Conservatives Hate America.

Captain America, that is.

In a desperate effort to revive partisan zeal among the critically stupid, a few political activists have once again resorted to their favorite half-wit dodge: the so-called "culture wars." We're sure you remember how well this worked for Dan Quayle when he bravely took on a sitcom protagonist.

The current target, however, is especially ironic: Captain America. Created in the run-up to Word War II as a super-patriotic superhero fully employed by and answerable to the US Army, Captain America fought spies stateside, the Wehrmacht in Europe, Commies during the Cold War (although -- nerd alert! -- those stories aren't what we call "canonical." Seriously, we talk that way). Since then, he has also taken on his share of extraterrestrials, terrorists and at least one evil psychiatrist. (To be honest, though, it is still mostly about Nazis.) He is, as comic-book readers are assured every month, "the living embodiment of the American spirit."

So what went wrong?

Apparently, in one recent issue of his comic-book, Cap showed up at a protest rally. And although the object of the protest didn't feature in the storyline, Cap says it's an "anti-tax thing," and his black partner the Falcon mutters something about "angry white people." The protesters are holding up signs with anti-Tea Party slogans. Well, imagine the hoo-ha, not to mention the folderol.

See, Fox News picked it up, and got some juicy quotes from the usual suspects. nationwide Tea Party Coalition board member calls the dig "juvenile," claims Marvel is making supervillains out of patriotic Americans, and that this will all hurt Marvel's brand. (Hey, did you know there's a Nationwide Tea Party Coalition? Or that they have a board? You do now, because Fox just found a way to give them some free publicity). And so the comics industry is part of a "systematic" effort to undermine the supposed movement -- because who knows unlikely conspiracies better than a bunch of guys whose professional lives were determined by watching the X-Files?

Now, according to the the official line from Marvel Comics boss Joe Quesada, this was all a big accident. A letterer (that is, not the fellow who wrote or drew the strip, but another artist responsible specifically for drawing or pasting letters into blank spaces) thew in some anti-Tea Party slogans on the signs. An apology is offered, and the signs will be altered in future reprints. (Aside to other nerds: but of course Quesda is the genius who arranged for Peter and MJ to not only end their marriage but kill their own children, so we aren't sure whether we can believe anything he says).

Well, maybe. But let's also be honest. Comic books, especially superhero comic books, have often had a political perspective. In the 1930s and 40s, they offered Jewish kids (like Captain America's own creators, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, not to mention the creators of Superman, Batman and especially the Spirit) a chance to do some home-front anti-Fascist propaganda, while also indulging in fantasies of power and assimilation. As Jules Feiffer says, it's no accident those heroes all had prep-school names like Bruce Wayne and Steve Rogers.

By the early 1970s, when the Egg's pop-culture department first began reporting, the agenda has changed a bit. You might have expected Russians to figure more frequently as bad guys than they actually did, for example. But a generation of writers formed by the Civil Rights movement were often quick to make their villains white supremacists (anybody remember the Sons of the Serpent, a Klan-knockoff that was actually led by a black man?), or Strangelove-level representatives of the military-industrial complex (Thunderbolt Ross). On the other side of the aisle, though, there were the Red Chinese, who featured frequently as villains, not mention crude racial stereotypes.

Zooming forward a bit, we get Frank Miller, whose revolutionary 1980s take on Batman is often accused of having a rightist law-and-order spin, which supposedly bled over into the last movie. Whether that's true or not, his Sparta-vs-Persian epic 300 certainly struck the modern Iranians as a bit of Persia-bashing. All of which brings us to Ed Brubaker, the current Captain America writer and, as Fox News demonstrates, a liberal. It wouldn't surprise us a bit if Brubaker's politics occasionally came through in his writing, although we have never noticed this ourselves.

But why shouldn't it? Does anybody think that the other characteristics of the guys who put comics together don't come through? Because if you doubt that they are overwhelmingly male, straight, and a little repressed, you haven't noticed the costumes on the ladies. Writers and artists, even the ones who write and draw juvenile fantasies of power, have no particular reason, apart from a commercial one, to filter out their own humanity, which includes among other things their feelings about modern society.

And, nota bene, a political perspective is not the same as a political agenda. In forty-plus years of reading comics, we can't recall ever being told how to vote. (Apart from electing Howard the Duck and rejecting Lex Luthor in their respective bids for the presidency). On the other hand, churches all over America have spent years distributing "voter guides," intended to tell the faithful exactly who supports their own vision of "Christian values." So on balance, we have to say that American comics are demonstrably less political than American churches.

Despite Quesda's [quite possibly bogus] apology, neither the hoo-ha nor the folderol has ended. (Complete coverage from i09, for the seriously geeky). A couple of liberals have dissected the recent Civil War storyline and determined that Cap was actually on the side of anarchy against social order. A very strange blogger named Warner Todd Huston has made the breathtakingly original argument that comics aren't high art. He's entirely correct, at least regarding superhero comics, although as a conservative he ought to show more respect for business. We doubt the Middlemarch movie will earn 5% of Iron Man's opening weekend.)

Sarah Palin's Butt

... is apparently the feature most attractive to her core constituency.

Clicking through these interwebs (which, as another Alaskan pol memorably informed us, is really a series of tubes), we stumbled upon a site called Conservatives4Palin. Presumably, there are dozens of sites like this: strident, a bit silly, and aimed at the True Believers. It would be unremarkable except for one curious design feature:

The butt shot.

