Effervescent Thoughts:

Scene: At the waning dawn of the new millennium, outside on the patio of the Johnson City Starbucks, watching traffic, the author is finishing up James Baldwin’s Go, Tell it on the Mountain. Purchased at a used bookstore, it’s a mass-market paperback with Baldwin’s picture on the back. He drinks a coffee, then an orange juice. His right sandal is broken and fixed with duct tape. Hastily fixed, from the looks of it.

I know, honey, being a twentysomething woman is difficult. You’ve got to have a great career, and have a fulfilling sex-life, and “Moves and Margaritas” with your girlfriends on Thursday nights, and (it’s still sad to say after all these years, but, yes) get a man. Well, I don’t know if you’ve got to have all these things, but your conversation makes it sound like you think you do. You there, sitting earnestly with your equally pale girlfriend having an ever-so-earnest conversation about “the Lord” and trying to make sense of life. You sputter with “like” and “you know”.

Did hyper-verbal men in the the 1950s had similar conversations? They, too, were once buried under the expectation that they be everything and have, indeed, everything. I bet they never came to any conclusions, either. Does anyone ever come to any conclusion? The existential terrors of expectations are immense. Nothing ever changes, but the vocabulary does.

I wonder and I doubt. This is my work.

I want to tell that pale twentysomething it’s okay to rage against it all, that the best way to deal with unrealistic expectations–especially unspoken expectations–is to ignore them. Or, like the Holy Fools, do things that go directly against those expectations. Just, God damn it, commit to something.

We are a generation of Hamlets. And I’m the worst of them.

I want to make a game of Starbucks Bingo. The free space is simply labeled, “Chacos”. Or, possibly, “MacBook Pro”. You’d get a triple-word score (does that happen in Bingo?) for “Baby-Boomer Woman in Corner, Loudly Doing Business on Her Cell-Phone”. The names are so ridiculous, I swear to God, she’s making it all up. She’s talking to no one. “Duct-Taped Sandals” should be a square, too.

A car drives by, erratically honking at nothing. Until I realize that the driver is honking at us, all of us. I used to do that. In fact, I think it might have been my favorite undergraduate pastime: driving around in a friend’s car, making an ass of myself. I’d honk and shout things. Once, I told a walking couple that they should hurry back to their dorm because the rapture was happening and I “didn’t want them to miss it”. You know, Christian charity and all that. My friend laughed, but they didn’t get it. In the South, people honk and shout lots of things. 

Her problem isn’t that other people have expectations of her. No, by no means! That will always happen. Her problem is that she’s taken their expectations and made them her own. Doing that makes it easier for everybody else. Why should they have to murder when you can just slowly commit suicide for the rest of your life? It’s a lot less bloody and, I think, it involves track suits.

I always forget how big the sky is. It’s immense. You can’t see all of it, even if you laid down on the hot pavement in the noonday sun. There would be still parts of the sky you can’t see. Today, there are puffy white clouds that children finger-paint carried into the sky by the wind.

Earlier this week, I saw a woman wave from her red truck at me. She was in the passenger seat. I didn’t know the woman, but she waved at everybody as they passed. She might have been on drugs or happy. I can’t tell the difference.

They probably said the same thing about me in college. I think people on drugs have a better experience of reality than most. But I’m not on drugs. And I’m not always happy.

I watch and I read. This is my work.

Oh, that passage was good. I better highlight it. Then underline it. Hell, I’ll put stars by it, too. Damn, that was good, Baldwin.

A friend stops, saying hello. She’s great. I enjoy talking with her. We exchange news.

Tired and Pregnant in the Hill Country

(NB. I was asked to preach at my Parish’s monthly evensong. We transferred the feast of the Visitation to tonight. Here’s what I said.)

“And Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Juda,” Luke 1:39

Her feet were bloody. So, she walked slowly. For most of her trek, the clouds, too, crawled inch-by-inch over the rugged mountain country. The whole way, they were deep blue, threatening rain. On her journey, she passed joggers, sweaty with serious dedication but oblivious to her passing. No one knew her and no one cared to know her. Her feet were cut and her back ached. She was tired and pregnant in the hill country.

