Come, Christians, Join to Sing!

     As I've mentioned here before, this semester I'm taking part in a faculty seminar, with the topic of freedom.  Namely, what freedom is, whether we are free, what we should be free to do, and, with distressing rarity, what our freedom might be for.  We have been meeting for two solid months and we have hardly said a thing, for instance, about love.  It seems rather that the freedom of being free with oneself, largehearted, broad-armed, tossing oneself away in a brave act of love, does not stir the imaginations of the conferees.  With the important but outnumbered and abashed exceptions of two fellow Catholics (both of them very smart and polite), the default "freedom" we turn to is a kernel of self-possession, usually taking the form, "I may do with my body as I please." 

     My students are more healthily skeptical about that piece of silliness, thank God.  They are also more easily moved -- perhaps just because they are young and still full of life -- by celebrations of faith, hope, and love.  But this week's conferee in charge of the discussion gave us what is apparently a well-known play by a Puerto Rican from New York, called The Masses are Asses.  If it were Marxist agitprop, it would have something to recommend it; instead it is both cleverer and far more cynical than that.  Its three characters are thoroughly contemptible, and everything said about everyone else in the world is full of contempt, too.  I guess it was supposed to be funny.  Apparently it illustrates the shackles of being neither Puerto Rican nor American, and not being able to do anything about it.  Then there was a short story about a Puerto Rican woman, living in New York, whose life is filled with the consumer inanities of our day.  It is not clear that we are supposed to see them as inanities.  She reads, for instance, a romance novel about a girl who goes to Haiti and is put under a voodoo spell by a big dark man who wants you know what.  That seems inane enough, but it is only one more thing she hedges herself round with, and the things, from the author's point of view, have no inherent value and inflict upon the woman no inherent loss; they merely signify her as a New York Puerto Rican, a hybrid.  So she goes to the Conquistador Hotel in San Juan, despising the Puerto Rican Puerto Ricans there, yet staring at the hairy chest of the guy behind the bar.  Which hairy chest prompts her to go to her room and phone the bar for service.  Service duly arrives.  The bartender boasts afterwards that the "gringa" up there doesn't know if she's a New Yorker or a Puerto Rican, speaking English and then Spanish, till finally he got her motor going and she screamed out, "Puerto Rican FREEDOM!"  Thus endeth the story.

     And so we talked, circuitously.  And it became clear to me that we were tossing the word "culture" around with abandon.  At which I wanted to anchor that word, suggesting that we in America were perhaps entering a post-cultural age, the first such in the history of the world.  "Culture," I said, "touches upon the deepest things that a people believe about the world and about man's place in it."  It is not, I said, a hodgepodge of habits, a little cuisine here, some patois there, and it certainly is not mass entertainment.  That suggestion went nowhere -- though it was heard by my two fellow Catholics, who did not take it up, no doubt thinking that to take it up would be to waste their breath.

     It's seemed to me since that there is an abyss of longing in man's heart, and that all healthy cultures, Christian or pagan, attempt to fill that abyss by what they love most deeply, and what stirs them to great joy or grief or pride.  It is what they will celebrate -- and even when human beings celebrate their culture's accomplishments, they don't celebrate one another; they elevate their heroes and poets from the past, and allow them to exalt their hearts, to expand the bounds of their imaginations.  But what if you have nothing of the sort to celebrate?  Then you turn to phony and frail things to toss into that yawning abyss.  You turn to material comforts, like the Puerto Rican woman from New York.  You turn to the vain prestige of a job.  You turn to distractions, provided to the masses en masse.  Or you make a great fuss over your ethnic heritage, and grow all the touchier about it precisely to the degree that there isn't really anything there anymore.  If you're in San Juan you watch Seinfeld and listen to Jennifer Lopez, same as if you lived in San Antone, or San Francisco.

     What does unite a people then?  One of our conferees and I talked about it briefly afterwards.  I told her a story about how I attended a Mass once and there standing next to me was someone I hadn't gotten along with, but who was apparently, as I only learned later, on his way to entering the Church.  We knelt together.  We prayed together.  I felt with a wave of shame that this good man was my brother.  Since that day my feelings for him have been entirely changed; I can't speak for his feelings for me, but he sure does treat me with kindness now.  What united us was something as far beyond politics, or ethnicity, or mutual utility, as the stars are above their images in a puddle in the street.  She said to me that we have that one food for the feast that is "global" because it is universal: the Eucharist.