The site layout is attractive, and appears to be professionally designed -- especially the title graphic. The symbols are there: Alaska's rugged mountains, the pipeline which represents its supposed prosperity and business-friendliness (setting aside the environmental concerns), even the stars of Ursus Major.

And, naturally, the former governor's caboose.

Now, we're tempted to mutter half-seriously about the way Palin and her supporters have used her looks -- her body -- as a campaign tool. There is a bit of tawdriness to that, but it's easy to overstate for effect. Obama was caught topless in the surf, after all. And let's be honest. This isn't an especially provocative photo -- she's wearing what looks like a tweed skirt, the sort of attire that actually repels the male gaze in most cases, with an exception made only for those of us who have spent far too much time in academic settings. (We also think Volvos are cool, not to mention beige corduroy jackets with a little bulge where you put the pipe and tobacco.)

On balance, though, we don't think this is tawdry or exploitative. We just think it's weird.

Shouldn't they be showing us her face, smiling in defiance of the liberal media? Or with a jaw set grimly to show her intolerance of terrorists, urbanites and PETA? Or, if they actually want to avoid showing Palin's face, wouldn't the usual dodge be to insert a bald eagle, photographed while scavenging at an Alaskan landfill?

Maybe the idea is that she's looking proudly at Alaska itself, the state she governed for 2.5 years, before resigning. But doesn't that mean she's looking backward? Shouldn't she be turned to face forward, swaggering boldly out of the north to come and save us poor anemic Lower 48ers from our taxing and spending?

Or does P4C actually think that Palin's core constituency wants a candidate who is perpetually focused on her own past? That is, after all, one kind of conservatism. A bit of a disservice to Edmund Burke, but there you have it.

Why We Love Wikipedia

Sure, it is quirky and not always reliable.  The articles are often full of misinformation, or worse yet trivia that obscures the importance of a particular subject.  

But sometimes, that trivia is priceless.  For example, the Brittanica article on Elijah would never have told us this:

From 1974 to 1976 Philip K. Dick believed himself to be possessed by the spirit of Elijah.

Anybody need that for Sunday?

Cardinal Kasper Calls for a Shared Catechism

Shared, that is, among Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans, as well as Methodists and members of the Reformed churches.

Wow.  Seriously, people:  Wow.

This is the most interesting ecumenical proposal we have heard in years.  While challenging, it is achievable; and while it would be a remarkable intellectual effort, it would also be entirely practical. 

Of course, catechisms play different roles in different churches, and those roles aren't entirely compatible.  Among Lutherans, for example, our two catechisms are actually a doctrinal norm, providing an authoritative reading of Scripture.  Among Roman Catholics, the catechism is a handy textbook of doctrines that are normed by external documents, both Biblical and otherwise. Anglicans use theirs "as a point of departure for the teacher," although its presence in the BCP presumably gives it a normative function of some sort.

Still, when you boil it all down, they are teaching tools first, and confessions of faith second.  Those are the two natures of a catechism, almost by definition.  And what better what to demonstrate the true unity of the Church, which is so often difficult to discern, than by creating a shared teaching tool which lays out the things we hold in common?

It may be argued that the Lima Document already serves this function, and we suppose it does.  But it is also full of sections which seek to mediate differences, rather than affirming agreements -- we are thinking, for example, of the necessary even-handedness with regard to antipaedobaptist church bodies.

No, we think that an actual catechism -- a Q&A about the faith, describing what is shared by the great bulk of Western Christianity -- would be not only an immense ecumenical achievement, but also an immensely useful tool for parish education.  

The Best They Can Hope For

We spent some time today puzzling over a minor liturgical problem, viz., whether to observe the Feast of the Transfiguration this coming Sunday, according to the custom of our American church, or join our European hosts by refraining until August 6.  In the natural course of things, we googled the word "Transfiguration," and were hit with a blast of not-entirely-welcome nostalgia.

Pictured, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, is a photograph of a small and pretty church, located near the place where we were raised -- walking distance from our house, in fact, provided one possessed thighs suitably muscular to endure the purgatory that is Meads Mountain Road.  Originally a seasonal chapel for hotel guests, it continued long after the hotels died, first as an Episcopal chapel and then as ... well, we'll get to that.   We have passed it thousands of times, by car or (bragging here) on foot.  You would see it on your left as you headed toward the trailhead, the anarchist's print shop or, perhaps, the Buddhist monastery. (Ah, our golden youth.)

This church -- the Church of the Holy Transfiguration, or more commonly the Church on the Mount -- was tended for many years by an elderly cleric named William Henry Francis, although we cannot recall ever hearing him spoken of except by title, as "Father Francis."  As we did not then know his proper name, we did not know that he was, properly speaking, also the Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Old Catholic Church in America, a predecessor body to the Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe and the Americas.  Headquarters in New Jersey.

(By the way, our own house was far up another nearby road, and even though it was a clearly a modern construction, and not in the least ecclesiastical in appearance, an amusingly large number of tourists, misled by the sign with our family name, stopped in the driveway to inquire about Mass schedules.)

