Everything That Rises

During Holy Week in the 1990’s the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York hosted a marathon reading of Dante’s Inferno every Holy Thursday night. It began at 9 p.m. or later and went straight through till morning, broken up midway by a recital on the cathedral’s great organ, whose pipes rang out portentously from above while Devil Dogs were served in the nave below. To take part in that reading, even just as a listener (as I did several years running), was to venture into the Underworld the way a sleepwalker might: now nodding, now dozing, now waking, now shaking your head back to alertness, now yearning for the long journey to be over; and then all of a sudden it was over, and you were out on the street, seeing the stars overhead just as Dante sees them in Florence at the end of the poem.

The experience suited the poem perfectly, and now here is science to say why: an article by an Italian neuroscientist in the journal Sleep Medicine (reported in the London Observer) argues that Dante Alighieri was narcoleptic.

The image is by Satoshi Kitamura, from The Young Inferno.

President Obama’s speech at the United Nations was in the air yesterday: a Russian-born shoemaker puffing on a cigarillo as he handed me back a freshly glued pair of boots had the speech playing on the radio in his workshop; a friend who plays a role (more invisible than most) at the UN called me from the General Assembly Hall — and there was the president’s voice in my mobile phone.

The morning after President Obama spoke to the nation about Syria Georgetown’s Jocelyne Cesari — a French-born expert on Islam and the West — pointed out that even if the process the president has pursued in anticipation of U.S. intervention in Syria is turning out to be very different from the process that preceded the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the outcome may be awfully similar. A key reason: religious diversity — suppressed by the Assads in Syria as it was suppressed by Saddam in Iraq — makes the balance of power in Syria so complex that only a fully negotiated peace, not an enforced one, has a chance of taking hold. Her column, for the Washington Post's “On Faith,” is here.

The recent short profile of Peter Ackroyd (it ran in T, the “style magazine” of the Times) is really a stylish portrait akin to the ones that decorate Ackroyd’s fifty-odd books. Cheers to the author, Jody Rosen (whose book about London taxi drivers I am eager to read, if he is still writing it):

In person, Ackroyd can seem a bit like a statue himself. He sits for an interview, barely stirring, answering questions in a deadpan tone, wearing a jowly frown that conceals occasional flashes of humor. He is a large, round, walrusine man; he has a bad leg and he moves uncomfortably, heaving himself up from chairs with great groans. He has always been a heavy drinker. “I used to drink spirits, but my liver said no,” Ackroyd says. These days, he only drinks wine, but lots of it: a bottle with dinner at a restaurant (he always dines out), and another bottle when he gets home at night.

He is, in other words, a boozer and an eccentric — an old-fashioned, classically English type. He certainly stands apart from his contemporaries. Ackroyd is a member of the vaunted British literary generation that includes Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes; he was born, in October 1949, six months after Christopher Hitchens and six weeks after Martin Amis. But unlike those glamorous globe-trotters, Ackroyd is a provincial and proud of it, with a hermetic lifestyle that supports his writing regimen. He hates to leave London, professing a strong dislike for the countryside (“It’s too noisy, too dangerous, I don’t trust their food”) and no interest in traveling to other cities (“I don’t understand their histories”). He avoids nearly all the rituals of literary celebrity, restricting his promotional efforts to the occasional interview and a single appearance per year at a literary festival. He lives alone, and reserves just two Sundays each month for socializing, taking day trips with a friend to visit historic English towns.

A hidden God can come to us in the memory of a sad song that a woman called Gelsomina used to sing, or in the epiphanic remark of Gelsomina’s friend the Fool in Federico Fellini’s La Strada: “If this stone is useless, then everything else is useless … even the stars.” With absolute clarity the Fool defines the torment and hope behind the idea of a hidden God. By rational standards, Gelsomina’s acceptance of the form her own life takes is incomprehensible and even unacceptable; yet seen sub specie aeternitatis, her submission and finally her death acquire a revolutionary religious force.

That’s the NYU film professor Antonio Monda setting up the premise of his book The Hidden God: Film and Faith, which MoMA published a few years back. As is well known — Vanity Fair is already taking it as evidence of a "Blissed Out Hipster Pope" — Francis cited the movie as a favorite in the America interview last week. As for Monda — Antonio, that is — he is profiled by Sam Tanenhaus as the host of a regular A-list “laboratory of ideas” at his apartment on the Upper West Side.