Yes, it was true an angel visited her. His wings were drifted snow and his eyes aflame when he told her that the awesome terror of God would overshadow her and she would bear a son even in her virginity. But, he also told her that her cousin Elizabeth was pregnant. “Old Elizabeth?” Mary asked, astounded. After all, her cousin spent most of their family celebrations presiding over a hot stove with her arthritic, spotted hands stirring pots. Yes, the angel assured her, even in her age, Elizabeth would bear a son because with God nothing shall be impossible. And then he disappeared out into the cold February night of clear stars to only the sound of barking dogs and her shocked, shallow breathing.

She was from a small town. And in small towns, they always talk in living rooms and beauty parlors and church vestibules in hushed voices about pregnancies out of wedlock. Of course, no one believed her when she told the story about the message from heaven. Why would they? It was far easier to believe that she’d been fooling around. Worse, it was far easier to believe she’d been raped by a soldier. But, “what a shame,” the women would say to each other as she passed, “What a shame to waste such a life,” and so they added her to prayer chains, the rumor spreading further. Even if nothing was said, they’d silently judge her as she passed. She could feel it. She caught hell in their eyes.

So, she had to get out. She had to leave. She had to take this promised child away, away from those who sat in judgment of her without understanding and who murdered her with words. If Elizabeth’s womb was miraculously fertile in her old age, maybe she would understand, maybe Elizabeth would know. Maybe the pregnant-too-old and the pregnant-too-young would understand each other in the hill country.

When she finally arrived, she would remember the scene for the rest of her life, walking up the craggy path where grass and mold grew between the stones to the simple house—no more than a shack, really. For a few moments, those heavy lugubrious clouds moved out of the way and cast patches of gold light in front of her. It was that humid, summer heat, so she stopped, wiped the sweat off her brow, pulled at her shirt and thrust her hands on the back of her hips to steady herself. Her feet were still bleeding. She sighed deeply.

From inside, near the stove, Elizabeth heard the sighed greeting of a pregnant soul, a body wracked with the promises of God. Aged and with protruding belly, Elizabeth slammed the screen door and shouted from from the porch, “Ave Maria! Blessed are thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb!” And Elizabeth’s greeting echoed throughout the hill country and down into the streams that ran through the hollers. The trees themselves shuddered at these words and the grass—the grass stood a little taller. All of nature leaned in at this greeting.

Elizabeth continued: “I knew it was you. I knew it was you and I seen you coming. And my baby leapt—oh, how he leapt!—when you sighed!” Elizabeth hurried, running as you’d imagine a pregnant old woman would. And when the young girl felt those gnarled, leathered hands clasp around her back and smelled lavender in Elizabeth’s hair and felt their pregnant bellies touch under that summer canopy in the hill country, the power of God overwhelmed her and she burst into tears.

She spoke out in words unknown, but remembered. In words hidden for a time, but always seen. Words that she had only half-heard for most her life, until they came out of her mouth: “MAGNIFICAT ANIMA MEA DOMINUM.” They didn’t have to be known, for they were knowledge. They didn’t have to be wise words, for they were wisdom. These were powerful words, the type of words she’d never utter again in her life, even when standing at the foot of the cross. But truth flowed from her lips.

And they wept in each other’s arms: no longer from the hills or a small town; no longer too-old or too-young; no longer too poor; no longer judged, categorized and dissected by hateful eyes; no longer empty, weak or forgotten; no longer even pregnant (although children were still in their wombs); they were no longer even women. They wept and saw each other as they knew they had always been: they were nothing but the image of God greeting itself.

Death and Transfiguration

(NB. As some of you know, I preformed in a one piano four hands recital a few weeks ago with the organist from my parish as a fundraiser. It was a good evening of some good music. Between each piece, we talked about the composer and the music. I was charged with the task of introducing our finale, a transcription of Richard Strauss’ Tod und Verklärung. I’ve included my favorite recording of it, in case you’d like to follow along.)

Capital-R Romantics love few things more than they love death and transfiguration. Of course, capital-R Romantics are those men and women of the eighteen-hundreds who rebelled against the stodgy rationalism and science of the Enlightenment by the free expression of artistic feeling. And, boy, did they feel! They expressed their wildest emotions, deepest melancholy and lurid fantasies by painting stormy oceanic scenes of shipwrecks; writing poems about daffodils and Grecian urns; writing dramas about men making deals with the devil; and by composing virtuosic piano pieces that made women swoon in salons all over Europe. In their spare time between all this feeling, capital-r Romantics would wander above the mists on lonely mountain walks, take lovers regardless of gender and aid in the overthrow of monarchs. They might live in squalor, hoping to die at an early age in some tragic bout of tuberculosis or the syphilitic brain fever while devotees mourned ’round the deathbed.

