A Disordered Life, Mostly
Longer Piece, Pt. IV
The School of the Parallel Syllabus: My Debt to Tolkien
Meanwhile, yours truly, unaware of Lefebvre, was unknowingly imbibing Catholicism through a not-so-obvious source: the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien.77
“The road goes ever on,” sings Bilbo Baggins near the end of The Hobbit. Indeed it does. We must at some point leave our earthly, temporal home for eternity: Hell, or Heaven (perhaps with a stop in Purgatory). But I just knew Tolkien’s books as adventure stories, and darned ripping adventure stories at that. An arrow-pierced dragon. Troll blood gushing from a sword thrust. Orc arms sliced off. A were-bear crushing a Goblin king. I got into Dungeons & Dragons and table-top gaming with miniature figures. I delved into other fantasy writing: Robert E. Howard (Conan, etc.), Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny. But only Tolkien’s truth-revealing Middle Earth endured into my adulthood. As teens, we listened to an LP record set of The Hobbit, which was a fun activity with friends in the school library’s audio nook. As for animated versions of Tolkien’s books, or the movies by Peter Jackson, the less said the better.
What knowledge and virtues did I learn from the great English philologist? From Frodo and Sam I learned lessons in friendship, courage, and devotion. From Aragorn I drank in lessons in duty, bravery, and humility. Boromir showed me about wrongly-directed desire but also repentance. His father Denethor manifested pride and despair. Saruman demonstrated how wisdom can be corrupted by the lust for power, whereas his brother wizard Gandalf revealed the perfection of wisdom through patience and perseverance. Faramir taught about filial obedience, religious duty, piety and thanksgiving. Eowyn gave a lesson on the proper roles for the two sexes. The Hobbits embodied innocence. Tom Bombadil was the unfallen Adam. Gollum exhibited the tragic effects of a soul and body bent by sin. Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam, in their wealth, modeled charity in their community to those in need. In his writings about the earlier ages of Middle Earth, Tolkien depicted a version of creation sung into being, and in those times there are those of the blessed peoples and beings who reject their proper role and seek their own desires and pleasures. For instance, in Tolkien’s Numenor, reminiscent of fabled Atlantis,78 we can recognize the fear of death, rejection of mortality, and titanic hubris of that era…and ours.
For all these reasons and more, I credit Tolkien with a significant role in my eventual reception into the Catholic Church. What I first saw through the adventure-hungry eyes and imagination of a naïve teen, I still grasped as a jaded adult, and later came to deeply appreciate as a middle-aged man.
The School of the Sea: How Do You Spell Authority?
But before middle age there were years of fault-filled wandering.
The end of the 1970s was the era of American mediocrity. It was a time of anti-traditionalism and confusion, both in society at large and in my life. (Not to mention in the Church.) Indeed, “without the shaping discipline of tradition, the individual is left at every moment to reinvent himself, with no guide but his own wayward appetites,”79 said Douglas Patey.
With college not an option—as far as I knew—and no viable path ahead—farming held no appeal—I decided to join the Navy. Although I had imagined the excitement of earthbound combat many times in childhood, I signed the papers for maritime duty, mainly because the Navy recruiter got to me first. Inspired by a high school cooking class, I prepared for a culinary career courtesy of Uncle Sam.80 My schooling was not what I’d envisioned.
What did I learn?