     And it has reminded me of other moments.  When a young man I'd known for a long time -- and who by chance visited my lecture just today -- told me, beaming, that his experiences at our college had changed his life, and that he was entering the Church at the Easter Vigil.  We shook hands and laughed -- that laughter that literary theorists don't understand, because it is full of mirth and humility and wonder.  I will not forget that moment either, as long as my mind is whole.  Or another young fellow who showed up yesterday to talk about community, and Alisdair MacIntyre; I'd had this student as a freshman five years ago, and shepherded him through our course in western civilization.  I hadn't seen him since, but he is now pursuing his master's in theology at our school, and will proceed on somewhere else to get his doctorate.  To look into his eyes is to perceive a quiet merriment and confident peace: the merriment made possible by what is right and good and beautiful.  And then the young lady, boisterous and pretty and as girlish as it is possible to be, disarming in all her ways, who barged into the office just minutes before I was to go to this seminar, asking about classes for next year (she is now my advisee, by request), her eyes growing wide with delight to hear about my course in Literature of Spiritual Crisis.  "Ooh, what's in it?" she asked.  "Anything I want!" I said.  "It's a catch-all title that will let me teach anything and everything.  Hopkins for sure, and Browning!"

     We Christians have something to celebrate. Oh, we don't often celebrate these days with the best sense, and our contemporary art sure is lousy, but at least we still remember to celebrate.  I wonder what it is like to have lived and never to have stood alongside someone who is not from your family, maybe not from your ethnic group, not from your neighborhood, not from your godforsaken voting bloc -- someone like the young man who sat next to me this morning at Mass, with a hearty, "Hey, Doctor E!" and a handshake -- and to have prayed to Someone and sung about Someone big enough to embrace us all, here and now, long ago and far away, years hence and who knows where.  What is it like, I might ask, to live and not to live?  Not to know that elation that elevates man beyond man, because it comes from man's creator, who loves him and who has promised him a feast?

     How sorry such a life would be!  Which makes me think -- or I should say, makes me insist -- that long before we Christians take to the streets in protest, we should take to the streets in song.  Let our merriment abash our opponents, before our indignation steels their resolve.  Let's take them by a storm of celebration.  I have no idea what is stopping us.  Surely it can not be our knowledge that we'd probably celebrate with lousy music.  Our opponents have lousy music too.  They invented most of it, after all, and we picked it up from them.  Let's go for the celebration.  Not to proselytize; just to pray and sing and be together, outdoors, with people to look on and laugh at us for being the fools we are.  Let them.  We keep it up, and they'll be fools alongside us too.

Comments

[Bill R]

This is why I belong to the choir--to sing, and to be with those who love to sing: Marvin, my prayer partner, a clerk in a drug store; Keith, the wise-cracking property manager; Jim, the lyrical black "chaplain" of the choir; Gary, the wealthy business owner; Nate, the black dude built like a linebacker who puts his arm around me when I tell him he's got an angelic baritone; the Other Bill, a biker who's always "so happy to see you, man!" And me, the lawyer who can, somewhat incongruously, use his argumentative voice to sing. We unite in praise to a common Lord, who is the source of our common culture.

[Beth from TN]

As so often with Tony's brilliance, I am once again reduced to a mere "wow; thank you."

[Sr. Dorcee Clarey, SGL]

I have been a "secret" reader of yours for over a year or so now, accessing almost everything you've written for Touchstone, or "sung" in words. Keep holding your lamp aloft, Dr. Esolen, and continue your singing--as you did in this piece. We need to see it shining/sounding ever brighter as things around us grow darker.

[Kamilla]

Sister,

Amen and amen.

Kamilla

[maria horvath]

Thank you for this hopeful post, Tony.

THE TRUE APPEARANCE OF THE WORD

As the cataract of ignorance falls
from off the eyesight of my soul,
I realize that all this huge Creation
round about me is the Word.

The hitherto quite unattended fact
that these familiar fingers number ten,
like an encounter with some miracle,
suddenly astonishes me

and the newly-opened forsythia flowers
in one corner of the hedge beyond my window
entrance me utterly,
like seeing a model of Resurrection.

Smaller than a grain of sand
in the oceanic vastness of the cosmos,
I realize that this my muttering
by a mysterious grace of the Word,

is no imagined thing, no mere sign,
but Reality itself.

~ Ku Sang (1919-2004), Korean poet

~ Maria

[Sr. Dorcee Clarey, SGL]

Just one more comment. I recently saw the documentary "The Singing Revolution", the story of Estonia's peaceful revolt against communism in 1939, primarily through the country's life long tradition of massed choir singing. You can view the trailer at www.singingrevolution.com. Dr. Esolen's musings reminded me of this film.

~Sr. Dorcee

[Joe Long]

Very much what I needed to see today. The losing academic and cultural fight is, in the end, a winning spiritual one - God bless you teaching that course, as I am convinced He'll bless the students.

Who knows? It may lead some braying asses to Masses, in the end. (I'm sorry, some wordplays are just so very, very bad, I can't quite refrain.)

[Rob G]

Great post, Tony. And awesome timing. I watched 'How Green Was My Valley' last night at your recent recommendation, and just loved it. And of course there's a lot of "taking to the streets in song" therein!

Cheers.