Tippi Hedren'd In My Own Backyard
And, a trip through this week's mailbag
I went out into the backyard on Saturday to get a little reading done, and was Tippi Hedren’d by the hungry hens, who suspected that I was hiding croutons, or something. Ladies and gentlemen, there are no more safe spaces!
I promised I would exercise self-discipline and not write over the weekend, but that I would post interesting e-mails from you. Here’s one from a reader responding to the story I told in “The Thin (Chartres) Blue Line” about Reuben, the Englishman who could see fairies. The reader writes:
Thanks for including the paragraph about Reuben, which is particularly interesting because I've actually read The Secret Commonwealth. [A book compiled in the 1690s by a Scottish pastor and folklorist, Robert Kirk, collecting stories about fairies and other beings, as seen by the people of the Scottish Highlands — RD]. I came to it after reading W. Y. Evans-Wentz' The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, a more recent book (1911) than Kirk's, and a book that was a little unsettling to me. Not because it described anything particularly frightening, but because Evans-Wentz gathered the stories directly from people who had experienced fairies, "The Gentry", themselves, people who were alive during my grandparents' lifetimes (!) not centuries in the past. Wentz' subjects were uniformly from the most rural, least educated part of the population; in many cases he had to rely on a variety of Celtic language interpreters for the interviews as these folks did not speak English. If I recall correctly, Wentz came to believe the veracity of the stories he heard, although that had not necessarily been his position when he began his research.
I'm not sure what to make of all of it. I'm certain that there are more unseen things in this world than I could ever understand or experience. And Reuben is certainly right in thinking that the world has changed, people have changed, our brains have changed, costing us the ability to perceive things that ordinary humans formerly could.
A decade or so ago I spent some time studying herbal medicine. One of the teachers I worked with — I can't remember which one anymore — explained to us how people knew which plants to use centuries before chemists would be able to analyze them. Until then I hadn't given it much thought, maybe it was trial and error, maybe it was physical appearance (my amateur interpretation of the Doctrine of Signatures), but this teacher believed that the plants themselves, or the spirit that inhabits each plant, had spoken to people directly. Trial and error, the teacher pointed out, would take far too long and be far too dangerous to be useful. Was she right? I don't know. I have not had the experience of a plant speaking to me, but I know people who have. Is this how the great cathedrals were designed, by tapping into a world of spirits? Or saints? Were the builders receiving information and inspiration from otherworldly sources? Is that why being in a medieval cathedral is such a powerful experience? At one time I would have scoffed at the idea (daughter of a research scientist here, raised to be rational); I no longer think of that prospect as unreasonable.
By the way, there is a Fairy Census to which people who have had direct experiences with faeries and spirits submit their accounts, people alive right now. The person collecting the information intends it as research and so records specific details about the person, the time frame, and location. It is an interesting read.
http://www.fairyist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/The-Fairy-Census-2014-2017-1.pdf
The reader’s letter called to mind a blog post of mine from three years ago. Look:
On the bus north from the Denver Airport, I sat next to a clean-cut young white guy, maybe in his early 30s, who was well dressed, in a business casual way. Turns out he was a trained shaman transitioning to a real estate career. “Six months ago, I had hair down to my waist,” he said. It turned out that his Indian spiritual master told him to leave the reservation and return to the world, and take up a normal career. “That is your path,” he quoted the old man saying.
Turns out this guy had spent many years in South America, studying in various shamanic traditions. He knows a lot about ethnobotany. I could have talked to him all day. The conversation was deeply fascinating. At one point I lad my cards on the table, and told him I was an Orthodox Christian, and though I very much disagree with his metaphysical and spiritual take on the world, I do agree with him about the profound mystery of our existence. I tell you, this neopagan was in some ways talking like an Athonite monk.
“You cannot put God, or reality, in a box,” he said. “You just can’t. So many people figure if you can’t prove it, or can’t conceive of it, it doesn’t exist. I don’t even argue with those people. It’s fine with me if they think this way. I know that’s not true, because I have experienced so many things.”
