Dancing About Architecture: A Not-So-Short Musical Biography

Adapted from my erstwhile Acousticx blog.

Image source: Jeffery Erhunse on Unsplash.

The first album I ever bought with my own money was a used LP copy of Pink Floyd's uber-weird Ummagumma album, which I always figured explains a lot about me.

I couldn't have been more than 8 years old. Our neighbors were running a garage sale, and there was the half-live, half-studio double album looking up at me from the table. I remember being taken in by the trippy Droste effect on the cover (not that I knew the term "Droste effect" at age 8), the lengths of some of the tunes (songs on the radio are four minutes or so, tops; why do some of these go on for 12?), and the incomparably bizarre song titles (e.g., "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict").

I didn't know the first thing about Pink Floyd, but I had to buy the album. If memory serves, it set me back a whopping 50 cents. I took that record home like the treasure it was to me, and I threw it on my crappy little record player in my bedroom.

Immediately, I was entranced by the spacy, and slightly spooky, vibe of "Astronomy Domine," the live performance that will always be the definitive version of the song for me. First impressions and all that. I wasn't prepared for the blood-curdling scream that blasted without warning out of my speakers by the time "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" rolled around -- nor was my mom, who at that point called up the stairs, wondering what on God's green earth I was listening to.

The studio album got even weirder, made up of a combination of proper songs and experimental workouts by the individual members. I remember being especially entranced by drummer Nick Mason's short-circuiting sound effects on "The Grand Vizier's Garden Party." I can't remember if I laughed at the aforementioned "Several Species," a Roger Waters sound collage of sped-up, slowed-down, and rhythmic chanted voices, accompanied at the end by a rant in a thick Scottish brogue. Chances are, I was too dumbfounded to do too much of anything.

The neighbors I bought the record from were farmers, and somehow a blob of white chicken poop had managed to dry itself onto one of the records. I cleaned it off the best I could, but I can still remember the scratchy whoosh, whoosh as the needle cut through the residue with each revolution of the platter. In hindsight, that just added to the strangeness of the whole listening experience.

I wish I knew whatever happened to my old pooped-up garage-sale copy of that album. Not only was it one of the now-hard-to-find original pressings, before the image of the Gigi album got airbrushed off the cover over copyright concerns, but it also began an intense lifelong interest in music for me. I've been fascinated by music for as long as I can remember, but Ummagumma is really where my personal musical journey began.

Which, again, probably says a lot about me. I like things that take chances, question assumptions, and push boundaries, both in music and in just about every other aspect of life. So Ummagumma either set the groundwork or scratched an itch that I didn't even know I had at age 8.

Processing sorrow

Isn't it wonderful that humans are such a deeply irrational species? If we were all coldly logical people, our world would be spared a great deal of the misery that arises from our irrational choices and mindsets. That much is undeniable. But it would also give us a world bereft of music and the rest of the creative arts, which bring so much beauty and passion and meaning to our lives. As is often the case in this imperfect world, it seems, you can't have the good without the bad.

The bad, for me, is that I have lived a profoundly sad life. I don't think I'm alone in this condition, so I'm not seeking pity. I just think some of us manage to paper over our perpetual disappointments and bounce back better than others do. But ultimately, the Buddha was right that life is imbued with suffering. None of us can escape its clutches. We all live in a valley of tears. And that's why we all need things that make life tolerable. Music has long filled that role for me. It's been my reliable friend and companion throughout my life.

I dreamed of being a musician when I was a kid. Later on, I dreamed of being a disc jockey. I pretended to be a DJ in my room, trying to make some witty patter like the jockeys on the local radio stations, as I flipped from one 45 to another on my record player. Those DJs came to be something like disembodied friends, their voices flowing through my speakers day after day, delivering the music that brightened my life.

I looked forward every week to Casey Kasem's countdown. I was excited to see what tunes had moved up the chart, which were descending from their former heights, and what new tunes might show up to tickle my eardrums.

I taped the entire radio simulcast of the Live Aid performance. Then I painted up a little tin with the Live Aid logo and kept all the tapes inside.

These were the little joys of a kid growing up in an otherwise difficult childhood in rural Michigan. I didn't have a lot of other escapes.

When I was around 13 months old, my drug-addled, abusive birth mother gave me up for adoption, no longer wanted, to my maternal grandparents -- and let me tell you, Grandma had her own issues. She controlled people by guilt-tripping them. She treated her husband like dirt, and when he was old, in failing health, and nearly blind, she kicked him while he was down, blaming him for everything that had gone wrong in her own life. My own early childhood abuse, meanwhile, left me afraid of my own shadow. People thought I'd have to go to a "special" school for emotionally troubled children.

But somehow I muddled through, went to "normal" school, and got decent grades. But I was a very awkward kid with few friends, very much aware that I was different. And as kids -- and even adults -- will do, they picked on the one who was different. I was always mocked and bullied. I remember watching other kids play on the playground and pretending to be part of the action as I looked on from a distance. I was denied victory in a spelling bee because the administrators got tired of waiting for one of the last two participants to slip up, so I was given a "miss" on a word I spelled correctly while the other kid, the grandson of a beloved teacher, spelled the word exactly the same and got the victory. If I'd complained, who was going to listen to me?

Even when I did accomplish something, I couldn't enjoy it, like when I won first chair in the percussion section of the school band. I joined the band late, about halfway through sixth grade, and progressed quickly. I was voted the band's "most improved" player after one year, and "most outstanding" after two years. But then came the responsibility of leading the percussion section, which was profoundly nerve-racking for a quiet, self-conscious, socially awkward kid. I didn't like it, and I can still vividly remember a younger percussionist who endlessly needled and bullied me because I struggled with my leadership position. It left my stomach in knots, but I did the best I could to drown out the aching feeling of guilt and failure by focusing my energies on the music our band played.

No one could see the pain that I hid inside. I don't remember ever crying much. My anxiety just kept mounting as I bottled things up and kept my head down. Making a scene would have just made life 10 times worse.

At least I had a good friend who lived down the street and pretty much accepted me for who I was. He had a comparably crappy childhood, so we were sort of on the same wavelength with each other. We spent a lot of time together riding bikes, playing my Atari, and indulging in music. I was always leafing through his mom's stack of mostly old '70s classic rock LPs, and I later bought her collection when she was short on funds. If my buddy and I weren't carrying around a boom box playing a cassette of some of our favorite mid-'80s music, we'd record ourselves trying to make music with our very limited skills, bashing out noises on cheap guitars, drum machines, and keyboards. Most of the stuff we made wasn't the least bit musical, but it served its purpose of being a creative release valve for two kids who badly needed it.

So music kept inserting itself into my existence as a kind of life preserver. It was a drug that, like all drugs, temporarily numbed the pain. But, happily, it's a drug with no side effects -- except, perhaps, for potential hearing loss and the damage to one's bank account. My grandma-turned-mom often reminded me, when I spent my money on music, that "you can't eat or wear CDs," wielding her ubiquitous guilt trips against me just for trying to find some small sliver of happiness in life. But once the music started, not even her perpetual nagging negativity could touch me. All was well in my little world for a few fleeting moments.

"One good thing about music," as the great Bob Marley said, "once it hits you, you feel no pain."

When all else fails, write

My own musical abilities hit a wall in college. Playing a snare drum in high school concert and marching band was one thing, but having to wrangle an entire drum kit challenged the limits of my coordination -- and I dreaded the idea of having to take a solo during our performances. I've tried other instruments over the years, but my hands just refuse to go where they need to go.

I understand music theory, in theory, so that's not the problem. I can play scales and chords on a piano, albeit slowly and often clumsily. Technically, I can read music. But spending my formative musical years playing rhythms instead of tuned notes, I never really dug down into becoming proficient at translating notation into performance. I have to keep looking back at the key signature, then counting the lines and spaces on the staff, and only then playing the required note, and then repeating the entire process for the next note on the staff. I can't just sit down and play something through at normal speed. I can't explain why. It's just an obstacle that I've never been able to overcome. And thus does a small army of guitars gather dust in my office, unplayed because I just can't seem to push past learning a few basic chords.

I was thinking for a while about getting a hurdy-gurdy built. I love the sound of a hurdy-gurdy. But hurdy-gurdies aren't cheap, and what if I couldn't figure out how to make the thing sound good? My track record with instruments says I'd fail, and I'd just have wasted a couple of thousand dollars.

A Mellotron remains a possibility, at least one of the modern digital re-creations of the fragile analog originals. The haunting sound of the Mellotron is one of the things that attracted me to progressive rock. And most of what's played on a 'Tron is chord-based, slow, textural, atmospheric. That's something I actually might be able to wrap my head -- and my fingers -- around, given some practice.

