The Taste of Life

I've been doing battle with a malfunctioning body for many years, and lately the malfunctions have been winning. In years past, I would have been pacing the floors at night, fretting about things I can't control, wondering why me, and simultaneously hoping for a miracle and trying to figure out why the God of love I was raised to believe in would let people suffer so much.

Now... well, now I feel something that's not quite what I'd call a weary resignation, because the feeling is more one of acceptance than of defeat. It's a foreign feeling for someone like me, but if the past year and a half has taught me anything, it's that I have absolutely no control over anything in this world. And that includes the grinding march of time and the toll it takes on one's aging body.

I recently wrote a 12,000-word essay in exchange for receiving a somewhat honorary Doctor of Theology degree. No one needs to lecture me on online scams and diploma mills: The degrees are conferred by an actual practicing seminary, one that offers holy orders through the laying on of hands, making the recipient an official priest through the Old Catholic line of apostolic succession. I received my minister ordination through this same seminary four years ago; now I want to take the next step and receive my holy orders one of these days. The online program takes about two years to complete, so I guess I'll have to see how my creaky old body holds out.    

The point is that I think of the Th.D. as a reward to myself, for all the years I've spent exploring the world's religious and spiritual paths, in search of something I can call my own. I love reading and researching, and since I'll never have the time or money to attend an accredited seminary school, this is the next best thing for me. Besides, mainstream seminaries will expect you to line up with their theological worldview, and I don't line up so well with what other people want. Fifty years of life experience has taught me that, if nothing else. I take what works, regardless of the source, and weave it into a way of life that makes sense to me. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone else.

That thought stuck with me as I was doing some research for a homeschool project on the pagan Wheel of the Year. I'm the theology teacher in our house, and while I fit in whatever else I can toward our daughter's education, my tireless and dedicated wife handles the bulk of the work. 

Paganism isn't new to me, but I'd never jumped in quite so deep as when I was gathering information for this latest project. I gained a greater appreciation for how our primitive ancestors lived closer to the earth, in rhythm with the seasons -- and it occurred to me that it wasn't because they were nobly enlightened tree-huggers that would put our conservation efforts to shame, but because they had to pay attention to the climate and the change of seasons if they wanted to survive the long, harsh, cold winters. They needed to prepare everything they consumed by hand. All the food supplies had to be safely stored away before the snow started to fly. And there had to be enough to last until the next harvest season rolled around. You couldn't just drive over to the supermarket to buy some bread if your grain stores were depleted. Either you planned ahead or your family starved. So of course they'd try to appease their gods through prayer and sacrifice, in hopes that their crops wouldn't be destroyed by storm, pestilence, or drought. We romanticize their lives, but their lives were hard, and often short. They were only doing what they felt was necessary to push through for one more cycle of the seasons.

In some ways, we haven't changed. It occurs to me, for example, that a lot of humans, even in our modern world, haven't stopped trying to appease their chosen deities in hopes of extracting some kind of favor. I ought to know. I did it for most of my life. With the preacher on TV telling me that all we had to do was ask and we'd receive our prayer request, I can vividly remember being on my hands and knees, tears streaming down my face, begging God to please fix me and make me feel better. And the healing never came. 

The problem is that we're always looking for a miraculous way out of our predicament, when maybe there just isn't one. We treat the Judeo-Christian God like a wish-granting genie, but that's not how the theology works. You can't change God's mind, so they say, and he already knows how your life story is going to play out. So you might as well stop groveling and come to grips with the hand life has dealt you. Prayer isn't going to do a thing. 

So why did Jesus go around performing miracles, then? Well, I think it's important to remember that he never healed people to make them better; he did it to point people toward God so that they would see the miracles the Son wrought and in turn glorify the Father. Because apparently the perfect creator of the universe needs his ego stroked like that. 

Recall that when Jesus found out that Lazarus was sick, he deliberately waited a few days before going to Bethany. Why? So that Lazarus would die first and Jesus would have to resurrect him -- which he says he did so that his disciples would believe in him. Seems pretty sadistic and self-serving to let Lazarus' family watch the poor man die just to prove a personal point, but that's how the Father and the Son roll. They don't do things for our sake. They do them so that we'll fall down on our knees before them and tell them how great and wonderful they are. Seems like a God of love would just heal people because he loved them and didn't want them to suffer. But with this God, there are always strings attached.

If it sounds like I'm angry with God, I'm not, because I don't believe in that God anymore. I find the entire belief system far too absurd, objectionable, and illogical. If a God does exist, it's not the God of the Bible. I still admire Jesus' ethical teachings and the spiritual lessons the Gospels try to teach us, and Mary is still the face of the loving, nurturing Sacred Feminine to me -- but I just can't pretend to hold a literal belief anymore in any of the Bible's supernatural claims.

And then let's compare the story of Jesus and Lazarus with the story of the Buddha and the grieving mother, as the contrast between the two stories illustrates my exasperation with the way Christianity does things with regard to people in need. 

In the Buddhist tale, a woman came to the Buddha, beside herself with sorrow, asking him to please perform a miracle for her that would bring her son back to life. The Buddha said he would do this for her, and that all she needed to do first was to bring him a single mustard seed from a house that death had not visited. The woman traveled from home to home, but everywhere she went, all she heard were stories of sorrow just like hers. Every home she entered had tasted death. Eventually, she realized what the Buddha had been trying to impress on her, that death is a part of everyone's life, and she returned to him with gratitude for the lesson learned.  

Now, which person's solution was superior? Jesus' or the Buddha's? Well, Lazarus is just going to die again someday, and Jesus' motives for resurrecting the man were self-serving; while the Buddha's comparatively selfless and more compassionate lesson was that we all die and that it's nobler to accept that reality than to want to bend the natural laws of the universe just to bring a grieving mother some temporary comfort. After all, her son will die again one day, and it could happen before her time is up, leaving her to grieve all over again.

That's how the Buddha did things. He knew that we all suffer in this life, and he wasn't going to try to give you false hope, or sell you a fairy tale, or glorify himself with some cheap parlor tricks to get you to worship him. All he gave us was an Eightfold Path to follow that he said would minimize our suffering and lead us to peace, if we could only walk the Path with sincerity and purpose. The Buddha was neither a pessimist nor an optimist, but a hard-headed rationalist, pointing us toward what is and what works, rather than what we want the world to be. The world doesn't care about our will. The most we can do is face whatever the world throws at us with equanimity.

You can see the Buddha's approach symbolized in an old Chinese painting called The Vinegar Tasters. In this allegorical scene, we find the leading figures of China's three predominant religious traditions gathered around a vat of vinegar. All three have dipped their fingers in to take a taste. 

Confucius wears a sour expression. To the Confucian mind, if something in life is sour -- and for the Confucian, it almost always is -- that means it needs to be fixed, usually by external force. So when the Confucian sees a world full of messed-up people, he assumes they have no hope of navigating life without being subject to a long and rigorous list of hierarchichal rules and procedures, with the belief that compelling order and obedience will bring about a virtuous society. Notably, this is more or less how the Chinese Communist Party exerts control over the people even today. The Confucians are the central planners, the power-hungry bureaucrats, the micromanagers and control freaks who don't trust the people to make their own decisions. They were the wear-a-mask-and-show-your-papers people of their time.

The Buddha, meanwhile, has a pensive look, as if he's acknowledging the bitterness of life but thinking about how he can apply his own hard-won logic and reason to make life more tolerable for those who are suffering. 

Then there's Lao-tzu, the mythical writer of the Tao Te Ching. He's wearing a broad smile, as he acknowledges that some things in life are bitter and some are sweet, and that the vinegar is doing nothing more than just being vinegar. The nature of vinegar is to be sour, and it would be absurd to expect it to be something other than what it is. You'd only scowl like Confucius if you expected vinegar to not be vinegar.

I think all three characters have some valuable lessons to teach us. You can control life to try to force it to work the way you want it, like Confucius; or you can accept things as they are and try to make the best of them, like the Buddha; or you can grin from ear to ear like Lao-tzu and say, "There is no 'best of it.' There's just it." Who knows what's good or bad? Life happens, and you just ride the waves as they come, and then one day you die and return to nature. The end. 

Lao-tzu's reaction makes me think of Doc Holliday's death scene in Tombstone, when his friend Wyatt Earp comes to visit him in the sanitorium. Wyatt's having trouble letting go and moving on, when Doc, channeling the ancient Taoist sage, asks Wyatt, "What do you want?"

"To live a normal life," Wyatt says.

"There is no normal life," Doc tells him. "There's just life."

In other words, you have to let go of the need to control things you have no power over. Things are what they are, not what we want them to be. So change what you can, and find peace with what you can't. 

This relates to me in the sense that I want to see my daughter grow up, and I'll certainly do what's in my power to make that happen. But at the same time, the autumn season we're experiencing now is a vivid reminder that all things pass in their time, and that the leaf doesn't cling to the tree when its time has ended. It's futile for us to hang on to that limb, yellowed and in decline, having played our part in the pageantry of life, all while praying to be made green and vital again. It doesn't work that way. Old life declines to make way for new life. The pagans know that. The Taoists know that. But our ego fights against it. It wants the nature-defying miracle. Fearing the potential for nonexistence, it wants to live on after our meatsuits give out. 