Now, this Fr. Francis was notorious for telling slightly-different versions of his own story, and we doubt that there is much truth to be known about him.  It seems that he had been a Benedictine monk in Waukegan before his ordination as priest and bishop.  It is extremely unlikely that he had married the Duke of Windsor, and no more so that he had performed services for "the Vanderbilts and others of their strata," as he claimed in a 1970 article in The Churchman.  But he did, as a matter of fact, receive into his church a retired Episcopal bishop of Arkansas who had been drummed out of the corps for publicly supporting Communism.  His background does seem to have been Anglican, and the Old Catholics had for some time been well-tolerated by the high-church Anglicans.  The rites of his parish seem to have had Prayer Book roots, and even today claim to be an easternized "Sarum" use.

Here is what we do know for sure:  he was popular with the long-haired young people who claimed Woodstock as the spiritual (and sometimes administrative) capital of their supposed nation.  Although made a fuss over not trusting anybody over thirty, they seem to have waived that rule for this one octogenarian.  They recognized, quite correctly, that he too was part of a despised subculture.

It is really all very sweet, in a cranky way.  "The Hippie Priest," and all that.  But beneath the surface, there is another story, both less romantic and less savory.  We have no details to share, but this little church isn't an entirely happy place, as we understand it.  (But then, in fairness, no place is entirely happy.)  Years ago, we heard gossip about an especially ugly power struggle.  Perhaps other readers will know more.

Beyond the parish, there is the bigger question of the church to which it is affiliated. This may be unfairly broad, but the Old Catholic movement, originally a principled liberal reaction against Vatican I, to which were later added a variety of renegades from Anglicanism and other church families, strikes us in its subsequent forms as a dodge for self-important poseurs.  

It sits nicely on a shelf beside the many Lutheran micro-denominations.  These are variously reported as anywhere from 28 in number to "over 100;" we have no idea how many there are, and we doubt anybody else does either.  But we do know that their clergy and, to a lesser extent their congregations, are often people who couldn't handle even the fairly modest requirements of the mother denomination:  don't sleep with your church members, for example.  Put up with meetings where nothing gets done, and learn to work and worship with people who share your creed but not your reading of it.  And all the other stuff that the rest of us do more or less easily, because we know that living in community, while difficult, is worthwhile.

So this little church that we remember from childhood, although a delightful place in many ways, is not something we would desire for ourselves, precisely because it is a retreat from true catholicism.  Even cranks need a home, and we are glad they have one.  But it is by nature a very small home, disconnected except in its own imagination from the rest of the neighborhood.  Schismatic clergy rarely sit at the table for ecumenical dialogues, because they bring to little to it.  An individual priest may do genuine ministry -- as well as anybody else or even better -- but it is arguable that his church (or "church") does not.

Yet such a small home, an ecclesiola extra ecclesiam,  is the best that our own schismatic Lutheran and Episcopalian friends can hope for, over the next few decades.  They break away, now, from well-established churches, with whom they can no longer live in community.  And what will become of them?  The answer, very likely, is nothing.  They will disappear into the same oblivion that has claimed most of their kind -- continuing to exist, to preach the Word and celebrate the sacraments, but to do so only locally, in isolation from the rest of Christianity.  

Oh, and About That Sports Bar

First, they make an excellent salad.  This is no small thing in a part of the world deeply committed to the rule of pork in its various forms, washed down with bland cheese and potent pickled cabbage.  "Salad" usually means a few slices of cucumber, off to the side.  It's good cucumber, to be sure, but it does middle-aged digestion no real favors.  So we have a short list of places that will sell us a big old American-style meal-sized salad.  And, defying all the stereotypes, the sports bar near church is near the top.

So we braved the unwelcome aroma of tobacco, and the only a bit more welcome glare of jumbo televisions, to sit in the sports bar, eating salad and reading the Tauchnitz Editions anthology of modern poetry from 1931.  (A favorite because it completely excludes the reprehensible Father Hopkins).

But jumbo televisions can be awfully distracting.  Not to mention educational.  Here's what we learned from one today:  that in the world of women's track and field, American competitors can be distinguished from their European sisters at a glance (even apart from the giveaway skin color).  The Americans are steroidally muscled, and wear businesslike spandex two-piece costumes, with what we're told are called boy-cut shorts.

The European women are slender, so slender that one wonders how they hope to run against the Yankee Amazons.  But what struck us most is that they have taken to competing in extremely small bikinis.  So small that the word "thong" passed our lips on more than one occasion.  During the long-jump, if memory serves.

We realize that to many readers this will seem offensively sexist, and we imagine that the indispensable Ms. Hogan will howl for our heads, but we feel bound by our Boy Scout oath to tell the truth:  track and field has just become a much more interesting sport for us.

After All, What's Funnier Than Premature Death?

Sorry for that obnoxious header.  But, truth be told, Father Anonymous has never given much thought to Rupert Brooke.   Oh, we read him for class, years ago, and then again inside a series of buses in Peru and Ecuador.  Both times, we saw what we had been instructed to see:  the legend of a beautiful and gifted young poet, born to travel in the most elite circles, cut down too soon by war.  A latter-day Sidney, yadda-yadda.

What we didn't see was his poem about the fish, pondering the secrets of death an immortality Fish say they have their stream or pond --

But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.

It goes on like this, and includes a distinctively piscine vision of Paradise:

Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found ....