Bottom line: I just long to make nice sounds come out of an instrument. I envy those who can make art with music, who can coax an instrument to life and fill the air with its beauty. I doubt I'll ever get there, but I'd sure like to keep trying.

If I want to express anything musically, I have to write about it. And I've done so quite often. I wrote record reviews for my college newspaper. I created a site called The Yes Chronicles that tracked the history of my favorite band through long-winded reviews of all their studio albums. I've written several concert reviews for my main blog. As a musician, it turns out I make a decent editor and a passable writer.

But even then, I lack the skill to write in florid language about why music appeals to my senses. I cut my teeth as a journalist. I write factual and analytical things. Flights of verbal fancy don't come naturally to me. And yet this is all I have, so I use it as an outlet. Everyone needs an outlet. My wife writes fiction and paints. My daughter draws. Me, I write stuff that no one reads. But it's all I have, so I work with it. I was once told I have no imagination, and that's probably not terribly off the mark. I just know that things from the imaginations of creative people enliven me, and that those things usually involve the creation of music.

Those who can, play. Those who can't, write.

In fairness, even I, the Great Unimaginative One, wake up in the morning at least once or twice a month with a melody in my head. But I have no way of expressing the melody through an instrument, and by midday it's gone forever. So I leave my ongoing need for music to those who are capable of actually creating music. If I can't create my own art, I'll leave it to those who can.

Either way, writing about music is always going to be a poor substitute for the music itself. "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture," as somebody once wisely observed. (No one's quite sure who said it first.) To that end, it's no surprise to me that there's a widespread disdain among many musical artists for music critics. The artists pour their emotions and their creativity into their music, and then along come the writers, sitting on the sidelines with nothing better to do, and pick away at the music, having offered nothing of equivalent creative merit in the process, save for a possibly clever turn of phrase here or there.

But music often brings a ray of sunshine to my life, as I know their art does for many others. Politics and religion inflame and often depress me, but music transports me to a good place. It’s my safe haven in an ever more chaotic world. So as a writer, I endeavor to find the good in music. It's not always possible, but I try.

I try because I need my safe haven. In addition to the depressing state of the world, my personal health sucks. I feel miserable most days. I think it has something to do with a neurological malfunction, but an endless barrage of tests, procedures, and visits to specialist after specialist turned up nothing conclusive. Still, random parts of my body malfunction and then might get better for a while, or they just decide to stop working at all. It all gets worse as I get older. I grin and bear it, because that's all I can do.

That casts an additional veil of sorrow over my life. So I need those flashes of sunlight that break through the clouds to keep me from spiraling into madness. Melancholy songs especially trigger something deep within me, as if they've grasped this sorrowfulness that's my constant companion and molded it into a shape that helps me process it, in a way I would be incapable of expressing on my own. I hear songs like that, and something deep within me says, "Yeah, you get it." They're profoundly cathartic. They're the ones that actually threaten to make my tear ducts function.

See, I identify with the Eeyores and Charlie Browns of the world. The ones who push on despite the enveloping gloom. The ones who always fall short but, perhaps foolishly, keep trying. And people like us need those glimmers of hope to keep trying. Music does that for me. Happy music lifts my spirits. But more importantly, the melancholy music empathizes.

The goal

Music is the one thing I tend not to burn out on in life, and writing about it might help channel my creative (and nervous) energies, so I can quiet some of the eternal chatter in my head and not become despondent over the state of the world.

That said, I'm acutely aware of the inherent challenge in writing anything useful about music. Because music is its own nonverbal language, all we can do with words is attempt to interpret how music makes us feel. Words are admittedly a poor conduit for expressing those feelings. But it's all you have if you're not a musician.

I'm not.

Hence the reason I blog about stuff -- music included.

Woke Religion, Predictable Obedience, and the Death Throes of the West

Over the past few years, I went through a phase of seeking out alternative media. The attempt was largely a failure because even though lots of people complain about the rampant censorship from the Silicon Valley monopolies, few seem willing to do anything about it. They won't try out the alternatives, apparently preferring to stick with FaceGoogTwit and bitch about the ever-increasing attacks on free expression until they themselves are inevitably canceled. Meanwhile, the alt-sites linger in low-use obscurity. (I can't even throw stones, as Eggshells exists on Google's Blogger. I just lack the time and, honestly, the motivation to transfer a decade's worth of posts someplace else.) 

So as I've been closing accounts, seeing what I need to keep open, and consolidating email addresses, I've gotten a passing glimpse of what most people are probably immersed in every day, which is the same stuff I've done my best to tune out over the past couple of years.

In particular, I went to my LinkedIn page, which I barely ever visit. And this place that I thought was supposed to be based around social networking to land a job was inundated with Ukraine supporters, people using pronouns in their usernames, and endless talk about "equity" and "diversity" and "inclusion." 

This followed previous days' glimpses in my everyday life of things like an NCAA TV ad that featured a snippet of a BLM march in a favorable light, and a trip through Walmart that revealed a little rainbow-colored puzzle piece on a T-shirt about boundless love and a new version of Hasbro's game of Life that now includes multicolored game pegs -- because pink and blue for boys and girls were just so retrograde, apparently. And that's not to mention all the TV ads that, as I saw someone else recently quipping, left him thinking that America is 95% black and gay.

This image drives the point home quite vividly:

As does this little meme:

Look, it's not that I even care about what you look like or whom your consensual romantic partners are. It's that I'm constantly told that I have to care, and that I'm a "privileged" bigot if I don't. A political agenda is being forced on us with a fanatical religious zeal, while it simultaneously attempts to demonize segments of society and guilt-trip people into acceptance. It's great that everyone has a seat at the table, but the table ought to be round, with no one at the top and no one subjugated to the bottom. Every civil-rights movement has historically pushed toward that goal, with equal treatment of every human being and equal protection under the law. 

The problem, of course, is that "equity" is not about equality. It’s about overweighting minorities -- often vanishingly small ones -- to the exclusion of the majority, which just creates a perverse kind of apartheid, a caste system based on personal values and immutable characteristics where small, aggrieved groups dictate the terms to the majority. The only thing this achieves, of course, is to turn old discriminations on their head while perversely calling it progress and justice. 

And you obviously can't have progress and justice when you're trying to push an entire group of people to the back of the bus. If your idea of justice is to turn old discriminations on their head, you've achieved nothing. You're moving us backwards. You haven't brought anyone together. You've done just the opposite. You've subdivided us into infinitely smaller micro-groups that, as the Oppression Olympics of intersectional politics has demonstrated time and again, will inevitably put us at each other's throats. 

This approach also teaches that your value comes from what makes you different, rather than encouraging us to look for the things that transcend our differences and unite us as human beings. It is an inherently divisive approach to life. It is a view of the world in which we focus on the narcissism of small differences to discover meaning in our lives. It is, ultimately, a way of life in which old unifying social, cultural, and religious consensuses have given way to a secular religion, in which certain "chosen" groups are glorified over others. 

Just look around if you doubt me. In our current environment, blacks, gays, transgendered people, and Ukrainians are holy people. Saints, practically. Meanwhile, COVID is the devil, Vlad Putin is the face of evil, and white males are original sin incarnate. Am I wrong?

Moreover, with the old God fading into the rearview mirror of our dying civilization, we are all "liberated" to be our own individual gods now, able to reinvent ourselves in our own image -- since "male" and "female" are, after all, just so many interchangeable costumes and states of mind. But you are also a Latinx womxn, because to live out this emperor-has-no-clothes fantasy, you have to eliminate real-life categories that conflict with the dogma. Biological women's spaces be damned, and never mind the linguistic imperialism of de-gendering a gendered language. That's how the Woke White Saviors roll. They know better. From the days of handing out Bibles to the Indians to now, they've always known better. 

Also, please note with great care everyone's skin color and their sex partners, but simultaneously ignore whether they're obviously men or women. But please do note if a child doesn't want to be his or her birth sex anymore, so we can irreversibly fill that poor kid's developing body full of hormones. Only in an environment like this could a TV commercial from a major corporation feature a mom helping her daughter put on a chest binder and act like it’s something praiseworthy, rather than a glorification of a sickness, a dissociation from self, that calls for healing rather than encouragement. It's as absurd, and as potentially dangerous, as telling the mentally ill that yes, we also hear the voices telling you to harm yourself, or telling anorexics that, yes, they really are fat, and that we support their right to purge.   

In this way does this warped mindset always, always, without fail, end up celebrating deviance. Stability, tradition, normality -- all bad. But deviance and depravity of of every kind is to be endlessly praised and glorified.

