 13-16, it is only a minor aggravation. What should bother people is that while this is being sung, the stage is littered with dead Philistines and, of course, Samson himself. Why such a song was thought suitable for a royal wedding—even in England—must remain one of life’s mysteries.
Handel had a habit of celebrating events that might appeal to eighteenth century British nationalism but which strike the modern progressive ear as horrific. Another of his great arias, Oh, had I Jubal's lyre, is from the final section of the oratorio Joshua. It is a song of thanksgiving sung by Achsah whose father Caleb has just given her to his nephew (her cousin) Othniel as a reward for driving the Canaanites out of Kiriath Sepher, a town near present day Hebron (Joshua 15:13-17). Achsah sings to Othniel:
Oh, had I Jubal’s lyre,
Or Miriam’s tuneful voice!
To sounds like his I would aspire,
In songs like hers rejoice.
My humble strains but faintly show,
How much to Heaven and thee I owe.
Now this is a well read young lady. True, Miriam is of her parent’s generation and, as Moses’ sister, she would be famous. But Jubal, seven generations removed from Adam in the line descended from Cain, is obscure, mentioned in only a single line (Genesis 4:21), identified as the son of Lamech and “…the father of all who play the harp and flute.” Achsah owes exactly nothing to Othniel whose achievement was conquering a small town in the Negev desert. She is a mere pawn in her father’s empire building strategy and you are being asked to believe she was utterly delighted by it. Perhaps. Maybe, were she a twenty-first century Middle Eastern princess, she would still be delighted to be thought of as a prize for an honored warrior. But why would Handel celebrate such views?
On the other hand are many hymns based on great poetry which are still less than satisfactory as liturgy. A prime example is the lovely but now infrequently sung Christmas carol “In The Bleak Midwinter” with a text by Christina Rossetti and a tune by Gustav Holtz. The poem addresses the question of why Jesus was born in a manger and proposes that it was “Enough for him,” the eternal God whose mother worshiped her beloved with a kiss. In the second verse, however, brilliant poetry is imposed on nightmarish theology: “Heaven and earth shall flee away when he comes to reign.” Still, it is a wonderful hymn. If pastors and ministers of music are troubled by its theology, musicians of every description are attracted to it. The current catalog lists more than 50 covers including those of Julie Andrews, Allison Crowe, Cyndi Lauper, Annie Lomax, Sarah McLachlan, James Taylor, Jars of Clay and the Crash Test Dummies.
Both popular and sacred music are often denigrated because the lyrics are thought to be simple and simple is equated with simple-minded. Such high criticism misses the point of song which is to engage the imagination rather than the intellect. In his recent book of collected lyrics, the songwriter Stephen Sondheim compares two songs with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from Oklahoma and “All the Things You Are” from Very Warm for May. The former is an eminently simple sentiment set to light, airy music by Richard Rodgers. The latter is sophisticated poetry set to the sophisticated music of Jerome Kern. [10]
You are the promised kiss of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long.
You are the breathless hush of evening
That trembles on the brink of a lovely song.
You are the angel glow that lights a star,
The dearest things I know are what you are.
But Mornin’ is the more successful song because, as Sondheim argues, poetry and lyrics are very different. “Poetry,” he writes, “is an art of concision, lyrics of expansion…Music straitjackets a poem and prevents it form breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric.”
The difference is often clearly evident in nineteenth century art songs. Take, for example, Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise based on poems by Wilhelm Müller. The third song is Gefrorene Tränen. The German poetry does not translate well but here is a more or less literal rendition:
Frozen tear drops
fall from my cheeks:
Can it be that, without knowing it,
I have been weeping?
O tears, my tears,
are you so lukewarm,
That you turn to ice
like cold morning dew?
Yet you spring from a source,
my breast, so burning hot,
As if you wanted to melt
all of the ice of winter! [11]
The lover is crying without realizing it. To make sense of this, the reader must ponder the metaphors carefully, leisurely. The forced tempo of even the most sublime music prevents this and leaves the listener with the image of tears coming from the poet’s burning breast which are nonetheless frozen because they are lukewarm. Contrast this with a popular song of the 1960’s, Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
This is not going to win the gold medal for rhetoric even if it makes a lot more sense than “Beat It.” The image of a white dove sailing is nonsensical. The notion that manliness is somehow related to walking down roads or that either is related to the central peace message of the song is far fetched. And what was Mr. Dylan thinking of when he wrote the answers are blowing in the wind? But this song was ranked Number 14 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. (Number One, the absolute greatest song of all time, bar none, was said to be Mr. Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” But that’s another story. [12])
As all right-thinking people know, the greatest song of all time is the hymn “Amazing Grace,” a poem by John Newton published in 1779 and set to various tunes until it was finally joined with the tune “New Britain” 56 years after he wrote it. [13] The tune is engaging and readily singable and the words are meaningful and accessible. The language, like that of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, is or sounds as though it should be biblical. The cadences are familiar and comfortable, the message is uplifting. The melody is a simple one based on the pentatonic scale common in folk, gospel and rock music. Hear it once and you can hum it on the way home.
Simplicity is often but not always the soul of a great song. Cole Porter and the Gershwin brothers, for example, often wrote songs with highly sophisticated words and music. Porter’s “So In Love” from Kiss Me Kate is a good example. It has been covered by virtually every major jazz singer and new recordings have been released every year since it was written in 1948. Millions of people recognize it instantly. Everyone likes it. But no one sings it in the shower even though they may occasionally hum the first three bars, “Strange, dear, but true, dear.”
Whenever someone notices anew that “The Star Spangled Banner” is not very singable or that its lyrics are a bit bellicose, there ensues a debate about possible replacements. No one understands “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and it would hardly appeal to southern ears. “America the Beautiful” sounds like a tourist guide. “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” uses the music of the British national anthem. “This Land Is Your Land” was written by Woody Guthrie and “God Bless America by Irving Berlin, one a Communist, the other a Jew. We must be sensitive to the delicate feelings of the right wing. In any event, “God Bless America” is, in its own words, “a solemn prayer” which might offend the left wing. Otherwise it has everything a great song needs. In fact, there was a strong movement in the 1930’s to use it in place of the Star-Spangled Banner and it is still widely used before sporting events because it is so easy to sing.
There is nothing wrong with listening to a song. When you hear Joan Sutherland sing about seraphim on fire or Kathleen Battle waxing humble about her vocal talent, you can give yourself over to euphoria without obsessing about the logic of the lyrics. But listen also to babies babbling and observe that they are (a) singing and (b) having fun. We are born to sing. You don’t have to be a medieval philosopher to know the world is made of music.
Notes
1. This is something of an exaggeration. Practically every high school and college has at least one glee club, the barbershop movement remains strong with more than 30,000 participants in the United States, and there are amateur choruses throughout the country. But these activities are highly structured and strive to sound as polished as possible. It’s like the difference between a suburban Little League and a pick-up game of stickball.
2. Mrs. Howe was one of the most accomplished Americans of her time, an abolitionist, feminist, essayist and poet of distinction who is less appreciated today than she should be. Her husband was an archetypical male chauvinist who opposed her every public action. With all she accomplished outside the home, she also raised four children who went on to distinguished careers of their own.
3. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are from the New International Version®. Copyright © 1984 by the International Bible Society.
4. One stadium equals 185 meters or about 607 feet. A typical horse would be about 5 feet (15 hands) at the withers, so the bible is talking about 1.8 million cubic feet of blood, about 11.5 million gallons. At 1.5 gallons per adult, that’s 7.6 million people.
5. There is nothing even close to a round yon virgin in the original German, the first verse of which is:
Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!
Alles schläft. Eynsam wacht Nur das traute heilige Paar.
Holder Knab’ im lockigten Haar,
Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!
Which translates:
Silent Night, Holy Night,
Everyone is sleeping. Only the faithful and holy couple keeps watch.
Lovely child with curly hair
Sleep in heavenly peace.
6. Modern hymnals include this under a title taken from its first line, “God of Our Fathers.” All the lyrics are undistinguished but only the third verse is truly bilious.
