Rocking the Paradise

My wife and I saw Dennis DeYoung tonight at the Wildflower Festival.  At 69 years old, we thought he should change his name to Dennis DeOld (ba-dum-dump!).  Dennis DeYoung was the lead singer of Styx, a rock group that probably took itself a little too seriously in the 1970's and 1980's, but they were talented and wrote a number of great songs, all of which DeYoung is now playing on his tour.

Several of the songs came from Styx's 1981 concept album Paradise Theater.  Paradise Theater was a real theater in Chicago that opened in 1928 and closed in 1958.  The opening song A.D. 1928 depicts the owners' buoyant optimism that greeting the opening of the theater.

Tonight's the night we'll make history, as sure as dogs can fly
And I'll take any risk to tie back the hands of time
And stay with you here all night
So take your seats and don't be late, we need your spirits high
To turn on these theatre lights and brighten the darkest skies
Here at the Paradise....

The Paradise Theater opened in 1928, the year before the Great Depression hit.  The "darkest skies" in the opening stanza are yet to come.  And they start to appear in the next song Rocking the Paradise.  It opens with a populist appeal.

So whatcha doin' tonight?
Have you heard that the world's gone crazy?
Young Americans listen when I say 

There's people puttin' us down
I know they're sayin' that we've gone lazy
To tell you the truth we've all seen better days

Don't need no fast buck lame duck profits for fun
Quick trick plans, take the money and run
We need long term, slow burn, getting it done
And some straight talking, hard working son of a gun.

 That opening line is actually one of the great lines in all rock music "Whatcha doing tonight?  Have you heard that the world's gone crazy?"  I've thought that often as I watch the political process in the US, ISIS in the Middle East and Europe, spiraling debt around the world and on and on.

The populist goes on:

Whatcha doin' tonight?
I got faith in our generation
Let's stick together and futurize our attitudes
I ain't lookin' to fight, but I know with determination
We can challenge the schemers who cheat all the rules

Come on take pride, be wise, spottin' the fools
No more big shots, crackpots bending the rules
A fair shot here for me and for you
Knowing that we can't lose

 Dennis DeYoung, at 69 years old sang those words tonight: "I got faith in our generation".  Of course people singing it today are a completely different generation.  They might wonder if his generation actually did anything useful.  I'm reminded (as a diversion) of another song that came out in the 1980's by Genesis, Land of Illusion.

I won't be coming home tonight
My generation will put it right
We're not just making promises
That we know, we'll never keep.

"My generation will put it right".  The hubris of it all. 

Back to Paradise.  The Paradise Theater was designed for silent films and therefore had horrible acoustics. The Theater opened almost simultaneously with the opening of the Paradise, "talkies" were introduced and the era of silent movies ended.  The miserable acoustics of The Paradise doomed it to second-class status and by the 1950s' it was bankrupt.  The story of a Theater called "Paradise" that was opulent and elegant but doomed to failure was too powerful a metaphor for a socially-conscience band like Styx to pass up and they used the Theater as a metaphor for the changes going on in America in the 1970s and 1980s.

If the beginning of the album depicts optimism at the opening of the Paradise the middle of the album depicts desperation.  One of the middle songs is titled "Nothing Ever Goes as Planned" and indeed it doesn't.  The populist fervor of the opening seems naive and misguided.  We can't focus on enemies ("big shots, crackpots, bending the rules") when we ourselves are flawed.  

Towards the end of the "middle" of the album, there's a little spoken dramatic interlude. Someone is inside the theater playing a saxaphone and his neighbor complains about the noise.

Hey , hey out there knock it off will ya?
Hey give it a rest will ya? I'm tryin' to get some sleep!
Want me to call the cops?
I tell ya Erma I can't till next week when they start to tear that damn old theatre down.

The Paradise is closed at this point.  The idealism that greeting it's opening has been replaced by selfishness and greed.  This is neatly summarized in one the last song Half Penny Two Penny

Half penny, two penny, gold krugerrand
He was exceedingly rich for such a young man
Sad story, old story
Bring out the band
Another divorce just a few hundred grand

Half penny, two penny, back of the queue
Yes mister poor man this means you
Justice for money what can you say
We all know it's the American way

 Styx was from Chicago and they were probably familiar with "Justice for money".  Of course, the song was written in the early 1980s. This was the era of the Yuppie, when "conspicuous consumption" became a topic of discussion and when BMW cars were so ubiquitous that their nickname "Beemer" became an everyday word.