Every major institution of power has been hijacked by this insane philosophy, and it showed when I unfortunately looked at my LinkedIn feed. It was all an endless stream of virtue signaling, all look at how different I am, all look at how wonderful I am for pointing out how different these people are -- but almost nothing at all about actual work skills and qualifications. It’s as if having some special niche identity, or virtue-signaling in support of those identities, is the skill and qualification now, such that how woke you are supersedes what you can actually do in the working world.

It’s like I don’t even live in the same universe with these people. 

And seriously, when you take a good, hard look at the political philosophy these people live by, it's really not all that different from a fanatical Jim Jones-style cult. It's just a really big cult -- one that happens to have taken over the entire institutional Western mind. It's a result of years of societal indoctrination that seeped out from the universities and made its way into the mainstream, once the indoctrinated college grads rose to positions of authority in entertainment, education, information, and the C-suites of the most powerful corporations. Now the high priests of the media feed the dogma to the average people, and the Woke Virus spreads further and further among those most incapable of independent thought -- leading us to where we are today. 

This explains why the same people who became fanatics over a virus with a 2% mortality rate have now so easily become transformed into war hawks, to the point of wanting a no-fly zone in Ukraine that would potentially spark a nuclear war. In their wild-eyed zealotry, they lack the ability to think through what they've been told to support and believe in. Even if the U.S. just gets a long-term war out of this -- which is what we seem to want, both to justify our massive military budget and to prop up Western hegemony over the planet, and we'll pin a false flag on the Russians if necessary to achieve our goal -- those in power will surely still be satisfied that they were able to fool so many people, for so long, over and over again, predictably, like clockwork. The state and the media, indeed, are Pavlov, and the masses are the dogs drooling at the dinner bell. It's furthermore safe to say that Milgram's obedience-to-authority experiments were a sad microcosm of how most human beings act. 

For the mind held captive by a religious cult, there's always the need to glorify the good in the face of great evil. In short, you must resist the devil. That's how we end up with these simplistic narratives couched in simple black and white terms. Never mind that Putin's invasion actually wasn't "unprovoked," in the face of thousands of Russians killed in eastern Ukraine. Never mind that our own government has done what Putin did many times over, on even flimsier pretexts. Never mind that what's happening in Ukraine is also happening in places like Yemen, Palestine, and China. 

(Ukraine figures accurate as of around March 10.)

We support the Israelis and the Saudis, respective aggressors in Palestine and Yemen, so pay no attention to those ongoing human tragedies. And we rely too much on cheap Chinese labor to draw attention to the Uyghur genocide. But Russia? Well, Putin won't bend the knee to the West, and he's attacking a U.S client state with a puppet government we helped install. So the Ukrainians are helpless bystanders, martyrs in their fight against the devil himself. And because Putin is the devil incarnate, the same "anti-racist," "anti-fascist," "compassionate," "tolerant" woke leftists have now decreed that it's OK to engage in hate speech against Russian soldiers and post death threats against Devil Putin -- and that you can lavish praise on Ukraine's Azov neo-Nazi battalion. (As we saw recently when the media proved that doxxing someone is bad unless you're doxxing supporters of the Canadian convoy, if these hypocrites didn't have self-serving double standards, they wouldn't have any at all.)

Only people in the grips of a mass psychosis -- or unrestrained religious zeal -- could think like this. After all, who would oppose hate speech against the literal devil?  

And so we end up in a place reminiscent of the 9/11 antiwar protests that were really more about being anti-Bush, as evidenced by the fact that the antiwar movement vanished when Obama took the White House but his foreign policy didn't change from the status quo. Now in 2022, support for Ukraine similarly isn't really so much about Ukraine but about the simple but alluring idea of siding with good over evil, resisting the devil -- just like an indoctrinated religious person would do. Why would you even think of disobeying what the high priests tell us? Are you a tool of the devil?

Then as now, we even get to dehumanize the "bad guys." Remember when the Obama administration killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American citizen, with a drone bomb? He was given no due process. He was just a kid whose dad happened to be on the administration's terrorist hit list. When asked how the administration justified killing an innocent child, Obama advisor Robert Gibbs glibly stated that the kid should have had better parents.

Fast-forward to 2022, and a former U.S. ambassador to Russia declares that ordinary Russians are just as guilty as Putin and so deserve to suffer from the West's economic terrorism.

This is no different from when Osama bin Laden justified the 9/11 attacks by saying the American people deserved to be attacked because they chose their leaders. But yeah, we're the good guys here.

All this helps explains why, if the actual truth contradicts the empire-promoting propaganda narrative, it has to be "fact-checked" away, just like it was with all of the C-19 spin over the past two years. (Kind of like how the Trump-Russia story turned out to be a massive hoax, while the Hunter Biden laptop was "Russian disinformation" -- until it wasn't. And we're supposed to believe this same media when it said the 2020 election wasn't rigged? The extent to which they silenced skepticism about the whole thing really tells you all you need to know.) 

You see, the official narrative, regardless of its relationship to the actual truth, is religious dogma that must not be opposed at any cost, because opposing the narrative threatens to undermine the power of those promoting it. And because most people uncritically lap up what authority figures tell them, the narrative neatly stands in for "the truth," and anyone who opposes it is a demon there to tempt us into sin and evil. Even if the actual truth is right there staring you in the face, you can’t accept it because it challenges what the high priests have told you. It becomes your woke dogma. And you end up no different from a fundamentalist Christian who denies the reality of evolution because the Bible and your preacher told you that evolution is a demonic lie.

In minds like these, censorship is no longer even controversial. It’s just what you do to preserve the narrative-slash-dogma. Suppressing inconvenient truths is "fact-checking" against "misinformation," while promoting propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies is "truth." This is why the "free speech" West has bent over backwards to censor any and all Russian media -- we can't dare let people ponder another point of view that might make them question what the high priests feed them. Moreover, "hate" is any opinion that doesn't comply with woke dogma. Say a man can't become a woman and you get kicked off social media, but hurl actual death threats at Russian soldiers and leaders while glorifying Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and you're good to go.

In China, the censorship comes from the top down, with not only assaults on free expression but also social penalties for those who oppose the state. Justin Trudeau's authoritarian attacks on Canadian truckers were something like a trial balloon for a similar social-credit system in the West, and the global corporate isolation of Russia, complete with freezing bank accounts and seizing private assets, shows just how powerful such a system can be, and how it could be used against anyone defying the narrative. We don't need gulags anymore to silence dissent; big businesses in collusion with the government can just starve you and your family until you comply.  

All this just goes to show that most people are irrational beings and will always find a religious belief of some kind to rally behind. Even the most hardcore atheists quite often make "anti-religion" their religion. Some white people revert to overt racism in the midst of all the prevailing madness, but that's also just another kind of religion. At best, it's a tribalistic cult built around pigmentation -- which is essentially just wokeness in reverse.  

To the Woke, objective truths, like 2+2=4, are now white supremacy. There is no way to reason with people whose minds have been captured by such extreme religious dogma. And they're compelled to believe what they do precisely because their cult demands that they reject objective truth. Otherwise, the whole thing would unravel. 

Russian culture, to its credit, has endeavored to resist this insane cult. Putin in particular has warned against the corrosive effects of wokeness, comparing it to what happened in Russia during the 1917 revolution. For all the man's faults, we would do well to listen to someone whose own nation has tragically gone down this road. 

I don’t like what the West has become, and so my sympathies learn toward all those who want to resist the bullying and the corrupting influences of the decadent West and preserve the old ways -- because they are human ways, grounded in decency and reality and mutual respect. The pre-Woke world had its flaws, to be sure, but the Woke solutions to our problems are a thousand times worse, in a thousand different ways. That's not to suggest I'm a fan of Putin, who is no friend to human freedom, but I'll wager that Russia will come out of this current mess all the better in the long run for having shaken off Western influences.

Russia has survived worse than this all-out assault from the West, and its people are tough and resilient. It'll be fine in the long run. In the short term, its alliances with China are deepening -- an alliance that may well break the back of the West, given the extent to which our short-sighted greed has made us almost completely dependent on China. The Biden administration can bellow and bray all it wants about threatening China for aligning with Russia, but China knows better. It holds all the cards in this relationship.   

For now, we all get our officially sanctioned Two Minutes Hate against Russia, while Wokeness reminds us that some people are more equal than others. Orwell's dystopian literature was supposed to be a warning, not a handbook -- and yet here we are. 

And if you think you're not part of the problem, I'll tell you this. If you put pronouns in your profile, or your social-media picture includes you in a mask, a frame telling everyone you got a shot like a good obedient little dog, or a Ukrainian flag, then I know everything I need to know about you. You do what you're told. Your mind is not your own. You're one of Milgram's test subjects. You signal your religion every bit as much as somebody wearing a hijab or a crucifix does. You are sleepwalking through life. 

