World Poetry Day

Rod Dreher has asked readers to submit favorite poems in honor of World Poetry Day.

No poem has revolutionized my life, but I enjoy poetry more and more as I grow older. Like most art forms, it seems to do some things no other form can do. I once asked someone struggling for words to express something very important to them whether they might sing, dance, paint or build it.

My dirty little secret: poetry is especially good after eight ounces or so of wine. Call that “transcending the left brain/right brain dichotomy.”

I quote or allude often to Yeats’ Second Coming, so I’ll not repeat that. Here are four others, not randomly chosen, but not my final answer, either:

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy

I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

(T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men)

The world unfurls its flag of toleration,
issues its edicts of equality,
and he who bears the sign of our salvation
is banished as a public enemy.
As Athanasius, when the world awoke
to find itself ensconced in heresy,
so we whose world must wear a harsher yoke
are called to Athanasian constancy.

We, too, may need to navigate a Nile
to dwell in desert solitude awhile,
with foreign tongue and unfamiliar face
endure injustice, exile, and disgrace.
Hold fast the Faith. Set swords about the Creed.
And call on Athanasius in your need.

(Mark Amorose)

“I hate to say most of these prayers written by saints-in-an-emotional-state.
You feel you are wearing someone else’s finery and I can never describe my heart
as ‘burning’ to the Lord (who knows better) without snickering.”
—Flannery O’Connor

And so I limit myself to the saints
who are sensible, the ones who wear flats
to a party, prickly wool skirts and pink
shirts with a Peter Pan collar. I think
too much, my mother claims. Still, it’s my aim
to talk to God in a voice that’s just my own,
not one on loan from a lonely nun
or a love-starved Spanish priest. The least
I can do is try to be true
though often my words betray me. Like just
now. I tried to read Thérèse of Lisieux
but couldn’t choke down all the icing, a feast
for the sweet tooth where my soul loves salt.
I know. I’m a sinner. I know it’s my fault.

(Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Flannery’s confession)

You passed me on the street
I rode the subway with you
You lived down the hall from me
I admired your dog in the park one morning
We waited in line for a concert
I ate with you in the cafes
You stood next to me at the bar
We huddled under an awning during a downpour
We dashed across the street to beat the light
I bumped into you coming round the corner
You stepped on my foot
I held the door for you
You helped me up when I slipped on the ice
I grabbed the last Sunday Times
You stole my cab
We waited forever at the bus stop
We sweated in steamy August
We hunched our shoulders against the sleet
We laughed at the movies
We groaned after the election
We sang in church
Tonight I lit a candle for you
All of you

(Charlotte Parsons, Nine-Eleven, via the Writer’s Almanac — which is no more thanks to MPR’s unpersoning Garrison Keillor.)

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Facebook

I have issue with Facebook. Doesn’t everybody?

One of those issues is not that Facebook allowed political campaigns to harvest data to sell us to Barack Obama and Donald Trump. They sell us to all manner of commercial ventures; why not to politicians, too?

Yes, as with television and radio, we are ultimately the product being sold on the “free” majority of the internet. That ramifies, but I don’t have time to go into that.

Get over it.

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Living by lies

Donald Trump isn’t the only person in the public square asking his minions to believe absurd, damnable lies:

I was very struck by [Rod] Dreher’s saying that the Czechs are too quick to dismiss the danger that their own country could adopt transgender insanity with terrifying swiftness (they assume that their fellow Czechs are too sensible to do this) but that, at the same time, we Americans are too quick to dismiss the danger that we could lose our religious liberty with terrifying swiftness. I would also add that there is a distinct link between the Communism that forcibly de-Christianized Eastern Europe and current transgender ideology. Both, as in the book 1984, show their power by forcing people to “live by lies,” blatant, obvious lies, and both glory in their power to do so.

(Lydia McGrew at What’s Wrong with the World? Hyperlink and bold added.)

Could it be that the foremost obligation of all sane people today (which should, but sadly does not, include all putative Christians) is to resist all lies, loudly and unabashedly?

UPDATE:

Eric Mader calls this “getting red-pilled.”

* * * * *

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

A man … is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.

(G.K. Chesterton) Be of good courage, you who are called “bigots” by those who are unable to conceive seriously the alternatives to their dogmas.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

The misgovernance we deserve

UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me that I reversed the roles of House and Senate in impeachment. I won’t try to parse how that changes my analysis of the odds of removal of Trump by impeachment except that it would seem to increase the heat on Senate Republicans.