I’ve been carrying the September Outside around for weeks, waiting for the right moment to read Ian Frazier’s piece about “Stealhead” Joe Randolph, a revered fishing guide on the Deschutes River in Oregon who took his own life at 49 after a long battle with depression. It was worth the wait, for the reasons any Frazier piece is — the high-informal style, the love of life, the unfeigned curiosity — and for this passage, as good a description of what might be called the spirituality of angling as any I’ve read:

The paths among the river that have been made by anglers’ feet are well worn and wide. Many who come to fish the Deschutes are driven by a deep, almost desperate need. So much of the world is bullshit. This river is not. Among the many natural glories of the Northwest that have been lost, this valley — still mostly undeveloped, except for the train tracks — and its beautiful, tough fish have survived.

Joe was the nakedest angler I’ve ever known. He came to the river from a world of bullshit, interior and otherwise, and found here a place and a sport to which his own particular sensors were perfectly attuned. Everything was OK when he was on the river … except that then everything had to stay that way continuously, or else horrible feelings of withdrawal would creep in. For me the starkest sadness about Joe’s death was that the river and the steelhead weren’t enough.

I am enough of a stranger to Latin to forget that the word opus — which we associate without an outstanding creative achievement — means work first of all. Well, the Opus Prize serves as a reminder. It’s a $1 million award meant to honor people and organizations rooted in religious faith who are doing what can be called inspired work — “unsung heroes of any faith tradition, anywhere in the world, solving today’s most persistent social problems,” as the prize literature lyrically puts it.

The prize this year has been organized by Georgetown’s Katherine Marshall, and the three finalists were announced yesterday: Sakena Yacoobi, an Afghani Muslim, founder of Afghan Institute of Learning, which strives to improve educational opportunities for women and children in Afghanistan; the Fahmina Institute, in Indonesia, which is committed to educating a new generation of young Muslims; and Carol Keenan, CEO of the Catholic Health Association, which represents more than 600 Catholic-affiliated hospitals in the United States. The winner will be announced in a ceremony at Georgetown November 13.

The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington is behind us, but Taylor Branch’s great trilogy about America in the King Years (which I’ve been reading on and off since Martin Luther King Day) makes clear that not a week passed in the civil rights movement without an episode worth marking half a century later.

Fifty years ago last Sunday, a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls dressed in their Sunday best. When they heard the news, in the home of a friendly nightclub owner in North Carolina, the civil-rights organizers Diane Nash and James Bevel pondered how to respond. Branch (in Pillar of Fire) tells the story, making clear what we tend to forget — that the nonviolence of the civil-rights movement was no pure impulse, but the impulse toward violence resisted and overcome:

Retreating into a spare bedroom, Bevel and Nash raged in sorrow through Sunday afternoon. To answer the Birmingham crime with deeds of equal magnitude, their first impulse was to become vigilantes — to identify, stalk, and kill the bombers in the place of corrupted white justice. Bevel believed it could be done; he knew that the identities of lynchers tended to become more or less an open secret. In wild caroms of mood, Nash and Bevel swung from a “Black Muslim” option to a grand alternative as pioneers in nonviolence: to combine voter registration work in Mississippi with the tactics of Birmingham direct action, including the children’s marches. They would raise a nonviolent army across the entire state of Alabama to converge upon Montgomery and settle for nothing less than the enfranchisement of every adult Negro in Alabama.

Taylor Branch will be our guest in the Faith & Culture conversation series at Georgetown on November 18.

“Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—this is not the voice of my childhood.”

That’s how Zadie Smith – speaking into a microphone – introduced herself in a talk (eventually published in the New York Review of Books) about the way the change in her voice over the years, as she moved from West London to Cambridge to the international literary society headquartered in New York, has revealed changes in her character.

So much has been said already about the interview with Pope Francis that I wouldn’t dare claim a wholly fresh insight about it. And there’s no need. So all I’ve got is this: my sense that the changes already taking place in this era in the lives of Catholic people can be heard in this man’s voice.