I would tell you that you need to wake the hell up, but I don't think it even matters anymore, because I don't see any way back for the West at this point. The rot is too deep, the infection too widespread. I doubt I'll have much more to say about any of it. I'll just look on and shake my head, while focusing on family, work, and hobbies. I can't change what's happening. I feel terrible for what my daughter will have to live through, but the only thing I can do is look after her and my wife in the short term. In the larger world, I'm massively outnumbered, by people with lots of influence and money, who in turn brainwash the masses into compliance. I'm powerless. I've tried to fight with words and have done so for decades, and the world just gets worse and worse.

There's really not much more to say, is there? The West has lost what made it the West. It's only a matter of time until the body draws its last breath and gives up the ghost. 

The One Thing I've Learned in 10 Years of Blogging

You have to be really dedicated or really stupid to keep writing a blog for 10 years that virtually no one reads. Yet here we are, on the 10-year anniversary of Eggshells.

This blog is technically a combination of at least three different ones I've started over the years. But the content has largely been the same, so to save a lot of hassle, they eventually got collapsed into this one. 

I enjoy writing. I always have. But I write about things that have limited audiences, like progressive rock, and outside-the-box politics and religion. I pour my heart into my writing, and I think I do a pretty good job of organizing my ideas and taking thoughtful stands on things that don't just parrot mainstream views. In that regard, I've always been an outsider looking in. So I can't really expect more than a tiny handful of readers, I suppose.  

The only thing I've written that's ever even gone semi-viral is a post reminiscing about my hometown. In sharing some history and some personal anecdotes, I got quite a few people thanking me for sending them down memory lane. 

I've also done some concert reviews along the way, and I salvaged from the Internet archives the pages of The Yes Chronicles, a website of Yes album reviews that I wrote close to a quarter-century ago. But mostly, I talk religion and politics. Lately, the religion has overshadowed the politics because I got burned out on politics, as the world got more woke and our leaders used a virus to exert tyrannical control over the entire planet.

Now, as I write this, the world is in the grips of anti-Russian hysteria, seething with wild-eyed fundamentalist rage. The global hive mind that's developed around this situation, and the ease with which it came about, is absolutely horrifying. It certainly doesn't say much for the future of free, critical thought -- but it does say a whole lot about how well propaganda continues to work.

I admit to being a longtime Russophile, so I find this mindless idiocy especially irksome. I have an affinity for the literature and music of Russia. I'm fond of Russian Orthodoxy and wear a gold pendant every day depicting the Holy Protection of the Theotokos, with a Russian inscription on the back. I used to run a page called Siberian Mind, indicative of a mind in exile, which is how I've always felt in the world -- now being one of those times. I like a lot of Russian foods. And I'm a copious consumer of White Russians and Moscow Mules -- fully aware that neither one has any actual Russian connection. (Not that that's stopping some people from renaming both drinks, Freedom Fries-style.) 

As for Russia's current leader? I can't say I have any strong opinion on him one way or another. But as the world turns him into another Saddam Hussein, it seems likely that the ex-KGB strongman is just looking out for his own nation's interests. For years, the Western media and leftist politicians have been trying to cement in Americans' minds a correlation between Republicans, conservatives, and Putin's Russia. And I think that's why there's so much unbridled hysteria over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It's as if the masses who've suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome over the past five or so years now have a place to channel their woke cancel-culture outrage. 

Certainly, the reaction we're seeing is not rational in the slightest, but a typically emotional response to media and government propaganda that predictably turns up in times of war. Any thinking person, after all, understands that the idea that Putin just decided to wake up one day and invade Ukraine for no reason whatsoever is patently absurd. And yet the narrative of the "unprovoked invasion" is being fed nonstop to the people, and most of them appear to be uncritically lapping it right up. 

You'd think that after two years of politicizing a virus to control world populations, regulate behavior and free movement, and disguise narrative control as "misinformation fact-checking," the masses wouldn't so easily fall in line again. But they've gone and done just that. Ukraine good, Russia bad. People in power say so, so it must be true. (And of course, deliberate misinformation is perfectly OK if it promotes a pro-Ukraine narrative. No fact-checks for bald-faced lies, only for inconvenient facts.) 

Of course, what this is really about is propping up Western economic and military interests, in the pursuit of maintaining American and EU hegemony around the globe. Russia is a threat to Western domination, and therefore it has to be neutralized. That's really what this all boils down to. Because why else would you be told to care about it so intensely, especially when there are so many other horrors going on around the world? Hundreds of thousands, including thousands of children, have died as a result of the U.S.-backed Saudi bombing of Yemen. Where is the media-manufactured outcry for its dead children? Where is the outrage over the political imprisonment, forced labor, forced sterilization, and religious and cultural suppression of the Uyghurs in China? Is anyone clearing out made-in-China goods from the shelves of their local Walmarts? (Of course not, because there would be nothing left.) I could go on, about the Palestinians, or about the plight of Syria, Somalia, Libya, Iraq, and more. 

So again, why does everyone care about this one particular situation in Ukraine and no others? Because they've been told to. And what is it that makes this situation supposedly so much worse? Well, you tell me. Never mind that the United States has a long and sad history of launching unprovoked invasions of other nations. No, we won't think about that. Nor can we point out China's human-rights abuses, because we rely too much on China's cheap labor, which corporate greed outsourced to the Communist nation decades ago, leaving our own manufacturing base decimated. And of course we can't point out what's happening in Yemen because of our role in facilitating it. The West is always killing someone, somewhere. But it's OK when we do it. 

So pay no attention to any of that. Russia bad. Putin bad. 

Let's not even consider the fact that the leaders of Ukraine are essentially puppets of the West, installed in 2014 with American financial support. (As ever, America's reckless, meddlesome, self-serving foreign policy of lesser-evilism creates a monster abroad, leaving others to clean up the mess.) No, let's not consider that Ukraine has a literal neo-Nazi battalion in its military ranks, and that those forces have both burned protesters alive and contributed to the death of scores of Russians in the eastern part of the country. (Little wonder that Ukraine was one of only two nations to refuse a UN proposal to denounce fascism. And yes, the facts on the ground prove it is obviously possible for a Jewish president to have Nazis in his own military.) Let's also not consider that Putin doesn't want Ukraine to join NATO, which would leave hostile military forces on Russia's doorstep. 

No, no. Russia bad. Putin bad.

It is entirely possible for there to really be no good guys in this situation -- and that includes the United States, in all its arrogance and naked hypocrisy, pissed off because Putin won't bend the knee to us and has the balls to attack America's puppet government in Ukraine. 

On the other hand, you could just as easily see this conflict as a matter of Russia's attempt to defend its own national interests, as it finds its own people being killed by a foreign military and it faces something not unlike our own Cuban Missile Crisis. But the Western corporate media only wants you to see its spin. In fact, it's going out of its way to silence any dissenting opinions -- just as it's been doing for two years of virus fearmongering. We know that masks don't do much of anything; we know that the experimental vaccines prevent neither illness nor transmission; we know that cheaper but effective drugs don't line the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry and so have to be villainized; we know that the vast majority of the population isn't at risk of death and that all the vaccine passports have therefore been a hysterical overreaction, creating an apartheid society and causing people to lose their livelihoods. And after years of being "fact-checked" into oblivion, those of us who never masked and never got jabbed are standing back and saying "I told you so" as mandates start to magically disappear, now that there's a new crisis to fixate people's minds on. You may now take off your masks and pick up your Ukrainian flags. 

But what's not going away is the control over people's lives. It's as if COVID was the dry run for what's going to follow. Consider how Justin Trudeau responded to a peaceful trucker protest in Ottawa. He suspended civil liberties under an emergency edict that conscripted towing companies to haul the big rigs away, allowed police to arrest peaceful protesters, and authorized the freezing of bank accounts of not just the protesters but anyone who so much as donated to them. This is the kind of social control that China exercises on its people for disobeying the government, and it's exactly what makes people like Trudeau, Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer, and so many other leftist control freaks so dangerous to liberty. 

And yet where was the U.S. media coverage of Trudeau's dictatorial behavior? Well, what little coverage it got was mostly framed to characterize the truckers as wild-eyed "fascists" who use "freedom" as a buzzword for their "hateful white supremacy." 

The Left: Workers of the world unite!

Also the Left: Not like that!

The following illustration really drives it home, as the cartoonist evidently perceives free speech as an existential threat to democracy -- signaling far more about himself than about the truckers.

This is literally how our institutions of power are characterizing people who stand up for individual freedom in the face of government overreach. The freedom-loving truckers are the fascists, not the psychopaths in power who are micromanaging our lives. 

Remember, these are the people currently feeding the Russia-Ukraine narrative to you.