Nor did we see the strange one about Old Vicarage in Grantchester.  He wrote it at a cafe in Berlin, so maybe it was just our mood, sitting in the Romanian sports bar this afternoon, eating a salad and watching women's track, but this struck us as one of the funniest poems we have read in years.  Oh, for my old Britannic home, it starts off , and you brace for the standard-issue patriotic stuff -- roses in the garden, punting on the Cam, this sceptr'd isle, some corner of a forgotten field that is forever England.  But then it goes brilliantly astray.  Because England is the best country, and Cambridge the best shire, but -- why Grantchester?  Here's why:

And of that district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.

And more and more like this.  The best part, for Egg readers, may be the clerical apparitions:

And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean…
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out ....

Here is our new goal for the afterlife.  Paradisal grubs are well and good for them what likes 'em, but we long to be ghosts on a vicarage lawn, dancing on lissom toes, and occasionally nodding to the dean.

So, Rupert Brooke, congratulations:  You're back on our list of readable poets from the Bad Century.  No Uncle Ez, to be sure, but you're better than that hack Wilfred Owen.

Well, They Do Paint Nice Pictures

There is a certain kind of Lutheran -- middle-aged, clerical, probably male and often, although by no means always, educated in St. Louis -- who has a sort of fetish for Orthodoxy and its trappings.  He wears a beard, maybe even a little ponytail, as a reminder that he is part of a distinctive counter-culture.  His office is appointed with a couple of icons (often hand-painted, perhaps even by himself).  On vacation last year, he fulfilled the lifelong dream of a pilgrimage to Mt. Athos.  He reads a good deal, is eager to talk about the Cappadocians and seems surprisingly familiar with the works of St. Maximus the Confessor.  At synod assemblies, or even in casual conversation, when faced with an unpalatable theological proposition he will take refuge behind a pious murmur to the effect that "I don't know how the East would feel about that," or even, "well, not without a true general council."  He's a nice guy, and probably a good pastor.

We can't take that guy seriously.

There are many reasons, the most pressing of which is that we are by our own nature and upbringing so thoroughly Latin.  Our vision of the Church, including its worship, its theology, and its life in the world, is irrevocably shaped by the traditions of Western Christianity.  (Give us "soberness and sense," every time and against all competitors).  And specifically, our understanding of Lutheranism, of what provoked its Confessions and how they should be read -- what they mean -- is rooted in the Latin experience.  Take that away, and we would need a different set of confessions.  We would be somebody else entirely.

This is, of course, Eastern Guy's whole point.  To him, our insistence on muttering the filioque is a sign of unreflective narrow-mindedness, a captivity to one small part of the Christian experience.  He was taught to think of Lutheranism as "an ecumenical proposal of dogma," and later intoxicated by the no-longer-new Finnish scholarship, which tries to connect Luther's understanding of faith to the Eastern idea of theosis.  (All good stuff, by the way, in its own place).  Either because of an unshakeable cultural no-popery, or because he was disappointed by the the seeming closure of papal ecumenism under JPII, he is unable to settle for the usual high-church Protestant romanizing.  And so he has spent decades fantasizing about a different kind of Lutheranism, one which bypasses Latinity (much less Germanness!) and connects directly to what he likes to think of as the Old Church, an "authentic" Christianity unmessed-with by the Middle Ages or Enlightenment.

And there's the second reason we can't take Eastern Guy seriously.  His vision of Orthodoxy, largely the same one with which Orthodoxy tries to grace its dimmest adherents, is patently false.  It is as false as the idea that Roman Catholicism is "essentially" unchanged from the days of Peter, or that Lutherans "follow" Luther.  (Worst-case scenario:  Baptists who say that their version of Christianity is older than Jesus, because it descends directly from John the [First] Baptist.) Sophisticated believers of all stripes know this is just silly, but Eastern Guy has allowed his own sophistication to falter, just in this one case.

And it's easy for him to get away with this because, honestly, he lives in a place where the Orthodox churches are few and small and play virtually no role in public life.  By making friends with a few priests, taking a monastery retreat now and then, he is able to welcome the stranger and sojourner in the land, and enjoy the frisson of exploring a foreign church culture, without ever confronting its depths.

For this fellow, we heartily recommend a few months as part of the once-dominant, now-dwindling Latin minority in what has become an overwhelmingly Orthodox nation.  Because the situation is quite different.  The Eastern churches, when they are in the majority, relish the opportunity to work hand-in-glove with the civil authorities, and to link religion with nationalism, in a way that most of us thought went out with Franco or with Muller's Deutsche Christen. If you don't believe us, check out Putin's Russia.  ("Essentially, the Orthodox Church is one of the only Soviet institutions that has never been reformed," said one priest, who declined to be identified", runs one cheery line in a Telegraph article).

And then there's ecumenism.  Now, we are the first to admit that the ongoing discussion of Christian unity has made for some empty gestures and hollow symbolism.  But we consider the discussion important enough to continue, even at risk of a little hugger-mugger.  

It was our honor to organize the kick-off service for a local observance of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  To our surprise, this is a pretty big event in our area -- at least among the Latins.  And "Latin" here is used loosely, to include Reformation Protestants (Lutheran, Reformed, and Unitarians in the distinctive Transylvanian sense), post-Reformation "Neo-Protestants" (Baptists, Charismatics), as well as the obvious Roman and Greek Catholics.  We were especially delighted, in fact, to meet the local Unitarian pastor and the Jesuit provincial, much less to see them pray side-by-side.