My belief in major realignment remains unshaken though this was a singularly bad illustration.

Related question: How do you spell “seppuku”?

* * * * *

Donald Trump’s incessant attacks on Robert S. Mueller are shameful, but he cannot fire Mueller. That’s why he salts his attacks on Mueller with attacks on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing the Russia investigation because of Jeff Sessions’ recusal, and who can fire Mueller.

Trump’s corruption of our system calls for impeachment, but there’s no serious chance of that.

Though the House of Representatives will probably fall to the Democrats in the Fall, I don’t think the GOP will lose the Senate. A Democrat House would gladly convict if only the Senate would impeach as it should. But Trump’s hold on Republican voters has the Senate too scared to act.

With one voice, Republicans in Congress have made it clear that if the president takes this extreme step, they will not be afraid to defy him by appearing on a cable news channel and saying something noncommittal. As they are doing right now. For instance, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “If he tried to do that [fire Mueller], that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency.” Beware, President Trump! If you continue down your present course, there is every reason to believe that Graham may even go so far as to write a memoir where he calls this “a dark, dark moment for this country, when people should have spoken up.”

(Alexandra Petri, If Trump fires Mueller, Republicans will be, like, really disappointed)

This is part of a massive realignment, typified in Illinois this very day, where Hillary’s minions are trying to purge Daniel Lipinski, a vanishingly-rare pro-life Democrat, while Jeanne Ives mounts a suprisingly strong, if underfunded, attack on Governor Bruce Rauner for his disappointing laxity on abortion.

Meanwhile, we’re continuing to experience the misgovernance we deserve.

* * * * *

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

A man … is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.

(G.K. Chesterton) Be of good courage, you who are called “bigots” by those who are unable to conceive seriously the alternatives to their dogmas.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

St. Patrick’s Confession

Because there is no other God, nor ever was, nor will be, than God the Father unbegotten,
Without beginning, from whom is all beginning,
The Lord of the universe, as we have been taught;
And His Son Jesus Christ,
Whom we declare to have always been with the Father,
Spiritually and ineffably begotten by the Father
Before the beginning of the world, before all beginning;
And by Him are made all things visible and invisible.
He was made man,
And, having defeated death, was received into heaven by the Father;
And He hath given Him all power over all names in heaven, on earth, and under the earth,
And every tongue shall confess to Him that Jesus Christ is Lord and God,
In whom we believe, and whose advent we expect soon to be,
Judge of the living and the dead, who will render to every man according to his deeds;
And He has poured forth upon us abundantly the Holy Spirit,
The gift and pledge of immortality,
Who makes those who believe and obey sons of God and joint heirs with Christ;
And Him do we confess and adore,
One God in the Trinity of the Holy Name.
~St Patrick, The Confession

(Eighth Day Institute)

* * * * *

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

A man … is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.

(G.K. Chesterton) Be of good courage, you who are called “bigots” by those who are unable to conceive seriously the alternatives to their dogmas.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Imposter Syndrome

A gem of an essay at Aeon:

‘Impostor syndrome’ describes a problem I don’t especially wish to solve. Its remedy is to recognise that one does in fact belong. Yet I can’t convince myself I want to fully belong – indeed, I would experience belonging as a loss. The reasons for this are several, though all converge on a conviction that being ill-adapted has a value I would not forfeit.

Lately, academia has grown more sensitive to how its culture flattens and normalises those who populate its ranks. Impostor syndrome is a way of explaining how non-standard identities can provoke alienation. Class is one such structure of exclusion, alongside race, gender, sexual identity and disability. But what are the epistemic costs of ‘fitting’? If we look only at alienation, we ignore the ways in which that subtly enforced sameness diminishes understanding.

…

In his exquisite poem ‘Digging’ (1966), Seamus Heaney observes his own descent from men who laboured. Of his father digging potatoes, he writes:

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

Against this raw strength, Heaney registers with melancholy humility: ‘I’ve no spade to follow men like them’ and the poem concludes:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

The poem’s beauty is its ambivalence, its reluctance to mark a generational shift from spade to pen as unambiguous progress. I long to wield both, and rue how often academic life would strip spades from those who have them. And that, more than anything else, is what I suspect betrays me as an impostor, though not in the anxious, normalised way.