Had Jesus been a fourth vinegar taster at the well, he would have turned the vinegar into wine, to glorify God through himself, and would have promised everyone eternal life as he handed out the drinking cups. That's who we want to show up. We want someone who will make the bad stuff go away and give us hope of something better. But wishing something to be so doesn't make it so.

Maybe some essence of us does persist after death. Maybe it doesn't. But if that's our focus, we're missing the point. Some people are so obsessed with heaven that they forget their life here on Earth, with all its highs and lows, its rewards and its challenges, its beauty and its ugliness. 

There's just life. So go live it while you still have it.

Find Your Own Truth, Before It's Too Late

Vietnamese C-19 propaganda
poster. 

By definition, there's nowhere for a person who doesn't follow the crowd and submit to authority to feel at home. It makes for a lonely life, but I can't change who I am. 

I got to thinking about this in recent days, as I see the madness growing and deepening all around me. No one will read this, but it all seems worth saying nonetheless. 

First off, I decided to read some Philip K. Dick before bed last night, and I stumbled on the part of his exegesis where he argues that the universe is actually insane. We think in terms of a benevolent creator or an indifferent Tao, but what if the thing that gave rise to the universe actually was certifiably looney-tunes? It would really explain a lot, especially now as we see the world devolving into a profound mass psychosis. 

I've been working on stitching together my own theological worldview, since I deeply believe there's something "out there," yet organized religion has never really cut it for me. I gave it one more try recently with Eastern Orthodoxy, but I think I've gone as far as I can go. On one hand I find comfort in some of our world's religious traditions, but on the other hand they all leave me wanting in one way or another. They get it, but they don't get it. Which I guess is understandable, since I think whatever the Truth is, it lies far beyond the ability of our feeble mortal minds to ever fully grasp. 

Accordingly, I'm working in fits and starts on a book that lays out my own mash-up of theological ideas. Seems like I always have these Big Thoughts rolling around in my head. They've been in there for years, as I've tried to beat my own path up the Mountain of Truth. And the more I try to make the world's traditional paths -- i.e., organized religion -- work for me in some fashion, at least to the extent that I can use one of them as a foundation and spin off from there, the more I'm reminded of Jiddu Krishnamurti's wise words that truth is a pathless land. No one else can make the journey for you, and in fact it's quite foolish to think that anyone could. There's no avoiding putting in the hard work yourself. 

Relatedly, I plan to enroll in an online seminary next year, with the goal of receiving holy orders to become my own priest, with actual apostolic succession in the Old Catholic line through a laying-on-of-hands ceremony. By then I imagine I'll have managed to fully flesh out my own theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Whether anyone will listen, or come to my church, is another story, because I don't imagine my vision of things will resonate with many people. 

See, I keep coming back to a kind of binary system similar to that of the Gnostics, who I think dreamed up one of the best explanations for why the world is the way it is. It neatly explains the Problem of Evil and so many other things for which theologians have had no satisafctory answers down through the ages. My thought, similar to that of the Gnostics, is that most of us have been fooled, by the Great Deceiver himself, into confusing the diabolical for the holy. And boy, after doing a PowerPoint on Islam for my kiddo, believe me, I'm more convinced than ever. Where the Old Testament merely relates stories to us about a malevolent God who commanded his armies to kill everyone, rip open the bellies of the pregnant women, dash their babies on the rocks, and keep the virgins for themselves, the Quran literally commands the reader to commit these kinds of atrocities himself, against all the indifels who won't submit to Allah. It's truly horrifying.

Among the reimagined scriptures that will pepper my book, there will undoubtedly be a verse that goes something like this:

Thereupon Satan, having posed as the Almighty, went to a place of many warring tribes, and, disguising himself as an angel, he told the greatest of all lies to a man taking rest in a cave. These lies united the myriad warring tribes as a single great warring tribe, and they sowed chaos throughout the world in the name of their God, and Satan roared with laughter as the people called it a religion of peace. 

At least for today, I took some solace in the words of the great medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, who speaks for those of us who have never been content to live by others' truths, religious or otherwise: 

We cannot live in a world that is not our own,
 In a world that is interpreted for us by others.
 An interpreted world is not a home.
 Part of the terror is to take back our own listening,
 To use our own voice,
 To see our own light.

When you think about it, it's kind of the 12th-century equivalent of saying "Kill your TV."

It's scary to step out on your own and have the courage to not live life the way others expect of you. You pay a price for nonconformity, often a steep one. But, paradoxically, I think it's the only way you'll ever find true peace. And maybe at the end of it all, the world will actually look slightly less insane.

Either way, the alternative -- a world where safety and conformity smother freedom and choice -- is clearly untenable.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has for years been talking about the growing culture of safetyism, where every threat is exaggerated and we become more and more afraid to take risks. Seatbelt laws, safe spaces, and trigger warnings are all examples, as are coddled kids whose parents force them to live in a bubble where no perceived harm can ever come to them. 

The state of our current world is the end result of the overwrought hysteria of safetyism. Faced with a virus that the overwhelming majority of people will survive, we have mandated everything from porous masks that do nothing to getting a shot as a condition of continued employment. And now we're reverting to show-your-papers Germany, circa 1943, just to gain access to public events and places. Maybe there will an "Unvaccinated Only" lunch counter segregated out for the untouchables, or maybe you won't be let in at all. But that's where we're heading, and we're doing it at a breakneck pace.

This can only happen when we let fear override our critical thinking and turn over our lives to a tiny cabal of propagandists with lots of guns and money.

The lesson we never seem to learn is that whether it’s a government, a religion, or a multinational corporation, concentrating power in the hands of a few almost always ends poorly. The rights and freedoms of the many are restricted in favor of the few who hold the reins of power. They do it using fear and the threat of punishment. And it works because humans have a hardwired tribal instinct. The average person has a job and friends and social obligations. So most people don't want to be the one who steps out of line and risks alienation. They might hate the conditions they live in, but staying quiet and conforming is much easier and carries little social cost. Just ask Jesus, Gandhi, or Dr. King what it costs to stick your neck out. The tribal leaders leave you alone if you don’t rock the boat. Fear is a powerful motivator, and people in power understand this all too well.

What they fear most is the day when the people come to the realization that we outnumber them. Massively. And that's why they work so hard to divide us, to lessen the chance that we'll ever unite in common cause against them, cast off our shackles, and finally become free people with free minds and free wills.

This, in a nutshell, is why I'm an anarchist. I'm just fed up with everybody's bullshit. That goes for institutional powers as well as for those who empower them by constantly rolling over and exposing their bellies -- and then having the audacity to blame our problems on the people who didn't obediently submit.

But I struggle even to find common ground with others who call themselves anarchists. A lot of them, far too many for my liking, think Marx was just misunderstood and his policies misapplied. And the rest, especially those from the liberatarian wing, labor under the false assumption that government is the sole threat to our self-determination.

Religion, for one, controls a lot of people. Some might say the world would be better off without religion. But I'm not so sure, because people will always fill their religious impulses with something. I don't think religion is inherently bad, so long as we use it to discover our place and ponder our origins in the face of a vast universe. Instead, the religious tend to either hand over their brains wholesale to their priests and pastors, or they let the teachings of their holy books fill them with self-righteousness and hate. The whole point is to tame our egos, not sacrifice our critical thought processes.

Far more powerful, and to me far more worrisome, are today's multinational business interests. Corporations should exist primarily to serve human needs, not to enrich their executives and their shareholders on the backs of what amounts to slave labor in the sweatshops of far-flung dictatorships. Nor should they be able to wield their power to control or compel social or political behavior, especially when it's done at the behest of a government that uses corporations to enact its will by proxy. "Private companies can do whatever they want," goes the tired mantra, but the problem is, whether it's a CEO or your governor enacting a restrictive mandate, you're being oppressed either way. But even if we accept the capitalist apologetics of that argument, then companies should be small and powerless enough that if they do whatever they want, their actions would have no large-scale societal consequence.

Then there are our political institutions. This one is simple: Governments should exist at the smallest and most local level possible -- if they exist at all.

That's the world I want to live in. And I doubt that I'll ever see it. In fact, I think there's a good chance I'll live out the remainder of my life as a prisoner in my own home, looking out my window at a world gone mad. I refuse to submit to this insanity just so I can earn a permission slip to exercise what should be my own inherent freedoms.

If somebody time-warped to the present day from, say, a decade ago, I think he would be baffled at just how easily the entire planet can be propagandized into obedience and submission, and then programmed to blame the people who refuse to follow the script. We're upending our entire way of life over a bug that has more than a 98% survival rate. We're treating as an existential crisis an illness that generates mild to no symptoms in the overwhelming majority of people who contract it. We're being programmed to wear masks with air gaps and with pores 20 to 30 times larger than the virus itself, and then demonizing those who point out the plain fact that masking a healthy person is like ordering people to wear garlic necklaces to ward off vampires -- i.e., rank superstition. We're redifining herd immunity as mass vaccination, ignoring the obvious fact that our bodies generate their own natural immunities. The sky is falling, the sky is falling, and it all truly blows my mind. Either critical thought is in even shorter supply than I ever imagined, or fear really is that powerful of a motivator. Maybe it's both.  