But the big dogs, the church to which the vast majority of our neighbors belong, was not represented at this or any other service.  Although it was once open to some modest interconfessional activity, that door was apparently slammed shut a few years back.  And we do mean slammed.  Priests and laypeople working for the church are strictly forbidden to participate in any official capacity in non-Orthodox events.  More than that, the church decided to celebrate the Week of Prayer in its own distinctive way, by issuing a statement.  It's linked above, in Romanian, but we'll translate -- very roughly -- a few of the highlights:

WEEK OF ECUMENICAL PRAYER -- or seven days of the Antichrist's Babylon?

... an exercise which wants to be charismatic, but which has one goal:  to unite the Orthodox Church with its catholic, protestant and pagan "brothers."  During this whole period, they make solemn processions through the street, which promote the deception of unity; they have alternative services with litanies and prayers in the Orthodox churches, then in catholic and protestant places, winding up with sermons either by heretics to the orthodox, or by Orthodox priests to the heretics.

Jolly  stuff, huh?  And then there's this:

ONLY ORTHODOXY IS THE TRUE CHURCH

.... One fears that [literally, "from sin"] the protestant and roman-catholic cults do not give heed that the Church of Christ already exists, and that it exists beyond them.  These are not "churches"!

You get the idea, right?  The word "heretic" is thrown around pretty freely, too.  That's always helpful.

We don't mean to be all that hard on the Orthodox.  Like the rest of us, from the Papacy to the smallest dirt-road snake-handling conventicle, they have the right to make and enforce their own church rules, and to mark off their church boundaries as carefully as they want. Ultimately, we all suspect one another of heresy, loosely defined, or we wouldn't be separated.   But geeze, guys -- do ya have to be so nasty about it?  And more to the point, what good is served by this sort of nastiness -- except to beat up on minorities, both ethnic and religious, as means to encourage adhesion within your own body?  To which we say:  Ick!

Anyway, we're just saying:  Eastern Guy should hang in our hood for a while.  We'll see how long that pony-tail lasts.

Three-Card Monte: The Redirected Benevolence Version

Susan Hogan, of whom we had never heard until recently, is now indispensable.  Where the rest of us just shoot off our mouths willy-nilly, her blog, Pretty Good Lutherans, brings actual journalism skills to bear on the church and its life.

She recently directed our attention to the not-yet-final minutes of a Southeastern Synod Council meeting, posted on the web.  Normally, you can't pay us enough to read synod council minutes, but it is cold outside, the nearest bookstore is far away, and its wares are mostly in Romanian.  (Oh, there's some Hungarian too, but we're saying mostly.)

Anyhoo, two related bits caught our attention:

1.  That a few SES congregations are designating their benevolence "for SES salaries and expenses only."  That is, they are saying "don't send our money to that lousy no-good-gay-loving national church."

This creates a conundrum, both ethical and otherwise, for the synod.  Typically, synods give very generously to the national church; in our own, the number is (if we recall correctly; fact-checks are welcome) well over 40% of receipts.  In times like these, that is not an easy commitment to meet.  It reflects a genuine sense that the national church's work is important, and that the synods have a duty to support it.  

So what do you do when your own donors tell you not to share their money?  To violate your own sense of duty?

The SES has apparently decided to keep the money, so that it will -- ahem -- avoid alienating the congregations in question.  It is easy to criticize, but then again, were we (God forbid!) a bishop, we would be working overtime not to give offense these days.

2.  At the same time, synods have been forced to cut back on their giving to the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary.  No surprise; in the SES, congregational giving is down a whopping 15% from last year, and the budget shortfall looks to break $150,000.   You have to cut back somewhere, right?

But here's the wrinkle.  Congregations unhappy not only with the national church but also with the synod (which is, after all, an arm of the evil octopus), and which have directed their benevolence giving away from either, have offered to redirect it into the grimly depleted coffers of the seminary.  (Which is, it seems to us, also an arm of the same evil octopus, but then again, we've always thought the benevolence-redirection crowd were prone to curious self-delusion).

And LTSS, though its president Marcus Miller, has refused their money.  

He does not take the moral high road here, at least not in the minutes.  He says that he has refused the money because he doesn't want to alienate the synods.  We aren't sure the synods would have a right to be alienated if he took it; the money was supposed to go to them in the first place, but they were supposed to give it to the seminary. We expect most people would just say, "Whew.  Glad it got there, even if I don't like the path it took."  Of course, public preening over this decision would have been unseemly, not to mention alienating in the extreme to people who had chosen differently.

Either way, we expect you'll agree:  it was a conundrum, wasn't it?

If You're Preaching Tomorrow

... particularly on the Epistle, you might consider this thought:

George Herbert (1593-1633)

Love (III)

              1Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

              2      Guilty of dust and sin.

              3But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

              4      From my first entrance in,

              5Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

              6      If I lack'd anything.

              7"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";

              8      Love said, "You shall be he."

              9"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,

            10      I cannot look on thee."

            11Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

            12      "Who made the eyes but I?"

            13"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame

            14      Go where it doth deserve."

            15"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"

            16      "My dear, then I will serve."

            17"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."

            18      So I did sit and eat.

J.D., R.I.P.

Salinger is dead.

We'll say more later, when we aren't posting by phone. We'll be sure to mention the soul- killing domestication of his best book by well-intentioned schoolteachers. We'll also throw in some stunningly obscure references to German literature and the Captain America movie.

But for now, we are fixated on one tantalizing detail in the BBC obit: a giant safe said to contain 15 finished novels.