About prostitution. About the effects of a freewheeling, colonial mindset on a Catholic country (the Philippines). And in return I tasted racism: when the Filipino non-commissioned and commissioned officers were put in positions of authority over white, black, and Hispanic sailors, they wielded that authority like a machete. But I also saw that comradery and human decency could flourish among the enlisted men. (No women on board at that time.) I acquired a broader knowledge of illegal drugs. I witnessed the rampant homosexuality of San Francisco. I was drawn partially into the world of born-again Christians and the anti-Catholicism of Chick Publications, those caustic and uncharitable little pamphlets. I heard a shipmate mention Padre Pio, and I had no idea who that was. I read Thoreau’s Walden and dreamed of an eremitic life, albeit without God. I got to travel to different parts of the U.S. and outside the country, gaining an appreciation for life at sea. I also learned discipline the hard way through punishment for infractions, up to and including a sentence of three days on bread and water (no joke!). I honed my improvisational skills. For example, I feigned an epileptic seizure while under imminent threat of beating from a corrections petty officer. I felt shame, and I experienced failure. But then, so did the nation. I was on an aircraft carrier cruising the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf while our diplomats and embassy staff were held in Iran. (Remember “the Shah is a U.S. puppet down with the Shah”?) Daily we saw Soviet planes and ships shadowing us—the USSR had just invaded Afghanistan. Our rescue mission failed and morale sank. The only good news that year was the news of the “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics, where our men’s hockey team beat the Soviets and then took the gold medal. In 1981 the Navy and I parted ways. I had no medals to carry home, no laurels, only a few campaign ribbons and many sub-standard memories. No tattoos but a pierced ear. And a desire to write.
Interlude: Reflections on Liberty
I was free from the constraints of military discipline, including the length of my hair, use of free time, behavior towards others (especially those higher in the hierarchy), clothing choices, political allegiance….Funny that when we were allowed off the ship in port it was called liberty, but it was liberty with boundaries. We had to be back onboard in time for our next assigned duty or before the ship left port. (Failing to do so was called “missing ship’s movement.”)
Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness. The foundation of our American way of living. What is liberty? “Understood in a good way, the laws of humanity are the laws of nature which liberty is held to respect,” writes Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize. So far this might accord with the understanding of liberty central to the Declaration of Independence, which speaks of humanity and “Nature’s God.” But Fr. Gleize continues by defining today’s liberty as an ideology. “Ideology makes reference not to what is real, but to preconceived ideas. Liberalism is among these ideologies that makes reference to the idea of liberty conceived as the foundation of everything else. Liberty is not governed by nature; one no longer acts in conformity with what one is, but with what one wants.”81
One would logically suppose that life is the foundational element of the Declaration’s formula, since without it, the other values are moot. But the promoters of liberalism (whether of the right or the left) have scrambled the formula’s order to make liberty—choice—the highest value.82 Gleize points out this illogical train of thought in the context of assisted suicide. Liberals assert their right to choose to take their own life, but as Gleize points out, “one cannot be free by taking one’s life: the taking of one’s life is concomitantly the taking of one’s liberty.”83 A further example of this idea’s absurdity can be found in Dostoevsky’s great novel of political and philosophical nihilism Demons, where the character Kirilov commits suicide believing he will therefore conquer the fear of death and become God, and thus obtain freedom for humankind.84 Likewise the pro-abortion hordes tout “choice” as a sacrament, overlooking the clash of persons and triumph of the stronger over the helpless involved in taking the unborn’s life. Those never born can never experience liberty or pursue happiness. A final example comes from the American public sphere: the treatment of the mentally ill. In the 1960s many civil libertarians and other advocates cried out for releasing many residents of asylums, on the pretext that their liberty was restricted.85 Makers of policy and law went along with that impulse, resulting in many mentally ill individuals out on the streets with little or no care. According to The Wall Street Journal, “the city of San Francisco released data last week [July, 2023] showing that 55% of homeless individuals rejected shelter when offered it.”86 How did that “liberty” improve their life or further their pursuit of happiness? Instead of a structured environment (and admittedly, some asylums were houses of horror) these vulnerable people were consigned to a dangerous (for them and the public) life on the streets.
Of course I never could have formulated all this at age twenty, but, to bolster the slow working of Tolkien’s Catholic-based deep wisdom, I would soon encounter another shaper of my soul.
The School of the Middle Ages: Pursued by Augustine
Why go to college? (“Why stay in night school?” Thank you Talking Heads.)