And he told me about some of those things. Here’s the part that stays with me, two days later: he said that most people in the Western world simply do not believe that matter can be charged with spirit. He talked about some of the things he had experienced living in shamanic communities overseas that proved otherwise. He knew very little about Christianity, because he grew up mostly overseas, and seemed surprised when I talked to him about what Orthodox Christianity teaches, and about classical (pre-modern) Christian metaphysics. It’s not the same thing as shamanism, not by a long stretch. But strangely enough, a traditional Christian would have more in common with this shamanistic wayfarer who looks like a real estate salesman than he would with most modern Westerners.
It puts me in mind of this C.S. Lewis quote:
The christening of Europe seemed to all our ancestors—whether as themselves Christians they welcomed it, or like Gibbon deplored it as humanistic unbelievers—a unique, irresistible, irreversible event. But we’ve seen the opposite process. Of course, the unchristening of Europe in our time is not quite complete. Neither was her christening in the Dark Ages. But roughly speaking we may say, that while as all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian, for us it falls into three, the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian.
This surely must make a momentous difference. I’m not here considering either the christening or the un-christening at all from a theological point of view. I’m thinking of them simply as cultural changes. And when I do that, it seems to me that the un-christening is an even more radical change than the christening. Christians and pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with the post-Christian. The gap between those who worshipped different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who don’t.…
I find it a bit hard to have patience with all those Jeremiahs in press or pulpit who warn us that we are relapsing into paganism. What lurks behind such prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows simple reversal, that Europe can come out of Christianity by the same doors she went in, and find herself back where she was. That isn’t the sort of thing that happens. A post-Christian man is not a pagan. You might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the pagan past.…
What that young man and I have in common is the conviction that the material world is not all there is. That living is an encounter with mystery. That most people, for whatever reason, cultivate deadness to that mystery, and to grace. Why? I didn’t ask him for his opinion, but my sense is that it frightens them.
I wish I had thought to share with the shaman on the bus this quote from Russell Kirk, which speaks for me:
I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.
That phrase of Kirk’s — One Poor Battered Gargoyle — would be a better name for this newsletter. I have always thought that if I get rich and open a pub somewhere, I will name it The Battered Gargoyle.
I also received a letter this weekend from a reader in Finland, responding to the letter — published within the “Thin Blue (Chartres) Line” post —by a reader commenting on how the changing expectations from marriage have also changed Christianity. The Finnish reader responds:
I wanted to comment on the comment your reader made on Christianity and its stance on marriage, the changes and whether a church that tries to combine the Christian sexual morals with the new view can survive.
To some extent I agree with your reader. The way your reader describes the changes in culture and subsequently in the church (at least in mine!) seem very perceptive.
Among the committed church members this combination of hedonistic and moral seems to be the normal approach to marriage. However, I'd like to add that it is not only the combination, but also the march order. The hedonistic side is primary, while the moral is secondary.
The result of this is that in reality, divorce is never really off the table. It might not be mentioned, but it isn't denounced either and seen as non-existing.
This all is due to the history and how the church has become intertwined with culture. The early Christianity was countercultural. Then culture became Christian. Now culture is becoming anti-Christian, and church has forgotten how to be countercultural - and also lost the willingness. At least mine has.
Where I disagree with your reader — or rather, where I think the picture is incomplete — is the future of the Church. I agree that Christianity that holds on to the hedonistic approach and tries to combine it to morals is probably doomed. It's culturally too aligned with the non-Christian culture to survive.
However, there is probably going to be a third way. I myself increasingly feel a change happening in myself that is pulling me towards that third way — and that's the counter cultural Christianity.
The thing is, for centuries culture and Christianity have affected each other. Christians have lived in that culture. I grew in the mainstream culture of the past three decades. I'm a creature of that culture, even if also of Christianity (and also of slightly more conservative Christianity, due to my family).
One would probably assume that being the creature of the mainstream culture, I'd either continue with its trajectory or kind of just unsubscribe from the latest weird stuff but keep everything else.
But if I look inside me, that's not what is happening. Instead, I feel that I'm increasingly moving away from the culture that gave birth to me. I'm not in a stasis, but rather taking the opposite trajectory to the current cultural change.
The reason? While I previously enjoyed movies and music everyone listened to, that all becoming tainted with a new dogma has made me question whether even all that I previously enjoyed was good. And as I decreasingly feel the need to go to movies or listen new music, the grip of the mainstream is weakening.
