Darling (24 page)

In his senior year of high school, my brother announced he was going to enter the seminary in the fall. In those years it was not such an unusual thing for an idealistic Catholic boy—the class president, the football captain—to aspire to a life of heroic spirituality.
Ah, but he's giving up so much,
people would falsely lament—falsely, for they all knew there was nothing much in the great so-much. They meant he was leaving the mortal desert of sex and dirty dishes and the morning commute to climb, to begin to
climb, the mountain. The inspirational climbers of that era were Thomas Merton (
The Seven Storey Mountain
), Dr. Tom Dooley (
The Night They Burned the Mountain
), and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (
I have been to the mountaintop
.)

My brother had been at the seminary for two years when, in his weekly letter, he informed our parents that he was coming home. A few weeks later I returned from school to find my brother's suitcases in the hall, his boxes of books. My brother must have given an explanation to our parents, but I never heard it. It was highly unusual for me not to ask, for I was the question man. But that is the curious thing about families, isn't it—how much one knows about parents and siblings, but also how much one will never know. Without losing any noticeable stride, my brother went on to college and law school and beautiful women.

During this period, my brother and I became rumors to each other. We could not have said, one of the other, on any given day, on which side of the country we were living, or with whom. We might see each other at Christmas, my brother affable, handsome, quixotic. My brother mentioned an important court case coming up. I told him I would pray for him. (Irony mixes fluidly with piety in our family.) No, don't, he said.

That's my brother the lawyer, at the wheel of his Porsche: His passenger is a stewardess from Lebanon. She is laughing; her languid arm drifts from the window as the Porsche pulls away.

•   •   •

A journalist friend assures me I don't know the first thing about deserts when I say I yearn to hike through the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. My friend lived for several years in Saudi Arabia. The first thing about deserts, he says, is sand. Not sand as metaphor, but sand as irritant: Sand in your underwear, sand in your shoes, sand in the rim of the Coke can. He says to
walk into the Empty Quarter is to journey into inchoate being. One feels dwarfed by emptiness, he says, as, he imagines, an astronaut must feel. “How could there be more than one God in such a place?” he says. My friend is an atheist.

This same friend also lived for a time in India. Such is India's comic fecundity, he says, that if one spits the seeds from a melon along the side of the road, then returns to the same spot the following year, one will find a constellation of golden fruit—dancing gods, he calls them—among the greenery springing from the ditch at the side of the road.

•   •   •

Several months ago, my brother sent me an e-mail concerning the Council of Trent, convened by Pope Paul III in 1545. If my life depended on it, I could not tell you what transpired at the Council of Trent. I noticed my brother sent copies of his e-mail to his nephews and nieces, as well as to our siblings. The wonder is not that he knows so much about Church history, but that such matters continue to preoccupy him. Why not let it go? The procession of our family continues, oblivious of the Council of Trent; there are baptisms, First Holy Communions, confirmations, weddings, funerals. My brother, the anti-theist, is always in attendance. That is he, photographed in a church pew, smiling. Next to him is his son. Me? Oh, I wasn't there. Out of town. Too distracted by my book on religion to show up for a grandniece's baptism.

I wrote to my brother a few years ago. I told him I was bored with his e-mails about religion. Bored with his scientific perspective, as he calls it. Bored with political faith. I asked him to stop.

Maybe the spirit of the times is to recoil from a mullah's absolute or a bishop's absolute, and to call that recoil atheism. Yet atheism seems to me as absolute as the surest faith.

As a Christian, I have so long sheltered in the idea of the God
of the Jews, I would never think to call myself a theist. Too much abstraction is implied. I have buried both my parents “marked with the sign of faith.” After September 11, I started describing myself as “Judeo-Christian-Muslim.” Though I attend weekly Mass, I am struck by how often the priest, in his homily, must remind the congregation what we believe.