7. Sydney Carter (1915-2004) was many things—poet, scholar, pacifist and theologian, and he was certainly not an anti-Semite. The analysis presented here would never have occurred to him when he was in the process of exploring one of his favorite metaphors. In an early poem which many thought of as a fitting epitaph, he wrote, “The dance is all I am, the rest is dust. / I will believe my bones and live by what / Will go on dancing when my bones are not.” There is evidence in the form of a note from his friend Rabbi Lionel Blum that when he realized the problem, he set out to modify several lines in the poem. Sadly, the Rabbi writes, "...before this could happen, Alzheimer's took over." See Blum's Introduction to Lord of the Dance and Other Songs and Poems, Stainer and Bell, 2002.
8. In demanding the death penalty for blasphemy, they were only following the mandate of Leviticus 24:14 which says, “Anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord must be put to death. The entire assembly must stone him. Whether an alien or native-born, when he blasphemes the Name, he must be put to death.” Obviously, Mr. Pilate would not have been impressed by Leviticus so they had to suggest a Roman crime and call for a Roman punishment.
9. Messiah and a great deal of Christian exegesis are full of such efforts to see the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy in some New Testament event. “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son” (Isaiah 7:14) is seen as a prediction of Matthew 1:24 which quotes it. But the Hebrew of Isaiah actually is better translated as, “a young woman has conceived,” referring to a sign from God to King Ahaz.
10. The melody is said to be, “one of the loveliest in the American repertory by no less an authority than James R. Morris, former head of the Smithsonian Institutions Division of Performing Arts. See Six Decades of Songwriters and Singers, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984.
11. Trans. Arthur Rishi, www.recmusic.org/lieder/assemble_texts.html?SongCycleId=47
12. The lyrics are misogynist claptrap. Even the central metaphor is absurd: “How does it feel / To be on your own / With no direction home / Like a complete unknown / Like a rolling stone?” Such a stone surely has a direction—down—and is derived from the aphorism “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” It was coined by the Dutch theologian Desiderius Erasmus who clearly meant that we have to live active lives lest we get rusty.
13. The essence of both music and poetry is meter which is defined by stress patterns in both. Thus, it is not uncommon to find poems and tunes whose meters complement each other. Francis Scott Key wrote a poem which he entitled “Defense of Fort McHenry.” Several days later, his brother-in-law noticed that it “fit” the music of a popular ditty, “The Anacreontic Song” by John Stafford Smith. Eight days after the poem was written, the words and music were published together as “The Star Spangled Banner.” Similarly, there are many poems that “fit” the “New Britain” tune, among them Samuel Taylor Colderidge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Robert W. Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”
Sunday, June 26, 2011
MR. ADAMS AND ME
Jerry Harkins
Let it be acknowledged at the outset that Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was one of the greatest of American photographers. His black and white landscapes are without peer and his portraits and still lifes are invariably revealing. His artistry combined a unique visual imagination with equally unique field and darkroom disciplines. Not everyone likes his images, the most famous of which tend to be too romantic for some. But everyone recognizes his genius, myself included.
There is, however, an artificial quality apparent in many of his landscapes as though he was trying to show the world not as it is but as it should be or might be if he were in charge. It is a quality that often inflates one’s first impression but that turns out to be superficial and, in the end, embarrassing. Take, for example, his signature image, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941.
Adams was driving south on what is now U.S. 84 after what he called a “discouraging” day in the Chama Valley. Around 4:00 PM he came upon the scene and instantly visualized it as a photograph. He very quickly set up his 8 X 10 view camera but could not find a light meter. Fortunately, “I suddenly realized I knew the luminance of the moon—250 c/ft2. [1] Using the Exposure Formula, I placed this luminance on Zone VII; 60 c/ft2 therefore fell on Zone V, and the exposure with the filter factor of 3X was about 1 second at f/32 with ASA 64 film.” [2] Even so, the negative proved very difficult to print in a way that would yield something close to his visualization. The concept and the physics were so out of whack that every important factor had to be manipulated in the darkroom. He burned and he dodged. He experimented with various developer-to-water sequences and was still working on it several years later, re-fixing and re-washing the negative and treating the lower section with a dilute solution of Kodak IN-5 intensifier.
He actually knew the luminance of the moon! Are you properly dazzled? Of course you are—at least until you start thinking about it. To begin with, Adams may have imagined the scene as it appears on the print, but the reality was very different. The sky was not black. It was 55 minutes before sunset. The sky was still blue, probably light blue, and the clouds were probably beginning to glow red. He was using a deep yellow filter (Wratten No. 15G) which darkened the sky without affecting the green in the shrubbery. The filter did not, however, render the sky black. We do not need to guess how much grayer it became because, in the end, it was the contrast between the sky and the clouds and the sky and the moon that Adams was interested in. He says the clouds were “two or three times as bright as the moon” which may be true but both were bathed in the light of the sun. And neither was made brighter by the filter which darkened them slightly if anything. The contrast in the print is wrong. The crosses in the cemetery were no brighter than the wall of the structure behind them or the rear wall of the church on the left, and the vegetation in the foreground was not nearly so dark. Overall, the contrast, on which the impact of the image is totally dependent, was nowhere near as high as it is in the prints.
What you have here is a striking photograph that was made almost entirely in the mind of the photographer. The camera, for all the technical talk, was incidental. I suspect a pin camera would have done as well or almost as well. I have no objection to this. Nor do I have a problem with the photographer’s visualization any more than I do with Picasso’s three-headed mistress. I really don’t care about the tensile strength of Picasso’s palate knife or even the dimensions of his brushes even if the artist thinks I need to know it. In the present case, we are dealing with what was in the artist’s head and what the results communicate to the rest of us.
Moonrise is the story of a very particular moment which is not the moment it was taken, but some moment the real moment inspired in the photographer. Whatever else it is, it is a night story, a midnight story: The pitch black sky hovers ominously over everything, occupying more than half of the image area. The laws of nature are suspended. Not even the light of the nearly full moon brightens that imaginary sky (just as the real moon did not an hour before sunset). The clouds and the grave markers are lit. We know intellectually their glow comes from the sun but that knowledge plays no part in the psychological impact of the image. It is a night image. Anything glowing must have its own internal source of light. The feeling is eerie and maybe a little scary. This is surrealism masquerading as realism or, perhaps, romanticism. The important thing, though, is that Adams visualized it all while riding along gazing out a car window—or maybe not. Maybe it was similar to William Wordsworth’s observation that, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” In Adams’ case, the tranquility was in the darkroom which, arguably, is where he “discovered” the photograph.
Monolith, The Face of Half Dome is another image made mainly in the darkroom. Taken in early afternoon on April 17, 1927, it is almost as surrealistic as Moonrise. Once again, the dark sky was created mainly in the lab. (A yellow filter again contributed to this.) The shadow on the right of the monolith is hard to explain. According to Adams, at noon the monolith was in full shadow. Nearly a month after the equinox, that’s hard to believe but, two hours later, the sun was slightly lower in the sky. This calls attention to what seems to be a shadow consisting of two shades of gray while the formation in the lower right hand corner seems to be in full sunlight. Moreover, the shadows of the trees on that formation suggest the sun is at the right rear of the picture. Why then is the right side of the monolith still in deep if not full shadow? The precisely perpendicular border of the shadow divides the image into two parts, light and dark. The same precision also suggests the line was created by a poor job of burning.
This is an early image and, unlike Moonrise, it seems to have no meaning or message beyond being a generic pretty picture. [3] Adams was attached to it, he says, because it was the first time his visualization was realized exactly in the final print. But what visualization? Is he talking about “visualizing” a perfectly straight line dividing the picture in two? I think not. This was a hard picture to take if what caught his eye was the texture of the monolith. My guess is that is precisely what Adams wanted to show and he was elated when he saw he had succeeded. Once again, I suspect his “visualizations” come largely or wholly after the fact, not before it.
Sand Dunes, Sunrise is one of the master’s greatest photographs. It is not at all romantic, although, like Moonrise, it conveys an unsettling mood. It is a hard-edged, almost abstract image taken near Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley in 1948. Unlike Moonrise, this was carefully planned well in advance and, this time, what you see is pretty much the scene as it actually was. The lab work is incidental. Here you see what happens when the process of visualization unfolds pretty much as Adams describes it. He knew in advance that the contrasts on the dunes at sunrise would create a metaphor for the feeling one experiences at moments of high anticipation.