Times like this are exactly why we've taught our child to always question what authority figures tell her to do -- to examine the facts, and to say no even if she's the only one doing it. I'm glad we live where we do, in a pocket of de facto resistance. But I fear the noose will tighten and the propaganda will become so relentless that there will eventually be nowhere left to go.

Whether that happens is up to us. Only we can save ourselves. 

What's in a Name?

This was something I wrote as a Facebook Note -- essentially a blogging function that's been discontinued -- back on Dec. 1, 2010, before either this blog or my daughter was born. I thought the post was lost for good, but I was able to unearth it recently. So I'm reproducing it here, in honor of Miranda Penelope's 10th birthday. And since I think of Eggshells as, essentially, my writing legacy, I wanted to preserve it here in case the archived Facebook version eventually vanishes for good.

Lori and I are thinking about having a kid. (Don't break out the cigars yet; nothing has happened.) Out of all the things I could be thinking about -- prenatal health, things to prepare around the house before the birth, how to change a diaper -- I've been fairly obsessed over names. This is why I work with words for a living. They fascinate me.

Even more fascinating to me are the current naming trends. Looking around online at a lot of baby-naming sites, I've been struck by several things.

• A lot of people are influenced by pop culture. Isabella and Jacob? Hello, Twilight.
• "Aden" names seem really popular: Aiden, Jayden, Hayden, Brayden, Cayden.
• Androgynous names are apparently in vogue, too: Taylor, Jordan, Riley. I even see Peyton mentioned as a girl's name. Am I the only one who thinks of Peyton Manning when I hear that name?
• For many, the notion of giving your child a "unique" name appears to consist of taking one of the names from the Top 100 list and mangling the spelling. This baffles me. You can spell it Emmaleygh if you want, but your girl is still "Emily" when someone speaks her name. And all you've done is made her life difficult, having to always spell and explain her name to people.
• Brooklyn? Really? Will she have a brother named Manhattan?
• People either don't know or don't care that patronyms are totally inappropriate for a girl. The "son" in "Madison" means just that -- "son," not "daughter." Same for the seemingly popular "Mackenzie" (or "Mickinzi" or "Mykynzee" or various other butcherings). "Mc" and "Mac" mean "son of." If Johnny Cash were still around, he could write a sequel to "A Boy Named Sue" -- "A Girl Named Mackenzie." And I guess people missed the point in the movie Splash: When the mermaid decided she wanted to be called Madison, the joke was that it was such a terrible, unfit name for a woman.

That last point is one that really galls me. Words mean things. Before you stick your kid with a name, wouldn't you take the time to research what it means?

Consider "Adrian," if you will. (Even if you don't want to, I'm going to consider it anyway.) "Adrian" has a Latin origin. It means "from Hadria," a town in northern Italy named after the Adriatic Sea. The town most likely got its name from the dark-colored sands along the shores. "Ater" is Latin for "black." That's how, in turn, the name "Adrian" also came to mean "dark one." Suddenly sounds a lot more sinister, doesn't it? That's probably why it was chosen as the name of Rosemary's baby. If you've never seen the movie of the same name, the short version is that Rosemary's son, Adrian, is literally the spawn of Satan.

Contrast that with my middle name, "Michael," which means, rhetorically, "Who is like God?" Well, the Dark One sure ain't, I can tell you that much. So my name is, at best, an inherent contradiction, and at worst, an affirmation that I am far from grace. Like I said, you need to think about these things when naming your kids.

It's even worse in my case, because my biological mother deliberately chose my name, knowing full well the connotations. She literally named me after Rosemary's baby because she hated my biological father so much. To her, I was the spawn of Satan. Further, my middle name is legally spelled not "Michael" but "Mikel." My biological dad's name was Michael, and the nearly illiterate misspelling "Mikel" was, I'm sure, an attempt to humiliate my dad. All my bio-mom ever said was that she named me after my dad, but I think the subtext is clear. Someone in my family (I don't remember who) once tried to tell me "Mikel" was the French spelling. Nuh-uh. That would be "Michel." I took four years of French in high school.

I know this is probably more than you ever wanted to know about me and my fucked-up family and childhood, but I bring it up to make a point: Don't be cruel to your children when you're naming them. If you have an ax to grind with someone, take it out on someone else, not your innocent-bystander kids.

And for anyone who's interested, my bio-mom was a drug-abusing, child-abusing, suicidal schizophrenic who gave me up for adoption to her own parents when I was about a year old, because she was completely incapable of raising me. She eventually died choking on her own vomit, after overdosing on prescription drugs. I've only met my bio-dad once. He took off when I was just a baby, and I've never blamed him for it. But all my attempts to reach him ever since our one meeting have, sadly, gone unanswered.

Anyway, when it comes to baby names, here's what I know Lori and I are not doing:

• Using an androgynous name. It's a pain in the ass not having people know whether the person they're calling or e-mailing is a man or a woman. Don't you hate it when you're applying for a job and the contact person is, for example, Jamie Smith? And you can't address the person as "Dear Mr. Smith" or "Dear Ms. Smith," because you don't know which one is right? I've dealt with that all my life. I've gotten lots of mail over the years addressed to "Ms. Adrian Rush." (I even once got an invitation to try out for the Miss Teen Michigan pageant. I should have shown up for the tryouts. That would have been a hoot.) Even worse, people frequently misspell my name "Adrienne" or "Adrianne" -- EVEN WHEN THEY KNOW I'M A GUY. It makes me feel bad for all the Jordans and Taylors in the world. They're both fine names, but they're bound to cause a lot of confusion.
• Using a trendy name. Despite my own love-hate relationship with my name, it was nice to always be the only Adrian, while there were always three or four Johns or Chads or Jennys or Julies in my classrooms. Today, classrooms are probably full of Ethans and Avas. (And Eethyns and Ayhvahs.) When thinking of names, I'm trying to steer clear of ones on the Top 100 lists. If the name isn't in the Social Security Administration's annual top 1,000, even better.
• Using a virtue name. I can already feel the irony of having a boy named Justice who gets in trouble with the law. And I'm sure a 16-year-old girl named Chastity can come up with lots of creative ways to rebel against her name.
• Similarly, using a name associated with a single religion. What if a boy named Christian decides to become a Buddhist or an atheist? What if a girl named Dharma wants to become a Catholic social worker?

What we do want to do is give a child a name that he or she will be proud of, and that stands out -- but not in a bad way. Lori says her mom always wanted a grandson named Michael, but I'm going back and forth about that name. For one, it's my own middle name, and as I've mentioned, I have issues with my name. For another, it's so plain. There are millions of Michaels in the world. And finally, it's a Biblical name. I'm not really big on saddling a kid with a name from the Judeo-Christian tradition. My hardcore agnosticism and my issues with many Christians (not Christianity, and not Christ himself, and not all Christians) make it hard for me to want to identify with it in any way.

I also want to give a child a name that's not only cute for a kid, but also suitable for an adult. I understand the temptation to name a cute little girl some adorable little doll-like name, like Kayleey Breeanne, but you're not just naming a cute little girl. You're also naming a grown woman who will one day have her own life and will have to live with that name forever. You're naming someone who will someday have to put her name on a resume and be taken seriously in the professional world. One good test I saw on a baby-naming site was to put your baby name in a context like this: "Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States, [name]." Would anyone take Kayleey Breeanne seriously as a doctor or a lawyer? These are all things to think about.

The other thing I'd like to do is give a kid more than one middle name. My hope is that it turns out to be a simple way to make the kid feel extra special. "You only have three names. I have four!"

But most importantly, I want the name to tell a story. And a positive story at that. I think (based on what I've seen online) that some parents just pick random strings of words that they think sound good together. A child deserves better than that. Sure, the name has to be pleasing to the ears (and believe me, I've tried plenty of combinations and considered the flow of the syllables and accents), but it should be special, too, whether the name itself has meaning or whether you're naming the child in honor of someone else.

Lori has focused on the boys' names, while I've been thinking a lot about girls' names. (Yeah, we're a strange couple. We'll both be happy with whatever we have, but I think she'd prefer a boy, while I know I'd prefer a girl.) The boys' names that she's mentioned she likes are:

• Trevor
• Sebastian
• Damian

I like "Gordon" and "Wyatt," too, and I've also been tossing around the idea of "Henry David" after my favorite writer, but I'm fine with her choices. I was thinking of "Ian" until I realized that it meant "God is gracious" (meh) and that it's merely the Scottish version of John (a fine name, to be sure, but there are already enough Johns in the world).

So let's see how this plays out:

Trevor: Two origins. In Welsh, it comes from a combination of "tref" (settlement) and "mawr" (large). So "Trevor" in Welsh is, essentially, "the man from the big town." In Gaelic, the name derives from the name "Ó Treabhair," or "descendant of Treabhair," which means "industrious" or "prudent." Given my Irish heritage (my birth surname was Dooley), I think I'll go with the Gaelic meaning.

Sebastian: From the Latin "Sebastianus," meaning "from Sebaste," a town in Asia Minor (near modern-day Mersin in Turkey). Sebaste, in turn, came from the Greek "sebastos," meaning "venerable."

