All my memories gather 'round her Miner's lady, stranger to blue water Dark and dusty, painted on the sky Misty taste of moonshine, teardrop in my eye
All my memories gather 'round her Miner's lady, stranger to blue water Dark and dusty, painted on the sky Misty taste of moonshine, teardrop in my eye
Whenever a man comes to me and says, “Padre, I do not believe in a future life, to be prepared for by the cultivation of the soul,” I always counter by saying: “Then what, in the name of all that is true, do you believe in? Nobody cares a cracked button about what you do not believe in, about death, life, God, man, or devil. The only thing that matters in the least, or that does not bore your friends, is what you do believe in. Do you, perchance, believe in this life, a life of externalities—that such a life is worth the living? Do you put your trust in the worth of seventy years or so, spent in fruitless search for a happiness to which you know, if you have half an eye on what goes on around you, you will never come, in increasingly agonized appeal for love and lovers which you find never do, after all, effectually pierce through those walls which isolate your lonely soul; years which shall end, when perhaps you have begun to learn a little how to make outer things serve your inner need, only in disease, decay, senility and—that is all? Do you believe in that? Then is your act of faith less a thing of reason, more a sheer miracle, than the faith of any man who believes in a future life. There may be no evidence for his belief, but there is all the evidence against your belief. Or else, it may be, your faith in this life is not a miracle at all, but is due to plain ignorance. It may be that you are still too young to look life in the face.
Let us by all means have more religion, but let it be real religion, theocentric, awed, a thing of beauty, and of deep humility. And let us not seek it for the sake of preserving civilization, that relatively unimportant incident. Let us seek it because we have lost our way, in a maze of sin and pride; because we are lonely, and life is dull, and the world’s gaudy baubles seem like tinsel; because God is our lost treasure; because we would be shriven; because we are children and the Father’s house is home; because we have too long been clever and self-sufficient; because worldliness is drab and stupid; because we would eat again the bread of God and drink once more the purple wine of Heaven.
See how his life is a failure, as men judge failure. The crowds which once followed Him to the Mount and about the seashore forsake Him. His very Apostles disappoint Him. They quarrel even about Its sacramental table. They sleep in the garden. One betrays Him for a little money. They flee when He is judged. What has become of the happy dream of a whole world following Him into the millenium? Gone, all of it. He is led out to die, billeted with a farcical title, spit at, derided,—a failure.
“Men and women”, He says to us, “see what life really is, even for the Most Perfect One. I know. I understand. The rose color has faded into the light of common day. Romance has proven but the gateway to an humdrum domesticity. The children you rejoiced in have grown up and forgotten you, more than you had deemed possible. Leaping ambition has become confined into the limitations of a tiny, useful, but monotonous niche in life. Friends you trusted have proved false or have grown fond of others and left you. Pain and sickness have broken your body. Over you come slowly the hurts of declining life. Your hope, too, for the world, your dream of industrial justice, of international love, of the ending of war, of the coming of the Kingdom—all seem to you thwarted at length by the incurable stupidity of man. You are tired, my child. You will not confess it to the world. You put a brave face on things. You seek to smile and hide the pain. Yes, my child, but I know.
“Well I know Thy trouble, O My servant true. Thou art very weary. I was weary too. But that toil shall make thee Someday all Mine own; And the end of sorrow Shall be near My Throne.”
He did not die in your place. He died and lives that you, remembering it and touching Him, may have courage, now that your turn has come to face things as they are, to live, suffer, die like a real man, a real woman. His hand is always near you. Fight on, comrades. “In this world”, He assures us, “ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”
It is because of this that the Holy Communion is and always must be the main service of Christendom,—that great, warm, pulsing, life-giving service which alone of all forms of worship Christ prescribed for us. Of its nature I shall say more in the last chapter. Just here let us recall it as the great comradeship of sacrificers. In it we offer Jesus to God, lifting up on high that bread and wine that He said He would use wherein to meet us. You possibly remember those old words which we say, trying to put into human language that lifting up of the Perfect Sacrifice to Him: “Wherefore we, Thy humble servants, do celebrate and make, here before Thy Divine Majesty, with these Thy holy gifts, which we now offer unto Thee, the memorial Thy Son hath commanded us to make, having in remembrance His blessed passion and precious death.” And then we venture to add our own imperfect beings to that Perfect Jesus, and we say to God, “Here we offer and present unto Thee ourselves, our souls and bodies.” We join our struggling, failing, striving lives to His life that He may give us understanding strength.