That is to say, the great majority of the works of a great American writer are about to be read for the first tim ever.

Well, It IS Transylvania, After All

And for the record, people here get really, really tired of casual references to Count You-Know-Who.  First off, the book was written by somebody who had never been here; second, the medieval warlord in question came from Wallachia, on the other side of the southern Carpathians (i.e., not Transylvania at all.  Another country); third, the guy was and remains a national hero for his resistance to the Turks.

And fourth, it makes them look sort of backward and superstititious.  Which is entirely unfair; this is a modern nation, with a cell-phone shop on every corner.  Even the remote Gypsy villages are littered with satellite dishes.  So come on, ditch the snooty Anglo-American prejudice and and cut them some slack.

Of course, it would be easier if the guy who just lost the presidential campaign didn't charge his opponent with hiring a magician to give him the evil eye.  Click above, but here's the gist:

... Mircea Geoana's claim that a "negative energy attack" by a bearded mystic led to his defeat [by Traian Basescu] in the presidential election has become the talk of the nation.

Like most former Soviet nations, Romania is used to rough and tumble politics and accusations of fraud were nothing out of the ordinary .../

But the recent publication of photos showing well-known parapsychologist Aliodor Manolea close to Basescu during the campaign has caused Romanians to wonder whether the president really did put a hex on his rival.

The photos show Mr Manolea, a slightly built, bearded man with a round face and cropped receding hair, walking yards behind Mr Basescu ahead of the debate. The mystic's specialities include deep mind control, clairvoyance and hypnotic trance, according to the Romanian Association of Transpersonal Psychology.

Wait a second.  "Transpersonal Psychology"?  And the winner denies it all, in a way that suggests that the accusations may be true:

Initially, Mr Basescu's office declined to comment on the issue with officials referring enquiries to the Liberal Democratic Party that supported the president. Officials there gave evasive answers – but not outright denials.

But yesterday, the president's spokesman admitted he knew Manolea but insisted the parapschycologist did not take part in campaign staff meetings. "I am not clear what this person was doing next to President Basescu," he said.

Mr Manoela's role in the elections evokes age-old Balkan rituals where the evil eye, witch doctors and other mysterious forces were used to launch mystic energy attacks on opponents and sap hapless victims of their vital strength....

Former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was so terrified of even traditional psychologists he feared were a threat to communism that he abolished psychology departments across the country and banned the word from the official dictionary.

(Unless of course, they were faculties of transpersonal psychology.)  

Now, before we get all high-horsey about politicians casting hexes on each pother, let's just remember the Gipper.  Yes, that's right, Saint Ronnie.  From the 1940s to the 1980s, Ronald and Nancy Reagan consulted a series of high-profile astrologers:  Walter Righter, Jeane Dixon, Joyce Jillson, and finally -- the one who became public -- Joanne Quigley.  (A Vassar girl, we add with a self-mocking smirk.)  Word is that they made important decisions, like negotiating with Gorbachev and the choice of Bush Sr. as Veep, based on astrological advice.

While we don't credit the scurrilous proposal that Righter's death -- on the very day that the Quigley story hit the press -- was arranged by the government, we do know that when Reagan was asked about his history of consulting astrologers and making decisions based on their recommendations, he just plain lied.  

So, should it be true that the president of Romania paid a psychic -- excuse us, transpersonal psychologist -- to suck the vital energy out of his opponent, it need not be viewed as a curious example of Balkan superstition.  On the contrary, it is just as likely to be another case of American cultural imperialism.

Crown Him With Many Stanzas

For about an hour, this afternoon, our plan was to sing Crown Him With Many Crowns.  A bulletin was prepared accordingly.  Then Mother Anonymous came home and informed us, from the pinnacle of musical prowess upon which she sits in this particular rectory, that we were in fact going to sing All Hail the Pow'r of Jesus' Name.  Honestly, we always confuse those songs.

But during our one hour in charge of the Sunday service, we had a moment's curiosity about Crown Him.  The LBW lists two authors, Matthew Bidges and Godfrey Thring.  Both men lived in the later 19th century, although Bridges was some twenty years older.  But did they collaborate?  Or did they, like the oft-cited monkeys at typewriters, somehow compose the same song at the same time?

Neither.  It seems (according to the amateur site linked above, which probably relies on The Gospel in Hymns or the Hymnal 1940 Companion), Bridges was an Anglican who entered the Roman church.  He wrote the hymn in its original form, six verses, and it achieved enough popularity that Thring, an Anglican who actually remained Anglican (somebody had to), felt that the faithful might be misled theologically by singing a Papist anthem.  Accordingly, he wrote his own version of the hymn, in six somewhat -- but only somewhat -- different verses.