Damian: From the Greek "damazo," meaning "to conquer, master, overcome, or tame." Yes, I'm well aware that the name "Damian" has its own horror-movie connections. But I don't think that many people make the connection anymore, and we certainly aren't picking out the name to deliberately brand the child as a demon, the way my name was picked out for me.

So Trevor Sebastian Damian is (in one way of looking at it) the prudent, venerable conqueror. Sounds like something that Sun-tzu himself would have approved of.

You suppose Trevor Sebastian Damian Henry David Rush is too much? Actually, I kinda like it. The prudent, venerable conqueror and beloved home ruler. I'll talk it over with Lori.

Now for the girls' names. I'll confess right up front that I adore the name Gretchen. Absolutely love it. Always have. I think it's a beautiful, classic, and woefully underused name. Feminine, yet strong. It's a pet form of "Margaret" in German and means "pearl." But Lori hates the name just as much! So strike that one off the list.

I've been thinking long and hard about girls' names, because so many of them come off sounding so treacly-sweet that they nearly turn me diabetic. How do you come up with a name that's pretty and feminine yet wouldn't make a woman sound like she's a perpetual 3-year-old with little ribbons in her hair? At first I thought it might be best to stick with a traditional name, but the only one I could come up with that I really liked was Anna Marie Theresa. And it automatically had two strikes against it: Anna was my bio-mom's name (technically it was Ruth Anna, but she went by her middle name), and "Anna Marie Theresa" also happens to be the exact name of an ex-girlfriend. So yeah, maybe I can just set that one aside.

Poking around on the baby-name sites, I first came across "Sabine." Not in the SSA's top 1,000 names. A Latin location name ("from Sabine"). Great backstory to the name, too. The Sabine women were abducted by first-generation Roman men to populate their new city. A war ensued, and it ended when the Sabine women threw themselves between the Romans and their own husbands on the battlefield. What a great name to bestow on a girl, suggesting such strength and fearlessness!

But then I got into Greek names. Jackpot. Selena, Iris, Irene, Helena, Lydia, Norah, Phoebe … I loved them all. So I decided to focus on Greek names to narrow down my options. OK, so my surname is English in origin, but there's not much I can do about that.

I finally have it down to my three favorites:

• Lyra
• Zoe
• Penelope

Lyra: A variant of "lyris," in reference to the lyre, a handheld stringed instrument. You see it in lots of pictures from antiquity, and in scenes depicting ancient Greece. I'm a music nut, so having a musical name would be perfect for a girl of mine, yet it's not an ordinary name like "Melody" or "Harmony." Best of all, it's never (best I can tell) been in the SSA's list of the top 1,000 names. I hadn't thought of this name since Lori and I listened to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy on audiobook. Lyra was the heroine of the story.

Zoe: Greek for "life." I can't think of a more positive name to give someone. I love names that start with "Z" sounds, too. My only concern is that the name has become very trendy. At first, I was thinking of Zoe as a first name, but I'm not sure I can bring myself to do it when it's in the Top 100 baby-name list year after year and apparently climbing. So it'll have to suffice as a middle name. I still haven't decided whether to stick a "y" on the end, yet, either. I just know there will be some people who think it rhymes with "Joe." But on the other hand, I don't want to cater to the illiterate. And as much as I like the lovely Zooey Deschanel, that's just going way too far. The double "o" in her name makes me think of the place where you go to see the animals, not of an affirmation of life.

Penelope: The faithful wife of Odysseus, who fends off suitors by saying she can't remarry until she finishes weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law. Every night, she unweaves the shroud and is eventually reunited with her husband. The name seems to be of uncertain origin: The most likely explanation I've read is that it's a combination of the Greek "pene" (thread) and "lepo" (to unroll). So Penelope is the cunning weaver -- faithful and resourceful. I've also read that "penelops" is a reference to a bird in Greek -- seemingly a type of duck that rescued Penelope as a baby. But a majority of baby-name sites simply define "Penelope" as "weaver." That cuts to the chase pretty nicely.

Thus, Lyra Zoe Penelope is (in reverse order) a weaver of life and music.

I tried to think of names that would be tease-proof in school, but kids are both creative and cruel, and they'll find a way to make fun of almost any name. Trevor could have tremors, and Lyra could be a liar. The only big alteration I made to my plans was to abandon one of my favorite name combinations: Zoe Irene Penelope Rush ("weaver of life and peace"). Initials: ZIPR. That might be fine if the girl grew up to be a track star who zips around the course, but I'd rather not saddle a kid with the nickname "zipper."

I'm sensitive to this stuff because I got crap coming and going with my name growing up.

Adrian:

• "Yo Adrian!" (Every person who says it thinks he's the first one to ever come up with it.)
• When HIV was discovered, I became "Aids." That was fun.
• "A drain." From people who apparently can't spell.

Rush:

• "Russian." (Harmless, but stupid.)
• "Do you listen to Rush Limbaugh?" (No.)
• "I'll bet Rush is one of your favorite bands, isn't it?" (Well, actually, yes. That was just a happy coincidence.)
• "What's the hurry?" (Thank you, I'm here all week. Please tip your waitress.)

My last name either comes from people who lived near rushes (a.k.a. cattails) or who weaved rushes for a living. Not much I can do about that, though. Before Lori and I got married, we tossed around the idea of both taking my birth name, Dooley, but when my bio-dad turned out to be kind of a disappointment, we scrapped that idea. And she never liked her maiden name, in part because people mispronounced it all the time. So our kids are stuck with "Rush."

The most I can do is not name a boy Howard Evan Arthur Dennis Rush. I'll let you think about that one for a moment.

Off the (Communion) Rails: The Legacy of Catholic "Relevance"

I’m a Generation X cradle Catholic, born a little more than a year after the church introduced a tremendous overhaul of its Mass. I grew up not knowing that the church had ever offered anything other than the so-called Novus Ordo Mass, instituted by Pope Paul VI following the Second Vatican Council. So it never struck me as odd that the priest faced the congregation, like a master of ceremonies, and that we engaged in a kind of prayerful back-and-forth conversation with him as the Mass unfolded.

But there were also things that nagged at me as I got older, like contemporary Protestant-ish hymns led by guitar-strumming cantors, or vapid homilies from the priests who seemed to want to be your buddy more than a mature spiritual leader. Those things seemed to cheapen what was supposed to be a reverent and worshipful event.

It didn’t help that my parents were the first Catholic converts in their respective families. Their Protestant backgrounds often shone through quite brightly, such that I had as much exposure to evangelical theology and attitudes as I did to actual Catholic catechesis. My mom, for example, watched the fire-and-brimstone preachers doing their thing every day on our local religious channel. They’d stalk the stages of their auditoriums, railing about the end times, the need to be saved, and the demonic forces that held the world in their grasp — like, well, the Catholic church.

Meanwhile, a Pentecostal-like movement swept through our local Catholic church. We had a “Charismatic Catholic” prayer meeting every week in the church basement. I went along with my dad and godfather a few times. People would lay hands on the sick and speak in tongues, not all that different from the faith-healing revivals Mom watched on TV.

If that seems confusing to imagine in a Catholic context, well, those were confusing times. I was part of the first generation of kids to be catechized in the Novus Ordo era. The church had undergone a massive shift practically overnight, and I don’t think most people quite had their feet under them just yet, least of all those who were expected to instruct us in the faith. Because what was the faith now? I understood not much beyond the basics of Christianity, mostly things to do with Christmas and Easter. And I was expected to prepare for participation in the sacraments — including confession, communion, and eventually confirmation — yet I can’t remember having anyone ever explain to me, in a meaningful way, what those sacraments meant, least of all in a Catholic setting.

Nor did anyone ever really talk about rosaries, novenas, or any other kind of private devotions that might have helped me understand how Catholicism was supposed to be different from any other Christian church. The nun who ran the day-to-day things at our church gave me a rosary following my confirmation, but I had no idea what to do with it. No one had ever shown me how to pray a rosary.

Long story short, practically everything I know about Catholicism, I had to learn through my own independent study. Doing so triggered my lifelong fascination with theological systems and why people believe what they believe. But even though something good came out of it, I never should have had to figure things out on my own. And I know I’m not the only one from the post-Vatican II years to have had such an experience.

In fact, looking back, I wonder how much of my poor catechetical formation was the fault of my parents, and how much was the fault of the reforms of the Catholic church itself. There’s no question that the post-Vatican II church failed me, and the more I read about those early years of transition, the more I’m inclined to think that that was a feature of the new church, and not a bug.

To understand what I’m talking about, I recommend the book Work of Human Hands. In it, the late Fr. Anthony Cekada, a sedevacantist Catholic priest, lays out a damning case, citing their own words, that the Vatican II reformers deliberately set out to strip away everything mystical and transcendent about the Mass, with the intention of orienting it toward man rather than the divine. In essence, the Catholic Mass was flipped on its head. The Novus Ordo was designed to be everything the Latin Mass wasn’t: pedestrian, contemporary, casual, and focused on the worldly, with many ancient prayers removed and wordings revised to make the Mass more ecumenical — that is, to make it more appealing to non-Catholics and to remove anything that made God sound too harsh or that demanded too much discipline, humility, and sacrifice from the people in the pews.  