Why do I go through all this?  It was a rock concert after all, and I was more interested in the skill of the guitar player than I was in the moral theme of the music (the guitar player was very good, he looked like and sounded like a young Tommy Shaw). I bring it up because everyone longs for a paradise, and the idea of a broken down paradise is indelible in the popular imagination.  Perhaps "paradise" was some time in your youth. Perhaps it was some era inhabited by your parents or grandparents or ancesters in the old country.  Things suck today, but boy if we only lived then we'd be set!

When we got married, there was another popular song that I'd like to bring up here.  Right Here Right Now by Jesus Jones.

A woman on the radio talks about revolution
When it's already passed her by
Bob Dylan didn't have this to sing about you
You know it feels good to be alive

I was alive and I waited, waited
I was alive and I waited for this

Right here, right now, there is no other place I wanna be
Right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history

The third line sticks with me: when I heard the song I always thought the singer was saying "Bob Dylan didn't have to sing this for you".  Meaning, you don't need your oracle to tell you the obvious: it's good to be alive.

But regardless, Right Here Right Now is more generational hubris.  Who cares what Bob Dylan said in the 1960s?  It's today, man! Yesterday's gone.

(these are all very favorite songs of mine)

I guess my point is that we can't pine for the good old days.  And we can't idolize the present or the perceived future.  We have to learn from the past and take what was good and true and apply it to the problems we have today.  Every era has it's own technological challenges and solutions and it's own cultural clashes. Moral decay from one generation can poison another generation and moral renewal in one generation may not bear fruit until that generation is dead and buried.  Generational pride is a tool of the devil to pit one generation against another. Waiting for the world to "wake up from history" is to wait for the old generation to give up and admit it lost.

Paradise won't be in our grasp until we experience it in Heaven.  Attempts to build paradise on Earth are doomed to failure at best and occasionally lead to war and genocide.   By ourselves we are unable discern what should be kept from a previous generation and what should be handed on to the next.  Pride and competition blinds us to the good and bad that exists in all eras.  The only way to tell what should be preserved and what should be discarded is a moral wisdom that transcends generations.   We can't "wake up from history" we need guidance from the Author of history.  And we need humility to know that we're not the pinnacle of human advancement. We'll get a few things right, but the the older generation will look at us and despair at the future and the younger generation will look at us and despair at the past.

The Benedict Option, again

Last year I had some rambling words about the Benedict Option and Dominican Option in the Church.  I've been thinking about it some more lately and I'm starting to tilt a bit towards the Benedict Option.  Here are my reasons.

1) There needs to be a community to maintain tradition.  In the light of history, this is obvious.  Like-minded people live together.  Read your Old Testament.  When the Assyrians and Babylonians conquered the Jewish states, the first thing they did was scatter the Jews.  In the case of the Assyrians, they scattered them so effectively that eventually the Israelites were assimilated out of existence.  In the case of the Babylonians, the Jews were apparently able to maintain enough cohesion to keep their identity, but they also were "only" in exile for a generation before a more tolerant regime took over.

The Jews were enslaved in Egypt for a long time, but lived in a tight community and were able to maintain at least a semblance of identity.  When Moses showed up, they needed to be re-instructed in the faith and were in a sad shape.  Hundreds of years of slavery will do that to a people.  But what if they didn't live in a community?  What if they were broken up and scattered across the Egyptian kingdom?  Surely they wouldn't have even remembered they were Jews.

Today the faithful find themselves atomized.  After eight years of Barack Obama, I think it's safe to say that the United States is a secular post-Christian country.  Faithful Christians find themselves surrounded by nominal Christians, post-Christians, atheists, agnostics, Nones, do-it-yourself spiritualists, and increasingly Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims.  And with every generation, the culture waters down the convictions of the faithful even more.  The faithful are being assimilated out of existence.

2) The era of rational dialog is over.  Jonathan Swift famously said "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."  We've seen over and over again the irrational protests sweeping the universities, Occupy Wall Street, protests over perceived racism, sexism, "privilege" of every sort.  These people cannot be reasoned with.  Even the thought of a conservative speaker on campus is enough to send people to their safe space.  If they won't even let the conservative talk, how is the conservative going to persuade anyone?

We are not dealing with ideas or philosophies that are arrived at by logic, trial and error, open discussion of experience with how said ideas have been implemented in the past.  We're dealing with emotional, irrational outbursts based on tribalism and populism ("Our people are great! You people suck!")  You can't break that with Aristotle or Aquinas.  You can't break it at all.  You just have to wait for the storm to blow over.

And if you do try to break through with your morality based on your traditions, you will do it alone.  None of the major political parties will stand up to the LGBT community.  None will take meaningful steps to reduce abortion. No significant network on TV will promote virtue. Conservative talk show hosts on the radio are typically on their 2nd or 3rd wives and are neutral at best towards gay marriage.