All these true life examples aside, it is actually incredibly hard to define Romanticism. There are several good books that try, especially Isaiah Berlin’s lectures on the subject. As a general rule, though, it might help you remember that capital-r Romanticism is just like, well, you know, any old regular romantic gesture, except taken to a whole new level. Instead of a nice Valentine’s Day Card, you get a symphony written in your honor after years of stalking by the composer. And, oh yeah, the symphony is based on visions your stalker/composer had while on opium. And, yes, he symbolically murders you in one of the movements and is marched to the scaffold. You rightly fall in love with him and spend several years in a bad marriage before getting divorced. Romantics take any feeling you might have, but raise it to a level of madness. Some call this mental illness, but I call it call it genius.

The German composer Richard Strauss was one of these capital-r Romantics, although he was later than most, as he still composing up to the 1940s. In one of my favorite quotes, Richard Strauss expressed that Romantic spirit: “I am against the apostles of moderation”. And his music shows it, too. He composed predominately in Tone Poems and Operas.

His Tone Poems are symphonic pieces of one movement that surround a general theme. Don Juan tells the story of, well, a Don Juan and his various conquests. His Alpine Symphony gives a moving setting of a hike to the top of a mountain. His famous Also Sprach Zarathustra was an attempt to put the philosophy of Nietzsche into musical form. You definitely know the opening few moments from 2001: A Space Oddessy. 

His Opera Salome was a musical setting of Oscar Wilde’s play describing the New Testament story of Herod’s daughter dancing for the head of St. John the Baptist. It has the famous and very suggestive dance-of-the-seven-veils. The final scene, though, is a lush and beautiful love song . . . that Salome sings to the decapitated head. And, then she kisses it before being killed herself. Elektra, his musical setting of the Greek Tragedy, tells the story of a woman seeking revenge by having pretty much everybody murdered. The Opera ends with her in an fantastic dance in the blood of her enemies. And, then, she, too, falls dead in true operatic style.

Is there any wonder why, then, in my personal musical trinity, there are three names: Gustav Mahler, Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. I was overjoyed when Debra suggested we do Death and Transfiguration.

Strauss wrote Death and Transfiguration when only a young man of twenty-four. In it, he tried to depict the death of an artist, a man who lived his life according to higher ideals. You could say he is one of our capital-r Romantics. Ostensibly, this piece is Strauss imagining himself on his own eventual deathbed. And so it opens in hushed chords of an unnatural rhythm and we join him there.

We are in that darkened room where the shades are pulled and we watch a death take place. It’s one of those times where you do not know what to do with yourself. So you stand and shift weight from right to left. You do not know what to do with your hands, so you wipe one sweaty, unsure palm on your knee. You do not know what to do with your own existence, so you blink, watch your breathing, and say nothing. And no one says anything. The weight of the room sits heavy in our throats. Just silence and the haggard breath of the man dying in the bed.

But, for the man – the artist – dying in the bed, he is not unsure of his existence. No, he is fighting for his life. Now, this unnatural rhythm which was quiet at the beginning now crashes in on him. Together, they conspire against him, they conspire to take his life. And so the death throes begin, teetering over the black abyss opening beneath his feet that threatens to consume him. We watch him struggle from across the room, still unsure of what to say or do. But, as he inches closer and closer to death, something odd happens.

His life begins to flash before his eyes. Here, he sees childhood, his loves, his dreams, those ideals! He sees all of them. But his dying life interrupts these sweet memories at every turn. And here, we have the most manic section of the whole piece. All of it is here: goodness, truth, terror, longing for more life and the ugly end. Finally, after one last struggle, the man, sweaty with exhaustion and with a rustle of wings up to the ceiling and some rumbling notes at the absolute bottom of the piano, gives up his soul. He dies.

There are many deaths that we know throughout our lives, that is for sure. There is, of course, the death of loved ones, perhaps one like how Strauss described it in the music. But there are other deaths, too. There are relationships and friendships that die. There are vocations and careers that die. There are ideals that die. Even egos, from time to time, need to die. It’s not just Strauss on this deathbed.