This year, the Catholic Church in the United States began using a new English translation of the Mass. The translation we had been using dated from 1973. The 2012 translation reverts to arcane English in an attempt to be more faithful to the Latin diction and syntax of the fourth-century Latin “vulgate” translation (from the Hebrew, from the Greek) of Saint Jerome. Why? I don't know. Why did Pope Benedict favor an eighteenth-century pattern for chasubles, as I have heard? And why did Vatican watchers raise their eyebrows at a Pope who favored an eighteenth-century pattern for chasubles? The Vatican must be more like a Ronald Firbank novel than we imagine.

Catholic journals blazed with controversy throughout that fall and winter. Many American priests, theologians, liturgists, and laymen objected to the new translation, particularly to the grammar of the Eucharistic prayer, which has taken an exclusionary meaning.

What I started out to tell you is that Sunday Mass has become a confusion, a bad lip sync. Some in the congregation continue to recite the 1973 translation—not out of refusal, but because humans are creatures of habit, and most of us have long since committed 1973 to memory. Some in the congregation resort to missals in the pews and follow the new translation scrupulously. Others, like the man who stands behind me, continue to pray in Latin.

The Creed (which comes early in the Mass) is the point at
which everyone stumbles. We used to recite the Apostle's Creed—rather, a version of the Creed closer to the Apostle's Creed, which dates from the first century. Now we most often recite the Nicene Creed, which was formulated in the fourth century as a refutation of the Arian heresy. The Arian heresy had to do with the divine nature of Jesus. The remembered lines are embellished with a few Latinate formulations that weren't there before, so we trip.

What is important to me is how important it is for me to be told what I believe. I could not, on my own, have come up with the two thousand years of argument that has formulated an evolving Christian theology. People who say of Catholics that we are told what to believe are correct. We are.

We are, most of us, not theologians. I borrow an excellent passage from an excellent pamphlet that was passed out to prepare American Catholics for the new translation. I cannot credit the author or the authors of the pamphlet, for there is no notation as to authorship or committee. The passage: “The Creed, or
symbolum,
is the symbol of our profession of faith; it is not the faith itself. We believe something because we first believed someone and that someone is Jesus.” But before we get to Jesus (or Abraham or Moses or the Prophet Muhammad or Buddha) there is probably someone else. Mama. Papi. Miss Nowik. Nibs. Rabbi Heschel. Brother James. Jim Downey. Robert McAfee Brown. Flannery O'Connor. Father Costa. Andy Warhol.

My brother and I have, after many years, achieved our importance to each other as a difference. Because it is sometimes difficult for my brother to climb the steps to my apartment, he will often come by and we will sit in his car and talk. We quite enjoy one another's company. My brother is no less a good man for not believing in God; and I am no better a man because I believe. It
is simply that religion gives me a sense—no, not a sense, a reason, no, not exactly a reason, an understanding—that everyone matters.

The congregation does not believe one thing; we believe a multitude of hazy, crazy things. Some among us are smart; some serene; some feeble, poor, practical, guilt-ridden; some are lazy; some arrogant, rich, pious, prurient, bitter, injured, sad. We gather in belief of one big thing: that we matter, somehow. We all matter. No one can matter unless all matter. We call that which gives matter God.

The moment of matter arrives with the Lord's Prayer. Jesus instructed, “
This is how you should pray: Our Father, who art in heaven
 . . .”

The prayer takes about thirty seconds to recite, to join, in the present, the Christian world of centuries. It is the first prayer most of us committed to memory as children. It is the prayer most of us will say as we die. It is the prayer others will say over our bodies. The prayer makes no attempt to say what God is, but only what we are, what we need: We are hungry; we are sinners; we fear evil. It is the prayer that most easily takes us out of ourselves and joins us to centuries of people who have gone before, centuries of people who will come after.

That woman—five rows ahead on this side, red beret—her husband died of kidney cancer last year, yet here she is. The world ends. He is gone. She is here. I pray for him, her husband. What can that possibly mean, that I pray for him? I mean in a feeble, childish, desperate way (because there are people I believe I cannot bear to lose, and I imagine that woman feels the same, yet she has lost), I ask the hope of Enduring Love I call God to accept the man that was and to console his widow. Because the man who was is yet part of this day insofar as he is missing and
she is here in her brave little red beret. Love is real. I have felt it, but I do not know how to live in love, once and for all, nor do I know if that is possible, though I have met people who almost seem to.

