2003 CONFESSIONS
December
November
October
September
July/August
June
May
April
March
February
January

Little Notes
Letters

Talk About Movies
Roamin' Catholic
Follow Me




Contents © 2003
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

CONFESSIONS
June 2003

---

OPEN, CLEAN, LONELY

Well, I went and mentioned good old Walker Percy last month, and I guess it got me going, because here he is again, albeit in a roundabout sort of way.

One of the quotations at the front of Percy's novel The Last Gentleman is from Romano Guardini's The End of the Modern World. It reads in part: "We know now that the modern world is coming to an end.... Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be the love that flows from one lonely person to another ... the world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean." Just now, we seem to be in an awful middle-ground -- the "Christ-haunted, Christ-forgetting" world that Percy alluded to in the opening line of his subsequent novel Love in the Ruins. (Some might call it Christ-hungover; He lingers, a painful leftover presence that punishes the conscience but brings no comfort. Such may be the penalty for knowing his rules without knowing Him.) Love has all but disappeared from the face of the public world, but the word -- hollowed out and inverted -- remains. Abortion, after all, spares retarded and/or unwanted children from a life of suffering. In the current parlance, that's love.

As for what is to come, the world is increasingly filled with animosity and danger, but it is not yet a world open and clean. Case in point: I resent feeling like I can't send my kids to public school, not so much for what they will (or won't) be taught there, but because I don't want to see my eight-year-old daughter at some school talent show, thrusting her hips and lip-synching to Shania Twain about what keeps her warm in the middle of the night. I don't even want her watching other eight-year-olds doing it. I don't want my son developing a pseudo-sophisticated sneer and an adoration for being cool, together with a fear of genuine enthusiasm, before he even hits puberty. (The cesspool culture will get to them eventually, I know. I feel obligated to keep it at bay until they're better equipped to see it for what it is.

But why should I resent it? Why is a public school obligated to reflect anything besides the prevailing public mores? If most mothers are happy to rock out and sing along while their daughters ape virgin-whores like Britney Spears, who am I to protest? For that matter, why should there be prayer in school? Why should the Ten Commandments be posted? We have other sources for rules against killing and stealing and lying. "You shall have no other gods before me?" Where does a public school get off posting that? My desire for public schools friendly to my beliefs is pure sentimental piety -- neither open nor clean. It's nostalgia for a lovely period in American history when public mores and Christian mores were more closely aligned, a period I never knew. (I was born the year Roe v. Wade came down.) I know that the Legion of Decency used to have influence over what did and didn't get shown in movies. But the Legion of Decency is no more. I don't know what happened to it. I do know that this country assimilates cultures, both religious and ethnic. It assimilated Jews; author Philip Roth got endless mileage out of that. Now, it has assimilated Catholics. Catholics fornicate, get divorced, contracept, vote for pro-choice candidates, even get abortions -- same as everybody else. A lot of them don't believe in the Eucharist, which stands at the very heart of the Faith.

If some of us resist assimilation, why should we be surprised when the world hates us, just as it hated Christ, just as Christ promised? The Judeo-Christian ethic may have dovetailed with the mores of our founders, but they weren't exactly instituting a government that would lead men to know Jesus.

Somebody wrote in to the magazine Salon.com to talk about her uncertainty about becoming a parent. "What would be the return on the investment?" she asked. Some of the magazine's staff thought the author of the letter "crass" and "emotionally crippled." Salon used the letter as the catalyst for a series of articles questioning the worthwhileness of children. I say bravo; let's be open and clean. Let's drag this out into the light and discuss. My mother has always said, "Children are the only game in town." I happen to think she's right, but such pronouncements won't hold up in the new age. People aren't pious enough, not toward Mother, and not toward Mother Church. Let's not be shocked and resentful. Let's love the lonely.

TOP