People at the beginning of the COVID drama were saying that the powers-that-be would program the masses to think of defending their freedoms as selfish. And as we can see, that's exactly what has happened. "Freedom" is now a dirty word. "Safety" and control will be enforced by any and all means necessary. The U.S. trucker convoy will predictably be conflated with the so-called "insurrectionists" at the Capitol as being enemies of America. And by demonizing Putin, with whom the Left has worked tirelessly to associate with the American Right, they can all be smeared and marginalized in one fell swoop. Don't like your government? What are you, some kind of traitorous Putin lover? That's already happening. Rolling Stone, for one, couldn't wait to jump on the bandwagon after the invasion of Ukraine to point out the conservatives who weren't being properly loyal to the narrative -- which somehow, in the woke minds of Rolling Stone's editorial department, made them Putin loyalists.

It's always the "tolerant" "liberals" who pull this crap. They now have their Woke War, with an Evil White Guy as their villain, and they're enlisting everyone in their cause -- and doing pretty well so far. Senator Mark Warner, ever an enemy of liberty, has done his part by writing to the big social-media outlets and telling them to silence Russian "propaganda" -- proving, as I've said for years, that the government simply uses its corporate masters to engage in censorship by proxy. If the government is limited by the Constitution, then it'll just do a corporate end-run around the First Amendment. This is why massive multibillion-dollar corporations are as much of a danger to human liberty as governments are, and why the endless argument that "private companies can do whatever they want" is completely irresponsible and short-sighted. 

Funny, isn't it, how much censorship we need in the fight for "freedom" in Ukraine?  

With all the ongoing effects of cancel culture in mind, think about all the sanctions on Russia that are piling up. (Sanctions only ever hurt ordinary people who have nothing to do with their government's actions, but I guess that's beside the point.) Think in particular about all the major corporations that are lining up to refuse to do business with Russia. Think, too, of all the banks freezing Russia out of international commerce. And think of how the U.S.-led media narrative is creating a worldwide ostracization of one nation. Then stop to think about this: If they can do all this to a nation, what's to stop them from doing it to you if you step out of line? Trudeau has already shown how this cancel-culture-gone-wild orgy can be applied to ordinary people. Disobey and we'll freeze your bank accounts, get you fired, maybe even seize your assets. We'll starve you. Obey us or die.

"The myth about the inviolability of private property on which the legal system of the United States and the EU rests upon has been ruined," Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Vodin says. "Properties, bank accounts, and prepaid goods are confiscated on account of nationality." He's not wrong. The situation is deeply alarming in its ramifications for the future of freedom of thought. What good is the First Amendment, after all, if governments can use their corporate allies to compel you to obey by canceling your ability to function in society?

This is why it's so crucially important for people to think for themselves, and to actively defend the right to do so. Don't let your elected leaders, a political party, motivational speakers, talking heads on TV, your favorite celebrities or athletes, your favored religious authorities, or your crazy uncle do your thinking for you. Moreover, don't think it's OK if someone else is being canceled, because eventually the cancellers will come for you. So do your research, think for yourself, and resist in whatever way you can. This is the most crucial thing in the world, if you ever expect the world to get better. I know I'm probably shouting into the wind, but it needs to be said.

When I started this blog a decade ago, on my 41st birthday, I could never have imagined things would ever get this bad when I turned 51. We're living in a real-life dystopia, and human liberty hangs by a thread. Yes, people were just as irrational during the 1991 Gulf War and in the aftermath of 9/11. I remember well. The difference between then and now is the extent to which the Woke Left has taken over every major institution of power. And we know that the Woke Left will use its power to cancel anyone with an unorthodox point of view. The technological advancements between then and now also give them almost complete power to control narratives and ruin lives. (And rig elections in broad daylight, but rampant corporate censorship doesn't allow us to talk about that.)

And what I've learned from 10 years of blogging is this: Human beings are depressingly predictable. They are tribal animals who will always fall in line and obey, especially when provoked by fear or majority opinion. They are, for the most part, mindless sheep. People are very easily propagandized, and I have to think this is something genetic within most of us, something embedded deep within the primitive human psyche. Perhaps it goes back to the day when being booted out of the tribe meant you were left to fend for yourself against the wild animals, with no protection from the tribe. Today, that takes the form of being cancelled, leaving yourself no support network and no job with which to support yourself and your family. It's a shame that we can't move past this mindset, that people who oppose those in power won't stand up, realize that we outnumber those in power, and unite, despite our differences, and demand to take back control over our own lives. 

But that requires engaging in critical thought, and it involves risking a lot, personally, socially, financially. And that's why it doesn't happen. 

And so the misfits like me look on, shaking our heads, as the masses dutifully wave their blue and yellow flags, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they're being manipulated into backing the very same powers that will exert more and more control over their lives. And one day they might wake up and realize that maybe the people who were speaking out about the creeping loss of human liberties weren't dangerous right-wing neo-Nazi white supremacist extremists after all, but just people who put freedom and critical thought over the illusion of security and the institutional demand for conformity of thought. 

But probably not. If this blog is still around a decade from now, I dread to think of what the world will look like then. I'm just amazed this blog has lasted as long as it has. Had I ever had any significant audience, I have no doubt it would have been canceled long ago. 

When I was 18, the Berlin Wall came down and a single man took on a Chinese tank in Tiananmen Square. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. The spirit of human freedom was in the air as I ventured into adulthood. Three decades on, the government orders masks and vaccinations over a virus with a 2% mortality rate, being white makes you racist, protesting for freedom makes you a fascist, and challenging the institutional narrative will cause you to lose your livelihood. And now a slowly expiring empire expects everyone to fall in line with its pathetic attempt to hold on to its fading power, even as doing so will push Russia into the arms of the Chinese, on whose manufacturing base we have become completely dependent in our shortsighted greed. The West is like a dying bully, trying one more time with all its might to exert its will on the rest of the world with a final gasp of air. One day it will all be over, and so much will have been squandered away. The Great American Experiment has traded individual liberty for money, power, and control. America has become the empire it once threw off. And like all empires, it will crumble and die, leaving much misery in its wake. That hour is not far away. I lament that my daughter will live to see it.

We never seem to learn. Maybe humans are simply incapable of doing otherwise.

The Letter Strangles the Spirit, but Change Births Opportunity

Kairos and Metanoia, the Greek symbols
of opportunity and change. One must embrace
the latter to find the former.
Artist: Girolamo de Capri, 1541.

Is your baptism "valid"? Is the idea of framing a spiritual event in legal terms such as "validity" itself off-putting?

People who were baptized under a certain priest in the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix -- I won't repeat his name, as he's surely been embarrassed enough already -- are no doubt asking those very questions, now that it's come to light that this priest has been changing one word in his baptisms, and that the church has decided the baptisms he's performed are therefore "invalid."

If you haven't heard, the priest, who was ordained in 2005, was discovered to have said "We baptize you" instead of "I baptize you" as part of the prescribed "formula" for a "valid" baptism. The priest has since resigned and has vowed to help people affected by the word change. For Catholics, this is no small matter, as you have to be baptized before you can receive any of the other sacraments of the church, including communion and even matrimony. Thus, an FAQ on the diocese's website, responding to whether people who were "invalidly" baptized also have an "invalid" marriage, says, "Maybe!" It's not clear whether the emphasis of the exclamation point is supposed to make them feel better about the situation.

I'll just state my view right up front: Invalidating marriages over a single word reeks of the worst kind of legalism imaginable. I was raised Catholic, and there's much I admire about the faith. It will always be a part of who I am. But I also tire of the church's constant emphasis on what's "valid" and "licit." The entire Catechism reads like a law book. Jesus railed against the very people who made their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long, confusing an overweening focus on outward precision for cultivating an authentic inner holy life. In other words: The precise recitation of a formula isn't what matters. What matters is your inner growth and transformation. 

One reason I've long been drawn to the Eastern church is that the West, with its entrenched focus on scholasticism and precise definitions for everything, reduces the spiritual life to a series of binding legal transactions, devoid of warmth or spirit. Even God and his nature are defined so precisely in the Catholic church that he always felt like a cold, distant abstraction when I was growing up. If God was love, I sure didn't feel it, buried as the Almighty was under a mountain of long-winded statements crafted with linguistic precision but with very little in the way of spirit.

This is exactly how, as Paul warned, the letter kills but the spirit gives life.

Over the past few weeks, I've been working my way through Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire Bible series. The New Testament has been published across two volumes, with the Old Testament to follow. I like Bishop Barron. He's long shown a desire to evangelize people from a Catholic framework, and his Bible series is designed to do just that, by weaving commentaries from himself, church Fathers, and great Catholic thinkers down through the ages around the scriptural text. The goal is to make scripture relatable to a modern audience that's increasingly turning away from the spiritual life, by showing readers why the main character of the Gospels is still relevant today. Combined with several essays on great works of Catholic art throughout the ages, the end result is a visually beautiful Bible that reads like a page-turning novel, while the commentaries function as edifying in-depth sermons on just about every major passage in the Gospel accounts.