Every Lord's day, at millions of altars, men thus lift Him up, saying “We offer Him, the Perfect One, and ourselves, so imperfect, with Him.” All back through the centuries also the great ones of the earth have done the same, saying “Look on Him and help us to be like Him. So shall we not fail, so shall we not be crushed by life, so shall we live indeed.” In the Communion He gave the saints what He gives us,—Himself, His Presence, the touch of Him,—so that they, rising in His strength, went out and faced life and death, unafraid.
Some people think it very smart to-day to say that nobody in the least cares whether Bishops are so commissioned or not. If they do not care, they ought to, at least if the security of Christendom is anything to them, for always the Bishops have tried to be exceedingly careful to select and consecrate only such successors as would preserve the essentials of the Faith. If you want to see the practical result of having no Bishops to preserve the simple Faith look at Protestantism all about us. It is rapidly degenerating into individualism, where any man teaches what he wills, where worship is giving way to secularism, where devotions have to be bolstered up with motion pictures and other popular baits. [This does not, of course, apply to all Protestants. It does, however, fairly describe the prevailing tendency, especially in America.] Or look at the Roman Church, which abandoned the Apostles' fellowship and made, or tried to make, all the Apostles subservient to the See of Peter, substituting for the Lord's constitution of the Church an autocratic Papacy. See the growth of superstition, so distressing to the better minds within the Roman Church itself. See the addition of doctrines unheard of by the Apostles, such as the Immaculateness of Mary, to the Faith. Rejection of the constitutional episcopate has brought upon the Christian Church schism, disunity, religious Bolshevism, the discrediting of the Faith. It were well that we remained in fellowship with the Apostles and their spiritual descendants. You may not, if you do, find yourself cheek by jowl with all the giddy modernists; but you will have some foundation on which to build your life, a foundation which will not have to be revised the next time a scientist discovers something, the next time a war breaks forth, the next time some sophomoric young philosopher prematurely finds a publisher, or some disillusioned novelist has a bad dream. Let your parish, aided by you, say, “We have nothing new. We have teaching and methods as old as Christ and yet as modem as that human life which changes in fundamentals not at all from age to age. We have kept it because we have remained in the Apostles' fellowship, subject to their godly restraint if we or our parsons should lose our heads.” Then will men say, “Thank God for some force in religion which is still able to function sanely and serenely in the midst of almost universal hysteria.”
Some of them used to think that they were in revolt merely against contemporary economics. They took out their resentment in damning modern society. From soapboxes, they shouted their message to the working classes, who did not know whether to laugh or get angry. Every college had its socialist club, whose idealist members would have made Karl Marx foam with wrath.
Now they, for the most part, have come to see that their resentment runs deeper and extends more widely. They are in revolt against the complacency, the smugness, the mere carnality of contemporary life. They are demanding that honesty be more highly evaluated than efficiency, truth more highly than materialistic shibboleths. But the fact that they scorn the way of Main Street does not mean that they themselves have anything to offer as a substitute. They have no notion of what is right; they know merely that almost everything that is seems wrong.
Like the somewhat older group led by Messrs. Mencken, Nathan, and the like, they are healthy and hope-inspiring but they have not moved from the cry of revolt to the demand for reconstruction. They insist that man was not made to be the unhappy, timid, and inglorious creature which the twentieth century has left him. These restless youths are the hope of the world. They will not much longer be content with mere negations. As in numbers and intensity of feeling they grow greater, they will, before many years have passed, hit upon some positive solution to life’s problem. Most of them think it will be, when it comes, a brand-new solution. They are mostly, like all young people, too preoccupied with themselves to see mankind in the perspective of history. They do not see that often a rediscovery is the most revolutionary sort of discovery.
At any rate, day by day, there are more of them thinking, even though at present they are but a tiny leaven in the mass of youthful complacency; and day by day they see a little more clearly that man’s ancient pursuit, his inevitable inquisition, is the quest for Truth. He must know why. Even as Christianity offered a new technic in the days of Rome, so it may be again. Christianity can do nothing whatever in a day when men believe in their own intellectual sufficiency. It could do next to nothing for the nineteenth century. In this later era, now that we know, or at least are rapidly learning, that rationally we can arrive Nowhere, now that we perceive that the great gods, Reason, and Activity, and Comfort, all have feet of clay, now that we know not whither to turn to find the way out of a hurly-burly bore, Christianity may do much. It may do everything. But that it may do anything, it is necessary that we perceive, at least a little, what the Christian technic really is.