Let’s try that again. Why go to college, if you don’t know why, and if you don’t know your destination? I finished my undergraduate studies with a B.A. and a double major: history and English (writing track). Also with personal baggage—to be discussed elsewhere—and debt. What did I learn? Some good stuff. By taking a course in Middle English literature I encountered some of the sources from which Tolkien drew. A Chaucer course exposed me to one of our great Catholic writers. I read a lot of poetry (some of it good), including Fr. Hopkins and his unusually-structured and rhymed poems. I enjoyed a course in Irish Literature ranging from “Pangur Ban” to “Waiting for Godot.” Likewise, a science fiction class covered Ray Bradbury and other classic writers in the genre. I gained skills in thinking, researching, and writing. But it was Medieval History that especially captured me, and I got to know a bit about St. Augustine of Hippo. My professor and I co-wrote a paper on him as a father, including his fatherly tough love with heretics. I presented it at a medieval conference in New Hampshire, and to my chagrin, repeatedly mispronounced the name of the neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus, a major influence on Augustine.
But also in Medieval History, I wrote a sort of debunking of hagiography, in which I started with a gussied-up legendary retelling of a saint’s life, followed by a medieval layer somewhat closer to the (ostensible) truth and only slightly miraculous, to the final, banal truth that the “saint” in question was no one special, not particularly holy, and just lucky to be remembered at all. I was a modern skeptic, though an inconsistent one. In a Western Civilization class I used Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” as a metaphor of civilization.
College was also a time of playing in bands and attending talks, readings, and concerts. I heard Joseph Brodsky memorably tell of his love of Auden’s poetry, and I listened to the forgettable poetry of the former priest, Philip Berrigan. I was entranced by poet and storyteller Joe Bruchac and his explorations of Abenaki myth and growing up in rural New York. I sat with other students asking questions of Howard Zinn and recall him as a mild-mannered, easy-going man. I met Bernie Sanders, every bit as gruff and uncompromisingly socialist as he is now as a Senator. I heard a Chinese artist whose name I forget speak about the Cultural Revolution under Mao. I experienced the brilliance of Talking Heads on their “Stop Making Sense” tour. And like millions of other Americans at the time, I watched the final tear-jerking episode of M*A*S*H, and the frightening nuclear attack drama, “The Day After,” which reinforced a campus appearance by anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldecott.
The mention of St. Augustine in my application to Syracuse University for grad school impressed at least one person on the admissions committee, but familiarity with the saint’s life did not help much in studying Latin American Historical Geography. Things fell apart.
A Very Short Digression on How Not to Pursue Love or Make It as a Rock Star
With all my shortcomings, it proved tough to find someone to share life with. Thus, many dead ends. I did not succeed. Regarding stardom: A self-taught bass player, I kicked around in cover bands over the years, and also played in a band or two making original tunes. We did not make it big. I did not succeed in that either.
The Exact Opposite of Right: 9/11 and After
Do I miss the last century? Sometimes. The 1990s should have prepared me for the new century. Rock star dreams disappeared. Homelessness. But also a conversion and realization that God is real and approachable. Ministry not realized. Vocational failure and firing from a job. Frustration with teaching. An unstable romance. The discovery of Christian Tradition in the form of Eastern Orthodoxy.
By the turn of the century I felt I’d accomplished whatever was possible for me on my home turf. I was completing a degree at my alma mater, teaching English composition, and looking for new opportunities.
9/11.
I was making a stop or two that morning before a class I was taking on campus. I was listening to NPR in my car. The news of one plane striking the tower seemed to equal an accident, but two planes was no coincidence. Many of the students were from the NYC area and a pervasive sense of shock permeated campus. The terrible scenes on endless repeat—how many times can we watch the video of the towers aflame, then collapsing?
Wake up, America. God wants your undivided attention.
Did America listen? Not really.
Did I listen? Not really.
When attacked, we defend ourselves. Then maybe we counterattack. Often we seek revenge. What we rarely do is make a concerted effort to assess why the attack happened and how we failed in our defense and response. America chose to lash out rather than reflect on itself: its divisions; its weaknesses; its strengths; its goals and the roadmap of how to achieve them; what it took for granted; who were its friends, and who were not; how it thought about itself and its self-image.