But, if Christ was right that a kernel of wheat must fall to the ground and die to bring forth much fruit, then we know that after every kind of death, there is a kind of transfiguration. Even Nietzsche, who was no friend of Christianity, believed that one must go under before one can go over. And for all it’s harmonic unsureness and rhythmic complexities and manic energies, Strauss gives this death over to transfiguration.

About the last few minutes of this piece, the transfiguration, I will say nothing. Only that you’ll know it when you hear it. But when Strauss found himself on his own deathbed at the age of 85 in 1949, he said to his daughter-in-law, “It’s a funny thing, Alice, dying is just the way I composed it in Death and Transfiguration.”

And Then What? Continued.

One of my favorite bloggers (BLS), asked a great question of my last post. She quotes me at the start:

“Any idea, no matter how high or brilliant or Godly, carries within the seeds of its very own destruction. Murderous hate and the brotherhood of man all grow together.” Hmmm. It seems to me that the second sentence here does not follow from the first….

I think they do. Solzhenitsyn wrote that the line between good and evil does not exist between people but is within us all, dividing the heart. It is true that men and women love and hate often and at the same time? Is it true that we can express love and hate at the same time to the same individual? There they are both within us, murderous hate and the brotherhood of man, all growing together.

Consider the Parable of the Tares. I know Christ said that it is about evil people growing up amid the redeemed, but I wonder if it can also be about good and evil within. Of course, we have capacity to grow and incubate both good and evil in our souls. We express both, sometimes doing both at the same time. And, even sometimes, hate is indistinguishable with love (and vice versa) until the time reveals which was wheat.

Not wanting to ruin his crop of wheat, the landowner advises his farmers to let the wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest. I think this is true for us, too, as evil and good grow within. Sometimes we can recognize what is good and what is bad, but sometimes we can’t. We have to wait for the harvest, for the perspective of time to know which was which. As Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be lived forwards, but is understood backwards”.

And Then What?

I love asking, “And then what?” to my friends who diet and exercise. “I just want to lose fifteen pounds,” they might say. And then what? “Then,” they continue, “I’d like to get more toned and just be healthier.” And then what? And then what? Try it sometime. Try it on yourself whenever you think something is going to help you change your life. It’s soul-crushing great fun.

When posed to any idea or thought, death is always the end of “And then what?” Death is even the end of Christianity. So, you want to spread the Good News? And then what? How will you do it? And then what? But how will you convince them? And then what? So on and so forth until one ends in either the death of self or the Spanish Inquisition. It might take more than a thousand steps in a thousand generations to get there, but there is a dark night with torture at the end, all the same. Any idea, no matter how high or brilliant or Godly, carries within the seeds of its very own destruction. Murderous hate and the brotherhood of man all grow together.

Start with freedom for all and end in total serfdom. It’s the only way humanity works. So-called communal living and Individualism both end in either murder or suicide. Even choosing not to believe anything is a kind of death, too. Ask it of anyone who proclaims belief in nothing and see the natural end of apathetic non-opinions.

Is death even the end, both naturally and philosophically? Is there anything beyond death, beyond this human instinct for murder or suicide? And then what? And then what? I don’t know.

I do believe that the cruelest trick of God was to give us minds that could imagine a static, changeless world but give us bodies that could never inhabit it. So, we dream of ideas ending in perfection, preaching that all will have life to the fullest. But inhabit bodies and minds that will never, never attain it.

Who will free me from this body of death? St. Paul once asked that. And then what?

“. . .and they were afraid to come nigh him.”

They say Moses veiled his face coming down the mountain because they were all afraid to come near him. His frightening face shone from the glory of God.

But what if Moses veiled his face to protect himself?

After all, who can behold the monstrous and inhuman beauty of the Lord and be knocked back among the mortals? He veiled to linger on that mountain (as it were), before gazing again on the shuffling of dusted whiners and scuttled whores. He covered his face to ease the sharp pain of reality’s return. Madness, murder, suicide — all diagnosable and certified — would greet him. And they were afraid because they knew the shock would kill him. So, he took his time. He veiled his face.

Surely the joy of the Lord would have killed him otherwise.

But who can say?