Three Friends
There were three friends Discussing life. One said: “Can men live together And know nothing of it? Work together And produce nothing? Can they fly around in space And forget to exist World without end?” The three friends looked at each other And burst out laughing. They had no explanation. Thus they were better friends than before.
‘'Well, you must admit it isn’t too badly put,’ he said cheerfully to the young woman over whose shoulder he had just re-read his thesis, which she was still holding in her pointed hands, her fore-arms resting on her hip-bones (half-Egyptian through her mother, she was built like those Egyptian figures one sees on monuments). ‘Infamous race!’ He kissed her head, the very scalp, underneath her hair, which had three different smells – on the crown of her head, on the temples, and where it met her forehead. ‘Yes, you really belong to an infamous sex.’ There was a silence. Then he added: ‘Nevertheless I’m pleased with you for not yet having protested: “Pretty odd to write things you don’t believe.”’
‘I haven’t said it because I don’t think it. But I admit I’m disconcerted…’
‘Everything I’ve written there I profoundly believe, and I’ve believed it since adolescence, since the age when one starts getting to know about people. But sometimes it seems to me that I could maintain with equal sincerity – that is to say with total sincerity – a completely opposite view of the question: a view that would demonstrate the grandeur of woman. Why? Because that maleficence and that absurdity and that grandeur all exist in women. Turn and turn about. Always turn and turn about. Sometimes, too, it seems to me that…
‘Here, I’ll tell you a story. There was once a boy in a boarding-school who was persecuted by one of the masters, who treated him with monstrous unfairness. One day, towards the end of the school year, the master sent for this boy, who appeared before him tense and bristling and said: “I suppose you’re going to give me another wigging.” The master replied: “No, I sent for you because I’m leaving the school for good, and we won’t see each other again. And so I wanted to tell you that if I gave you a rough time it was because I liked you so much. Now give me your hand and go.” They shook hands and parted. And, as he had said, they never saw each other again.’
‘What’s the point of that story?’ asked the young woman, knitting her brows a little.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
She had turned her face towards him, and she searched his eyes (like a real woman) not so much in order to understand as to see if she could find reassurance there.
But he, as always, was smiling at something else.
“Our system is most frequently characterized as a dictatorship or, more precisely, as the dictatorship of a political bureaucracy over a society which has undergone economic and social leveling. I am afraid that the term “dictatorship,” regardless of how intelligible it may otherwise be, tends to obscure rather than clarify the real nature of power in this system. . . Even though our dictatorship has long since alienated itself completely from the social movements that give birth to it, the authenticity of these movements (and I am thinking of the proletarian and socialist movements of the nineteenth century) gives it undeniable historicity. These origins provided a solid foundation of sorts on which it could build until it became the utterly new social and political reality it is today, which has become so inextricably a part of the structure of the modern world. . . . It commands an incomparably more precise, logically structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness, is almost a secularized religion. It offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. . . . […] The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.
Obviously the greengrocer . . . does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer’s superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan’s real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer’s existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?
Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient;” he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.
Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe…
The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.
Why in fact did our greengrocer have to put his loyalty on display in the shop window? Had he not already displayed it sufficiently in various internal or semipublic ways? At trade union meetings, after all, he had always voted as he should. He had always taken part in various competitions. He voted in elections like a good citizen. He had even signed the “antiCharter.” Why, on top of all that, should he have to declare his loyalty publicly? After all, the people who walk past his window will certainly not stop to read that, in the greengrocer’s opinion, the workers of the world ought to unite. The fact of the matter is, they don’t read the slogan at all, and it can be fairly assumed they don’t even see it. If you were to ask a woman who had stopped in front of his shop what she saw in the window, she could certainly tell whether or not they had tomatoes today, but it is highly unlikely that she noticed the slogan at all, let alone what it said.
It seems senseless to require the greengrocer to declare his loyalty publicly. But it makes sense nevertheless. People ignore his slogan, but they do so because such slogans are also found in other shop windows, on lampposts, bulletin boards, in apartment windows, and on buildings; they are everywhere, in fact. They form part of the panorama of everyday life. Of course, while they ignore the details, people are very aware of that panorama as a whole. And what else is the greengrocer’s slogan but a small component in that huge backdrop to daily life?
Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth. . . .
The bill is not long in coming.”