I haven't read the Bible from cover to cover in at least 25 years, maybe longer. So a lot of these old stories that I know by heart feel fresh again as I savor them in their original contexts. But what I'm also remembering is the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of taking the scriptures literally. I'm not saying that I reject its supernatural claims out of hand, but rather that the many contradictions and inaccuracies render it impossible to take in the scriptures as objective historical fact. Just to name a few things:

• All the Gospels disagree on who stood by the cross and who was the first to the empty tomb.
• The names of some of the disciples differ from one Gospel account to another.
• In Matthew, the thieves crucified with Jesus mock him; in Luke, one asks for Christ's mercy and forgiveness.
• Also in Matthew, Judas returns the 30 pieces of silver that purchased his betrayal and hangs himself. In the Acts of the Apostles, he purchased a field with his ill-gotten gains, and he dies in the field after he falls and his internal organs gush out. 
• Matthew further states that Judas' blood money and the purchase of the potter's field is the fulfillment of a prophecy in the book of Jeremiah. The quote in Matthew actually comes from the book of Zechariah.  
• In the synoptic Gospels, Jesus cleanses the temple after his triumphal entry to Jerusalem; in John, it happens early in his preaching career. 
• The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew is the Sermon on the Plain in Luke.
• Jesus is said to have been born during the reign of Herod, who died around 4 B.C, according to the best historical evidence we have. But Joseph and a pregnant Mary were traveling for the census ordered by Quirinius, governor of Syria, and history also shows us that Quirinius took office in A.D. 6, the same year he ordered the census. Thus, Herod couldn't have been alive at the time of the census.
• There is no historical evidence of a custom releasing a prisoner on the eve of Passover, as Pilate did when he released Barabbas to mollify the demands of the mob.  

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Literalists try to explain away problematic passages like these, but in many cases, there's simply no way that both accounts of an event can be true. And I think that's why attempting a literal understanding of the scriptures is to misread their intent. Their intent is to impart a spiritual truth about our relationship with the divine -- we'll call it God here, for purposes of keeping the discussion in context. To that end, the scriptures are best viewed neither as fact or fiction, but as an insight into deeper spiritual realities that can only be alluded to through our limited methods of human communication. To understand what they're saying to us, we have to look beyond the printed words, past the surface errors and inconsistencies that would otherwise trip us up, and consider what the deeper lesson is to be learned. 

Let's again consider the rite of baptism, which has been a source of contention for centuries. Does baptism remove the stain of original sin from the soul, or is it just a symbol of faith? Can infants be baptized, or must someone be of age to declare his faith before being baptized? Is pouring water over someone's head sufficient for baptism, or do you have to be fully immersed? And if you have to be fully immersed, is once enough, or do you have to do it three times? All of these are stances that different Christian churches take on the matter.

Baptism, an act peculiar to Christianity, originated with John the Baptist, who made the rite a part of his ministry. Its origins lie in the Jewish practice of ritual cleansing in the mikvah, a pool of water in which those considered "unclean" under the Jewish law would immerse themselves in order to return to a state of ritual purity. John himself, according to scripture, baptized people as a visible act of repentance from their sins, a rationale that was similar but not identical to the older Jewish ceremony. 

John's approach, in turn, hardened into church doctrine within a few centuries, to the point at which the church taught that baptism was necessary for the forgiveness of sins. When Augustine in the fifth century developed the idea of original sin of Adam and Eve as a kind of sexually transmitted disease, the church further connected baptism with the washing away of original sin from the soul, such that you couldn't receive any of the other sacraments, including communion or matrimony, until you were first baptized. Moreover, if an infant died before baptism, it would go to Limbo, where it would be at peace -- but because the stain of original sin was never removed from its soul, it would forever be denied the presence of God.  

The church has wisely distanced itself in recent years from the concept of Limbo, for it is abhorrent not only to imagine that an innocent child is born with sin but also to presume that, even if that were the case, a God of love would punish the soul of that child for something it had no control over. Proclaiming the existence of a Limbo was to presume how God would dispense his justice -- as if humans ever had control over such a thing, and as if the church could dictate the rules to God himself.

The point of faith, after all, is not to follow hidebound rules but to transform your heart. If someone tells you he's a Christian because he doesn't want to go to hell when he dies, that person has some spiritual growing left to do.

But is the church much different, if it decrees that your baptism is "invalid" because of the variation of a single word? I would say no. In fact, I would say it's missing the whole point. I understand the argument that the administering of sacraments has to be prevented from becoming some kind of free-for-all -- the Diocese of Phoenix, in trying to wave off charges of legalism in light of the "invalid" baptisms, uses the example that you can't use milk in place of wine for communion -- but it's not as if the priest was invoking Satan during his baptisms. He said "We" instead of "I." That's it. There was no ill intent. The pope could ease the anxieties of those affected by these "invalid" baptisms by simply offering an indult specific to this case -- proclaiming that those baptized by the priest in question are still "validly" baptized because the priest had no ill will and the intention of the ceremony was still carried out.

I suspect that in the Eastern church, that's precisely how something like this would be handled. The East, with its merciful practice of oikonomia, is much more open to meeting people where they are and considering individual circumstances. It's not that the East takes a loosey-goosey anything-goes approach to the spiritual life. To the contrary, the East has preserved tradition far more than the West has. It's just that the East doesn't try to dictate terms to God, doesn't try to control and define every aspect of the spiritual journey, and is content to let mysteries be mysteries, understanding that the church isn't a courtroom but rather a hospital for souls, where mercy and healing supersede legal justice. If you ask a Catholic theologian how the transubstantiation works, he'd tell you about the precise words used to invoke the Holy Spirit, the exact moment at which the Spirit changes the bread and wine to the Body and Blood of Christ, and the circumstances under which all this must take place. An Orthodox theologian, asked the same question, would say, "I don't know precisely how and when it happens. I just know that it does."   

That's the primary difference between East and West. The West has taken "development of doctrine" to such an extreme that the church has become more or less a reflection of the culture in terms of its relationship to the modern world -- yet when it comes to conferring its sacraments, literally not a single word of deviation can be tolerated. The East is just the opposite: It develops its doctrine only when absolutely necessary, because it reasons that eternal truths handed down from the founders and early fathers of the church are just that, and consequently they don't bend to changing social norms -- yet the church offers merciful flexibility to help people struggling through their own individual circumstances. 

The Western church, as this recent baptism fiasco illustrates, places itself in the position of holding God's grace prisoner to the recitation of what essentially become magic words. There's more than a reasonable chance that the term "hocus pocus" derives from the point in the old Latin Mass when the priest says "Hoc est enim corpus meum," or "This is my body," before the transubstantiation of the bread and wine. If so, it only underscores just how long this problem has been around, and how outsiders have long, and not incorrectly, viewed the church's insistence on a precise order of words as constituting a kind of magical incantation, without whose correct recitation God's grace gets stuck somewhere between heaven and earth -- stranded in Limbo, perhaps. 

What we have to remember is that the sacraments are for us, not for God, and that we are unable to hold his grace hostage to the precise utterance of a specific string of words. The grace conferred, along with the inward change it sets in motion, is the whole point. The incantation that accompanies it has no real effect on anything, other than to give those present peace of mind that the sacrament was "done properly." 

Why is this necessarily so? Because if you believe in the God of the Bible, then you also believe that he could forgive and save the faithful with a snap of his fingers. But he doesn't, because he wants us to grow in faith, with the grace he bestows on us, through the sacraments and otherwise. If God is all-knowing, he would have known before the creation of humanity that we would miss the mark -- the literal meaning of the word "sin" (hamartia). Changing one word in a sacramental formula is a kind of missing the mark, and certainly not one that would block the grace of a sacrament from being conferred. Neither the reception of a sacrament nor our greater spiritual journey is supposed to be about following niggling little rules, but about transforming ourselves. 

Think back to the repentant thief on the cross as portrayed in Luke's Gospel. Jesus himself welcomes the man into Paradise, even though we can presume that the man was not previously a follower of Christ and therefore not baptized. Even the church today allows for baptisms of blood and desire -- i.e., the equivalent grace of baptism bestowed by way of martyrdom or by an unfulfilled desire to be baptized before death -- so why should it not be the same in this case? Why cause so much anxiety among the faithful in the Phoenix diocese when the church could simply decree that the priest meant well and grant an exemption?  