Likewise, instead of staying put and putting in the effort to work on myself, after graduation in December I chose to flee from the Northeast to the Pacific Northwest, to meet someone, a woman who was a friend of a friend, and try to start over at age forty.
In these endeavors America failed, and—mostly—so did I. Rather, it’s not that we failed, but that we tried to do something without God’s blessing. America stubbornly persevered in its independence, and buried itself in the quicksand of folly from whence it might still be extracted, but is in deadly peril and close to sinking below the surface, cut off from all help. I dare to say that I learned some lessons and by God’s grace have so far been spared.
It’s not that I’m an optimist. No. I am more of a dreamer. Maybe that should all be put in the past tense. I still dream, but I am a realist staying close to home, sometimes almost cloistered.
After 9/11 the U.S. did not stay at home, to its detriment. Rebuild infrastructure at home? No. Instead, destroy places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, then pour money back into those foreign lands even as American bridges and power grid decayed. Strengthen democracy at home? No. Instead, meddle in the governance of other countries, but allow undemocratic elements to grow and fester in our midst. Protect Christians at home or elsewhere? No. Instead, privilege any group but Christians. Share the cost of fighting war throughout society? No. Instead, let the burden of fighting fall almost exclusively on service members and their families. Be humble before God and acknowledge His sovereignty? No. If anything, atheists and the might-as-well-be-atheists grew louder and bolder after 9/11. The results are many: America has lost respect in the world. Americans have grown more divided. America is declining in religious belief. Liberalism has been succeeded by insanity promoting transgenderism, endorsement of sodomy, sexually grooming children, and on, and on. We are unmoored. Adrift. Not tied to anything. Without direction, but surely destined for destruction. “Once a culture loses its moorings it begins an accelerating round of futile change.”87 But there will always be those who resist change.
Orthodox American Dreams of a Golden Age
I encountered what I took to be resistance to change at St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church in Albany, NY in 1998.The Divine Liturgy took hold of me the first time I sat, entranced, breathing incense under the vigilance of the icon festooned walls, on waves of chant, drinking in the colors of the vestments and knowing the iconostasis stood as a witness and to protect me from mysteries I could not understand. Defended by the mounted warrior Saint George, spear piercing a dragon, a Christian Middle East trampling down its oppressors rose before my American eyes.88
Middle Eastern Christians may have a memory of long-gone triumph, but their reality is living as a minority in lands once their own. (Both the dream and the reality were absent from any planning by America for its invasion of Iraq post 9/11, to the detriment of indigenous Christians there.) However, my journey took me from the Arab minorities, past the long time horizons of Greeks stubbornly clinging to their ethnicity and remembering great empires, to the apocalyptic Eastern Orthodox fantasies of the Slavs, especially the Russians.
Those fantasies go something like this: Nineteenth century! Tsar, Church, and people united! Pilgrimages to the monasteries and consultation with spiritual fathers. Rallying of the Slavs and fulfilling the destiny of the race to save the world! Standing firm against the West and the Jesuits. Preparing to re-take Constantinople from the Turk. Holy Russia with its holy priests. A lamp burning in front of the icons in every palace and hut. The pilgrim walking the roads of Holy Russia, endlessly repeating the Jesus Prayer.
That is the dream, and it still resonates with many. One can find these Russian dreams in unexpected places such as Jordanville, N.Y, or in Seattle and San Francisco at sites associated with St. John Maximovitch, or in Alaska with its legends of St. Herman. While I took the dream seriously, I could never reconcile it with living in twenty-first century America. I studied Orthodox theology and benefited from books by Schmemann, Lossky, Florovsky, Men, and others. I learned to serve at the Liturgy and grew my hair and beard long in old Russian clerical style; I was even tonsured a Reader (minor clergy). I read Dostoevsky and my faith was deepened by his books, even if he disliked Catholics, Poles, and Jews. Solzhenitsyn offered a less-restrictive view of the world through Russian eyes.