Impostor syndrome rides on the perception, most fundamentally, that one is getting away with something. I struggle to grasp just why this sleight-of-hand ought be counted a bad thing. I sometimes still feel a fraud in academic environments, but neither do I mind it much. Indeed, taking a little pleasure in getting away with things is something I come by honestly – a family legacy, if you will.

None of my academic bona fides reassure me more than counting myself a squatter

(Amy Olberding, How useful is ‘impostor syndrome’ in academia?, Aeon Essays)

Update:

Did you ever feel like an imposter in Church?

“The Rooted Faith in Wendell Berry’s Fiction.” Jack Baker and I write about how Berry’s exemplary characters root themselves in order to bring healing to damaged places:

Berry describes himself as a “marginal” Christian, and his position on the outskirts of our dominant, consumerist culture makes his a voice from the wilderness—one many evangelicals with more orthodox theology might do well to consider. Perhaps the greatest threat to the church today isn’t falling for doctrinal heresy but implicitly adopting the consumerist, self-centered assumptions of our Western culture. It’s all too easy for American Christians to assent to the right doctrines on Sunday while inhabiting a counter-Christian economy the rest of the week, loving ourselves more than God and neighbor.

(Jeffrey Bilbro, for whom also a tip of the hat for pointing me to Amy Olberding’s essay)

* * * * *

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

A man … is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.

(G.K. Chesterton) Be of good courage, you who are called “bigots” by those who are unable to conceive seriously the alternatives to their dogmas.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Religious tribalism

As a prefatory matter, I have long believed that one’s guiding philosophy is functionally religious. That has ramifications beyond what follows, but those are for another day. For now, think of it as “atheist Stephen Hawking had a religion of sorts.” It’s the sort of thing “scientism” was coined for.

In an episode of “The Briefing,” yesterday Dr. Al Mohler of Southern Seminary reflected on the death of the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. You can read a full transcript of the eight minute segment on Hawking using the link above.

Here is how the episode was summarized on Mohler’s Facebook page, which I think is broadly representative of what Dr. Mohler said on the show:

We believe that Stephen Hawking and all of his brilliance was simply evidence of the fact that he was a human being made in God’s image but a human being who died without God. That’s the great tragedy but that’s not what you’re likely to read in the obituaries.

Instead what you’re going to see is a secular world trying to find a secular reason to celebrate a secular thinker and to say something significant about the meaning of his life. At the end of the day, the secular worldview can provide no argument for why the life of Stephen Hawking was ever significant nor your life nor my life. Only the biblical worldview can answer that question and it does profoundly answer that question.

The thing that struck me when a friend showed the post to me is this: If you swapped “Oppenheimer” for “Hawking” and, on the Facebook post, changed the name and photo from Mohler to Francis Schaeffer you could show the entire post to someone, say that Schaeffer wrote it on the occasion of Oppenheimer’s death in 1967 and… it’d be believable.

I love Schaeffer so I don’t mean that purely as criticism of Dr. Mohler. If we must talk like an evangelical from the 1960s, Schaeffer is a very good one to choose. And yet when you read that take on Hawking’s death, the tedium of it still comes across.

…

Earlier this week I got coffee with a friend I hadn’t seen in years. Like me, he grew up in an abusive fundamentalist church which left him with plenty of baggage to work through over a number of years. As we talked, the conversation turned to the work of Jordan Peterson and to a debate that my friend had seen in which Peterson and William Lane Craig, the renowned Christian apologist, argued over the possibility of meaning in human life. I said to my friend that several Christian friends of mine watched the debate and were far more impressed by Peterson than they were Craig. My friend nodded. “Peterson doesn’t care about winning,” he said. “Craig wanted to a win a debate. Peterson wanted to pursue truth.”

If there is a defining problem with a certain brand of reformed evangelicalism, it is that we care more about winning—winning debates, winning political campaigns, winning institutional battles—than we do about simply pursuing the good, the true, and the beautiful.

(Jake Meador, The Tedium of Worldview Analysis at Mere Orthodoxy)

* * * * *

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

A man … is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.

(G.K. Chesterton) Be of good courage, you who are called “bigots” by those who are unable to conceive seriously the alternatives to their dogmas.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

The Almost Nearly Perfect People Redux

Swedish schools, religious as well as secular, distinguish between “education” and “learning,” as odd as that may sound. The former is the curriculum; the latter, the time spent, for example, at recess, lunch, or social gatherings — outside the context of teaching. Religious education and practice are allowed only outside the highly regulated curriculum. Even then, any religious activity, such as school prayer or the lighting of Shabbat candles, must be voluntarily undertaken. In each case, it is up to the parents either to include their children in the activity or to opt out.