Here are both version, for those who can't get enough of such things:

Bridges (1851): Crown Him with many crowns, The Lamb upon His throne; Hark! how the heavenly anthems drowns All music but its own: Awake, my soul, and sing Of Him who died for thee, And hail Him as thy matchless King Through all eternity. Crown Him the Virgin’s Son! The God Incarnate born,— Whose arm those crimson trophies won Which now His brow adorn! Fruit of the mystic Rose As of that Rose the Stem: The Root, whence mercy ever flows,— The Babe of Bethlehem! Crown Him the Lord of peace! Whose power a scepter sways, From pole to pole,—that wars may cease, Absorbed in prayer and praise: His reign shall know no end, And round His pierced feet Fair flowers of paradise extend Their fragrance ever sweet. Crown Him the Lord of love! Behold His hands and side,— Rich wounds, yet visible above, In beauty glorified: No angel in the sky Can fully bear that sight, But downward bends his burning eye At mysteries so bright! Crown Him the Lord of years! The Potentate of time,— Creator of the rolling spheres, Ineffably sublime! Glassed in a sea of light, Where everlasting waves Reflect His throne,—the Infinite! Who lives,—and loves—and saves. Crown Him the Lord of heaven! One with the Father known,— And the blest Spirit, through Him given From yonder triune throne! All hail! Redeemer,—Hail! For Thou hast died for me; Thy praise shall never, never fail Throughout eternity!

Thring (1874): Crown Him with crowns of gold, All nations great and small, Crown Him, ye martyred saints of old, The Lamb once slain for all; The Lamb once slain for them Who bring their praises now, As jewels for the diadem That girds His sacred brow. Crown Him the Son of God Before the worlds began, And ye, who tread where He hath trod, Crown Him the Son of man; Who every grief hath known That wrings the human breast, And takes and bears them for His own, That all in Him may rest. Crown Him the Lord of light, Who o’er a darkened world In robes of glory infinite His fiery flag unfurled. And bore it raised on high, In heaven-in earth-beneath, To all the sign of victory O’er Satan, sin, and death. Crown Him the Lord of life Who triumphed o’er the grave, And rose victorious in the strife For those He came to save; His glories now we sing Who died, and rose on high. Who died, eternal life to bring And lives that death may die. Crown Him of lords the Lord, Who over all doth reign Who once on earth, the incarnate Word, For ransomed sinners slain, Now lives in realms of light, Where saints with angels sing Their songs before Him day and night, Their God, Redeemer, King. Crown Him the Lord of heaven, Enthroned in worlds above; Crown Him the King, to whom is given The wondrous name of Love, Crown Him with many crowns, As thrones before Him fall. Crown Him, ye kings, with many crowns, For He is King of all.

For our money, Bridges was the better poet, but only by a hair.  His images are a bit more solid, and his vocabulary a bit more wealthy.  On the other hand, he omits the Resurrection, a significant hole which Thring fills in quite beautifully.

What amuses us is that the "Papist theology" in the original version is, unless we are missing something, not especially Papist.  Anglicans (except perhaps Bp Spong) certainly don't deny the virginity of Mary.  We suspect that the most objectionable image is the idea of that Christ's "power a scepter sways."  It just sounds so, well, Erastian.  But was this ever a serious problem for the Established Church in its glory days?

In any case, note the the Lutheran Book of Worship uses the Bridges version, with these significant alterations:  (a) Stanza 6 is omitted; (b) stanza 3 is moved to the next-to-last place; (c) Thring's stanza 4 follows Bridges's stanza 4 ["Lord of life"].  And, most significantly,  (d) Bridges' stanzas 5 and 6 are combined into one.

Evangelical Lutheran Worship omits the stanza about Lord of Peace, but is otherwise the same.  The Service Book and Hymnal also used five stanzas, including the hybrid final one.  But it omitted the one about Virgin's Son.  

For the life of us, we can't see how the various hymnal editors, when faced with such an abundance of such similar material, make these decisions.  But when our dream is realized, and some musically-inclined former English major sits down to compile a reference hymnal, worship leaders can make their own decisions, selecting from all twelves stanzas, according to the images they choose to highlight in a particular service.  Or -- heck, why not? -- sing 'em all.

Haiti, Cherie

The earthquake in Haiti is too terrible to contemplate, much less discuss in a silly preacher's silly blog.  If you have not already given money to Lutheran World Relief, do it now.  You can come back here afterward.

No, we have nothing to say about the earthquake, or the stupefying death toll, or even the seminarian son of a Lutheran bishop who was killed there.  But we have to talk about Haiti, so we'll talk about something else entirely.

It was, I think, autumn of 1986.  I was about 18 months out of college; I had already done the customary quick tour of Italy, Spain and France, and worked as long as I could stand at my first "grown-up" job, tapping out Morse for the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company.  I had as yet no sense of a vocation, religious or otherwise, but I had its first stirrings:  the little animal inside, biting and scratching to make me stop what I was doing and look around for something -- anything -- else.

So I gave up a cozy apartment by the Gowanus Canal, ditched my paltry few possessions, and bought a plane ticket for Port-au-Prince.  There was no do-gooderism involved here, mind you; I wasn't traveling with a school or an NGO or anything like that.  All I wanted was a warm place to spend the winter.  And I figured Haiti would be cheap.  After all, they were in the middle of a revolution.

After four months or rioting, Baby Doc had skipped town in January.  Since then, there had been chaos, as would-be tyrants seized and lost power, one after another.  The people, poor and oppressed as they had always been, were poorer and more oppressed than ever. 

I spent a month in Haiti, and another month in the Dominican Republic.  There are more stories than I could possibly tell here.  Some are funny, some frightening, many smack of Graham Greene or Joseph Conrad.  Some of my favorites are just gross:  A stream of goat piss, pouring down from the roof of a van, into the lap of the guy next to me.  The man underneath me in an open boat, where we were piled up like cordwood for an illegal border crossing, who vomited a seemingly ceaseless stream of yellowish fluid, and the woman on top of me, who looked down reflectively for a few moments and declared, "Bananas."