Salvaging the Shipwreck of Faith

A few weeks ago, I went to see the Met Live in HD production of Richard Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal (1878). Originally, I had intended to make a return trek to NYC to see it, but due to my procrastination (my foremost spiritual gift), I couldn’t make it work. Like a Nun in Lent, I dutifully resisted the urge to listen to any recordings of it, so beyond the Prelude and the Good Friday Magic music, I experienced it “live” for the first time. I didn’t even read the provided synopsis that day. I was summarily shaken to my core, spent the entire third act weeping and came out of the theater barley able to walk (I wish that were an exaggeration). It’s now my favorite Opera of all time, surpassing even Tristan und Isolde.

On first glance, Parisfal is a Christian Opera. After all, it’s about the Knights of the Holy Grail — not the ones who “impersonate Clark Gable” — and their efforts to win back the Spear which wounded the crucified Christ. There is a Communion service (of sorts) at the end of the first act and even a baptism in the third. Kundry is forever cursed to roam the world only laughing and never crying because she mocked Christ. Jesus is never mentioned, but there is lots of talk of “the Redeemer”. Yet, there are lots of non-Christian parts, too, and the Met’s production did a nice job of emphasizing those Buddhist and Eastern elements.

Once I had my bearings and drove home, I cracked open Bryan Magee’s The Tristan Church: Wagner and Philosophy (2002). Fantastically accessible and well written, I heartily recommend it to you if you’re curious about these things. In the chapter on Parsifal, Magee works hard to dispel the myth that Parsifal is a Christian work of art. Yes, it has Christian elements (and Eastern elements), but Parsifal is an embodiment of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer — not Jesus. You might recall I once referred to Schopenhauer as “Ecclesiastes for Atheists”.

But, what really struck me was this quote from one of Wagner’s essays, “Religion and Art” (1880):

It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion, inasmuch as the mythical images which religion would wish to be believed as true are apprehended in art for their symbolic value, and through ideal representation of those symbols art reveals the concealed deep truth within them.

For Wagner, religion is a ship wrecked by a literalism and clerical infighting. Religion was no longer about truth and mystery, but devolved into being about particular dogmas. Unlike other Atheists, however, Wagner believed that underneath all of this, there was still much value in religion. Art saves this kernel of religion from the clutches of the fake magic of doctrine, returning faith to it’s rightful role in transformation and the numinous.

Art’s job, therefore, is to rescue religion from itself. And I can’t help but wonder if he was right.

Lent 2013

Listen, I shall tell you a mystery: I do not like life. Within me, there is ______________. Yes, it has always been there. I can hear its echoes on the periphery of spiral-bound High School books, even through to today’s still-born paragraphs. That no matter how wonderful my life is – and, yes, there have been years of joy and plenty and laughter – it is never quite wonderful enough to escape ______________. Life is better in my head.

Now, all of this is not to say that I want to end life. In the abstract, I suppose, yes, I do look forward to death just like most Christians do with the worn apocalyptic sigh of “E’en so, Lord”. But, just like anyone else, the living urge screams up when I am eyeball-to-lightbulb with sudden break lights in front of me. I, too, swerve to avoid disaster like the rest. Yet, here I stand, tucked between an imagination that breeds colorful expectations and a grayer reality. I’m disappointed. I’m worn the fuck out.

Yet, I still get up every morning (mostly) on time, when the faint slivers of light brighten from behind spiny, leafless mountains. Sometimes, when I leave the house with wet hair, turn from the lock and step towards the car, I’m always surprised how much brighter it is. I forget winter is only season and not, say, a state of existence. Most days as I drive down the hill, I say aloud in my car, “Sun, you are most welcome this day”. I forget that if joy is temporary, then ______________ is, too. My priest says this is not forever. All things are temporary.

How do I greet the morning with my mourning soul? Have I really gotten up? No, I can honestly write, I am down and I have been down for the count. How long? Months, years, decades, maybe a century as the crow flies? I’m not sure. But, here I am, stuck in the water-less cistern of ______________. And, herein lies the problem: I can’t get up. I don’t think I can get up. Mostly, though, I don’t even want to get up.

I don’t want to get up. Yet, there I am. Here I am, yearning for light, all the same. Here I am, mumbling madness . . . but I haven’t given up, not yet. I will want to get up, one day. One day, perhaps in the ninth hour, I will think I can, even. One day, I will get up out of ______________. But, no. No! Not today. Today, I do not want to get up. 

Do not ask me what it is. You know what it is. You know it where the muscle fibers cut away from the bone. You know its stalking of the mid-afternoon, circling ’round a coherent idea, swimming in thoughts not thought. You know it in crying tears never came, in passions never sung. Do not so coyly inquire!