The few minutes just before and just after the sun comes up over the horizon are what Maya Angelou called the “pulse of morning.” [4] During that brief interval, the temperature drops noticeably. In summer, the birds have been singing for about a half hour but now they pause. The wind, if there is any, freshens. If it is calm, a breeze comes up. Experiencing this tiny drama, an observer senses both the possibilities and the uncertainties of a new day. What Adams has done is to re-create these feelings using a straightforward image of a range of shades of gray with just enough context to prod the viewer. You know this is a real landscape, not an abstraction. The photographer took special care to reveal the sand ripples at the bottom of the image in what appears to be an opening in the earth. The ripples are what cues you that the scene is real. Moreover, I believe, they speak to the transience of both the moment and its meaning (although I am not oblivious to the shape of that opening). This is a beautiful image and, if I am right about its meaning, it is also a brilliant one. It is not necessary that Adams’ visualization include my “pulse of morning” analysis, only that his emotional state be consistent with it. The artist feels what the critic then tries to put into words.
Mirror Lake is one of several Adams images of the large lake-like widening in the Merced River about a mile from the trailhead behind the Ahwahnee Hotel. The fullness of the lake tells us this must have been springtime. The brightest light seems to be coming from the upper right. Assuming it is morning, the camera then is looking north. [5] It seems that little or nothing was done to change what the lens saw and it may be that Adams did not even use a filter. In other words, this is an objective photograph in the ordinary sense of the word. What he saw is pretty much what you get. Which brings us to a central problem: just exactly what is Adams trying to do?
Along with other giants of American photography in the 1920’s and 30’s, Adams thought and wrote a great deal about the medium, trying to establish an identity for it as part of the cultural scene. Naturally there were competing schools of thought and disagreements were intense. In 1934, Adams wrote, “Photography is an objective expression; a record of actuality. The photographer who thoroughly comprehends his medium visualizes his subject [as] a thing-in-itself.” [6] And Mirror Lake is objective for the most part. [7] So are his portraits and still lifes—in some cases they are painfully objective.
Joyce Yuki Nakamura, Manzanar Relocation Center, c. 1942 is a thoroughly objective picture of a pretty little girl, obviously of Japanese descent but with the long curly hair and Peter Pan collar speaking of American acculturation. A viewer must inevitably enjoy the image because it is so cloyingly cute. It is not until you realize that the child is an internee in a U.S. concentration camp that you experience any strong emotional reaction. You may then read meaning into several aspects of the picture, the lopsided smile, the partial closure of the right eye, the fancy blouse.
Contrast the portrait of Joyce Yuki Nakamura with the thoroughly non-objective photograph of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay by Berenice Abbott. Millay was a true Greenwich Village bohemian known as much for her voracious bisexual exploits as for her exquisitely sensitive poetry. The image is meant, I think, to highlight the latter and Abbott has posed it brilliantly with the man tailored shirt and tie contrasting sharply with the distant expression on the subject’s face. The same expression appears in many Millay pictures including the famous one of the 22-year old poet under a dogwood tree at Vassar by Arnold Genthe. But it is rare to see her teeth and the slight overbite that suggests vulnerability. The clincher is the knee that tells you she is wearing a skirt. The apparently masculine suit is a façade, a suit, if you will, of armor. Abbott always included the knee in the prints she made. Other darkroom technicians did not, thereby unbalancing the composition and betraying its meaning.
The difference between the two photographs is stark; the meaning of Joyce Yuki is totally dependent on the words of its title and the viewer has to know what a “relocation center” is. The meaning of the Millay portrait is entirely in the photograph. It requires no words. It may help to know who the subject was but, possibly, words would actually detract from the meaning. It is as much a product of the photographer’s conscious planning and intelligence as Moonrise or Sand Dunes and every bit as successful.
As acknowledged in the first sentence, Adams is among the greatest of American photographers. He is also the best known. Twenty-six years after his death, both his coffee table books and his technical works remain best sellers and a print of Moonrise recently sold at auction for $360,000, almost 90 times the price of an Abbott print. He deserves the gratitude of those of us who enjoy his work and those of us who try to learn from it. At the same time, it does no harm to acknowledge with Professor Harold Hill that there is a fine line between magic and flim-flam and that Mr. Adams was a masterful practitioner of both.
Notes
1. Candela per square foot. Until 1948, the measure of luminosity varied but was based on a specified candle or flame. Today it is defined as the luminous intensity (the amount of light emitted or reflected), in a given direction, of a source that emits monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 X 1012 hertz (a yellowish green) and that has a radiant intensity in that direction of 1/683 watt per steradian. (A steradian is a standardized cone-shaped solid emanating from the center of a sphere and, thus, a pin source of light. There are 12.5664 steradians in a sphere.) In other words, luminosity is the brightness of light and is independent of the source’s context, in this case, the sky. The source in Moonrise is the sun the light of which is reflected by the moon. The moon is a tiny fraction of a sterdian so its radiant intensity is a tiny fraction of 1/683 watts. What is more interesting is that business about c/ft2 falling on Zone 5. I’m not expert in Adams’ zone system but it seems a long way from 250 (Zone 7) to 60 (Zone 5) to an exposure factor of 3X with his Wrattan No. 15 (G) filter to the actual exposure. Especially if the 250 is wrong (I suspect he misplaced a decimal point and the actual figure should be 2,500). Adams of course was not the first or last great artist to bullshit people about what he did. Nor was he unaware of what he called “the compelling impulse of photographers…to discuss equipment and materials…down to the smallest detail.” It’s the fine line between the detail and the bullshit that gave him trouble.
2. Adams, Ansel, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Little, Brown and Co., 1983, p. 41. I’m not sure about that ASA 64. The American Standards Association (now the American National Standards Institute) did not get into photographic standards until after 1946 so my theory is he meant to say “an ASA equivalent of 64.” That would imply a fairly fast film for the time but still agonizingly slow given that both the earth and the moon were moving.
3. Even though Half Dome is the definitive image of Yosemite, this picture could have been taken anywhere. Nothing jumps out and says Yosemite or Half Dome. Adams, of course, had climbed the Dome frequently and knew it intimately. Thus, he recognized this face of it but did not bother to communicate that to the rest of us except in the title he gave it.
4. “On The Pulse Of Morning,” Delivered January 20, 1993 at the Inauguration of President Clinton.
5. There are several untestable hypotheses here. It may be that I have invented the evidence to support a preconceived opinion about the air being not nearly as clear in the afternoon.
6. From an article titled “An exposition of my photographic technique” quoted in Eisinger Joel, Trace and Transformation: American Criticism of Photography in the Modernist Period, University of New Mexico Press, 1995 p. 68.
7. The main exception is the reflection of the tall tree in the center of the image. The tree itself is without detail, its reflection is highly detailed—exactly the opposite of what you might expect. The water at that point is considerably brighter than the sky which suggests that Adams made it brighter specifically to bring out the detail. Not any easy thing to do.
The photographs discussed in this essay are all readily available on the internet and have been omitted here for copyright reasons and because they need to be seen in a size larger than possible here.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
HEAVEN HELP US
Jerry Harkins
If you want to get to heaven, let me tell you what to do,
You gotta grease your feet in a little mutton stew.
Slide right out of the devil's hand,
And ease over to the Promised Land.
Take it easy! Go greasy!
—Woody Guthrie, Talking Blues
We are all children of God and heirs of heaven. But the journey is long and the path rocky that leads to salvation. For many are called but few are chosen. Narrow is the gate and hard is the way which leads to life, and there are few who will find it.
Of course it helps to have a map. Or know someone who does.
Sunday, May 1, 2011 was a sad day in the long and depressing history of the Roman Catholic church. In an elaborate spectacle of pomp and pageantry, the Pope kissed a vial of blood entwined in a filigreed reliquary. The blood had been taken from his immediate predecessor Karol Józef Wojtyła, John Paul II, and the kiss was part of his beatification ritual. The church was proclaiming that the late Pope is certainly in heaven and was encouraging the faithful to pray to him to intercede with God for their intentions. It had already certified that John Paul was responsible for at least one miracle, the cure of a French nun from Parkinson’s Disease of which the late Pope had himself been a victim.