And if things like the risk of being under surveillance by phones and other tech at home becomes worse in the future, I can see myself taking steps to mitigate it, further removing me from the mainstream to the counterculture.
This doesn't mean that I'm retreating from the world or renouncing everything. Not at all! And I still enjoy good film classics and even new music. But I feel more and more like a stranger to the world, in some ways more separate from it than before.
In my church I also feel myself sometimes somewhat alienated. Not only because others have moved away from me (which has happened to some extent) but also because I myself have increasingly moved away from the normal — which I was part of at some point in my life.
I have my doubts whether Western mainstream Christianity has what it takes to survive. We might not be willing enough to be countercultural. Perhaps too intertwined with the culture and centers of power. But still — Christianity in the beginning was in essence countercultural. This gives me hope, as becoming countercultural would in fact be nothing else but just going back to the roots and finding old treasures.
Finally, to return to the question of marriage: to my wife and me — how we view marriage — there is no such thing as divorce. It doesn't exist for us. That is not how our church understands marriage, but that's how we see it. Marriage is duty — and for the better or worse, we are bound together for the rest of our life. Within those bounds we'll find love and intimacy.
(Granted, we discussed all difficult things openly within the first month of dating, even how big our family should be, God willing. All skeletons were intentionally brought to daylight, less hidden landmines for the future.
And our dating did not begin with passionate kissing in a disco but by shutting ourselves in a room to look at the pros and cons of dating and other approaches, not leaving the room before a decision was made. It took five hours.
Ah, perhaps we were somewhat countercultural and non-hedonistic already back then... ;)
I often write about cultural disintegration as a negative thing, but the Finnish reader points to the positive side of the phenomenon. When a culture has become decadent, or in some other sense corrupted, sane people will want to dis-integrate with it. Here is a petty example, one I might have brought up in this space recently. I am an ardent Francophile, and was looking not long ago for something light and fun to watch. I looked into the Netflix series Emily In Paris. After about 20 minutes, I was out. It was the scene in which the title character and her boyfriend masturbated while staring at each other on an international video connection. Such vulgarity is so off putting. But I was already on the edge because this character, a young American who just moved to Paris, is constantly checking her phone and constantly taking and posting selfies. A minor thing, yes, but it’s one of the facets of contemporary life that I loathe. It is a pleasure to secede from such a culture.
One of the great things about contemporary life, though, is how it is possible to do just that. My kids have access to incomparably more music than I did at their age, and have never considered themselves bound to the boring and repetitive garbage that rules the pop charts. Netflix and Amazon feature a lot of garbage, but it’s also possible to curate for yourself and your family a first-rate film and television experience.
More deeply, I am grateful for the fact that my children can attend a classical school where they are immersed in a Great Books approach to learning. My ninth grade daughter has been assigned a reading from Aquinas for over the holidays. This is not a school for gifted and talented kids. It’s a classical school, one that takes seriously its mission to educate young people in the foundational works of our civilization. It’s a very small school. It has no sports teams, or any of the other accoutrements to education that mainstream American kids expect from high school. What they do is teach real literature, real history, real art, real philosophy — and they do it relatively inexpensively.
These things are positive goods, and I will not give them up. Yet I wonder what it means in the long term. That book I’m reading now, The Revolt Of The Elites And The Betrayal Of Democracy, is a classic work by the late left-wing cultural critic Christopher Lasch. His basic thesis is that the economic and cultural elites in American life had seceded from everyone else, and held the masses in contempt as backwards people for whom they (the elites) were under no obligation to care. The book came out in 1996, and was deeply prophetic. Everything Lasch wrote back then has either come true, or gotten worse.
In an early chapter, Lasch writes about how elites have used the idea of meritocracy to justify separating their children from the masses in school — the better to get the kind of education that will allow them to rise higher within meritocratic orders. Though he was a man of the Left, Lasch doesn’t hate hierarchy in principle, but he does value the old-fashioned idea that those who have been given much have a corresponding responsibility to serve the common good. In the book, Lasch worries that the lack of common schooling will make a sense of a shared culture impossible, and thus make the concept of the common good meaningless.