To be blunt, that’s what the modernists behind Vatican II appeared to have wanted all along. Modernists had been itching to “update” the Catholic church since the 19th century, and they finally got their way with Vatican II and the new Mass. Defenders of the post-Vatican II church often argue that the council never intended the wholesale reforms that we ended up with. Be that as it may, the modernists used the council as a springboard for the reforms they had sought all along. They infiltrated the church leading up to the council and hijacked it afterwards.

It’s still shocking to me, for example, to know that one Orthodox observer at Vatican II was told by a Catholic theologian that “we’ll get rid of Mariology very soon” — as if reverence for the Mother of God was an embarrassment that the church needed to dispose of. That comment sadly embodies the spirit of Vatican II and its attendant fallout, whether that was the original intention of the council or not. In the aftermath of the council, rosaries fell into disuse and were often actively discouraged. Churches stopped saying the Stations of the Cross, and in some cases the plaques that signified the stations were removed from the walls. I can even remember going to churches that had shoved their Mary statues into closets, as if to confirm what that Vatican II theologian had said about the coming end of Mariology.

Whether the purpose of all this was to deliberately undermine everything distinctive about Catholicism or just to make ecumenical gestures toward other faith traditions, the result was the same: The Catholic church was effectively de-Catholicized. Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that it was Protestantized. 

I didn’t realize it until many years later, because I had no context in which to place the changes, but the result of all these reforms was essentially the creation of a new church, one that was now only nominally Catholic. Even if the sedevacantists and other critics are wrong and the modernists had no nefarious motives, even if all the modernists set out to do was to play nice with other faith traditions, the result was that they still watered down everything it meant to be a Catholic. Catholicism was no longer something set apart, something distinct from Protestant culture. It was now just another item on the menu.

Some of the worst post-council excesses were eventually reined in under Pope John Paul II, with his deep devotion to the Blessed Mother, but by then the damage was done. So how did the excesses come to pass in the first place? Well, modernists had long argued that the old Latin Mass the church had used for centuries left the people unengaged in their own faith. The Mass needed to be performed in the local language, they said, and there needed to be more opportunities for active lay participation. For perspective, the old Mass was centered on the priest’s offer of sacrifice to God at the altar. The priest would generally speak the Mass inaudibly, in Latin, with the responses limited mostly to the altar servers. The congregation’s role was mainly to prayerfully observe the priest’s sacrifice of the Mass, and to receive the Eucharist at the appointed time.

Moreover, the priest stood facing the altar and crucifix — i.e., away from the congregation. I don’t like to characterize his posture as “having his back to the people,” as is often said, because I think that conveys a misunderstanding of what was happening. It’s not that the priest turned his back on the people; it’s that he was facing in the same direction as everyone else, leading us to Christ, out front and in control, like a holy bus driver of sorts.   

Reformers were right that there were problems to be addressed. For example, I’ve heard complaints from old-time Catholics that priests were rushing through the recitation of the Mass rather than treating it with due reverence, while many in the pews paid little attention to what was happening at the altar, perhaps praying a rosary or looking at their watches or just zoning out, in effect doing little more than receiving communion. It seemed that something needed to be done and that everyone shared in the blame. Priests needed to treat the Mass with greater dignity, and the congregation needed to be more actively involved.

But instead of making a few needed tweaks, the modernists decided to swat a fly with a sledgehammer.

There was no reason, for instance, to rip out the communion rails in the churches following Vatican II. Having recipients kneel in the presence of Christ, as the priest administered the host, conveyed the holiness inherent in the exchange. In stark contrast, I grew up lacking a deep understanding of the Eucharist. I’m sure someone along the way explained to me the church’s teaching on transubstantiation, but it was certainly never emphasized. I stood to receive communion, only to have the person at the front of the line plink the host into my palm like it was a poker chip. Sometimes the distributor was the priest; other times it was a layperson. It didn’t seem to matter who gave you communion, or in what manner.

The point is that the church’s “reforms” stripped the reception of the Body of Christ of its holiness. In the old Mass, only the priest’s consecrated hands could touch the host; kneeling recipients would receive it on their tongues. Now? The priest dishes out plates of wafers to a small army of lay assistants, and reception on the tongue from the priest is now the exception. Reception in the hand is now expected in many churches, such that you’ll often have some layperson’s unconsecrated hands pressing a wafer into the recipient’s equally unconsecrated hands.

Accordingly, I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that in the 50 years since the Novus Ordo replaced the old Latin Mass, most American Catholics, according to a survey, don’t even know that the church teaches that the bread and wine at communion become the Body and Blood of Christ. Priests don’t emphasize it, catechism teachers gloss over it, and the casualness with which communion is carried out gives people no sense of the importance of what they’re actually receiving.

Just the fact that the communion lines are long while the confession lines are short speaks to the disconnect. It wasn’t until I attended a Latin Mass as an adult that I even heard a priest remind everyone that you must be in a state of grace to receive the Eucharist. In other words, if you have anything to confess, you need to go to confession first. Then, and only then, are you properly disposed to receive communion. I’ve never once been to a Novus Ordo Mass where the priest said that.

Nor does fasting before communion really exist anymore. In the old days, you couldn’t eat or drink anything after midnight of the day you were to receive communion. Now you have to fast for just a measly hour beforehand — and considering Mass lasts about an hour, you pretty much only have to stop eating once you open the church doors. Not really a sacrifice or a hardship.

The problems with the modern church extend far beyond the Eucharist. Another poll reveals that a majority of American Catholics disagree with their church regarding contraception, divorce, abortion, same-sex relations, cohabitation, even having kids out of wedlock. Again, it’s hard to think that the lax modernist attitudes within the church’s leadership haven’t significantly contributed to the situation, especially when you contrast Novus Ordo-goers with those who attend the Latin Mass. 

What I mean is that the way each group does Mass speaks volumes: At the Novus Ordo, a relaxed, almost lackadaisical, casualness in both dress and posture is the order of the day; while folks at the Latin Mass will be dressed to the nines in their Sunday best, women veiled and wearing dresses, as everyone sits, stands, and kneels as one, with disciplined military precision, their attention quietly riveted on the priest. There couldn’t possibly be more of a contrast between the two Masses in the seriousness, gravity, reverence, and dignity with which the respective congregants approach their faith. And there does appear to be a direct correlation between outward appearance and inward adherence to the faith.

Those who prefer the Latin Mass are, perhaps unsurprisingly, very well catechized in what their church teaches. In fact, the differences between them and those who go to the Novus Ordo are so stark, according to one survey — 51% Novus Ordo approval of abortion rights, for example, versus 1% in the Latin Mass — that you might think you’re looking at two completely different churches. And in a sense, you are.

And that’s precisely why arch-modernist Pope Francis wants to shut down the Latin Mass. The same pope who has shown so much tolerance for those out of line with traditional church teaching, the same pope who once famously said “Who am I to judge,” has laid down the hammer on the old Mass. Not because of some defect in the old Mass, but because it holds up a condemnatory mirror to what modernism has wrought on the church, on its members, and on Catholic belief.

Francis didn’t frame it that way, of course. His excuse for placing extreme restrictions on saying the Latin Mass is that it has become a tool of division within the church. Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had removed most restrictions on saying the Latin Mass, correctly pointing out that it had never been banned following Vatican II. So German bishops can be in near-schism with the policies they’re promoting in their churches, the pope can bring a pagan idol into St. Peter’s Basilica, he does next to nothing about the sex-abuse scandals, and he privately praises pro-LGBT activism among the clergy — but letting a small minority of theologically sound Catholics celebrate the same reverent Mass that most of the saints attended for hundreds of years? Well, that’s just a bridge too far. 

And Francis isn’t messing around: His own Vatican secretary of state, his right-hand man in Rome, is reported to have said before the edict came down that “we must put an end to this Mass forever.” So much for the pastoral and compassionate pope who wanted to reach out to people on the margins. But then that’s the way “liberal” “tolerance” usually seems to play out, isn’t it?

Now, I’m not saying I’m 100% on board with the Latin Mass contingent. Nor am I 100% opposed to some of the reforms that Vatican II and the new Mass brought about. But at a minimum, it seems that if you’re going to be part of an institution, you ought to be in line with its teachings. Francis and the modernists, in thumbing their nose at tradition, are turning the Catholic church into something it was never intended to be. The Latin Mass crowd, meanwhile, embodies what it means to live an upright Catholic life, but Francis is correct in suggesting that the old Mass itself has become as much a political statement and an obsession with proper form as it is an embrace of tradition. Francis called out the rigid spirit of those who attend the old Mass — and he’s not entirely wrong to do so.

In fairness, I have no doubt that many, if not most, who attend the Latin Mass are there for good reasons — they find spiritual truth there, it enriches their lives, they see it as a more authentic expression of Catholicism, and so on. But I’ve been to enough Latin Masses and spoken to enough people who attend them regularly to know that there is a triumphal, even Pharisaical spirit among some of the congregants. I do understand why they feel that way, and I have some degree of sympathy for their viewpoint. But I’m not so sure it’s a healthy religious attitude. Standing up for what’s right is one thing, but closed-minded fundamentalism is another. Nor does doctrinal correctness mean much if you lack the fruits of the spirit.