This means that there is in fact no religious education in Swedish schools — it is legal only outside the state-mandated curriculum — and so there is no religious education to outlaw. What the state would now outlaw, however, should the proposed legislation pass, is the opportunity for Christian, Muslim, and Jewish children to feel part of a group they can identify with, to learn about their religious and cultural heritage, and to partake of a value system that isn’t built on a belief in the almighty state, blessed be its name.

… As we all know, it is much easier to outlaw liberty — that has always been Sweden’s default choice — than to struggle with the questions it raises and the perils it poses.

(Annika Henroth-Rostein, Sweden Aims to Outlaw Religious Education, Which Is — Already Illegal)

“The question” here is Muslim immigrants now 10% of the Swedish population, with 11 Islamic schools segregating boys and girls. My blog title is based on this book, which is on my bought-but-not-yet-read list.

* * * * *

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

A man … is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.

(G.K. Chesterton) Be of good courage, you who are called “bigots” by those who are unable to conceive seriously the alternatives to their dogmas.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

For the record

If you’ve followed this blog for long, you may have noted that I’m a bit of a Russophile. Of course, I’m also an Anglophile and increasingly a Francophile, all for various reasons.

But back to Russia.

I’m rooting for Russia to shake off the bad habits of 70 years of Communist tyranny. I’m rooting for its Orthodox Churches, being built at a prodigious rate, to cease being, shall we say, “Potemkin,” but to be full not just on Sunday morning (in contrast to the present religious laxity of nominally Orthodox Russia), but at other services of the liturgical cycle as well. And I’m not rooting for it to become just like us because I think it has potential to do better than that.

I think Russia has again become a scapegoat in our politics. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, opposing the Communists was, understandably, an American obsession, and to an extent became the raison d’être of the Republican party. Now again it’s an obsession, more for the Democrats than for the Republicans, imputed superhuman powers and cunning.

I doubt that Russian trolls influenced the 2016 election. I doubt that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to that or any other end. But I’ll grant you that Vladimir Putin may actually be playing the 12-dimensional chess that Trumpistas impute to President Chaos, and that he and his aides may have noted Russian-exploitable financial vulnerabilities of Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner.(Notably, the U.S. has rarely been competitive with Russia in chess.)

But I do not doubt that Russia, and Putin, were behind the nerve gas poisoning of a former Soviet spy in Great Britain, that it was appalling, and that sanctions are appropriate.

I’ll leave it for another day, perhaps, to lament anything equally appalling that we’ve done.

UPDATE:

It’s not directly relevant to what I wrote above, but the chess nexus made it irresistible. Garry Kasparov, writing of Putin:

When I retired from professional chess in 2005 to join the Russian pro-democracy movement against Putin, I was frequently asked how my chess experience might help me in politics. My answer was that it wouldn’t help much at all, because in chess we had fixed rules and uncertain results, while in Russian politics it was exactly the opposite.

* * * * *

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

A man … is only a bigot if he cannot understand that his dogma is a dogma, even if it is true.

(G.K. Chesterton) Be of good courage, you who are called “bigots” by those who are unable to conceive seriously the alternatives to their dogmas.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Calvinists and Wahabis

Every year around Christmas time, we begin to hear noises about Christmas trees having “pagan origins.” And there are many who rush to the defense of the poor trees. I yawn. My ancestors worshipped trees, and I daresay their later Christian descendants were glad to see the Church baptizing the trees as well as people. There simply is no “pristine” matter from which the faith starts fresh. God always speaks and reveals Himself in terms that can be assimilated. He does not destroy culture, but fulfills it. The Christmas tree is a stark reminder that the Child born on that day has a rendezvous with a Tree, and that there is no getting around it. There is a Tree at the heart of our faith, even as there was at the heart of the Garden.

CS Lewis once opined that pagan mythology consisted of “good dreams sent by God to prepare for the coming of Christ.” Such myths can also carry deep darkness and confusion – but such is the nature of a world that is broken. God does not offer us redemption by destroying a broken world. He does not erase or eradicate the cultures of mankind. It is only a darkened theology that imagines every production of the human imagination to be worthy only of the dung heap. That sort of destructive view belongs to the scions of Calvin and the iconoclasm of Wahabis: it is not the work of God.

(Father Stephen Freeman, When Chaos Ruled the World – Part I)