According to an ABC News poll conducted in 2005, 90% of Americans said they believe in heaven. Amazon.com currently lists 4,410 books on the subject including several with the title Heaven Is Real or some close variation thereof. One, currently No. 6 on Amazon’s list of bestsellers, tells the story of a four-year old boy, Colton Burpo, who visited heaven while under anesthesia.[1] He returned with descriptions of what he encountered and with the message that the end times are near.
In fact, in almost all religious traditions, an afterlife of one sort or another is the very purpose of earthly life. In Christianity, the New Testament is almost entirely an instruction manual on how to avoid hell and get to heaven. In the words of the old Baltimore Catechism, “God made us to know, love and serve him on this earth and to be happy with him forever in heaven.” Jesus repeatedly stressed heaven as the goal of life and taught his listeners how they must live in order to achieve it. He went so far as to instruct them not to worry about their earthly needs but to seek first the father’s kingdom and his righteousness (Matthew 6:33). [2] The instructions varied over the three years of his ministry but the simplest was merely to believe in him. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved” (Acts 16:31).
Christians have always taken an expansive view of “believe,” maintaining that it includes absolute obedience to a long list of moral precepts, only a handful of which were ever endorsed by the founder. Jesus, for example, never addressed such major taboos as abortion, birth control or in vitro fertilization, and never bothered with such lesser (Protestant) offenses as card playing, dancing and coffee drinking. The Catholic Church claimed the right to expand on Jesus’ teaching and said it was the exclusive gatekeeper of heaven. The Protestant reformers saw this as a gambit for gathering power and riches for a corrupt hierarchy and they preached a return to the doctrine of sola fide—salvation or “justification” by faith alone. We are all sinners and none of us can earn salvation merely through good works.
In the Smalcald Articles, Martin Luther wrote, “All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood (Romans 3:23–25). This is necessary to believe. This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law, or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us.” This implies that salvation is easy, that in fact everyone is saved, but it was not Luther’s last word on the subject. He and the others also contrived to believe the teaching of St. Augustine that very few human beings actually go to heaven and, in fact, that God has predestined every person from the beginning of time to heaven or hell. Luther himself understood that predestination raises many uncomfortable questions about the nature of God but he accepted these as mysteries and basically ignored them. John Calvin, on the other hand, embraced the notion that the vast majority of people had been doomed to eternal damnation before the creation of the universe.
If all this reminds you of the Mega Millions Lottery, it is because the psychology is similar. You buy a ticket which costs you relatively nothing but gives you a preposterously long shot at winning indescribable riches. You are buying into a dream and deriving pleasure from anticipating what you will do with the jackpot. There are, however, a number of differences. In one of these games, the house knows who the winners will be before the first ticket is sold. (In the other game, such knowledge would put the sponsor in jail.) In one, the losers are not left free to try and try again but are immediately and permanently banished to hell. Of course you are still free to purchase indulgences promising forgiveness of your sins but indulgences apply only to earthly punishments imposed by the church and purgatorial punishments imposed by God. They will not keep you or get you out of hell which is, in all probability, your destination.
The church has long been aware that its teachings regarding heaven and hell are inconsistent, illogical and embarrassing. On the one hand, it cannot avoid promoting the good news that God loves even sinners. On the other hand, it is obvious that an omniscient God must foresee all things and will their existence. Thus, God must will that some, perhaps the vast majority, of his beloved creatures suffer eternal damnation. Similarly, a creature without free will cannot sin but one with free will is independent of God’s will and, presumably, of God’s foreknowledge. Finally, a church with total power to bind and loose things on heaven and earth must also be a monopoly. And in fact, the church teaches that outside itself there is no salvation. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. In the words of the 1993 Catholic Catechism, “…all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body.” The metaphor of something passing from the head through the body need not detain us. Apologists try desperately to suggest that non-Catholics who would want to be part of the church if only they knew about it can somehow gain heaven. Which is the opposite of what John (3:5) says Jesus said: “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” But the gospels are full of ambiguity on this as on many other subjects.
The early fathers and doctors who decided which books constituted the New Testament left out some interesting candidates and included others that are really strange. By the early years of the fourth century, they had pretty much agreed on the twenty-seven books found in modern bibles. What emerged were three versions of the new faith. The first of these, the original orthodoxy, came out of Jerusalem and was recorded in the synoptic gospels and Acts. If current scholarship is correct, Mark is a rendering of certain sermons of Peter delivered perhaps in Rome. Mark founded the church of Alexandria which is today’s Coptic church. It may be that some of his followers encountered the Gnosticism of Marcion of Sinope which inspired those who established the important library found at Nag Hamadi in 1946.
Matthew and Luke are derivatives of Mark, both presenting somewhat more rigorous interpretations of Jesus’ ministry. The church likes to ignore the differences and treat these “synoptic” gospels as the foundation of all its teaching. The second version includes works of John, a gospel, three epistles and Revelation. John, whether he was one writer or two or three or more was both a mystic and a philosopher. Revelation paints a vivid and horrific picture of the end times and clearly implies that few will be saved. The third and most radical version is that presented in the epistles attributed to Paul. This is the legalistic, rule bound Roman Catholic faith we know today, built on a gospel foundation to be sure but much more ascetic in morality and much less dependent on Jewish thought and practice. Pauline theology assimilated the old orthodoxy following the first Council of Nicaea in 325 and the spread of Augustinian pessimism shortly thereafter. (Interestingly, the Nag Hamadi library suggests that the Christian Gnostics considered Paul one of their own or at least a sympathizer. There is no doubt he hit upon some of the same paradoxes that concerned them but it seems highly unlikely that he had ever encountered Gnosticism at first hand.)
The synoptic gospels are said to be in agreement but, aside from a few passages that read like plagiarisms of each other, they differ in many important respects. They actually seem to be second or third hand recollections recorded by people who weren’t there—descriptions of an elephant by the proverbial blind philosophers. For example, Jesus famously spoke in parables. But of the thirty-six or so (depending on how you count) recorded in the New Testament, only thirteen are reported by more than a single evangelist. The gospels are only roughly consistent and each writer had his own agenda which is why the church fought vigorously for fifteen hundred years to keep the Bible out of the hands of lay people. But bear in mind that the church was selling redemption and salvation so it is not surprising that its understanding of the basic gospel message is that this life is merely a rehearsal for the life to come. For fifteen hundred years, princes and prelates fought furiously for control of the lives of the mass of people who lived in poverty and subjugation. Heaven was the church’s trump card. Do as we say. Be humble and docile. And your reward will be infinite joy after you die. To make this promise as credible as possible, the church had to employ the most tortuous logic against what were already ambiguous texts. This required a degree of casuistry that would make the Red Queen blush.
We do not know for certain who any of the evangelists were. Only the fourth gospel claims to have been written by a named author, John the beloved disciple (John 21:24). In any event, the synoptic gospels describe the origins and beliefs of a new (but not radically new) version of the Jewish faith. Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). Some of these “fulfillments” seem major. An eye for an eye (Deuteronomy 19:21) becomes turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39, Luke 6:39) and hate your enemy is transformed into love your enemy (Matthew 5:43). [3] Here and elsewhere, if you focus on the changes Jesus is calling for, it is easy to think of the good news as the gospel of love. If, on the other hand, you focus on what you have to do to lead a meritorious life, the news is not so good. It is far more difficult to love your enemy than to hate him. It is relatively easy to avoid adultery but much harder to avoid looking at a woman lustfully and harder still to pay the price of ogling Jesus demands, “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away” (Matthew 5:29).
Jesus is not so clear as to what we must do to enter heaven. On the one hand, he says, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:29-30). But then he also says that very few will merit heaven. He tells the apostles, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” (Mark 4:10-12). Not that the message is a secret. According to Matthew (28:19), he tells the disciples to “…go forth and teach all nations.” It seems he expects that few will understand and follow him, few will pick up that light burden.
Maybe Jesus himself did not intend to give us a blueprint. He used fourteen metaphors to describe heaven, all of them poetic but not one of which makes a great deal of sense. [4] “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough” (Matthew 13:33). Say what? Several times Jesus compared heaven to a mustard plant or a mustard seed. For example, heaven, “…is like to a grain of mustard, which a man having taken, did cast into his garden, and it increased, and came to a great tree, and the fowls of the heavens did rest in its branches.” (Luke 13:18). There are some 3,700 members of the mustard family but only a handful are woody and only one might be considered a tree—a very small tree—in which birds could perch. Assuming that is the species Jesus had in mind, why is heaven like a small seed that grows into a tree?