No help is coming from within the Church, either. The Catholic Bishops in the US are famously squeamish about cultural issues.  And when they do pull their cumberbunds up to give a talk on social issues, they cloak them behind morally neutral language.  We are told to speak of "religious liberty" when speaking about Church entities being forced to provide contraception.  But ... why is contraception coverage a violation of religious liberty?  Does that mean the Church thinks contraception is a sin?  You'd never know, listening to our leaders, who strenuously avoid the "s" word.  That may be a good legal strategy, but it doesn't help the faithful if morality is ignored.  It just makes the Church look legalistic -- possibly even narrow and rigid and pharisaical -- because it focuses on legality instead of morality.  Why not focus on both?

I have other reasons, but they are subcategories of the two above.  Against those problems I offer a number of benefits of a close community of faithful.

1) Mutual reinforcement.  We all go through cycles of optimism and pessimism.  Getting people together lets the people in their optimist phase cheer up those in their pessimist phase.

2) Respectful engagement. Since we all go through cycles of optimism and pessimism, having everyone together lets the pessimists bring some realism to the optimist point of view.  But beyond some vague mutual enrichment, it enables people who are on the same side to disagree with each other.  You can speak your mind among friends. To borrow a spoiled phrase from the liberals, it's a "safe space".  I attend meetings of the Readers of First Things, and that's the experience. The discussions are intense, but we're all on the same side, so at the end of the evening, we're still friends and there are no hard feelings.

So what do to? In my previous post, I linked to a talk by Father Eric Bergman where he advocates physically moving close to the parish.  Of course, you'll have to have the rest of the parishioners do the same.  But I would amend that. In the year since I wrote that post I've come around to the idea of parish shopping.  If the primary interaction you get with your parish priest is a seven to ten minute homily once per week, then it had better be a good one, or at least not a bad one.  I mentioned that the faithful today are atomized, surrounded by a lot of lukewarm Christians and non-Christians.  Some of them will be in your parish, which is as it should be: they are being saved just like you.  But if one of them is your parish priest or music director or other minister that can make your life miserable, then that's not the community you should be in.  Don't waste your time there. It's too dangerous to your soul.

In the extreme case you might have to change dioceses, if one of the lukewarm types is your bishop.

Winning Friends and Influencing Others

In a recent Apostolic Exhortation that received some murmur of attention in the press, we read these beautiful words:

Love is not rude 
99. To love is also to be gentle and thoughtful, and this is conveyed by the next word, aschemonéi. It indicates that love is not rude or impolite; it is not harsh. Its actions, words and gestures are pleasing and not abrasive or rigid. Love abhors making others suffer. Courtesy “is a school of sensitivity and disinterestedness” which requires a person “to develop his or her mind and feelings, learning how to listen, to speak and, at certain times, to keep quiet”.107  It is not something that a Christian may accept or reject. As an essential requirement of love, “every human being is bound to live agreeably with those around him”.108 Every day, “entering into the life of another, even when that person already has a part to play in our life, demands the sensitivity and restraint which can renew trust and respect. Indeed, the deeper love is, the more it calls for respect for the other’s freedom and the ability to wait until the other opens the door to his or her heart”.109 

"Love is not harsh", "Its actions, words and gestures are pleasing and not abrasive or rigid."  "live agreeably with those around [us]."  It's a bold new approach to the world outside the Church.  Gone are the days with St John Paul II and Benedict XVI would publicly scold a poor soul in Latin while the rest of the Cardinals would giggle at his perplexity and shame.  No more will the USCCB post cruel caricatures of President Obama on its website.  The windows have been thrown open to the world!  A new era of engagement built on mutual respect!

Our Pontiff is certainly trying to reach out to those separated from us.  And let's not forget that "pontiff" means "bridge builder". Now the Protestants, Muslims, secularists and -- possibly! -- even the Jesuits will come around to embracing Church Teaching due to the gentle words of our Pope and those that emulate him.

Today's Gospel reading is particularly challenging to the modern skeptic. In today's reading (John 14:6-14), Jesus not only says that he is identical with The Father (affirming the Trinity, at least in part), but Jesus also claims that He is the sole means to gain access to The Father.  No goofy indifferentialism or syncretism here!  How will our pontiff build bridges to those that don't see eye to eye with us with regards to this challenging passage?

By insulting people.

Pope Francis: Many ‘mummified’ or ‘vagabond’ Christians.

http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2016/05/03/pope_francis_many_%E2%80%98mummified%E2%80%99_or_%E2%80%98vagabond%E2%80%99_christians_/1227163

We'll have to rent out the Convention Center for our next RCIA class given the mannerly ecumenical outreach here.