When I returned to my Christian roots after a long journey through other religious traditions and the words of far-flung spiritual thinkers, I fell in with the Quakers. Their contemplative approach to faith suited my spiritual temperament, especially after my long stay in Buddhism and its centeredness on meditative introspection. There's no priest in most Quaker traditions, and no one speaks unless, guided by the Spirit, a person chooses to rise and address the congregation -- after which the meeting falls back into the silence of active listening for the "still, small voice" within. That form of mostly silent worship is indicative of the Quakers' bare-boned approach to the faith. Their meetinghouses, which are notably not even called churches -- are sparsely adorned, with perhaps a conspicuously placed Bible serving as the only reminder that you're in a place of worship. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the Quakers also take an unorthodox approach to the sacraments -- including baptism. 

Specifically, Quakers believe that true baptism occurs as an inward change, not as an outward ritual. Consider that when English-language Bibles use the word "repent," they are translating the Greek word metanoia, which signifies a transformative change of heart. So when John the Baptist was urging the people to repent, he wasn't calling for them just to be dunked in water, as if the dunking itself generated some kind of mystical change, but for the people to use the ceremony as a reminder of the inward change that they then had to put in the hard work to achieve. Baptism, then, was an outward pledge by the recipient to focus on an inward spiritual cultivation. 

The Quakers, however, believed that outward rituals became an end in themselves and missed the point of what the rituals were supposed to represent in a person's life. Those rituals therefore held a serious potential to stunt spiritual growth. All the arguments about what form a "proper" baptism should take, including whether you say all the right words, suggests that the Quakers had a good point. 

A valid one, even.

We can argue all day about scriptural interpretations regarding baptism. I'll note only that John the Baptist said that while he baptized with water, another was coming who would baptize the people "with the Holy Spirit and with fire." Later, Jesus tells Nicodemus that one must be "born of water and the Spirit" to enter the Kingdom. The common denominator between the two statements is the involvement of the Spirit in one's transformation. Having someone pour water over you doesn't achieve that transformation. Nor does an approved combination of words by a priest. It's up to you, and your willingness to let the Spirit help change you inwardly. 

What Signs and Symbols Can Teach Us, If We Pay Attention

Carl Jung, the famous psychoanalyst, once told the story of a patient who was so caught up in her own logical rationalizations for her troubles that he found it difficult to make any progress with her. At one session, Jung said, the patient told him about a dream in which someone gave her an expensive piece of jewelry that looked like a golden scarab. As the patient talked, Jung heard a persistent tapping noise on the window behind him. When he went to investigate, he found a large flying insect seemingly insisting on getting inside.

"I opened the window and immediately caught the insect in the air as it flew in," Jung writes. "It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer, whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words 'Here is your scarab.'"

According to Jung, the patient finally opened up to him and made great progress following that eerie event. 

Was it all just a chance occurrence? Jung didn't think so. Such incidents of synchronicity, he believed, are signs that reveal themselves all around us but require an openness of mind for us to perceive them. Think of how you might toss yarrow stalks to point you toward a reading in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of oracles. When you can see how the particular reading relates to your life, you can think of it as a fluke of happenstance, or you can engage your intuitive mind to understand why you might have been led to that particular reading in the first place. But to achieve the latter, we have to break down the barriers that our rational minds throw up, insisting upon "mere coincidence" or "baseless superstition" as ways of dismissing what could otherwise be seen as the universe trying to get our attention.

I thought of Jung after lying awake in bed early this morning and trying to justify why I shouldn't make the 75-mile trip out to the Byzantine Catholic church I've been attending recently. I was tired. I could go next week. I could always just spend some quiet, reflective time at home in place of attending a liturgy in person.

So I stumbled downstairs, got some coffee, and opened my computer to see if there was any work waiting on me. When there wasn't, I checked my email and then popped over to YouTube -- only to find a new upload from one of the channels I follow, The Ten Minute Bible Hour. Matt Whitman, the keeper of the channel, is an evangelical Protestant who often visits other denominations of Christian churches and talks to their pastors and priests in an attempt to find out what they believe and why. As someone with a similar curiosity toward other religions and beliefs, I always appreciate Matt's attempts to be open-minded and learn, rather than bicker over whose dogma is right or wrong. 

Well, wouldn't you know it: A brand-new upload on the channel had Matt visiting with Fr. Thomas Loya -- a Byzantine Catholic priest, at his Byzantine Catholic church in the Chicago area.

Coincidence or not, I interpreted that as a nudge from beyond to not be so lazy and make the drive to church.

If that wasn't enough for one day, the Gospel reading at today's liturgy, from Matthew, was the story of the Canaanite woman who begged Christ to cure her daughter. That just happened to be the last thing I read last night, as I work my way through Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire Bible: The Gospels. I had no idea that was going to be the Gospel selection today at church, and yet there it was, repeating itself from my bedtime reading. Crazy, right?

Things like this are not new to me. I take them in stride while not dismissing their message. For example, I know that Mary has kept tugging on me to come back to the Catholic-Orthodox family every time I wander too far away. I remember feeling her call out to me as I was visiting a Catholic church after many years' absence. Out of the corner of my eye, a nearby statue of her was silently prodding me to come over and talk to her. So I did, and that began my return to the faith I was born into. Later on, I was overcome with a warm feeling of compassion, acceptance, and unconditional love when I reached out to touch a likeness of her in another Catholic chapel.

Skeptics may say it was all a matter of my own psychological projection. Maybe; maybe not. But there have been so many Marian apparitions over the centuries, many of them officially accepted by the Catholic church, and some of them witnessed by thousands, that I'm inclined to believe there's something to it all. Even the Orthodox have their accounts of apparitions, the most famous being the prolonged appearances of the Theotokos at Zeitoun, in Cairo. 

And that's not to mention all the accounts of weeping statues and icons across the ages, or the famous Guadalupe tilma.

In recognition of the encounters so many have had with the Blessed Mother, myself included, I wear a necklace depicting Mary's appearance to those keeping vigil at a church in Constantinople in the 10th century. According to the story, St. Andrew the Fool and his disciple, Epiphanius, saw the Virgin descend into the church, surrounded by angels and saints, and joined the congregation in prayer, spreading out her veil of protection across the faithful.

"Do you see the Sovereign Lady of All?" Andrew asked, unable to believe his eyes.

"I do," Epiphanius confirmed, "and I am amazed."

The Holy Protection of the Theotokos, as the event is known, is the subject of many Orthodox icons and has become the name of many an Orthodox church. 

When it comes to Mary's kid, you may have heard of the numerous accounts of Eucharistic miracles, including stories of human heart tissue growing from a neglected communion host. Those that have been medically examined, like the Shroud of Turin, apparently all share the same blood type.  

You can say these are all clever forgeries and fanciful tales designed to keep the gullible in the pews. And for all I know, you could be right. You could even say they're Satanic deceptions, as many zealous anti-Catholic evangelicals do. But to take either stance, I think, is to miss the point. 

Think about Jung's scarabeid beetle, and how it showed up at just the right time to help his patient make a breakthrough. It didn't really matter whether some mysterious universal force put the beetle there to help Jung's patient or whether it was just an amazing coincidence. The end result was that the event allowed the patient to let down her rational defenses and consider what the physical manifestation of her dream meant to her on a deeply fundamental level. It widened her perceptions from only what she could logically deduce to what was possible if she understood the event as a symbolic reality. 

Religion works the same way, if we can take religious teachings onboard as being literally true on an emotional level. That opens us up to realities that our logical and linguistically limited minds may not have been able to perceive.   

In a similar way, our family has a New Year's tradition of doing personal tarot readings for the upcoming year. The readings aren't some kind of magical insight into the future, but rather a way for us to see how our lives and experiences relate to the cards we pulled, which in turn lets us create a relevant context for the spread. It helps us become more mindful and aware of things that might happen, given our habits, tendencies, and circumstances, so that we can skillfully prepare for them beforehand. 

I was thinking about all this after I saw a video earlier in the week that is said to have originated in Ukraine. The event depicts an Orthodox priest performing an outdoor ceremony during what appears to be Theophany, the celebration of Christ's baptism. At the back of the alcove where the priest is blessing the waters, we see a life-size icon of Christ being baptized in the Jordan. Those familiar with the Gospel story know that after Christ was baptized, the Holy Spirit descended as a dove from the heavens, accompanied by a voice saying, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

In the video, as the priest is conducting the ceremony, a dove flies into the building and perches on top of the icon, in what feels like a real-life re-enactment of the descent of the Spirit. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. 

The event sent shivers rippling across my body and nearly brought me to tears. Most people in the comments were praising God for giving the people a much-needed sign in these troubled times. Me? I was reminded of why I find the story of Christ so compelling and why I've always come back to it, even after traveling many other spiritual roads that are worlds removed from Christianity. 