The answer may be that Jesus thought of heaven itself as a metaphor for God and God, of course, is love. It is not a place to which you go but something—something ineffable—of which you ultimately become a part. It may be similar to the state of enlightenment that is the goal of Buddhism in which the individual seeks to escape the path of reincarnation and reache Nirvana, a state of being free of craving, anger and other stresses. Alternatively, it may be like the reunion of the spark of gnosis with the godhead. In either event, perhaps the good news is that life does have a purpose which is to become one with love. Admittedly, Jesus does not really “listen” as a mystic of any kind but he is often as obscure as any of them. This obscurity, I believe, is why Paul and the apostles misunderstood him in anticipating the imminent arrival of the second coming. More importantly, it may be the solution to Paul’s lament, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).
The idea of heaven as the universal storehouse of love does not have to be true any more than any other vision of an afterlife or any other myth is true. The value of narrative lies in its ability to engage the higher powers of the mind: empathy, imagination, creativity and, most importantly, our moral sense. It will never appeal to those religionists seeking dominion over others, those to whom power is the greatest good. But the idea that love is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Point Omega,” the supreme consciousness toward which our lives seem somehow directed can inspire us and give us great delight.
Notes
1. The book by the boy’s father, Todd Burpo, published by Thomas Nelson, is No. 1 on the New York Times paperback and e-books non-fiction lists for June 11, 2011.
2. Biblical quotations are from the New International Version®. Copyright © 1984 by the International Bible Society and available online at biblegateway.com.
3. Matthew 5:43 quotes Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as saying, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” However, nowhere in the Old Testament are the Jews explicitly instructed to hate their enemies and nowhere are they told to love them. But it seems reasonable to infer the former from the Lex Talionis of Leviticus 24:19-20: “Anyone who injures their neighbor is to be injured in the same manner: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” God often intervened to help the Israelis in battle (e.g., Joshua 10) and the custom was to leave no enemy alive even after the battle was won.
4. In fact, most of these are technically similes beginning with such phrases as “The kingdom of heaven is like…”
Jerry Harkins
If you want to get to heaven, let me tell you what to do,
You gotta grease your feet in a little mutton stew.
Slide right out of the devil's hand,
And ease over to the Promised Land.
Take it easy! Go greasy!
—Woody Guthrie, Talking Blues
We are all children of God and heirs of heaven. But the journey is long and the path rocky that leads to salvation. For many are called but few are chosen. Narrow is the gate and hard is the way which leads to life, and there are few who will find it.
Of course it helps to have a map. Or know someone who does.
Sunday, May 1, 2011 was a sad day in the long and depressing history of the Roman Catholic church. In an elaborate spectacle of pomp and pageantry, the Pope kissed a vial of blood entwined in a filigreed reliquary. The blood had been taken from his immediate predecessor Karol Józef Wojtyła, John Paul II, and the kiss was part of his beatification ritual. The church was proclaiming that the late Pope is certainly in heaven and was encouraging the faithful to pray to him to intercede with God for their intentions. It had already certified that John Paul was responsible for at least one miracle, the cure of a French nun from Parkinson’s Disease of which the late Pope had himself been a victim.
According to an ABC News poll conducted in 2005, 90% of Americans said they believe in heaven. Amazon.com currently lists 4,410 books on the subject including several with the title Heaven Is Real or some close variation thereof. One, currently No. 6 on Amazon’s list of bestsellers, tells the story of a four-year old boy, Colton Burpo, who visited heaven while under anesthesia.[1] He returned with descriptions of what he encountered and with the message that the end times are near.
In fact, in almost all religious traditions, an afterlife of one sort or another is the very purpose of earthly life. In Christianity, the New Testament is almost entirely an instruction manual on how to avoid hell and get to heaven. In the words of the old Baltimore Catechism, “God made us to know, love and serve him on this earth and to be happy with him forever in heaven.” Jesus repeatedly stressed heaven as the goal of life and taught his listeners how they must live in order to achieve it. He went so far as to instruct them not to worry about their earthly needs but to seek first the father’s kingdom and his righteousness (Matthew 6:33). [2] The instructions varied over the three years of his ministry but the simplest was merely to believe in him. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved” (Acts 16:31).
Christians have always taken an expansive view of “believe,” maintaining that it includes absolute obedience to a long list of moral precepts, only a handful of which were ever endorsed by the founder. Jesus, for example, never addressed such major taboos as abortion, birth control or in vitro fertilization, and never bothered with such lesser (Protestant) offenses as card playing, dancing and coffee drinking. The Catholic Church claimed the right to expand on Jesus’ teaching and said it was the exclusive gatekeeper of heaven. The Protestant reformers saw this as a gambit for gathering power and riches for a corrupt hierarchy and they preached a return to the doctrine of sola fide—salvation or “justification” by faith alone. We are all sinners and none of us can earn salvation merely through good works.
In the Smalcald Articles, Martin Luther wrote, “All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood (Romans 3:23–25). This is necessary to believe. This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law, or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us.” This implies that salvation is easy, that in fact everyone is saved, but it was not Luther’s last word on the subject. He and the others also contrived to believe the teaching of St. Augustine that very few human beings actually go to heaven and, in fact, that God has predestined every person from the beginning of time to heaven or hell. Luther himself understood that predestination raises many uncomfortable questions about the nature of God but he accepted these as mysteries and basically ignored them. John Calvin, on the other hand, embraced the notion that the vast majority of people had been doomed to eternal damnation before the creation of the universe.
If all this reminds you of the Mega Millions Lottery, it is because the psychology is similar. You buy a ticket which costs you relatively nothing but gives you a preposterously long shot at winning indescribable riches. You are buying into a dream and deriving pleasure from anticipating what you will do with the jackpot. There are, however, a number of differences. In one of these games, the house knows who the winners will be before the first ticket is sold. (In the other game, such knowledge would put the sponsor in jail.) In one, the losers are not left free to try and try again but are immediately and permanently banished to hell. Of course you are still free to purchase indulgences promising forgiveness of your sins but indulgences apply only to earthly punishments imposed by the church and purgatorial punishments imposed by God. They will not keep you or get you out of hell which is, in all probability, your destination.
The church has long been aware that its teachings regarding heaven and hell are inconsistent, illogical and embarrassing. On the one hand, it cannot avoid promoting the good news that God loves even sinners. On the other hand, it is obvious that an omniscient God must foresee all things and will their existence. Thus, God must will that some, perhaps the vast majority, of his beloved creatures suffer eternal damnation. Similarly, a creature without free will cannot sin but one with free will is independent of God’s will and, presumably, of God’s foreknowledge. Finally, a church with total power to bind and loose things on heaven and earth must also be a monopoly. And in fact, the church teaches that outside itself there is no salvation. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. In the words of the 1993 Catholic Catechism, “…all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body.” The metaphor of something passing from the head through the body need not detain us. Apologists try desperately to suggest that non-Catholics who would want to be part of the church if only they knew about it can somehow gain heaven. Which is the opposite of what John (3:5) says Jesus said: “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” But the gospels are full of ambiguity on this as on many other subjects.
The early fathers and doctors who decided which books constituted the New Testament left out some interesting candidates and included others that are really strange. By the early years of the fourth century, they had pretty much agreed on the twenty-seven books found in modern bibles. What emerged were three versions of the new faith. The first of these, the original orthodoxy, came out of Jerusalem and was recorded in the synoptic gospels and Acts. If current scholarship is correct, Mark is a rendering of certain sermons of Peter delivered perhaps in Rome. Mark founded the church of Alexandria which is today’s Coptic church. It may be that some of his followers encountered the Gnosticism of Marcion of Sinope which inspired those who established the important library found at Nag Hamadi in 1946.