What do we do, though, when whatever passes for the common culture is something from which we wish to withdraw, not for snobbish reasons, but because participating in it comes at too high of a moral, cultural, even spiritual price? A couple of decades ago, the writer Caitlin Flanagan published a much-discussed essay in The Atlantic Monthly, talking at length about sexual aggression and pressure to conform to a radically permissive sexual culture that teenage girls face in the pornified contemporary culture. Flanagan, riffing on the then-popular phrase “It takes a village to raise a child,” asked what it meant when you felt obliged to save your child from the village? That is where many of us are today, with relation to popular culture and its institutions — and not just when it comes to raising our children.
The Finnish reader is really onto something when he says that once you start withdrawing from popular, normative culture in some ways, it becomes easier to do so in many other ways. If you take the big step of educating your kids classically, for example, you are likely to realize that you don’t have to conform in other areas of life. For me and my family, embracing Orthodox Christianity was a big step in this direction (I hear from some Catholics that joining a Latin Mass parish does something similar).
That explains, I think, why I was so taken aback recently by the plight of a man who came to hear one of my talks, and who was deeply dismayed that his three adult children have either left Christianity entirely, or are barely hanging on, because they had grown so disgusted with white Evangelicalism in the Trump era. Could it possibly be the case that they mistake white Evangelicalism for the whole of the Christian tradition? Of course it could. One of you readers pointed out to me in an e-mail that the Catholic Church has lost many people who lost their ability to believe in Catholicism, but did not convert to another form of Christianity, believing that Catholicism is all there is. I think this must be a far more normal experience than my own. And for me, the only reason I knew much about Orthodoxy was because of my friendship with the writer Frederica Mathewes-Green.
Yet I confess that if I somehow lost my ability to believe in Orthodox Christianity, with somehow regaining an ability to believe as a Catholic, I would cease to be a Christian. I beg the pardon of you Protestant readers, but this is true for me. It’s not that I think that Protestant believers aren’t really Christians — not at all! It’s just that Catholicism, and even more than that, Orthodoxy, are so — how to put this? — immersive, such that everything that’s not them seems pale by comparison. One doesn’t realize how thoroughly modern Protestantism, in all its forms, is until and unless one gives oneself over to the Catholic or Orthodox way of life.
And sadly, it is quite possible today to live as a Catholic in the US, at least, and be a de facto Protestant, with the deep mystery pushed to the margins. I’ve written before about my Catholic days, leaving an Orthodox service at Frederica’s church to fulfill my Sunday mass obligation at a nearby parish, and leaving the Catholic service near tears, because it was so thin and vacant — and did not have to be, considering the wealth within the Catholic tradition. It was like going to a great and rich mansion for dinner, and being served in the garage, on paper plates. The aesthetics do not negate the fact that the Eucharist is still the Body and Blood of Christ. Better to have the true Christ in the Sacrament in a crummy Our Lady of Pizza Hut church than within architectural splendor where the Sacrament is seen only as a symbol, if it is presented at all. My point is simply that we are embodied creatures, and aesthetics makes a tremendous difference in how we perceive the spiritual realities with which we are presented. Our priest has observed that since our little mission parish installed a real iconostasis (icon screen), he has seen our congregation behave with more of a sense of reverence and awe than before, when we only had the money to make do. I worship there, and it’s really true. The same God that was present in our more humble surroundings remains with us — but because of the beauty of the iconostasis, the sanctity of our surroundings is made more clearly manifest. It’s like the time my former Orthodox priest in St. Francisville took his vestments to the dry cleaners in our little country town for the first time. The older black woman receiving the garments, startled by their beauty, exclaimed, “It’s like they got God all over them!”
Yes, exactly right.
I’ll need to give some thought to this, and write about it on another post — I’ve already violated my discipline — but it really is true. It’s all about battered gargoyles and neoclassical pediments, but played out theologically. It’s hard to get the boy back on the modern Christian farm once he’s seen the icon lamps of Byzantium.
(Hey, a special thank you to reader Dick R., who, signing up for this newsletter over the weekend, because my 4,000th subscriber. Well, “subscriber”; this thing is free for now, but just you wait, my pretties, I’m gonna whomp you with a request to subscribe for reals — five dollars per month, the minimum I can charge on Substack — before too long.)