I came up against some seemingly irreconcilable facts. The Russian Church had been totally undermined and infiltrated during Soviet times. The Orthodox and Catholics, which both had good claims to apostolic foundations, were not in communion. Ethnicity was still a driving force amongst the Orthodox in diaspora, and nationality counted for more than unity in some cases. Finally, the Orthodox had little experience of the level playing field found in religiously tolerant (or, from another viewpoint, religiously indifferent) lands. The Orthodox were used to either the caesaropapism of the Byzantine empire and Tsarist Russia, or the dhimmi status of life under the Ottomans or repression by atheist communists.89
The more I tried to fit my American self into an Orthodox mold, the less comfortable I became. As I delved into the time before the “Great Schism” between East and West, and sought common ground between the two in the Benedictine tradition and pre-schism saints, the more I felt like a stranger in Orthodoxy. It may have been a great place of learning and growth, but it was not a suitable terroir in which to thrive.90 During that same period I was also getting a lesson in the decay of quintessential American institutions, and the long reach of God even into non-traditional bastions.
The Shelving of Books: How the Library and Evergreen Helped Me Become Catholic
American liberty is supposedly built on firm foundations of free speech, the free exercise of religion, and so forth. Those foundations have been manifest in our society through various institutions, such as the press, or what we today call “the media.”91 In 1999 and 2000 I worked at a small-town newspaper, and mostly I found it rewarding. It was the last gasp of traditional journalism, and we covered a great deal of local news: schools, town boards, police blotter and fire calls, sports, religion, and features. The paper I left then is now without its own press, office or newsroom, and heavily reliant on press releases, non-local stories and social media for its pathetic content. While there doesn’t seem to be a discernible political slant, it is a bland confection most useful for obituaries. At least we have a paper published five days a week, which many small communities do not have. Bigger markets suffer with opinions mistaken for factual news. This a-geographical and biased “news” coverage only adds to the alienation of people from the places they live, and from what are supposed to be trustworthy sources of information from which to extrapolate prudent personal choices and decisions involving the common good.
When we examine the fall of liberty-supporting American institutions, we may overlook the library. For decades the library was a place of furthering one’s education, a democratic bulwark available to all on an equal basis, and a quiet location for study, reflection, and research. Of course there were distortions to that equality caused by segregation and isolation, but the depiction of the tidy library, chocked full of books and overseen by benevolent librarians was generally held. But like other institutions (family, government, social organizations, etc.) it was infiltrated and politicized.
In college I worked at the main campus library. When I was homeless in Albany, the library was a refuge after work and before I had to find a place to sleep for the night. Changes in technology resulted in some changes to the library, but books still held their ground and the majority of shelf space. But the twenty-first century saw the library turn a corner, and not in a good way. Years before “wokeness” was in common parlance, the public library was woke. People still have a stereotypical image of the old-ish, spinsterish librarian shushing people. Those days are gone for good. Many librarians today are apt to sport sleeves of tattoos, unnaturally-colored hair, and multiple piercings in place of a pair of glasses dangling from a lanyard around their neck. I started working for a public library system in Washington in 2002 and stayed until I could no longer take it (2010). At least I’ll have a small pension when I turn 65. I did low-level work, mostly checking in and shelving books and other materials, but I also did some special projects and helped patrons. Much of the change came due to librarians: that profession is heavily female and ideological. The library degree is wickedly expensive, but it acts as a thorough gate-keeper. You don’t get into senior ranks without it.
While working for the library I started to see things changing. For instance: lots of porn viewing on the public computers. Because of free speech concerns nobody would stop it. The crucial battle? Anime and the growth of “YA” (young adult) and graphic novels. Rather quickly the emphasis was on the teens, and anime was in. If you know anything about anime then you know it is a sort of gateway to porn, and, in Japan, it can often be pornographic. Also, the teens were not expected to behave as in days past, and the librarians often took the side of noisy patrons against the other staff. And of course all the Heather Has Two Mommies gay-propaganda stuff was flooding into the library’s holdings.