Matthew and Luke are derivatives of Mark, both presenting somewhat more rigorous interpretations of Jesus’ ministry. The church likes to ignore the differences and treat these “synoptic” gospels as the foundation of all its teaching. The second version includes works of John, a gospel, three epistles and Revelation. John, whether he was one writer or two or three or more was both a mystic and a philosopher. Revelation paints a vivid and horrific picture of the end times and clearly implies that few will be saved. The third and most radical version is that presented in the epistles attributed to Paul. This is the legalistic, rule bound Roman Catholic faith we know today, built on a gospel foundation to be sure but much more ascetic in morality and much less dependent on Jewish thought and practice. Pauline theology assimilated the old orthodoxy following the first Council of Nicaea in 325 and the spread of Augustinian pessimism shortly thereafter. (Interestingly, the Nag Hamadi library suggests that the Christian Gnostics considered Paul one of their own or at least a sympathizer. There is no doubt he hit upon some of the same paradoxes that concerned them but it seems highly unlikely that he had ever encountered Gnosticism at first hand.)
The synoptic gospels are said to be in agreement but, aside from a few passages that read like plagiarisms of each other, they differ in many important respects. They actually seem to be second or third hand recollections recorded by people who weren’t there—descriptions of an elephant by the proverbial blind philosophers. For example, Jesus famously spoke in parables. But of the thirty-six or so (depending on how you count) recorded in the New Testament, only thirteen are reported by more than a single evangelist. The gospels are only roughly consistent and each writer had his own agenda which is why the church fought vigorously for fifteen hundred years to keep the Bible out of the hands of lay people. But bear in mind that the church was selling redemption and salvation so it is not surprising that its understanding of the basic gospel message is that this life is merely a rehearsal for the life to come. For fifteen hundred years, princes and prelates fought furiously for control of the lives of the mass of people who lived in poverty and subjugation. Heaven was the church’s trump card. Do as we say. Be humble and docile. And your reward will be infinite joy after you die. To make this promise as credible as possible, the church had to employ the most tortuous logic against what were already ambiguous texts. This required a degree of casuistry that would make the Red Queen blush.
We do not know for certain who any of the evangelists were. Only the fourth gospel claims to have been written by a named author, John the beloved disciple (John 21:24). In any event, the synoptic gospels describe the origins and beliefs of a new (but not radically new) version of the Jewish faith. Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). Some of these “fulfillments” seem major. An eye for an eye (Deuteronomy 19:21) becomes turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39, Luke 6:39) and hate your enemy is transformed into love your enemy (Matthew 5:43). [3] Here and elsewhere, if you focus on the changes Jesus is calling for, it is easy to think of the good news as the gospel of love. If, on the other hand, you focus on what you have to do to lead a meritorious life, the news is not so good. It is far more difficult to love your enemy than to hate him. It is relatively easy to avoid adultery but much harder to avoid looking at a woman lustfully and harder still to pay the price of ogling Jesus demands, “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away” (Matthew 5:29).
Jesus is not so clear as to what we must do to enter heaven. On the one hand, he says, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:29-30). But then he also says that very few will merit heaven. He tells the apostles, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” (Mark 4:10-12). Not that the message is a secret. According to Matthew (28:19), he tells the disciples to “…go forth and teach all nations.” It seems he expects that few will understand and follow him, few will pick up that light burden.
Maybe Jesus himself did not intend to give us a blueprint. He used fourteen metaphors to describe heaven, all of them poetic but not one of which makes a great deal of sense. [4] “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough” (Matthew 13:33). Say what? Several times Jesus compared heaven to a mustard plant or a mustard seed. For example, heaven, “…is like to a grain of mustard, which a man having taken, did cast into his garden, and it increased, and came to a great tree, and the fowls of the heavens did rest in its branches.” (Luke 13:18). There are some 3,700 members of the mustard family but only a handful are woody and only one might be considered a tree—a very small tree—in which birds could perch. Assuming that is the species Jesus had in mind, why is heaven like a small seed that grows into a tree?
The answer may be that Jesus thought of heaven itself as a metaphor for God and God, of course, is love. It is not a place to which you go but something—something ineffable—of which you ultimately become a part. It may be similar to the state of enlightenment that is the goal of Buddhism in which the individual seeks to escape the path of reincarnation and reache Nirvana, a state of being free of craving, anger and other stresses. Alternatively, it may be like the reunion of the spark of gnosis with the godhead. In either event, perhaps the good news is that life does have a purpose which is to become one with love. Admittedly, Jesus does not really “listen” as a mystic of any kind but he is often as obscure as any of them. This obscurity, I believe, is why Paul and the apostles misunderstood him in anticipating the imminent arrival of the second coming. More importantly, it may be the solution to Paul’s lament, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).
The idea of heaven as the universal storehouse of love does not have to be true any more than any other vision of an afterlife or any other myth is true. The value of narrative lies in its ability to engage the higher powers of the mind: empathy, imagination, creativity and, most importantly, our moral sense. It will never appeal to those religionists seeking dominion over others, those to whom power is the greatest good. But the idea that love is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Point Omega,” the supreme consciousness toward which our lives seem somehow directed can inspire us and give us great delight.
Notes
1. The book by the boy’s father, Todd Burpo, published by Thomas Nelson, is No. 1 on the New York Times paperback and e-books non-fiction lists for June 11, 2011.
2. Biblical quotations are from the New International Version®. Copyright © 1984 by the International Bible Society and available online at biblegateway.com.
3. Matthew 5:43 quotes Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as saying, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” However, nowhere in the Old Testament are the Jews explicitly instructed to hate their enemies and nowhere are they told to love them. But it seems reasonable to infer the former from the Lex Talionis of Leviticus 24:19-20: “Anyone who injures their neighbor is to be injured in the same manner: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” God often intervened to help the Israelis in battle (e.g., Joshua 10) and the custom was to leave no enemy alive even after the battle was won.
4. In fact, most of these are technically similes beginning with such phrases as “The kingdom of heaven is like…”
Monday, January 10, 2011
CAPTAIN COURAGEOUS TAKES THE HELM
Jerry Harkins
“It’s not like we’re in crisis; it’s not like all of a sudden we need some daring new initiatives. Thank God for the leadership of Cardinal Francis George, things are going well.”
—Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
—Lewis Carroll
I am not certain that anyone actually reads Candide these days but the Archbishop of New York might profitably be reminded that the Portuguese Inquisition hanged Dr. Pangloss for the heresy of optimism and the Vatican placed his story on the Index of Forbidden Books. You can see why. After all, if this is the best of all possible worlds, what’s the use of churches? It is precisely for this reason that most hierarchs are grim, gray pessimists and their theology is morose and pitiless. When the Pope says “God is love,” he is talking about God the Avenger who is ready to cast you into hell for eating the wrong apple. In other words, tough love. Very tough.
If the American bishops who tapped Tim Dolan last month to be the President of their Conference decided to undertake any daring new initiative, you can be pretty sure the bozos would declare pedophilia a new sacrament. There are approximately 340 Roman Catholic bishops serving some 176 dioceses in the United States. All were selected for their strict conformance to Vatican-think not for their intelligence or even their holiness. All are theological conservatives and hold mainly right wing political and social views. They think women and gays are divine errors and they automatically oppose the interests of both. At present, they are also united in opposition to health care reform and will support Republican efforts to repeal it. These views are decidedly at odds with a large majority of Americans brought up Catholic. As the result, the church in America is a dying institution. It is already dead in Europe.
Apparently, Tim hasn’t noticed. He has joined the Catholic Legion of the Otherwise Distracted (CLOD). And there are many, many distractions. For one thing, the demand for exorcisms is growing rapidly under the influence of the Harry Potter phenomenon and the church has only a handful of exorcists experienced in casting out devils. For another, the bishops need to figure out how to implement the Pope’s revival of the Tridentine Mass given the fact that the seminaries stopped teaching Latin thirty years ago. Worse, they need to figure out what the hell he was talking about when he said that the use of condoms might possibly be okay for male prostitutes. That’s a doozy. Might they be okay for male but not female prostitutes? How about male porn stars? Gays? Then we have the problem of lay people who are abandoning their parishes and starting up their own congregations unsupervised by local dioceses. Some are led by defrocked priests, others by never frocked men and—horror of horrors—women. Until The New York Times reported on this movement in Belgium, the American prelates could blithely ignore it here at home. Now, however, it’s bound to attract the attention of reporters and editors who specialize in kicking the church and other dead horses. They will find it blossoming in American dioceses right under the noses of the prelates. And, of course, there’s the troublesome question of money. It may not be a crisis that would impinge on the bishops’ happy hours but it is a pesky little speed bump which is forcing them to close schools and parishes on a wholesale basis. At the top of the agenda, however, is the apparent transmission of Hepatitis A from the communion wafers at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Massapequa Park, Long Island to parishioners attending Christmas mass. As said wafers are the body and blood of Christ, there is some concern about Jesus’ liver function. It could have been worse. Hepatitis B would have raised truly discomforting questions.
