It is just too easy to become jaded these days. The last two blogs have perhaps revealed a bit of my personal frustration about living in an age where it seems that ideas (admittedly only ideas)—sometimes known as “values,” such as truth, goodness, justice, which Plato called the “forms”—are no longer valued by folks so much. Rather, personal goals seem to come first, no matter what they might be. In other words, what is deemed valuable is any individual’s personal agenda, and facile applause follows achieving that, with little thought given to the value of that enterprise or its value to the common good. The idea of community is lost, it seems, or at least placed far behind the notion of the individual’s personal growth, even if that growth is in a direction that just may in fact be harmful to those around that individual, or at the very least, in conflict with what had hitherto been regarded as transcendent values.
Assuming I am even partly right about what I have suggested above, then one might have every right to ask the following tough question: “How can I, in the face of changing values or, better put, the devaluation of traditional values, do or even say anything of value?” And I spent some time thinking about this very thing this week, and it came to me that there really is only one thing that one can do to make a difference in an Orwellian world such as I have described.
That difference can be traced, I’m sorry to say, to a source. I say sorry because the notion of any source aside from the individual is, these days, rather unpopular. The individual, it is believed, has the capacity and, more importantly the right, to determine for him or herself what is right, or should I say to determine what is right for him or herself. These palindromatic notions seem, as I hint at in the opening paragraph, to be essentially the same thing. But for those of us who might want to suggest a different, less popular and, yes I’m afraid traditional, perspective, we will look to find the source that I speak of.
That source is a mountain. Not one of the seven hills of Rome, not Athens Mars’ Hill, not Dharamsala in the Tibetan Himalayas, not even Mt. Zion in Israel. No, it is a much smaller “mountain,” really only a hill, one you probably have never heard of, known as Har HaOsher. It lies between Capernaum and Gennesaret, where once, it is said, were spoken by an itinerant rabbi something called the Beatitudes. These teachings can be summed up with any one of a number of quite positive words like grace, compassion, even love. Among those summary words, to me one, however, stands out: redemption. They are redemptive teachings, blessings on those who seek to practice even a fraction of them. That rabbi broke that blessing into bite-sized pieces. They’re not hard to do, they don’t lie “beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, ‘Who will cross the sea, get it and proclaim it to us so that we may follow it?’” No, “the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.”
If there is a solution to a world whose values are in dissolution, then, it seems to me, that the way through the chaos may just be to speak redemption, to show compassion and kindness to everyone we encounter. That rabbi did that very thing when the world he inherited was in at least as much disarray as ours is today. He chose to bless, to redeem. Perhaps we can, too, if we put our mind to it. After all, if we look for it, that redemptive word may just be very nigh unto us, already in our mouths and our hearts. And if it is, perhaps we should just speak it, for redemptive speech might be the first step toward a better world, precisely as it was quite a long time ago on a hill in Galilee.
You might think a blogger would love op eds. “After all,” someone might say, “a blog is really just an op ed of a different sort.” Point taken. Yet, hopefully, this blog, is more, even though it purports to be from a residual Welshman, i.e. someone of Welsh heritage so distant that if he doesn’t do something about that, such as each week writing a piece called the Residual Welshman’s Blog, it would be lost.
“Is your ‘Welsh’ heritage really so worthy of preservation?” that same someone might query. “Why don’t you just do what everyone else does—move on, get on with your ‘American’ identity already. Get over this vain preservation of your romantic notions of ‘heritage.’” I’m sorry, this time point not taken.
Why? Because dealing with history, grappling with our own history, is actually not as much cathartic as it is enlightening. We must ask questions about how we got where we are, recognizing that “we” is not simply ourselves but it is the collection of those who made us who we are—our parents, our grandparents and, if we are lucky enough to remember them, our great-grandparents. Yes, as the Bible says, “we are not our own,” though I think St. Paul means what he says there (“and you are not your own” [καὶ οὐκ ἐστὲ ἑαυτῶν], 1 Cor 6:19) in a different way in that passage. There he is talking about redemption. Yet maybe I am, too, or at least what must lead up to redemption, for that same saint explains that you can’t self-redeem any more than you can self-birth or self-resurrect. We are part of a larger, human family, and that human family, like our own family, has problems.
What I am getting at, then, with this blog is the first thing we should do, if we want really to go forward into, say, the new year resolved to be better people—assuming betterment is on your mind at all—is to confront the truth of who we are, how we have become who we are, not forgetting the past but embracing it, confronting it, dealing with it, and maybe even admiring some parts of it. For there just may be some folks in our personal histories we admire. For me there certainly are.