Where I completely agree with the Latin Mass folks, however, is in their rejection of relevance. The Catholic church is in the state it’s in because of its seemingly endless desire to tinker and innovate. Ever since its unilateral addition of the filioque to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed a millennium ago has it been this way. It can’t leave well enough alone. And indeed, Vatican II, for all its purported noble intentions, ended up being, more than anything else, an expression of how to make the church “relevant” to the modern world. In doing so, it has succeeded only in watching its Novus Ordo churches empty out. Its desire for relevance has made it even more irrelevant, in a culture that continues to be openly hostile to its very existence.  

This is one of the biggest reasons Orthodoxy looks more and more attractive to me. Do you think the Orthodox care if they’re “relevant”? If a church is secure in its faith, then the faith and its traditional teachings ought to speak for themselves. There should be no need to cater to popular trends, or to the popular desire to be entertained at church, or to dumb down the faith in any way. Eternal truths, after all, are just that. The culture ought to conform to the church, rather than the other way around.

Development of doctrine, within reason, is one thing. Sometimes the church needs to elaborate on its existing truths to address unforeseen situations. But to invent new dogmas out of whole cloth, like papal infallibility, is quite another. Some wags have suggested that a Catholic from 200 years ago would be a heretic in today’s church. That’s probably true, and that points to a significant problem that the Catholic church needs to come to grips with.  

There’s a reason, after all, that large young families are flocking to the Latin Mass: They want a firm spiritual footing. They’re yearning for goodness, truth, and beauty in a modernist world that only feeds them cynicism, relativism, and confusion. They want something bigger than themselves to hold on to in a culture filled with narcissistic meaninglessness. Francis and his modernism are the problem, not the solution. You can’t have a banal Mass with contemporary music in an ugly modern church building and expect to instill deep faith in people. A casual Mass and casual beliefs feed on each other.   

I’ve always struggled to believe, and I’ll always wonder whether that was because my catechism was so bad and the Catholic churches I grew up in were so… un-Catholic. Don’t get me wrong: the Novus Ordo can be done well. I love the new Mass in big cathedrals with choirs and organs and beautiful, inspiring architecture. The transcendent beauty of such places always seems to affect the reverence with which the Mass itself is conducted.

But the Catholic church isn’t interested in reverence and tradition so much anymore, and the rot goes all the way to the top. The church is so completely infiltrated with modernist heretics (yes, I said it) that I’m not sure it can be saved. I know the church has survived a lot of horrible popes in the past, but the entire edifice seems to be crumbling now. The church no longer holds the massive institutional power it once did. It’s now on the outside looking in, being run by people who want the church to mimic a depraved culture, while the depraved culture just continues to heap scorn on it. 

Meanwhile, too many Catholics are ignorant of their own faith and too accommodating of cultural trends that run counter to traditional church teachings. When I wanted to learn what I hadn’t been taught about Catholicism, I put in the effort myself. Most people won’t do that, if they ever figure out there's a problem with their religious education at all, and the faith will suffer for it more and more with each passing generation. Those who care enough to agitate for change — mainly the Latin Mass-goers and a handful of aging bishops — don’t appear to hold enough power to right the ship.

The church will inevitably continue to lose its institutional power in this post-Christian world, and those who embrace the traditional faith are slowly coming to grips with the reality that they’ve lost the culture wars. Thus is the church entering a period of countercultural witness. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. After all, before the church allied with Emperor Constantine, it spoke truth to power as a rebellious outsider, a continuous thorn in the side of the system. It now has the opportunity to return to that vital role, if it can manage to purge itself of its enemies within and still survive. 

Pope Benedict predicted this future for the church. He believed that the church, falling out of cultural and political favor, would shrink dramatically, but that the church that remained would emerge purified and still able to bear witness to the truth of the faith. This is a little of what he said:

From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge, a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so will she lose many of her social privileges. […] 

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently, but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man's home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

Want to guess when he spoke those words? When he was still just Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, in a radio address in 1969 — a few short years after the conclusion of Vatican II, and on the eve of the rollout of the Novus Ordo Mass that would replace the 400-year-old Traditional Latin Mass.

He saw what was coming. And his successor in Rome is only helping it all come true.

(Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino, on Unsplash.)

Dipping a Toe Into Orthodoxy

I attended my first Orthodox catechism yesterday. A group of around 10 of us met in the church’s old temple. That was where I attended Divine Liturgy at that church for the first time, more than a year ago. The community has since grown so much that Sunday services had to be relocated to the much larger dining hall. Nice problem to have, when you consider how church attendance is in sharp decline in so many places. It seems that people are yearning for the certainty of strong faith in these tumultuous times. The Orthodox, by their very nature of being Orthodox, certainly provide that firm foundation. Even better, they manage to do it without being overly zealous, scripture-flinging fundamentalists. I’ve had my fill of that for one lifetime.

The deacon who led the class gave a good overview of Orthodox soteriology. Similar to the Catholics, the Orthodox see salvation as an ongoing process, not as a one-and-done intellectual assent that happens during the emotional peak of an altar call. When folks of a one-and-done mindset ask if someone is “saved,” Catholics often reply: “I was saved, I am being saved, and I hope to be saved.” See, for example, Ephesians 2:8, Philippians 2:12, and Romans 13:11. 

The Gospels themselves lean toward a past-present-future basis of salvation. When Christ affirms, for example, that loving God and neighbor is the key to gaining eternal life (Luke 10:25-29), he didn't mean just offering up a single act of love: You have to keep working at it. (And no, that doesn't equate to “salvation by works,” as Protestants so often claim of Catholicism. It just means that being a follower of Christ entails walking in his footsteps and following his example.)  

There is a difference, though, between the Catholic and Orthodox views on soteriology. Having been on both sides of the discussion, I’ll try to offer a fair summary.

In Catholicism, your continuing salvation is dependent on your ongoing fidelity to the church and the frequent reception of the sacraments – in other words, being a “good Catholic” in obedience to Rome. Catholics once took the notion of extra ecclesiam nulla sallas – no salvation outside the church – to mean that you couldn’t be saved outside the Catholic church at all. The church has backed off that stance in recent years, but Pope Boniface VIII declared unequivocally in a 1302 proclamation that “it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.” More than a century later, coming out of the Council of Florence, Rome was again adamant that “none of those existing outside the Catholic church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but that they will go into the ‘eternal fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels.’”  

It was also decreed at the Council of Florence that the soul of any person with unconfessed mortal sin on his soul at the time of death, or who was not relieved of Original Sin through baptism, would be sentenced to eternal torture in hell. So get yourself baptized and confess to your priest before it’s too late.

In Orthodoxy, the church itself is not the source of your salvation. Rather, the church helps orient you toward salvation. Through active participation in the life of the church – which includes reception of the sacraments – we become more like Christ through an ongoing process of purification that leads us through this life and beyond. That’s the heart of theosis – becoming by grace what God is by nature, in the words of St. Athanasius of Alexandria.

Of course, being partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), the very heart of theosis, is only possible if you believe that man is inherently good, the crown of God’s creation, made in his image, with the potential to become as pure as we were before the Fall. As the deacon at our class illustrated, the concept of theosis has never been popular in the West because of the negative – often extremely so – Protestant view of humanity. Luther, of course, famously referred to human beings as dunghills whose inherent ugliness can only be hidden from view by the pure white snow of God’s grace. We never actually stop being dunghills; our filth is merely covered so God can bear to look upon us. Thus, we never really become cleansed; God’s grace is imputed but never infused. Our inner nature never changes. Consequently, we never progress toward anything better. 

Luther probably adopted this view because of his own extreme scrupulosity. He would spend hours compiling lists of his sins and going to daily confession, only to find no relief from his view of himself as nothing but human waste. His solution was to proclaim that all humans could not be otherwise, that his warped conception of himself must hold true for all people in their fallen human state. Spurred on by his (reasonable) opposition to the selling of indulgences, he went on to launch a religious reformation that held his deeply skewed view of humanity at its core.

The total depravity of mankind, of course, is one of the five points of Calvinism – which therefore has just as dim of a view of the nature of humanity as Luther did.

All of this has always seemed to me like an ungrateful slap in the face of the God who proclaimed that his creation was good.

There was, however, one point in our discussion that flung me back into my own personal struggles with the idea of the “omni-God”: omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent. Our deacon went through Calvin’s view of predestination, the bleak notion that no matter what you do, now matter how holy of a life you might live, God has already chosen whether you’ll be saved or damned. 

I’ve always found that idea abhorrent. Yet my struggle to reconcile free will with divine omniscience makes it difficult for me to reject the idea outright.

Here’s what I mean: If one of God’s attributes is omniscience, then he always knows what choices we’ll make before we even make them. If I’m presented with Options A, B, and C, an omniscient God always knew I’d pick, say, Option B. So do we really have free will, or is it just an illusion? Were Adam and Eve always destined to eat of the tree? Are we just puppets on strings?