Another non-crisis facing the church is the role of women religious. As always, the nuns are virtually the only good news in Christendom but the Curia despises them as it does all women. At the moment, it is conducting two witch hunts in the United States, an “Apostolic Visitation” by the Congregation for the Consecrated Life and a “Doctrinal Assessment” by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith formerly known as the Holy Inquisition. The “Visitator” is Mother Mary Clare Millea, a canon lawyer and Superior General of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart. The Grand Inquisitor, also known as God’s Fireman, is the Most Reverend Leonard P. Blair, the Bishop of Toledo, Ohio. Both initiatives are couched in the usual Vatican doubletalk reminiscent of Big Brother. Mother Mary, for example, reminds her putative hosts that John Paul II often said the “…consecrated life, with its variety of charisms and institutions, is a treasure.” He did indeed say that but what it means in English is that women have always been a thorn in the side of the church and he worries that modernization is making them even more heretical than they used to be. So the bishops have a pretty full plate without having to worry about any daring new initiatives.
On a practical level, the church is faced with a vicious circle: it names incompetent yes-men to its hierarchy who issue absurd proclamations which make it impossible to attract intelligent men to its service. Thus, the church gets stupider and stupider and smaller and smaller. One of my favorite examples is Father Michael Cichon, pastor of the Church of the Assumption on Staten Island, who issued a fatwa denying the sacraments and religious education to the children of parents who fail to attend mass on Sundays. He enforces this by means of a bar coded identification system printed on the back of the weekly offering envelopes. Then there is the case of Thomas J. Olmsted, the wacky Bishop of Phoenix, Arizona. His Excellency recently issued a “Decree Revoking Episcopal Consent to Claim the ‘Catholic’ Name according to Canon 216” against St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center for performing a legal abortion in a case where its doctors determined a woman could not survive a fifth pregnancy. The bishop excommunicated the nun who was President of the hospital but did not order her burned at the stake. He and his advisors disagreed, you see, with the expert medical opinion which apparently conflicted with Catholic science and philosophy dating back to the thirteenth century. In any event, he was so angry that he failed to notice that the institution in question was not using the word Catholic in its name.
So when Tim says “things are going well,” you can assume that he’s in over his head and has adopted the philosophy of Alfred E. Neuman to the effect, “What, me worry?” In the real world, things are not going well at all. Consider, for example, the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York. It recently completed a project called, “Christ Jesus, Our Hope, A Diocesan Strategic Plan for Renewal.” It found that in the ten years ended in 2009, mass attendance had fallen 16%, baptisms 25%, first communions 30% and marriages 33%. At the end of the period, churches were operating at 36% of capacity and school enrollment was down 47%. Interestingly, revenues were down only 12.7% but the operating deficit was up 140% and net assets were down 375%. The financial nightmare reflects the high price of pedophilia. It will come as no surprise that Part I of the Christ Jesus Our Hope strategic plan calls for something very close to a going-out-of-business sale. The objective is not so much renewal as survival and the prospects are bleak. This is Brooklyn, the fifth largest diocese in the United States and just across the river from Tim’s own Archdiocese of New York. Out in the hinterland, things are even tougher. Eight dioceses in the U.S. have declared bankruptcy although this is pretty close to being meaningless. Some of the eight are simply trying to dodge expected tort judgments. Then there are dioceses that are in fact technically insolvent but are unwilling to open up their books to court supervision. It’s hard to know what is going on in the minds of the hierarchs.
Or take the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, the 21st largest in the country with about 731,000 Catholics in ten counties of southeastern Wisconsin. Tim may remember it because he was its Archbishop for a little more than seven years before being translated to the Big Apple. In recent years, it has closed 75 or 26% of its parishes. In the year ended June 30, 2010, contributions declined by 10% and overall revenues declined by 4%. Operating income showed a deficit of $2.1 million versus a surplus of $510 thousand in 2009. On the first business day of 2011, Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki filed for bankruptcy.
Milwaukee is not new to scandal or inept crisis management. Its former Archbishop, from 1977 to 2002, was Rembert G. Weakland, a Benedictine Abbot, a distinguished musicologist holding a Ph.D. with distinction from Columbia University, and the last unabashed liberal in the American hierarchy. Under his administration, Milwaukee was probably the only diocese in Christendom whose elementary school children were taught to use condoms as part of their sex education. They were also told there is no right and wrong on such matters as abortion, contraception and premarital sex. He advocated for gay rights and women's ordination. Strangely, he was hopelessly inept at responding to the pedophilia crisis in its earliest public stages but none of this is what brought him down. Earlier in his career, he had been a practicing homosexual who had, at one point, paid $450,000 from archdiocesan funds to an extortionist with whom he had had a consensual affair decades earlier. Tim may remember all this because he was Weakland’s immediate successor. In other words, he inherited the mess. No problemo!
And then there was the little matter of the late Father Lawrence C. Murphy who sexually abused 200 boys at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. This went on, according to Father Murphy himself, for 22 or 24 years depending on which interview you read. From the beginning, the children tried to notify the authorities but they were largely ignored until Archbishop Weakland essentially begged Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, to defrock him. Joe refused on humanitarian grounds—Murphy was sick at the time and in fact he died two years later in 1998. Such delicacy! Tim probably does not remember this one because he didn’t arrive in Milwaukee until 2002 by which time it was old news and he is not one to rummage around in ancient history. At his mass on Palm Sunday 2010, he denounced the, “recent tidal wave of headlines about abuse of minors by some few priests, this time in Ireland, Germany, and a re-run of an old story from Wisconsin.” Stuff happens. Get a life!
One of President Tim’s first actions in his new job was to appoint Bishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of Oakland, California as Chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage. His credentials include a doctorate in canon law, the authorship of the notorious California Proposition 8 and his conduct of the first Latin mass in Northern California in 40 years. He is also one of only 17 bishops to sign the fundamentalist Manhattan Declaration. He was the perfect choice to defend marriage in that he had exactly no experience in the subject except what he read in the Vatican comic books.
It’s hard to imagine what would constitute a crisis in Timothy Dolan’s lexicon. A telegram, perhaps, from the Holy Ghost, saying, “Icebergs ahead?” Perhaps even God won’t sink this church, but stupidity and megalomania have already done so in large parts of its former domain. For too many centuries it has been dominated by a self-perpetuating coterie of old men with the social graces of two year old boys and the moral convictions of Mafia thugs. They adorn themselves in the most flamboyant frippery and relieve themselves of pretentious nonsense disguised as moral guidance. Nearer My God to Thee.
Jerry Harkins
“It’s not like we’re in crisis; it’s not like all of a sudden we need some daring new initiatives. Thank God for the leadership of Cardinal Francis George, things are going well.”
—Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
—Lewis Carroll
I am not certain that anyone actually reads Candide these days but the Archbishop of New York might profitably be reminded that the Portuguese Inquisition hanged Dr. Pangloss for the heresy of optimism and the Vatican placed his story on the Index of Forbidden Books. You can see why. After all, if this is the best of all possible worlds, what’s the use of churches? It is precisely for this reason that most hierarchs are grim, gray pessimists and their theology is morose and pitiless. When the Pope says “God is love,” he is talking about God the Avenger who is ready to cast you into hell for eating the wrong apple. In other words, tough love. Very tough.
If the American bishops who tapped Tim Dolan last month to be the President of their Conference decided to undertake any daring new initiative, you can be pretty sure the bozos would declare pedophilia a new sacrament. There are approximately 340 Roman Catholic bishops serving some 176 dioceses in the United States. All were selected for their strict conformance to Vatican-think not for their intelligence or even their holiness. All are theological conservatives and hold mainly right wing political and social views. They think women and gays are divine errors and they automatically oppose the interests of both. At present, they are also united in opposition to health care reform and will support Republican efforts to repeal it. These views are decidedly at odds with a large majority of Americans brought up Catholic. As the result, the church in America is a dying institution. It is already dead in Europe.