So, be kind, please. Be gentle (with this soul). Lower expectations (of your lover). Only caress my locks as a warm wind lazily makes its way from the turrets. The cedars signaling a dance, filled with the breeze. Sleep with me. It’s all I know to do, for in oblivion I do not speak. All we let our cares slide out to the lilies below, watered with tears. I abandon myself, belief, faith, time, now.

You, there! You reading this with timorous heart, wounded by  ______________! You are why I am here now, before you will be. So, I ask you: what is it in a man that makes him get up, time after time? What is it in a woman that makes her want to get up after failure, after falling? My friend, my friend, I do not know! I have no answers. But, surely, it must — it must! — be grace!

Listen! And I shall tell you a secret: all shall cease and we shall become gods, et saecula saeculorum.

On a Snowy Night, The American Dream

Snow! I can hardly say the word without inspiring deep dreadful terror in my fellow Southerners. For the days leading up to the forecasted opening of the heavens are full of worried murmurs: “They’re callin’,” they whisper, “for four to ten inches on Friday!” So, well-meaning pot-bellied men inquire about the status of your snow tires and whatever-wheel-drive your car might be. Women wrinkle their faces with consternation during hasty preparations to get home before the impending doom, before the white death scatters its hoarfrost over the rugged mountain’d earth. They all rush to where the heat suffocates to comfort while the snow licks the ground just beyond frosted windowpanes.

Not all are so lucky. Cars (both front-wheel and rear-wheel) and those big diesel trucks alike slide down the icy hills and, staggering like drunk men, try to get back up them. Some slide off the road before coming to a comfortable stop. Some hit power lines, plunging iced streets into night. While across town, lying in bed, some can feel the chill whispering on that foot sticking out from under the blankets. Meanwhile, the stifling heat leaks out doors and windows into the outer darkness beyond. Silence and the clock reads blank.

Unless you’ve been living under that rock permafrosted to the earth, you’re most likely aware that we had a presidential inauguration recently. These are always occasions to celebrate the civic religion. Always, if you will, a moment of great self-congratulation as the so-called greatest nation on earth selects a leader without bloodying the soil (whether he is Democrat, Republican or Whig). “Look,” the country seems to say, “How well we peacefully transfer power — like woah! — and what a feat that was in twenty-twelve, y’all!” My God, we’re exceptionally good at lauding ourselves at these things.

And, yes, of course, he said we have plenty of work to do. We the people must, the President inferred, roll up our proverbial sleeves just like he did on the campaign trail and do the good democratic work of bringing the American dream to the dreamless disenfranchised. “We must act,” he said, “knowing that our work will be imperfect.” We must act to bring about that self-evident truth of the equality of all women and men, regardless of race, religion, creed, sexuality, et cetera, et cetera.

Generations ago, was not a black man sold into slavery? Then a few decades ago was he not a second-class citizen in Alabama? But now is not a black man the President of the these United States? Do we not shine in transformed brightness of this fraternity of brothers and sisters? We must build that Republic that great men once said could shine like a city on a hill, illuminating the cold world frozen in sundry tyrannies. So on and so forth, until Beyoncé maybe (definitely) lip-synced about watching over ramparts for the night-proof of the flag still flying.

But, revolutionaries (both pacifist and violent) teach that equality has little to do with building up and more with tearing down. After all, we cannot beg freedom from a foreign sovereign, but must seize God-given rights in a bloody coup d’etat. We cannot build or compromise our way out of slavery, but must ruin the institution all-together. The unfinished pyramid of our Republic needs to be knocked down every once in awhile in order to reach higher to that all-seeing eye of God. Or so it seems, they say.

And, yes, on a snowy Sunday, do not the faithful stamp their feet in the narthex and shake their hair kissed by wintry flakes in an almost bored procession to the Altar of God? Do they not inquire of each other on how their roads were and who drove out in the snowstorm a few days ago, or does anybody need a ride? Do they not kneel as one and speak as one in belief towards the one God, heaven-maker and son-giver? Do they not drink from the same one cup of salvation? Is their not unity in their harmony?