I'd love to be able to believe all of it on a literal level. But I do regard it as true on an emotional level, and I think that understanding of the story can be just as deep, profound, and life-changing, inasmuch as it directs our minds away from our egoic tendencies and toward something much larger, eternal, beyond words, logic, and reason.

It gives us hope. And that, in these dark times, is no small feat indeed.

The Simple, Quiet Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh was perhaps the softest-spoken man I've ever encountered. My wife and I went to see him deliver a public lecture, sometime in the early 2000s. I can no longer recall the exact date or the venue, but I'm pretty sure it was on a university campus in Chicago. As he sat lotus-style, surrounded by fellow monks, he spoke so calmly and quietly into the microphone that we strained to hear his words coming out of the auditorium's sound system. But just being in the presence of such a spiritual giant was in itself an experience I'll never forget.

My wife woke me up this morning with the sad news that the man affectionately known as Thay, or "teacher," had died. The 95-year-old Buddhist monk had been in poor health for several years since suffering a massive stroke that left him unable to speak. Having been exiled from his native Vietnam for his peacemaking efforts during the war that tore the country apart, he built a monastic community in France and lived there until he was finally allowed to come home in 2018. He lived out his final years at the Vietnamese temple where he was ordained a monk in 1942.

I first encountered Thay when I was immersed in the study of Buddhism. I was something of an armchair Buddhist for about 15 years, having taken an intrerest in the tradition after walking away from the Catholicism of my upbringing. Thay's book Living Buddha, Living Christ helped me build a bridge from one faith to the other, and it also opened my eyes to the reality that no single religion held an exclusive claim to the Truth. At their core, they all attempted to either point us toward union with the divine or to imbue us with the humility to see ourselves in others. 

The Buddhists excelled in the latter, and Thay in particular focused his teachings on the concept of "interbeing," the observation that none of us exists independently, and that once we can clearly perceive the intricate web of existence of which we're all a part, we will become more naturally inclined to treat others, and our world, with greater love and compassion. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, Christ said, and if we see ourselves in others, then why would we even want to do them harm? Thay once astutely observed that to love your enemies, as the Sermon on the Mount teaches us, is impossible -- not because of the repulsion we might feel toward an enemy, but because once you truly love your enemy, both you and your enemy have been transformed, such that the other person is no longer your enemy but your friend. Understanding the essence of interbeing, seeing ourselves in others, grows our compassion toward others, as we see that they suffer and struggle through life just as we do. 

Perhaps the most beautiful thing about Thay was that he believed this to be true, in his deepest heart of hearts. He genuinely thought that the world could achieve lasting peace by tirelessly striving toward embracing the tenets of interbeing. And he embraced those ideals in the way he lived his life. He was the quietest, gentlest, most humble man on the outside, but inside he possessed an unwavering belief that practicing peace and compassion, without compromise, would transform the world. Still waters run deep, they say, and few embodied that truth as well as Thay did. It would have been a grave mistake to interpret his outer gentleness as a sign of inner indifference.

Dr. Martin Luther King, himself a peaceful giant of a man, saw these qualities in Thay and nominated the monk for the Nobel Peace Prize. "He is an Apostle of Peace and Nonviolence," Dr. King wrote. "His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity."

Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk who took a shine to Zen philosophy and was friends with the Dalai Lama, considered himself a spiritual contemporary of Thay, inasmuch as they shared a vision for the world built on a compassionate union of humanity that cut across all artificial boundaties. Merton had this to say about Thay when the Zen monk faced potential persecution in his Vietnamese homeland for standing up for peace:

I have said Nhat Hanh is my brother, and it is true. We are both monks, and we have lived the monastic life about the same number of years. We are both poets, both existentialists. I have far more in common with Nhat Hanh than I have with many Americans, and I do not hesitate to say it. It is vitally important that such bonds be admitted. They are the bonds of a new solidarity and a new brotherhood which is beginning to be evident on all the five continents and which cuts across all political, religious, and cultural lines to unite young men and women in every country in something that is more concrete than an ideal and more alive than a program. This unity of the young is the only hope of the world.

I liked to think of myself as a Thomas Merton-Dorothy Day Catholic when I came back to the church. Merton, like Thay, saw the common threads that bind humanity together, superseding our surface differences; and he embraced the value of unity in diversity, for even if we hold to religious expressions that look very different at first glance, he unuderstood that those religions are driven by the same basic root impulses and desires. Dorothy Day, meanwhile, lived a commendable life of feeding, clothing, and sheltering the poor and needy, embodying Christ's call for his followers to do so when he told them in the 25th chapter of Matthew, "Whatsoever you did for the least of these, my brethren, you did for me." 

And I still believe that being a good Catholic, let alone a good Christian, means, first and foremost, following the moral and ethical example that Christ left for us. Slavish devotion to dogmatic minutiae misses the point and leads to self-righteous Pharisaism, but just saying you believe without putting in an effort to imitate the compassionate heart of Christ isn't enough. And condemning others for the speck in their eye while you have a log in your own only makes you a self-righteous hypocrite. Our job, as Jordan Peterson so magnificently stated it, is to "pick up your damn cross and stumble up the hill." We will suffer in this life. The Buddha told us that, and so did Christ. How we react to that suffering determines our capacity for inner transformation. Will we reach Nirvana? Will we find the Kingdom of God within ourselves? Not without putting in the hard work to change ourselves. 

I can see in myself how I'm losing the battle. I'm not the person I was when my wife and I went to see Thay giving his lecture. When I returned to the Catholic church with a fresh perspective gained from my spiritual travels through the East, I would have defended the strident Anabaptist and Quaker view of every Christian's responsibility toward cultivating peaceful nonviolence and unconditional enemy-love, based on a straightforward reading of the Sermon on the Mount. That we are called to unconditionally reject violence, hatred, and anger is a view that Thay himself promoted. 

But the world we inhabit makes living out those values tremendously difficult. In many ways, it feels as if we're reverting to a new Dark Ages, where the iron hand of a tyrannical and all-powerful church is being revived, but this time by way of secular forces bent on silencing, demonizing, alienating, and ostracizing anyone who deviates from its unbending and frequently irrational dogma. As civic religion declines, a zealous political religion is rapidly filling the void left behind, leaving in its wake a hostile society that's exceedingly difficult to meet with love and compassion. When massive authoritarian institutional powers want to control your movements, dictate what you can and can't say, and either praise or condemn you based on your outward appearance and immutable characteristics, how do you not respond with anger and hostility? How do you not resign yourself to utter despair? How do you rise above and resist the temptation to become the mirror image of that which despises you?

The obvious answer is that you just knuckle down and do it. You pick up your damn cross and stumble up the hill. But that takes a trememdous force of will. Anyone can practice equanimity in peaceful times, but doing it in the midst of a chaotic world that stands in hostile opposition to your very existence is the stuff of heroes. And yet as the likes of Dr. King and Gandhi have shown us, nonviolent passive resistance has the power to topple even the greatest of evils. There's something to be said for flipping tables in the temple to draw attention and make a dramatic point, but holy men like Thich Nhat Hanh would tell us that remaining steadfast in our commitment to peaceful interbeing is the only surefire way to defeat hatred and evil.

I used to believe the same. For me, Thay's death offers an opportunity to reflect on how to embrace those values in such challenging and tumlutuous times. 

One may counter that it's easy to preach peace from the safety of a monastic community detached from the everyday world. And yet we see where the alternative leads -- which makes me believe that, far from being empty platitudes of passivity, Thay's words are as insightful and potentially life-changing as those of the Sermon on the Mount, in that living a life of peace is just about the hardest thing you can do, yet it also holds an unmatched potential for changing both us and the world we live in. 

Merton said of Thay that his efforts toward peace, which came at a high personal price, illustrated that "we are people who still desire the truth where we can find it and still decide in favor of man against the political machine when we get a fair chance to do so." Merton, in other words, understood that politics is not our savior. It won't lead us to any kind of lasting truth or peace, because politics only understands power and focuses on temporary solutions to fleeting social problems. Relatedly, my wife, in bringing me the news about Thay this morning, observed that we don't hear as much about the Dalai Lama as we used to. I think she's right, and I think that in itself a sign of how the spiritual is being subsumed by the political in our world. We're increasingly tuning out our spiritual mentors in favor of finding salvation in our political tribes. 

Great minds like Merton's and Thay's pointed us toward something bigger, more deeply transformative. Perhaps it is only through bringing the power of the eternal spiritual to bear on the temporal and ephemeral realm of the political that we'll be able to rise above what troubles us in this life.

In that regard, maybe Thay's message to the world wasn't the foolishly naive optimism that a jaded world might regard it as being, but rather the deepest of wisdom -- perhaps the only kind of wisdom that can save us in the long run.