None of this happens as a forgetting of a day in summer, or winter, though there is that. I didn't leave the coffee pot on, did I? Shall I stop at the bakery on my way home? There is all of that.

The truest, most sublime vision of the Catholic Mass I have ever seen was in a Terence Davies movie called
The Long Day Closes
. The camera tracks over the heads of an audience in a movie theater, following the beam of blue light from the projector toward the screen, passing through the screen, then over the heads of the congregation in a Liverpool Catholic church, the congregation kneeling and rising as, all the while, on the sound track, the voice of Debbie Reynolds sings “Tammy.”

This confraternity of strangers—the procession of the living with the dead—is the most important, most continuous confraternity in my life, though unpronounced except by rote prayer. I take my place in a pew as I would take a seat within a vast ark. Going where? We don't know. All we know is that one Sunday we will not be here. We know that nothing will change for our absence. Those are the names of the dead under the stained-glass windows and on all the tombs and plaques and rooms of testament and so forth, and so what? That is the consolation I take from the Mass—that I will join the obverse, which is represented to me by a lantern in a corridor that leads behind the altar. That I will join, for a while, the passive, prayed for. And then I will be forgotten. The procession will go on; it will emerge from the other side of the altar.

But not forgotten by God, please God.

And will there be an other, an active, present, everlasting love?
Eternity—which is a thought outside of time, isn't it?—need have no duration at all, I tell myself. Cannot, in logic. But that, too, is desperate.

And it doesn't matter a fig whether we say “worship” (1973) or “adore” (2012).

3. The Cave

In Israel, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, one need only gaze up to see caves that were once chambers of an ancient sea—dry, riven sockets that seem to watch. The eye of the cave, however, is not the regnant metaphor. The mouth of a cave is what we more often say. The mouth of a cave is an image of perdition. We are organisms that sustain ourselves through our mouths. Indeed, we are caves ourselves. Since we eat, we fear being eaten. But we like the idea of secrets in the earth, of emeralds, rubies, sunless seas, for the womb is the cave we are born of.

Girls are taught early by their elders that their bodies are sacred caves, that they are, therefore, priestesses of some sticky magic and that boys are after stealing their magic. Boys are taught by their elders to mind the fact of their compulsion by Nature to enter that cave; that therein resides the meaning of manhood. Human innocence is calculated according to knowledge of the cave.

Mysteries and oracles abounded in the caves of the ancient world. Hindus and Buddhists revered caves as sacred sites, carved chapels in them and painted the walls. Because of the cave's long association with the esoteric and the supernatural, Plato took the cave as an allegory of unreason, of false apprehension. The prisoners of Plato's cave became unfit for any greater reality, content as they were to face away from the light of day and to consider only shadows.

Iegor Reznikoff, a musical anthropologist who has studied the
resonance of cathedrals throughout Europe (by singing in them), has also explored the resonance of prehistoric caves. He has noticed that resonance in caves is often greatest or most pleasing in chambers with paintings on the walls, which suggests to Reznikoff a correlation between paintings and music. Caves were probably chosen for their resonance; probably they were used for chanted worship; probably they were painted commemoratively because they were places of ritual.

The book of Exodus, chapter 33, is nearly an inversion of Plato's allegory. Moses begged God to show him His glory. God refused—
No human can see Me and live.
But then God relented somewhat:
I will place you in a cleft of the rock, and screen you with my hand until I have passed by
. So it was that Moses withstood an experience of the ultimate reality by turning his back and shielding his face, much like the prisoners of Plato's cave.

A section cut away from the wall of a cave to reveal what is inside (like an X-ray view) became a prevalent conceit in early Greek-Christian iconography. Within the cave, the dead lie buried like bolts of cloth, or we see the hermit solitary at his prayer or we see the scull of Adam beneath the crucifix at Golgotha or we see the manger of Jesus.