I think a recent op ed. that I reluctantly read but basically agreed with states this pretty well.[1] It’s about confronting the truth, taking ourselves out of our psychological safe spaces and looking hard and long at ourselves and saying, “Well, this needs to change.” And some of that may come with reminding ourselves why it needs to change. Maybe it’s just a matter of being a bit overweight, so for our health, our longevity, and our role in our family or our need to be a good example to others that we need to lose weight. Or maybe it’s something even more serious, like our comportment or something we do that we know our grandparents would never have approved of. Maybe that kind of recollection of the past can urge us to make some changes. Maybe we can learn to forgive more quickly, too—I speak for myself. I know for me, in that sense, my grandparents, who taught me the “law,” as it were, also provide an example of grace.
Thus, as we get ready to launch into the new year, I hope you and I and all of us can exercise the good judgment that hopefully our forebears once did, and be tough enough on ourselves to make the changes that need to be made, while showing the grace to others that, I hope may be true for you, our grandparents once showed to us. Paradoxically it all starts, as every new beginning always does, with the past.
“May you be praised, my Lord, for our sister, Bodily Death, from whom no living human being can escape.”[1] Thus wrote St. Francis of Assisi some time just after 1200 AD. To St. Francis, my good friend Piergiacomo Petrioli assured me just yesterday, everything was good. “That’s the point,” he said as we sat in his living room in Bologna discussing how the Renaissance, which began almost precisely a century after St. Francis wrote this canticle, came about. “The point is that Francis cared about all of creation, saw everything as good because it came from God’s hand. And so,” he added, “even death could be seen as good, as a release from the troubles of this life.”
Giotto’s St. Francis before the Sultan
And that, we agreed later in the course of the conversation, was the beginning of the period of Western history in which the focus on repeating over and over in the cold echoing chamber of the high-ceilinged central nave of a Gothic cathedral, “God is Pankrator (Ruler of All)” reverted to the idea that “God is a human being, too.” Piergiacomo added, “The point is that the emphasis of the Renaissance is not that ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world’—he was quoting Browning, of course—“but that God, as a human being, suffers with us humans, participates in our humanity; that human suffering is thereby redeemed, dignified to the extent that even morte corporale can be nostra sora (i.e., sorella), our sister.” This he said, with my slight adaptation, of course, in a lovely Italian accent. St. Francis himself must have sounded like Piergiacomo, I thought to myself, gentle and warm.
But the title of this blog is not St. Francis’ views on death, but rather “Traveling,” and I come back to that now. For when I am traveling, one of the things I like to do best is to visit my friends on the continent and chat with them about things like the origin of the Renaissance, something I had never before connected with St. Francis. The reason for that is, perhaps, that somewhere in my mind the cautionary words of G.K. Chesterton were still rambling about, for he once wrote of St. Francis, “… it is not true to represent St. Francis as a mere romantic forerunner of the Renaissance and a revival of natural pleasures for their own sake. The whole point of him was that the secret of recovering the natural pleasures lay in regarding them in the light of a supernatural pleasure.”
What I think Chesterton is cautioning against is not the importance of the emphasis beginning with St. Francis on all created things being good that Piergiacomo and I were touting as foundational to the notion of humanity that the Renaissance would advance. In any case, such emphasis certainly owes itself much more to the rediscovery of ancient texts than to St. Francis’ memorable declarations about death or Brother Sun or Sister Moon. Rather, I think that Chesterton is railing against those who want to put St. Francis on a pedestal, or more precisely, those who would distort his views about the interaction of man and God. That same group might emphasize St. Francis’ love for animals as a part of creation to the exclusion of his view on redemption and humankind.
Elsewhere in his biography of that saint, Chesterton offers a vivid description of Francis that I think is likely to be precisely right:
“He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation. A lover of men is very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of the Greek word carries something like a satire on itself. A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids. But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ. Say, if you think so, that he was a lunatic loving an imaginary person; but an imaginary person, not an imaginary idea.”[2]
As usual, Chesterton gives us more to ponder than we may have wanted. His challenge to his reader is to consider St. Francis not in general, but in particular. And this is the challenge that Chesterton and later C.S. Lewis would lay at the feet of every churchgoer, every human being, to consider God in particular and each person in particular. It is much easier to love the idea of humanity than to love your neighbor.
Which brings be back to traveling, for how can I love my neighbor when I’m journeying such a long way from home? Well, if you’ve been reading any of my other blogs so far, I imagine you may know my opinion about the answer to that question. But in case you haven’t, I’ll tell one last story about traveling that might illustrate what I mean.
There once were two couples who went a traveling. One went to a large, impoverished city in Africa and bought bread and carried it with them everywhere they went in case they met any street children there. (As it turned out, they gave a great deal of bread away, and much more than food, as well. Indeed, I believe they would have surrendered their bodies to fire, were it necessary, to help those in need.) The other couple went to some other far more luxurious spot—Hawaii, I think it was—on vacation; that second couple gave money to world hunger relief organizations from time to time, especially when there was a crisis in the news. That same couple felt very good about their donations, and from time to time would tastefully mention their own generosity to their friends over dinner. But they could see no reason to encourage the other couple about their trip to Africa, or to help them in their admittedly limited-in-scope “humanitarian” effort. In fact, they gently rebuked them when they were having lunch together before they left. “You know, it’s a vain effort, you going there. It won’t cure all the ills in the world; you might even come back with one—a disease. Better to give money to some relief organization or something—that’s what we do,” they told the first couple in a well-intended, but condescending way.