We endured mandatory diversity training, which really meant feeling guilty for being white. Formerly a tolerant old-school liberal collection of misfits, the staff was weeded out in favor of the young Red Guards willing to make a great leap forward with new policies and a new vision. We even began opening on Sundays, which at first the union resisted before giving in. All these changes resulted in a workplace and workforce thoroughly indoctrinated in the subversive, so it was no wonder the library has become the site of grooming aka “drag queen story hour.” The once-good had been corrupted.
*
Sometimes the subversive is itself subverted. God can penetrate the enemy fortress if He so chooses and deliver the captives from bondage. After three years of courses in Orthodox theology I had the option of writing a thesis to obtain a master’s degree. After conferring with my wife, I decided against that path, opting instead to pursue a Master’s in Public Administration with a focus on public policy. For the previous five years I’d immersed myself in American history: presidential biographies, studies of different eras, political philosophy. As much as I liked studying theology, I wanted to get a degree I could “do something with.” I was thinking of public service or the non-profit sector. I still saw vestiges of hope in the public sphere and thought I might contribute to our common welfare in the great American tradition.
I finally settled on a program at The Evergreen State College, a non-traditional state school in Olympia, Washington, the state’s capital. Evergreen is a pure hippie invention, with degree programs assembled by individual students and narrative evaluations instead of grades. The central plaza is named Red Square, and the school mascot is the giant Pacific mollusk named the Geoduck (pronounced gooey-duck). Surprisingly, the education I received was good, with courses team-taught by practitioners and academics. There was an emphasis on team projects and real-world issues. Many of my fellow students were working their way through the ranks of the state bureaucracy or non-profits. But there were warning signs too. I spoke up about the rights and perspectives of Christians and received hardly any support; several students did thank me privately, but felt uncomfortable doing so in class. I had to fight against a “mindfulness” exercise in one class that I defined as Buddhist practice, and refused to take part. I clashed with a teacher over the issue of “gender.” I objected after she told an undergraduate that there something like forty different “genders.” I summed up her position: sex as socially constructed; my position: sex is a deep ontological reality and truth. That teacher later tried to deny me credit for a course though I staved off that attempt.
I sought ways to incorporate my faith into my school work, but that was made difficult by the lack of a well-developed social doctrine in the Orthodox churches. I tentatively planned to look at the growth of the Benedictine order for lessons in public administration, looking at the saint’s Rule and how the Benedictines contributed to the stabilization of Europe over the centuries and led the way in ministering to others as a forerunner of many of our charitable institutions. That particular project never came to fruition, though it did give impetus to my search for pre-schism common ground.
But another strain of Catholic thought revealed itself in a class on sustainable economics. I stumbled on E.F. Schumacher’s classic book on appropriately-scaled economics, Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, and learned about his conversion to Catholicism. That book taught me about subsidiarity, adjusting hierarchies and responsible entities to the size and scope of a problem. For example, helping a family displaced by a fire would best be handled by the local church or branch of a helping organization, not by a state-level entity. Schumacher worked out guidelines for utilizing technology appropriate for the needs of the situation. In other words, farmers cultivating small plots have no need of a gigantic tractor.
I also looked at Pope Benedict’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate, a powerful introduction to Catholic Social Teaching, love, and solidarity. Both the document and the book opened my eyes on an alternative path to both amoral capitalism and immoral socialism. It also, unlike Orthodox theory, accommodated and even supposed a forum of relative equality for Christianity and other beliefs, rather than caesaropapism or subjugation.
And just like that I had a new key for unlocking the door hiding the secrets for successfully addressing the common good. Although I walked through the door, the path ahead proved far less simple than I anticipated.
*
There was one day at the Divine Liturgy when, in my capacity as a tonsured Reader, I proclaimed the epistle for the day. Shortly after that, I quietly and unostentatiously slipped out and left. I cannot explain it, but I had a sense of being impelled to leave. My wife was already in the process of giving up on Orthodoxy, so now we needed to figure out our next steps.