That’s what I thought when I read the interview — on a computer screen Thursday afternoon, in a homemade Word document on Friday morning, and by day’s end in a PDF file sent to me by a Jesuit-schooled friend. (The next day an e-book version went straight to no. 1 on Amazon.) The strongest impression was that Francis is a person who can make himself known, and felt, through his voice.

Karol Wojtyla was trained as an actor, and he brought an actor’s voice to the papacy. It projected outward. It spoke to continents at once. It invigorated a written text, while never obscuring the fact that the text that he was pronouncing generally was written – right up until his final appearances from the Gemelli hospital and at the window of the papal apartments.

Joseph Ratzinger was trained as a scholar, and in his many books he had a scholar’s voice. He had a lovely speaking voice, too, and it rang out powerfully and sensitively in The Ratzinger Report and the two volumes of interviews that followed. To hear him preside in Italian over John Paul’s funeral – as I did, from the colonnade at St. Peter’s – was to hear a man of sophistication and surprising gentleness, even tenderness.

Ratzinger (few would argue the point) never found his voice as pope. He never brought that gentle scholar’s voice to the papal megaphone, or never found the slightly different voice required of the slightly different figure who was Benedict XVI.

Pope Francis (few would argue the point) has found his voice as pope from the get-go. Jose Maria Bergoglio was trained as a Jesuit, and most of us in the anglophone world don’t know what he sounded like when he was Jesuit provincial or archbishop of Buenos Aires. But we know already what he sounds like as pope.

And what is that? A man of the world? A searching Christian? A member of a religious community? A stealthy progressive? A cultured man whose heart is warmed by literature, music, and art? Clearly, he is all these things. But his voice suggests that he is essentially a conversationalist, with all the tag implies. He’ll figure out what he is saying in the act of saying it. He’ll listen as well as speak. He’ll address himself to the person he is sitting with (the Italian Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, in the interview). He’ll speak in the present tense and to the present moment.

Listen to Francis’ account of how the religious encounter comes about: though obviously very deeply considered, it might have been worked up on the spot:

… God is always first and makes the first move. God is a bit like the almond flower of your Sicily, Antonio, which always blooms first. We read it in the Prophets. God is encountered walking along the path. At this juncture, someone might say that this is relativism. Is it relativism? Yes, if that is misunderstood as a kind of indistinct pantheism. It is not relativism if it is understood in the biblical sense, that God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. You are not setting the time and place of the encounter with him. You must, therefore, discern the encounter.

It is already a very interesting conversation.

There’s a new biography of Elliott Smith, the gentle, desperate, George Harrison-inspired songwriter who died in disquieting circumstances in 2003. Bookforum's review is by Rhett Miller, leader of the alt-country stalwarts the Old 97's, who makes this good strong point:

I’ve always believed that we songwriters are all secretly writing the same song over and over again. The message we are sending out can take all sorts of forms, sit atop any number of melodies, come out in a whisper or a howl, but remains constant. We deal with one core issue throughout our creative lives, puzzling over it, wrestling with it, trying either to make some sense of it or to banish its attendant demons.

"Purity of heart is the will to one thing" is how Kierkegaard put it, but maybe it took a songwriter to develop the idea with such clarity. In any case, the passage points right to the aims of Everything That Rises. In my writing life the “core issue” I always wind up puzzling over involves the nature and claims of a Catholic and Jesuit heritage — the heritage, of course, of Georgetown University, where this site has its origin and where I have found a voice. I hope that I and we will range far and wide here; I hope we’ll find ways to wrestle with the core issues that matter most to us in our lives. And I hope the Catholic and Jesuit inheritance, no matter how strenuously we reckon with it, will be present here the way it is present in my experience and in the experience of this university, now nearly 225 years old: as a source of knowledge and wisdom, of provocation and consolation; as a source of truth and a reminder, ever vigilant, of how complex and hard-won any real truths are.

September 23 is a holiday on my calendar: the first full day of autumn, yes, and also the birthday anniversary of John Coltrane, born this day in 1926.

This is Coltrane’s Spiritual, recorded at the Village Vanguard in New York in 1961. “Our Kind of Spirituals” will be an ongoing feature here.