Yet, even here at the Altar of Sacrifice, do not proud divisions remain . . . so . . .  well, proud? Do we not congratulate ourselves on our myriads of race and sexualities and so on, even though we are all over-educated classists? Do we not speak with pride about our diversity, even though we only use the same monophonic watered-down “nice” words of bourgeois liberalism? Is this unity? Do we not prevent the destruction of certain bureaucratic ecclesiastical institutions of a forgotten age because–well, who the hell knows why we do that! My God, we’re exceptionally good at lauding ourselves! Is this the brotherhood of man?

Even with all this unity and community bombast, I can’t honestly say whether I’ve ever seen that so-called self-evident truth in either the Church or the State. I’ve heard we’re good at it, but I haven’t seen it. Yet, I have lived through snowstorms where the power was knocked out, when it did not matter who you know or how much money you make or how well-known your pretentious little subdivision is, when road and grass are obscured into one by snow seen without lights, all return to default. Wealth, poverty, great and small are rendered the same by a snowstorm. The slate is wiped clean and the constructed pyramid of civilization crumbles for a brief moment into nothing. It is only here, at the mercy of uncontrollable forces under the all-seeing eye of God, that all live as they were created: equal.

Too Many Voices in my Head

Not to sound like a barbershop codger, but I remember the old internet where nerds could hide behind obscure usernames on Xanga or message boards, free from the prying eyes of the High School aristocracy. Even though none of the aforementioned aristocracy had even heard of the Kindertotenlieder and the mere thought of it would depress anyone else in my small, corn-crowded hometown, there were other nerds on the internet who shared my interest in Gustav Mahler. These nerds, by the way, were bona fide nerds, too — none of this geeky-hip Liz Lemony crap the kids have today. No, back then, it was uncool to be uncool. Saintly or nefarious, pure or pornographic, the internet was freedom.

Nowadays — Jesus, I really do sound like a Korean Vet in a barbershop! — the internet doesn’t feel as free, especially Facebook. I completely sympathize with Sara Scribner’s description of her issues with it:

I had to switch roles often on Facebook. Students at the school where I work would friend me, and then I would have to alter my comments. My boss friended me. Soon, I was jumping through a number of mental hoops, double-checking whether the “me” I broadcast was professional, upbeat, proper. It’s not easy to make all these projected selves cohere: My friends and family include folks from Southern evangelical Christianity, from the rap/rock critic subculture, from ’90s bohemia, from mommy-land, from the public-education universe. My guess is that most people on social media have some variation of this problem. In life, I entered each space separately; on Facebook, it all happened simultaneously.

I find myself doing that all the time, although, perhaps my friend’s list isn’t diverse as Ms. Scribner’s. I seldom write anything really personal as most everything from my humor to the stuff that seems personal is all really just universal, big picture stuff. Because of my conservative friends, I’m afraid to proclaim that I’m really a pacifist who wants strict gun control and completely socialized medicine. So on and so forth and vice versa.

Plus, as Ms. Scribner points out, there’s the whole Oh-My-God-I’m-Being-Left-Out feeling, which is the exact opposite of what I felt when I first dialed up the internet my freshman year of High School. Now, I can’t help but feel that since I’m neither pregnant nor married nor in a serious relationship nor in my quote-unquote chosen career field nor going on really expensive trips every few months nor Instagraming my dinner and am not cuter than my pseudo-ex’s new love, that somehow — somehow! — I’m missing out on the common human experience that is life. And thus, it whizzes by me with Instagram filters while I read lengthy Russian novels and spend evenings in front of a typewriter that’s out of correction tape.

This depresses me. And, then, I’ve got to wonder if any of my “friends” are looking at my page with the same depressed green eyes of envy, thinking my life is the best. That thought depresses me even more.

Facebook is not about living. It’s about appearing to live. It’s the black and white, wittier, perfect-teeth, smoke-screened presentation of ourselves to each other. It’s about hiding behind these carefully-selected images, then sanitizing them so as not to offend, and are, finally, broken down into an algorithm so advertisers can earn millions. On Facebook, we are embodied irony shackled to “ourselves” and the voices of those around us.

Most days, the fight to hear my own voice or see it on the page is hard, even if this voice sounds like an old man getting a shave and complaining about the price of a bag of feed. At least in a small-town barbershop a man could be a man and not have to explain himself to the person who once said he was “ZOMG SO FUNNY” at that one party, or to his former pseudo-ex. No, it is true, I don’t need their voices. I need the freedom to be.