People speak of reception into communion with the Roman Pontiff as “swimming the Tiber.” But I have never learned how to swim. (Yes. I went into the Navy unable to swim. With a minimum of training I qualified as the lowest-grade swimmer during boot camp.) Looking back, it may be that the Lord picked me up like a flat stone and skipped me across the Tiber. But, once on my way across, then on the river bank, I had no desire to re-cross.
The months leading up to my reception into Catholicism had been eventful. I’d quit the library, graduated from Evergreen, visited my family in New York’s North Country, worked at the Washington legislature during a legislative session, and celebrated my fiftieth birthday. I’d become more familiar with Catholicism—though not in its traditional form—and seen government at work up close in the crafting and compromising of bills. But the events around my fiftieth birthday (July 4, 2011) were decisive.
I went on retreat to Mount Angel, a Benedictine monastery in Oregon. Situated at the end of a long drive punctuated by mini-shrines of the Stations of the Cross, and set upon a hill rising above farmland looking like an Italian landscape, Mount Angel is a lovely place. The buildings are in an Italianate style, including the campanile, though with some modern touches. The library is a sedate, modernistic building with an intriguing collection and an atmosphere conducive to study. The main church building is impressive in its monastic style, though the lack of a high altar detracts from its character. I enjoyed three quiet days there, and gained a slight familiarity with monastic rhythms.
That was just prior to my birthday. On my birthday we went to Seattle to see a movie that pierced me like a two-edged sword: Terence Malick’s meditation on life and death and God’s answer to Job and reconciliation with God and man, The Tree of Life. It is often the case that the means God uses to touch us are especially charged with grace at a particular place and time. The means may or may not contain much intrinsic value or strength. The revelation of the Transfiguration serves as an example. Peter, overwhelmed by the power of the mountaintop moment, wants to take up residence there, but the Lord has other plans. After the three favored disciples experienced a glimpse of the divine light, they then had to descend to the world’s turmoil below. Had they returned to Tabor’s peak the next day, they would not have found any great power in evidence. The beauty of the spot and the superb view would have remained, as would the memory of their privileged viewing of Moses, Elijah, and divine Jesus confirmed by the cloud of the Spirit and voice of the Father, but that would not be the same as the impact of the moment of transfiguration. I have watched the movie again and while it is a fine piece of cinema it will never have the power it did the day I marked a half century of life outside the womb.
I had been reading more and more Catholic writing as well. Orthodox literature has its depths (no one beats Dostoevsky’s investigations of the soul and will) but not its breadth. Much of what qualifies as literature from Orthodox countries has not been translated into other languages. I found plenty of good Catholic reading. One example is the work of Sigrid Undset, especially Kristin Lavransdatter, the evocative, unsentimental trilogy set in medieval Catholic Norway. A non-fiction book of equal import was George Weigel’s mammoth Witness to Hope about Pope John Paul II.92 My wife and I also discovered the wisdom of Abp. Sheen.
After contacting different parishes in the Tacoma, WA, area I sensed a rightness at Holy Rosary, a beautiful church in Tacoma with a solid, faithful pastor.93 We received instruction and had canonical impediments removed. On August 17, 2012, my wife and I had our marriage convalidated; she was brought back into the Church and I was received as a Melkite Greek Catholic since I’d been chrismated (confirmed) in the analogous Antiochian Orthodox Church. Subsequently, I was allowed to change ascription to the Latin-rite.94 During this time I was a part of the national service organization AmeriCorps, overseeing a tutoring center at a technical-vocational college in Tacoma. Thrilled that there was a Catholic parish only a block away where I could attend Mass at lunch, I swiftly realized the Jesuit-staffed parish was a purveyor of heterodoxy, and I stopped going there. Thus began my journey through the mainstream Catholic Church. This period finished with the end of my two years in AmeriCorps and a road trip to visit my in-laws in Illinois. We made a pilgrimage out of visiting Peoria by stopping at the cathedral and visiting the diocesan headquarters with its lovely small museum dedicated to Archbishop Sheen. The nuns in charge gave us a personalized tour and we came away with a growing esteem for the famous American prelate.