I struggle to work through the implications of where this idea leads. It doesn’t seem to leave us much agency, and while it’s not the same thing Calvin proposed, it more or less gets us to the same place, in that we don’t have much say in the fate of our souls if the scripts of our lives have already been written. And it seems to reduce “free will” to a stark binary choice of doing things God’s way or being cast into eternal torment, which is less a choice and more an ultimatum.

I won’t press the point any further for now, except to note that I also struggle with the tension between divine omnipotence and omnibenevolence on one hand, and suffering and evil on the other. Coming to grips with the omni-God in the context of the world we live in is not a new dilemma for me, as I’ve documented here recently. But it is something I need to sit with before I can make any significant progress on this tentative journey and press deeper into Orthodoxy.

(Photo by Nuta Sorokina, from Pexels.)

This Is Why I Hate Humanity

I made the mistake today of checking in on the news.

It seems Maskapalooza is making a comeback, because a surgical mask will totally stop a virus that’s about 1/30th the size of the pores in the mask, never minding the massive air gaps. And it’s all the fault of those who have the audacity not to submit to having an experimental, potentially cytotoxic vaccine injected into their bodies, to protect themselves from a virus with a 98.3% survival rate. It’s a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” after all. And apparently, immune systems don’t exist.

And “tolerant” “liberals” from Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s former HHS secretary, to CNN’s ever-reliable nitwit Don Lemon think that all the filthy unvaccinated swine shouldn’t be able to shop, work, go to ball games, or have access to their own kids. Because, you know, a virus with a 98.3% survival rate is an existential threat. And even if you're vaccinated, you still have to fear the Great Unwashed, for some reason.

Tyrannical lunatics like Gavin Newsom are even starting in with the painfully predictable “you don't have a right to drink and drive” crap. Because letting a drunk person get behind the wheel of a hunk of metal and glass moving at a high rate of speed is totally the same thing as putting already vaccinated people at risk of getting a virus with a 98.3% survival rate.

All this guilt, fear, and shame, over nothing. The only thing these control freaks do is stir up unhinged people like this, who, like so many today, lets his emotion override any semblance of common sense:

Maybe we should just reintroduce “coloreds-only” sections in public places and turn them into “unvaccinated-only” areas. That way, the vaxxed — who for some reason are being told to mask again, even though they’re supposed to be protected from the Black Plague of Our Times — can be protected from the untouchables. Or maybe we should bring back yellow stars and internment camps. That would be neat.

The current news cycle is deliberately propagandizing the public into fearing and scapegoating “the unvaccinated.” Don’t believe you’re being manipulated? Try this on for size:

Bad, bad noncompliant freethinkers. If the world can’t get back to normal, it’s all their fault. 

And it seems like most of the public is lapping it right up, being played like a fiddle, just the way they did last year when all this nonsense began.

Seeing all that Chicken Little garbage today was quite enough for me to remember why I stopped paying attention to current events in the first place. Christ, if we devolve back into mandates and lockdowns again, I think I’m going to lose my freaking mind. And if we do, it has nothing to do with the unvaccinated and everything to do with all the clueless morons who are incapable of turning off their damn TVs and thinking for themselves.

I’m just dumbfounded. I’ve always felt like I don’t belong in this world, but that sense of alienation has reached new heights over the past year and a half. Fifty years, and I still can’t figure people out. Fortunately, I have a kindred spirit in my wife, who says she must be an alien with amnesia: She can’t remember what planet she came from, but she knows she sure doesn’t fit in here. Just two lost souls living in a fishbowl, as Pink Floyd put it. Thank goodness for her, because I don’t think I could have survived all this irrational madness without her.

Humans suck. 

The Pope Who Hated His Own Church

You've probably heard that Pope Francis has decided to crack down on the Traditional Latin Mass. Ironically -- or perhaps not -- Francis' decision came on the anniversary, to the exact day, of the beginning of the Great Schism of 1054, when Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida excommunicated Michael Cerularius, the patriarch of Constantinople. The split would never be healed, and Catholicism and Orthodoxy remain today as two separate expressions of the Christian faith. 

The Schism was the end result of years of disagreements -- theological, cultural, and otherwise -- between the Eastern and Western churches. It's difficult to come to any other conclusion than that the West was the primary antagonist in the matter, with its insistence of papal primacy over all of Christendom, rather than having the bishop of Rome acting as first among equals. Orthodoxy continues its practice of collegiality among its bishops and patriarchs, while Catholicism continues to hand down its unilateral edicts from one man in the Vatican.

The latest papal edict is the reversal of the liberalization of saying the Latin Mass. Francis' predecessor, Benedict XVI, in arguing that the Latin Mass had never been abrogated following the Second Vatican Council that modernized the Catholic church, officially authorized its continued use. That was a big deal for traditionalist Catholics who had long bristled at the reforms that had come out of Vatican II. Up until that time, the Mass was said in Latin all over the world, as the priest, facing the crucifix and the altar, recited the Mass mostly inaudibly, with only the altar boys making responses. At high Masses, a choir would sing some of the prayers, but churchgoers quietly prayed with their rosaries or reverently followed along in their missals with side-by-side translations. That was how the Mass was said for 400 years, ever since the Roman Missal of 1570 established the Tridentine Mass. 

The reforms of Vatican II were an attempt to bring the ancient church into the modern world. The Mass would now be said in the local language, the priest was turned around to face the congregation, the people were given the responses once limited to the altar boys, and the altar rails where the faithful once knelt to receive communion were torn out, in favor of having people walk up to the priest (or a layperson authorized to assist) to receive the Body of Christ. 

lifesitenews.com

Some traditionalists contend that Vatican II was a conspiratorial attempt to undermine the church, with its heavy focus on ecumenism and the active involvement of Protestant "observers" at the council. And while I don't know enough to take a stance on those claims one way or another, it's undeniable that the church lost its sense of reverence and holiness by making the Mass more mundane, for lack of a better word. 

The Latin Mass was transcendent in its beauty. It directed attention toward, and promoted contemplation of, the Almighty. It was all oriented toward offering a sacrifice to God. After Vatican II, the Mass became a contemporary participatory event between priest and congregation, almost like a dialogue between the two. It was now this-worldly, rather than otherworldly, with the Eucharist itself reduced to little more than a picnic. The inevitable result of all this was that God was no longer center stage at Mass. At its worst, the modern Mass became a sort of entertainment directed at the individual. I'm not talking evangelical Protestant rock-concert-level entertainment, mind you, but in comparison with the old Latin Mass, the contrast was still quite shocking. The script got flipped.

I was born after Vatican II, so I only ever experienced the so-called Novus Ordo Mass growing up. Some of the Masses I can remember from my youth were garishly awful, with guitar-strumming lectors leading us in contemporary hymns that smacked of feel-good me-and-Jesus Protestantism. These Masses reflected the church buildings themselves, generally modern and ugly, devoid of transcendent beauty. I wouldn't discover the Latin Mass till many years later. But once I did, I could see a night-and-day difference between the old church and the new one, and I was left to wonder how the Catholic church could have ever cast such splendor and beauty aside -- and why. 

I'm not saying Novus Ordo Masses can't be done well. But with the relaxed attitude of the new Mass came relaxed attitudes toward Catholic theology, to the point where priests were delivering the equivalent of pep-rally sermons, designed not to offend and often reducing a rich, centuries-old theological tradition to "be nice to each other." Little wonder, then, that catechesis is so bad these days. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that a mind-boggling 69% of Catholics believe that the bread and wine at communion are merely symbols of Christ, as opposed to the church's teaching that the bread and wine become the actual Body and Blood of Christ. Of those surveyed, 45% didn't even know what the church's stance was.

That kind of failure to even understand the basic tenets of your own religion comes from the top down. Either priests aren't learning what they need to learn in seminary, or they aren't bothering to make sure their congregations are well catechized. I know all this stuff because I constantly asked questions in my younger days, wanting to understand exactly what I was supposed to believe. But I shouldn't have had to force the issue. Some adult in my life, some priest, some catechism teacher, should have been able to sufficiently explain everything to me. Instead, to the best of my recollection, no one ever gave me more than the bare-bones basics -- pretty much enough to get through my first confession, first communion, and confirmation. 

If that's typical of the contemporary state of Catholic teaching, and the Pew poll suggests it is, then is it any wonder why the churches are emptying out? If you can't make an argument for why people should stay in the church, then they're not going to stay.

But you know where Catholic church attendance wasn't sagging? In Latin Mass attendance. A 2019-2020 survey of 1,779 Catholics found that 98% of those aged 18 to 39 who attended Latin Mass were weekly attendees. In comparison, Gallup reports that just 22% of those aged 20 to 29 who attended the Novus Ordo were weekly churchgoers. 

FSSP coat of arms

In addition, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP), an organization of priests and seminarians who train specifically to say the Latin Mass, have consistently reported exponential growth in their parishes. Some have doubled in size in recent years. Here in North Idaho, our Latin Mass parish, St. Joan of Arc, saw a nearly 30% increase in its numbers as of 2019. St. Joan outgrew its original building and had to construct a larger one. And that's not unusual: "At some of our Masses we will have as many as maybe 350 people, and so not everyone fits, and so people are actually sitting outside the doors, looking in through the open doors," said a San Diego priest. Another priest said that his church added a fourth Mass when 200 people were coming to worship, When it did, another 200 showed up.