“This value which we have above suggested unquestionably belongs to the Tolstoians, who may roughly be described as the new Quakers. With their strange optimism, and their almost appalling logical courage, they offer a tribute to Christianity which no orthodoxies could offer. It cannot but be remarkable to watch a revolution in which both the rulers and the rebels march under the same symbol. But the actual theory of non-resistance itself, with all its kindred theories, is not, I think, characterised by that intellectual obviousness and necessity which its supporters claim for it. A pamphlet before us shows us an extraordinary number of statements about the New Testament, of which the accuracy is by no means so striking as the confidence. To begin with, we must protest against a habit of quoting and paraphrasing at the same time. When a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let him state first of all what He said, not what the man thinks He would have said if he had expressed Himself more clearly. Here is an instance of question and answer: Q. “How did our Master Himself sum up the law in a few words?” A. ” Be ye merciful, be ye perfect even as your Father; your Father in the spirit world is merciful, is perfect.”
There is nothing in this, perhaps, which Christ might not have said except the abominable metaphysical modernism of “the spirit world”; but to say that it is recorded that He did say it, is like saying it is recorded that He preferred palm trees to sycamores. It is a simple and unadulterated untruth.The author should know that these words have meant a thousand things to a thousand people, and that if more ancient sects had paraphrased them as cheerfully as he, he would never have had the text upon which he founds his theory. In a pamphlet in which plain printed words cannot be left alone, it is not surprising if there are misstatements upon larger matters. Here is a statement clearly and philosophically laid down which we can only content ourselves with flatly denying: “The fifth rule of our Lord is that we should take special pains to cultivate the same kind of regard for people of foreign countries, and for those generally who do not belong to us, or even have an antipathy to us, which we already entertain towards our own people, and those who are in sympathy with us.” I should very much like to know where in the whole of the New Testament the author finds this violent, unnatural, and immoral proposition. Christ did not have the same kind of regard for one person as for another. We are specifically told that there were certain persons whom He specially loved. It is most improbable that He thought of other nations as He thought of His own. The sight of His national city moved Him to tears, and the highest compliment He paid was, ” Behold an Israelite indeed.” The author has simply confused two entirely distinct things. Christ commanded us to have love for all men, but even if we had equal love for all men, to speak of having the same love for all men is merely bewildering nonsense. If we love a man at all, the impression he produces on us must be vitally different to the impression produced by another man whom we love. To speak of having the same kind of regard for both is about as sensible as asking a man whether he prefers chrysanthemums or billiards. Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity; He loved men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a gigantic centipede. And the reason that the Tolstoians can even endure to think of an equally distributed affection is that their love of humanity is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their own theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat. But the greatest error of all lies in the mere act of cutting up the teaching of the New Testament into five rules. It precisely and ingeniously misses the most dominant characteristic of the teaching – its absolute spontaneity. The abyss between Christ and all His modern interpreters is that we have no record that He ever wrote a word, except with His finger in the sand. [See John 8:6] The whole is the history of one continuous and sublime conversation. Thousands of rules have been deduced from it before these Tolstoian rules were made, and thousands will be deduced afterwards. It was not for any pompous proclamation, it was not for any elaborate output of printed volumes; it was for a few splendid and idle words that the cross was set up on Calvary, and the earth gaped, and the sun was darkened at noonday.”
“Not the least disgusting feature of this Gospel according to the Platform is its reference to religion, and even to the Christian Religion, as an authority and mandate for what it does. Christian Religion? Does the Christian or any religion prescribe love of scoundrels, then? I hope it prescribes a healthy hatred of scoundrels;—otherwise what am I, in Heaven's name, to make of it? Me, for one, it will not serve as a religion on those strange terms. Just hatred of scoundrels, I say; fixed, irreconcilable, inexorable enmity to the enemies of God: this, and not love for them, and incessant whitewashing, and dressing and cockering of them, must, if you look into it, be the backbone of any human religion whatsoever. Christian Religion! In what words can I address you, ye unfortunates, sunk in the slushy ooze till the worship of mud-serpents, and unutterable Pythons and poisonous slimy monstrosities, seems to you the worship of God? This is the rotten carcass of Christianity; this mal-odorous phosphorescence of post-mortem sentimentalism. O Heavens, from the Christianity of Oliver Cromwell, wrestling in grim fight with Satan and his incarnate Blackguardisms, Hypocrisies, Injustices, and legion of human and infernal angels, to that of eloquent Mr. Hesperus Fiddlestring denouncing capital punishments, and inculcating the benevolence on platforms, what a road have we travelled!”