The first couple was not taken aback. Rather they might even have expected as much, for they had long before come to love Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and even to understand that Bodily Death, too, is the sister of the moon and sun, and our sister, too. They were not going to Africa to rebuke that sister. They were going to find and help their brothers and their sisters. They did not love the idea of humanity, they loved human beings.
Now I myself did not and still do not understand one thing about the first pair, the couple who actually went to Africa, for I do not understand St. Francis’ idea that death could ever be our sister. I am rather angered by death, with Herculean emotions welling up from deep within. When a friend or family member dies, I feel that something fundamentally bad has happened, something gone wrong in the universe. But that is me, not Chesterton, not the first couple, nor probably the second. But I wax mystical.
Yet I was speaking about traveling. St. Francis’ travels are well known. Now another Francis, a new Pontifex Maximus, to use a Latin (and quite ancient Roman) term, is traveling, as well. He has just left Italy, to build a bridge to the needy, the poor in another hemisphere, one with which he is quite familiar. I will leave Bologna for a different America, the one with which I am familiar, only a few days after him. This Francis is not voyaging to Africa, but to Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay, countries where life is rife with challenge, where in every valley death casts a long shadow, where there are needy and weeping souls, real people, about whom it seems to have been forgotten by far too many who could care (but don’t) that they are human beings. In his travels the Pope will—indeed, I believe, already has—like St. Francis, bring warmth and love for human beings, not just for “humanity.”
Compianto
In the meantime, until I leave, Piergiacomo and I will sit by and by, eating Parmesan and raising a glass to TheCurious Autobiography, which he is now reading, and more especially and fittingly a cup running over to both the pope and the saint, whose love for humanity and human beings was and will be, I hope, remembered and, by the time this blog is posted, seen, as well. For our part, we shall consider the importance of the Renaissance again and again, admiring the work of artists, and reading a piece of literature or two—I hear Petrarch beckoning—and, before I leave, perhaps even visiting again Santa Maria della Vita here in Bologna. To the right of the altar of the central nave one can see the masterpiece of Niccolò dell’Arca, his Compianto, a sculpted work that portrays the humanity and pain of human beings in the face of the most horrific death in history, before history could be changed by a single naked act. But the nakedness of that act involves a trip I once took to Estonia, which will be the story of another blog about traveling, a blog I will write perhaps a long time from now.
For more on Renaissance Art, see Artsy’s website and follow your favorite artists. For example, see on Raphael.
[1]Laudato si mi Signore, per sora nostra Morte corporale, da la quale nullu homo uiuente pò skappare, from Michele Faloci Pulignani (ed.). Il Cantico del Sole di San Francesco di Assisi. Foligno: Tipografia di Pieter Sgariglia, 1888, pp. 10–11; http://www.prayerfoundation.org/canticle_of_brother_sun.htm. My translation.
[2]The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (Ignatius Press, 1986), 70, 29.
That source is a mountain. Not one of the seven hills of Rome, not Athens Mars’ Hill, not Dharamsala in the Tibetan Himalayas, not even Mt. Zion in Israel. No, it is a much smaller “mountain,” really only a hill, one you probably have never heard of, known as Har HaOsher. It lies between Capernaum and Gennesaret, where once, it is said, were spoken by an itinerant rabbi something called the Beatitudes. These teachings can be summed up with any one of a number of quite positive words like grace, compassion, even love. Among those summary words, to me one, however, stands out: redemption. They are redemptive teachings, blessings on those who seek to practice even a fraction of them. That rabbi broke that blessing into bite-sized pieces. They’re not hard to do, they don’t lie “beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, ‘Who will cross the sea, get it and proclaim it to us so that we may follow it?’” No, “the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.”
If there is a solution to a world whose values are in dissolution, then, it seems to me, that the way through the chaos may just be to speak redemption, to show compassion and kindness to everyone we encounter. That rabbi did that very thing when the world he inherited was in at least as much disarray as ours is today. He chose to bless, to redeem. Perhaps we can, too, if we put our mind to it. After all, if we look for it, that redemptive word may just be very nigh unto us, already in our mouths and our hearts. And if it is, perhaps we should just speak it, for redemptive speech might be the first step toward a better world, precisely as it was quite a long time ago on a hill in Galilee.
“Is your ‘Welsh’ heritage really so worthy of preservation?” that same someone might query. “Why don’t you just do what everyone else does—move on, get on with your ‘American’ identity already. Get over this vain preservation of your romantic notions of ‘heritage.’” I’m sorry, this time point not taken.