Apparently, Tim hasn’t noticed. He has joined the Catholic Legion of the Otherwise Distracted (CLOD). And there are many, many distractions. For one thing, the demand for exorcisms is growing rapidly under the influence of the Harry Potter phenomenon and the church has only a handful of exorcists experienced in casting out devils. For another, the bishops need to figure out how to implement the Pope’s revival of the Tridentine Mass given the fact that the seminaries stopped teaching Latin thirty years ago. Worse, they need to figure out what the hell he was talking about when he said that the use of condoms might possibly be okay for male prostitutes. That’s a doozy. Might they be okay for male but not female prostitutes? How about male porn stars? Gays? Then we have the problem of lay people who are abandoning their parishes and starting up their own congregations unsupervised by local dioceses. Some are led by defrocked priests, others by never frocked men and—horror of horrors—women. Until The New York Times reported on this movement in Belgium, the American prelates could blithely ignore it here at home. Now, however, it’s bound to attract the attention of reporters and editors who specialize in kicking the church and other dead horses. They will find it blossoming in American dioceses right under the noses of the prelates. And, of course, there’s the troublesome question of money. It may not be a crisis that would impinge on the bishops’ happy hours but it is a pesky little speed bump which is forcing them to close schools and parishes on a wholesale basis. At the top of the agenda, however, is the apparent transmission of Hepatitis A from the communion wafers at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Massapequa Park, Long Island to parishioners attending Christmas mass. As said wafers are the body and blood of Christ, there is some concern about Jesus’ liver function. It could have been worse. Hepatitis B would have raised truly discomforting questions.
Another non-crisis facing the church is the role of women religious. As always, the nuns are virtually the only good news in Christendom but the Curia despises them as it does all women. At the moment, it is conducting two witch hunts in the United States, an “Apostolic Visitation” by the Congregation for the Consecrated Life and a “Doctrinal Assessment” by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith formerly known as the Holy Inquisition. The “Visitator” is Mother Mary Clare Millea, a canon lawyer and Superior General of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart. The Grand Inquisitor, also known as God’s Fireman, is the Most Reverend Leonard P. Blair, the Bishop of Toledo, Ohio. Both initiatives are couched in the usual Vatican doubletalk reminiscent of Big Brother. Mother Mary, for example, reminds her putative hosts that John Paul II often said the “…consecrated life, with its variety of charisms and institutions, is a treasure.” He did indeed say that but what it means in English is that women have always been a thorn in the side of the church and he worries that modernization is making them even more heretical than they used to be. So the bishops have a pretty full plate without having to worry about any daring new initiatives.
On a practical level, the church is faced with a vicious circle: it names incompetent yes-men to its hierarchy who issue absurd proclamations which make it impossible to attract intelligent men to its service. Thus, the church gets stupider and stupider and smaller and smaller. One of my favorite examples is Father Michael Cichon, pastor of the Church of the Assumption on Staten Island, who issued a fatwa denying the sacraments and religious education to the children of parents who fail to attend mass on Sundays. He enforces this by means of a bar coded identification system printed on the back of the weekly offering envelopes. Then there is the case of Thomas J. Olmsted, the wacky Bishop of Phoenix, Arizona. His Excellency recently issued a “Decree Revoking Episcopal Consent to Claim the ‘Catholic’ Name according to Canon 216” against St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center for performing a legal abortion in a case where its doctors determined a woman could not survive a fifth pregnancy. The bishop excommunicated the nun who was President of the hospital but did not order her burned at the stake. He and his advisors disagreed, you see, with the expert medical opinion which apparently conflicted with Catholic science and philosophy dating back to the thirteenth century. In any event, he was so angry that he failed to notice that the institution in question was not using the word Catholic in its name.
So when Tim says “things are going well,” you can assume that he’s in over his head and has adopted the philosophy of Alfred E. Neuman to the effect, “What, me worry?” In the real world, things are not going well at all. Consider, for example, the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York. It recently completed a project called, “Christ Jesus, Our Hope, A Diocesan Strategic Plan for Renewal.” It found that in the ten years ended in 2009, mass attendance had fallen 16%, baptisms 25%, first communions 30% and marriages 33%. At the end of the period, churches were operating at 36% of capacity and school enrollment was down 47%. Interestingly, revenues were down only 12.7% but the operating deficit was up 140% and net assets were down 375%. The financial nightmare reflects the high price of pedophilia. It will come as no surprise that Part I of the Christ Jesus Our Hope strategic plan calls for something very close to a going-out-of-business sale. The objective is not so much renewal as survival and the prospects are bleak. This is Brooklyn, the fifth largest diocese in the United States and just across the river from Tim’s own Archdiocese of New York. Out in the hinterland, things are even tougher. Eight dioceses in the U.S. have declared bankruptcy although this is pretty close to being meaningless. Some of the eight are simply trying to dodge expected tort judgments. Then there are dioceses that are in fact technically insolvent but are unwilling to open up their books to court supervision. It’s hard to know what is going on in the minds of the hierarchs.
Or take the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, the 21st largest in the country with about 731,000 Catholics in ten counties of southeastern Wisconsin. Tim may remember it because he was its Archbishop for a little more than seven years before being translated to the Big Apple. In recent years, it has closed 75 or 26% of its parishes. In the year ended June 30, 2010, contributions declined by 10% and overall revenues declined by 4%. Operating income showed a deficit of $2.1 million versus a surplus of $510 thousand in 2009. On the first business day of 2011, Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki filed for bankruptcy.
Milwaukee is not new to scandal or inept crisis management. Its former Archbishop, from 1977 to 2002, was Rembert G. Weakland, a Benedictine Abbot, a distinguished musicologist holding a Ph.D. with distinction from Columbia University, and the last unabashed liberal in the American hierarchy. Under his administration, Milwaukee was probably the only diocese in Christendom whose elementary school children were taught to use condoms as part of their sex education. They were also told there is no right and wrong on such matters as abortion, contraception and premarital sex. He advocated for gay rights and women's ordination. Strangely, he was hopelessly inept at responding to the pedophilia crisis in its earliest public stages but none of this is what brought him down. Earlier in his career, he had been a practicing homosexual who had, at one point, paid $450,000 from archdiocesan funds to an extortionist with whom he had had a consensual affair decades earlier. Tim may remember all this because he was Weakland’s immediate successor. In other words, he inherited the mess. No problemo!
And then there was the little matter of the late Father Lawrence C. Murphy who sexually abused 200 boys at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. This went on, according to Father Murphy himself, for 22 or 24 years depending on which interview you read. From the beginning, the children tried to notify the authorities but they were largely ignored until Archbishop Weakland essentially begged Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, to defrock him. Joe refused on humanitarian grounds—Murphy was sick at the time and in fact he died two years later in 1998. Such delicacy! Tim probably does not remember this one because he didn’t arrive in Milwaukee until 2002 by which time it was old news and he is not one to rummage around in ancient history. At his mass on Palm Sunday 2010, he denounced the, “recent tidal wave of headlines about abuse of minors by some few priests, this time in Ireland, Germany, and a re-run of an old story from Wisconsin.” Stuff happens. Get a life!
One of President Tim’s first actions in his new job was to appoint Bishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of Oakland, California as Chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage. His credentials include a doctorate in canon law, the authorship of the notorious California Proposition 8 and his conduct of the first Latin mass in Northern California in 40 years. He is also one of only 17 bishops to sign the fundamentalist Manhattan Declaration. He was the perfect choice to defend marriage in that he had exactly no experience in the subject except what he read in the Vatican comic books.
It’s hard to imagine what would constitute a crisis in Timothy Dolan’s lexicon. A telegram, perhaps, from the Holy Ghost, saying, “Icebergs ahead?” Perhaps even God won’t sink this church, but stupidity and megalomania have already done so in large parts of its former domain. For too many centuries it has been dominated by a self-perpetuating coterie of old men with the social graces of two year old boys and the moral convictions of Mafia thugs. They adorn themselves in the most flamboyant frippery and relieve themselves of pretentious nonsense disguised as moral guidance. Nearer My God to Thee.
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