I've seen that kind of attendance myself. St. Joan offers five Masses on Sundays, and on the occasions I've attended, the church was packed. The same goes for our Immaculate Conception parish run by the Latin Mass-observing Society of St. Pius X, where I've seen the overflow standing in the narthex, all the way back to the front door. (More on the SSPX in a moment.)

Religious vocations are on the rise in the FSSP and SSPX, too, where the rest of the church continues to see a decline in men pursuing the priesthood.

So, of course, given the popularity of the Latin Mass, the natural thing for Pope Francis to do would be to strangle the life out of it. 

Bishops must now approve of the use of the Latin Mass within their jurisdictions, and some will inevitably say no. Any priests ordained after Francis' edict will have to get express permission to celebrate the Latin Mass from their bishops, who in turn will have to get Vatican approval. Latin Masses can no longer be said in parish churches, no new pro-Latin Mass groups can be fomed within those parishes, and those churches can't create new parishes for the sole purpose of saying the Latin Mass. In other words, any Novus Ordo churches that offer the occasional Latin Mass can no longer do so, but those Masses can't be moved to a new parish, either. The only option for them is to either move to a non-church building or cease to exist. Pretty much the only place the Latin Mass can be said now is in parishes that already exclusively say the Latin Mass. 

That means Latin-only FSSP churches like our local St. Joan of Arc are safe -- for now. But our bishop now has the power to pull the plug on the church whenever he wants. And given his seeming antipathy toward anything resembling Latin Mass practice in the Novus Ordo, it wouldn't surprise me to see him bring the hammer down now that he can. 

So why is the "liberal," "tolerant," "who-am-I-to-judge" Pope Francis doing this? According to him, too many people who populate the Latin Mass are doing so in a show of rejection of Vatican II. But rather than take the growth of the Latin Mass as a sign that maybe the church needs to fix some glaring problems, Francis would rather suppress the movement that points to those very problems. 

I know that some people who prefer the Latin Mass are rigid, unbending, and uncharitable, and that they use the Mass as a weapon to express a kind of pharisaical self-righteousness to the world, and by extension to the modern church. I get that. But Francis is using that minority of people as an excuse to attack the entire edifice of the Latin Mass. 

My sense is that most of those who attend the old Mass just want an authentic Catholicity where theology still means something, and they can't find it in the modern church. Those who attend the Latin Mass are well catechized. Unlike those in the Pew poll, they know very well what the church believes and is supposed to teach. They see that the modern church is failing to pass on the faith, and so they've sought out a place that still resembles the Catholic church of centuries past. 

The old Mass is also appealing to young people with large families. Go to any Latin Mass (while you still can), and by and large, that's what you'll see. And they're there because they're looking for meaning in a chaotic, narcissistic, and nihilistic modernist world that leaves them adrift, directionless. The boomers who foisted their ugly, empty modernism on us seem incapable of comprehending the mess they've made, or why young folks are rejecting it.

You can count the 84-year-old pope among the clueless of his generation. And he will have none of your dissent if you force the issue by way of the Latin Mass. In fact, Francis' right-hand man in the Vatican, Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, is reported to have said, shortly before Francis' edict, that "we must put an end to this Mass forever." Meanwhile, Archbishop Arthur Roche, who in May Francis appointed as the new prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, was said to have gloated that Benedict XVI's Latin Mass liberalizations were nearly dead and that "we're going to give the power back to the bishops on this, but especially not to the conservative bishops." Roche was known as an opponent of the Latin Mass at the time of his appointment, and there was concern back then that Francis' decision to pick him meant bad news for the future of the Latin Mass. Turns out that concern was well founded.

So Francis can't be bothered to do much of anything about the sex-abuse scandal in the church. He has largely stood by while the German church pursues policies sharply at odds with Catholic teaching. He threw faithful underground Catholics under the bus in striking a secret deal with Communist China regarding control of the church there. He attacked church leaders who thought people should still be able to come to church and receive the sacraments during the COVID outbreak. He smeared people who opposed useless mask mandates. He says that those who refuse an experimental vaccine for a virus with an astronomically high survival rate are engaging in "suicidal denialism." Hell, so far he hasn't even spoken a word about the spate of church vandalisms and arsons in Canada. But if the only thing you want to do is worship in a manner that promotes transcendental beauty and upholds Catholic tradition and theology, well, that's just going too far.

It's hard to imagine that history will remember Francis' pontificate fondly. In attempting to promote a view of the church as kinder and more Christ-like, he has succeeded only in forcing a rigid leftist idealism on the church that is frequently at odds with the church's own mission and theology. But it's also no surprise that we've reached this point, as the theological drift ever since Vatican II was always heading precisely in this direction -- and it's hard not to think that where we've ended up was the plan all along. For instance, I recently read of an Orthodox priest who was told, as he sat in on Vatican II, that "we'll get rid of Mariology very soon," as if the Mother of God was a problem the church needed to rectify. And indeed, I can remember well the Catholic churches of the '70s and '80s that shoved their Mary statues into closets, in their wrongheaded attempts to play nice with Mary-hating Protestants and the Christian-hating modern world. 

Now the church is reaping what it has so foolishly sown. In its obsessive desire to be "relevant" in a world hostile to its very existence, the Catholic church is in danger of meaning nothing to no one. And anyone who wants to engage in meaningful Catholic worship is being told to go away. 

SSPX insignia

I imagine many will. The SSPX, which has a somewhat tenuous relationship with the Vatican, performs exclusively Latin Masses, like the FSSP does. I wouldn't be surprised if the SSPX sees an influx of traditionalists as a result of Francis' edict, nor would I be surprised if the Vatican decides to cut ties with the SSPX to make a point. If that happens, I would expect an uptick in sedevacantism -- the Catholic movement that has rejected the legitimacy of every papacy since John XXIII's, on the grounds that Vatican II, begun on his watch, was an illegitimate reform of the church. (I can't say the sedes are wrong.)

In light of the crackdown on the Latin Mass, it's notable that Cardinal Humbert's excommunication that triggered the Great Schism came about because Patriarch Cerularius resisted Vatican pressure to make the Greek churches in southern Italy conform to Latin practices. If they didn't, they would be forcefully shut down. Sound familiar? History does indeed repeat itself, and the arrogance of Rome remains the same. 

In any event, Francis' attack on the Latin Mass came two days before I decided to attend a nearby Orthodox church. The Eastern church on the other side of the Schism has held an interest for me for many years now, but the only headway I ever made into Orthodoxy was to join an Eastern Catholic church, which is Orthodox in its liturgy while remaining in communion with Rome. I made that move in part because I just wasn't ready to make a clean break from Catholicism, and because I could still receive the sacraments. Not so in Orthodoxy, where I'd have to go through a lengthy catechumenate process first. 

Now I think I'm ready to get off the fence and make the leap, as I can no longer in good conscience remain in a church (even if I'm only nominally "Catholic" at this point) led by a man who shows such utter contempt for its own teachings. Never in a million years would an Orthodox patriarch attack his own church's Divine Liturgy and demand its suppression. Nor will the Orthodox church ever need to call a council to modernize its method of worship. Orthodoxy doesn't conform to the world; rather, one conforms oneself to Orthodoxy. 

Indeed, there's something to be said for a church that prioritizes the eternal and unchanging truths of its ancient teachings over bowing to the compromise of modernist "relevance," that doesn't water down its theology for the sake of getting along, and that doesn't practice the "development of doctrine" that has landed the Catholic church in this spot in the first place. Orthodoxy sticks to its guns, come hell or high water. (Especially hell.) 

To some extent, I don't have a dog in this hunt. My ongoing interest in Christianity has more to do with a love for Mary and the Sacred Feminine, a need for something transcendent to hold on to in these maddening times, and an allegiance with the values of Western Civilization than with any need to feel "saved" from something. It's just that, being raised Catholic, I can appreciate the benefits of following the Catholic faith, so long as one's faith is well formed. Vatican II and the Novus Ordo Mass clearly haven't encouraged the development of well-formed Catholics, and they really can't, because the modern Mass doesn't take us out of ourselves. It's earthbound and puts humans instead of God at the center of worship. 

And that's exactly why the modernists are attacking the Latin Mass: It holds a mirror up to their own failures, and to the destruction they've wrought on the faith. The very existence of the Latin Mass calls them out. 

It's not surprising that those who have infiltrated the leadership positions of the Catholic church are doing exactly what their woke leftist political contemporaries are doing: making phony calls to "unity" that are really just cloaked demands to do things their way. They're authoritarian to the bone, and they're hell-bent on destroying the traditions and institutions of the Western world. That includes traditional, devout expressions of an ancient faith. 

Meanwhile, we can all see the consequences of a narcissism-run-amok world where universally agreed-upon truths to hold society together are growing scarcer by the day. At some point, there won't be enough cultural glue left, and it will all come crashing down. Deluded leftists think that won't happen. As they always do, they think their utopian fantasies will work this time.

One can only hope it's not too late to save us all, including the church, from their destruction.