But here's one I think about a lot.  There was a fellow named Georges, about my own age, who showed me around the capitol occasionally, in exchange for hot-dogs and 7-Up at a little place near the Champs de Mars.  I realized dimly then, and realize more acutely now, that this tiny green-tiled diner, like something from the American 1940s, probably offered a level of luxury, not to say nutrition, that Georges could never hope for without somebody like me.

One day, after I had been there a week or less, we went to the Pantheon, a grandly-named museum, unremarkable except for air-conditioning and the anchor from one of Columbus's ships.  As we emerged into the miserable, swampy heat, we heard the sound of horns blaring, and then saw cars and trucks streaming out of the city center, followed by hundreds of people on foot.  All around us, the shutters of the shops were slammed shut and padlocked.

Georges grabbed one of the people running out of town, and spoke to him quickly in Kreyol.  Then the other man yanked himself free, and kept running.  George took me by the wrist, and began running straight into the crowd.

"So," I said, hurrying along.  "What's up?"

"He says there will be a manifestation -- a protest. He is running away because he says it will be dangerous.  He says there will be hitting and shooting.  But I say that's OK, I will be hitting and shooting back."

"Oh.  I -- uh -- I see."

"Wait," said Georges, barely hesitating.  "I forget, this is not your country.  I can take you back, back to your guest-house.  You want that?"

"Well," I said, "I don't know.  I kind of want to see what's happening ...."

"Then come on!  You will see what is happening, all right."

So in we plunged, swimming against the tide of smarter people, until after a while we found the buzzing swarm of protesters, and merged into them.  It was a big crowd -- press estimates ranged as high as 200,000, and I have heard (although this is probably untrue) that it was the largest protest in Haitian history.  For hours that day, we marched through the otherwise empty streets of Port-au-Prince, making our way slowly in a great curve back toward the are from which I had come -- the area near the Palais Nationale.

Oh, and there were cops -- in blue uniforms, marching and driving white pick-up trucks.  At one point, I was pressed tightly against the bumper of a truck, looking up at an officer wearing mirrored glasses and pointing a shotgun at my head.

"He wants to shoot us," Georges explained excitedly, adding, "And I hope he does!  I hope he does shoot.  Because then, after the first shot, the rest of the crowd will climb all over him, tear him to pieces."

"Ah," I said.  "Yes."  I didn't feel that I needed to point out the downside of this strategy, at least for the two of us.  

Later, a few of George's friends stuck a tape recorder into my face, as if they were journalists or historians.  I tried to sound like a freedom-loving American in support of a noble cause, but the truth is that I was a bit vague as to the cause at hand.  I gathered that the general momentarily in charge -- Namphy, perhaps, or maybe Joseph; who knows? -- was a dog.  But the more immediate object of the protest was the disappearance of Charlot Jacquelin, a reading teacher.  It seems that in the part of the world where "to disappear" is a passive verb (one does not disappear, but rather is disappeared), teaching people to read is a form of political activism.

"The government says they don't know where he is," Georges explained grimly.  "So we say, 'Give him to us alive, then.'"  And indeed we did -- signs all through the crowd read "Ban Nou Chalot Vivan," and we periodically raised a chant in the same words.

At last, we arrived at the wrought-iron gates of the Palais, the residence of the dictator du jour.  It was a big White-House style building, with a broad manicured lawn and a radar antenna sweeping back and forth on the roof.  I stood one one side of the gate, and on the other stood a team of soldiers in khaki uniforms, holding Uzis, or some other submachine gun.  I had seen guns like this before, but this was the first time one had ever been pointed at me.

From the crowd, somebody brought out the bicolor, the traditional red-and-blue Haitian flag.  ("It is the French flag, with the white part torn out," a guidebook had helpfully explained.)  This flag had been suppressed by the Duvaliers, but now it was back.  Ours was a large specimen, perhaps twenty feet on its long side, and protesters grabbed the corners and waved it up and down, while the rest of us danced underneath it.

I danced underneath it.

And here is the point to all  this.  The people in that crowd wanted, and deserved, a better country.  Their nation was the poorest in the hemisphere, and surely the most chronically ill-governed; the Duvaliers are in some ways a bright spot, a beacon of stability in Haiti's godawful history of coups and countercoups.  But they were dictators, and a popular uprising had driven them away; for a moment, it must have looked -- to Haitians, at least -- as though the country's fortunes were about to change.  It must have looked as though this was the beginning of a new and better time for their country.

One or two of the protesters started to climb the iron fence; I watched the soldiers with machine pistols swing their arms casually upward.  But they didn't shoot.  Even that small reprieve must have looked like a signal of hope.

It wasn't.  In all the years since, I have occasionally met travelers from Haiti -- most recently last summer, in Chicago -- and I ask them what they have seen.  Occasionally, somebody tries to put a pretty face on things -- "Signs of improvement," they say gingerly -- but usually they just shake their heads and say, "Worse than ever."  Of course, that was all before last Tuesday.

I wonder about the people I knew in those days -- Georges, and Chantal the waitress whom I later discovered leading a voodoo ceremony, and Charlie who took me to my first cockfight, and the small cluster of nearly deranged expatriates who still lived there then, apparently because they had no place else to go.  But mostly I wonder about the nation itself, and whether it is possible to go forever as it has gone so long.  And what will happen if it is. or if it is not.