Notes:
77. An excellent introduction to Tolkien (and one which properly sets him in his Catholic context) is by Joseph Pearce, Tolkien, Man and Myth: A Literary Life (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998). See also Philip and Carol Zaleski’s The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). Holly Ordway’s Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (Elk Grove Village, Illinois: Word On Fire, 2023) is a rewarding examination of Tolkien and Catholicism.
78. For a spell-binding book about Atlantis by a Tolkien scholar, see Robert Lazu Kmita’s The Island Without Seasons (Lincoln, NE: Os Justi Press, 2023).
79. Patey, op cit.
80. For more detail, see my “Confessions of the Omelet King,” pp. 55-59 in the anthology Take Two—They’re Small, edited by Whitney Scott (Crete, IL: Outrider Press, 2002).
81. Gleize, “Exit or Requiem,” The Angelus, November-December 2015 (Volume XXXVIII, No. 6), 78-81.
82. It could also be argued that the pursuit of happiness is held by libertarians to be co-equal with liberty. For a devastating takedown of libertarianism and its incompatibility with authentic Catholicism, see Christopher Ferrara’s brilliant The Church and the Libertarian (Forest Lake, MN: The Remnant Press, 2010).
83. Gleize, “Exit or Requiem,” 80.
84. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons (New York: Vintage, 1994).
85. See David Oshinsky’s “Its Time to Bring Back Asylums,” The Wall Street Journal, July 22-23, 2023, C1-2.
86. WSJ Editorial Board, “Why San Francisco Is a Homeless Mecca,” August 6, 2023.
87. Patey, 103.
88. For the story of my spiritual journey through the Christian East, see my essay, “Christ is the Light of East and West: One Man’s Search for the Apostolic Faith,” The Coming Home Network Newsletter, April 2014. Link: https://chnetwork.org/story/christ-is-the-light-of-east-and-west-one-mans-search-for-the-apostolic-faith-greg-cook/
89. See my article “Words We Live By: Orthodox & American Ideals in Foundational Texts,” The Word, Volume 52 No. 5 (May 2008), 5-9.
90. When I was received into Orthodoxy I named St. Gregory the Theologian (or “of Nazianzus,” as he is known in the West) as my heavenly patron, thinking that my given name had never been properly utilized. When I returned to the West and Rome, I named Pope St. Gregory the Great (“Dialogos” in the East, for his book of dialogues. Gregory the Great had spent time in Constantinople as the Pope’s emissary before being called back to Italy. He thus had an appreciation for eastern liturgy and customs, but resisted the encroachments of the eastern emperor. I also discovered the writing of Dostoevsky’s disciple Vladimir Solovyov and his premise of the role of the Russian Church in service to Rome.
91. E.E.Y. Hales, in his Revolution and Papacy: The Papacy and the Revolutionary Movement in Europe, 1769-1846 (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1960) quotes diplomat Cardinal Consalvi during the time after Napoleon’s downfall. “I dared to say that the freedom of the Press [sic]…is the most dangerous weapon ever put into the hands of the opponents of religion and the monarchy. The liberty of the Press is no mere passing or limited evil, it will be permanent and will develop, so to speak, with each public crisis and with each social upheaval. The perils to which it gives rise are palpable and incalculable; its advantages and benefits will be nullified by criminal influences” (238). Consalvi states further that “talent, even genius, cannot triumph in these daily combats in which pens venal and filled with hatred [i.e. the press] take issue with men of goodwill, distorting their characters and behavior, and putting themselves forward as the sole defenders of the people and liberty” (239).
92. In the past decade I have reconsidered the papacy and legacy of the Polish Pope. I have reservations about his canonization which agree with the concerns raised by Fr. Patrick De La Roque, FSSPX, in his Pope John Paul II: Doubts About a Beatification (Kansas City, MO: Angelus Press, 2011). Two insurmountable issues, I believe, are the Assisi interfaith prayer meetings and the treatment of pontiff as rock star and personality.
93. Now, sadly, closed due to structural problems in the building and a lack of support from the Archdiocese of Seattle.
94. See footnote 88.
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