The Transcendental Poodle
In his 1969 book Rumor of Angels, sociologist Peter Berger discusses “signals of transcendence,” the “reiterated acts and experiences” of everyday life that point beyond it. Play is one such signal: it forms an enclave separate from the facts and necessities that govern our ordinary social reality. The capacity for play suspends such facts and necessities, makes them relative, not determining, and gestures to a realm beyond what seems all encompassing. Our “propensity for order” is another such signal. It scaffolds our lives with a structure of sense that suggests reality itself has a meaningful structure, that it works as it should. Berger asserts that such signals of transcendence are “prototypical human gestures,” but I suspect that my poodle B. J. displayed those gestures as well.
Certainly B.J. took play with transcendent seriousness. His favorite chew toy was a cheap plastic hamburger with a small hole on the bottom. When squeezed, the hamburger whistled. B.J. would grasp that hamburger between his front paws in a thoroughly proprietary way and spend hours—hours—gnawing it with unchecked intensity. Any hand careless enough to move toward it provoked a deep-throated growl ready to erupt at any moment into a snapping snarl. For B.J., that hamburger was more than cheap plastic, more than a material object, more than a toy. It stopped time, concentrated space, and ruptured all interaction. He was engrossed in a heightened experience that existed well beyond the mundane and normative.
More often, however, play for B.J. was much less fierce. To spark a response, I sometimes walked two fingers toward his face. Predictably, it elicited a growl. When I continued to approach, he would suddenly grasp my fingers in his mouth and give them play bites, teeth barely impressing themselves on my flesh, acknowledging my game as a game, a skylarking antic in no way constituting an existential threat. It was a canine version of a benevolent and bemused tolerance, entirely different from instinctually driven behavior.
B. J.’s propensity for order was profound. Poodles are noted for the strength of their territorial marking instinct, strategically spritzing urine to stake their claim and warn away interlopers impertinent enough to stray within its boundaries. He was engaging in what the cultural studies folks would call “a signifying practice.” In this case, B. J. was true to instinctual form, spraying trees, the lamppost, the fence across the street, even the cable box. Every day the same stops, in the same order. Every day, the same routine.
Now, routine is widely considered deadening despite, or, perhaps, because of, our being firmly ligatured by it. It certainly does not induce that pleasurable cessation of time induced by a “flow” experience. Perhaps our dislike of routine resonates from the past, a cultural echo of the newness with which America has always been associated, beginning with John Winthrop’s hope that Massachusetts Bay Colony would be a city on a hill, through Thomas Paine’s declaration that the American Revolution inaugurated “the birthday of the world,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for “an original relation to the universe” to Henry David Thoreau’s frank belief in “old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.” Perhaps routine fits uneasily with the tinselled myth of the frontier with its escape from what John Milton called “the muddy pool of conformity and tradition” and pursuit of the new, with its incessant movement, the journey more important than journey’s end. It’s a story of rugged, restless men and women, abandoning the settlements, penetrating the wilderness to stake their claim on an unsettled life, only to move on again as that life increasingly settled again around them, because they felt, as did Thoreau, they “had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”
Many people know why Thoreau went to Walden Pond, but few realize he left for the same reason: to escape routine. Appalled at the path his feet had worn from his door to the pond, he realizes “how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.” Off he goes, wayfaring again, preferring to sail before the mast in his life’s voyage rather than spend it on hold in the hold. But for most Americans, the frontier closed by 1890 as manifest destiny drove settlers to the impervious barrier of the Pacific Ocean. The country turned to industrialism, and while it was innovative in many ways, it also required the structural efficiencies of the assembly line and time-motion studies. Human labor, human energy, became mechanized, rationalized, routinized.
Still, I give routine fair quarter: it coordinates our experience; it organizes the too-muchness, the Red Bull and Snickers sugar rush, of our lives. And so, I found in B.J.’s patterned progress up and down and across the street a recognition and a kind of connection. And yet, within this routine was another. At some point, invariably, as I watched him trot briskly along the sidewalk, his little legs pumping like four furry pistons, he would jump, launching himself off the earth, drawn upward, a small moment of transcendence. I’d like to think it was for joy, for sheer, pulsing delight in his canine condition, but of course dogs are not given to metaphysical reflection. I am, though, and so I wondered how long it had been since my two feet have transcended this all too solid planet.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Fallen Away
Fallen Away
We are tribal creatures. Some of us belong to the Democratic tribe, and some to the Republican tribe; some to the Green Bay Packers rooting tribe, and some to the cat’s eye marble collecting tribe; some to the vegetarian tribe, and some to the Jimmy Dean pancakes and sausage on a stick tribe. I was born, raised, and educated in the Catholic tribe. Now I am a member of what some claim is the even larger tribe of fallen-away Catholics.
I find it difficult to explain, even to myself, why I joined this tribe. It was not political, even though I disagreed with the Church’s stand on contraception, abortion and sexual orientation, which put me in the very large tribe of Americans who ignore uncongenial edicts from Rome. It was not sociological, even though I thought women should be ordained and priests allowed to marry. It was not academic, even though I could not accept a historically contingent document like the Bible, its component books assembled first at the Council of Hippo in 393, debated at subsequent councils, and finalized as infallible at the Council of Trent in the 16th century, as the divinely-inspired, inerrant word of God. It was not especially doctrinal, even though I found the Augustinian conception of original sin, an iniquity bequeathed to posterity by his conviction that all humanity was present in Adam, a stunningly unfair insult to human dignity and a punishment out of all proportion to the offense of intemperate fruit eating. Besides, what was up with God’s ironic comment on Adam’s fate: “the man has become like one of us.” Us? Doesn’t the Apostles’ Creed recited at every Mass begin, “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth?” And the notion of the Holy Trinity! Why, it did not simply rattle the latch of logic; it burst open the door. How could one Supreme Being be, at the same time, a composite of three persons. If God was, as Aquinas said, esse, being itself, utterly transcendent and, as Anselm said, “than which beyond thinking cannot go,” was a triune God contradictory in that it made God a being in triplicate?
No, none of these account for my membership in the tribe of the fallen-away. In fact, I considered most of the Church’s teachings morally resonant: the sanctity of free will and conscience that summoned us to exceed what, by nature, we were; the buttressing of revelation with intellect and reason; the emphasis on individual accountability, the recognition that the body, like everything else in the created order, is inherently good; the notion that evil is an internal lack or absence resulting from a failure to act in accordance with the good present in things, the idea that charity should infuse every aspect of our lives. Moreover, the rituals, mysteries, and symbols of the Mass and other services—the resurrection and ascension, the miracle of transubstantiation, the infusions of grace, the stations of the cross, the priestly vestments, the blessing of throats, the anointing with ashes, the burning of incense, the votive candles, the statues, the indulgences and prayers for the poor souls in purgatory, the stained glass windows and vaulted ceilings and soaring organ music—enchanted a world I saw as desperately disenchanted. Just being in a church during Mass seemed a small, sublime experience of transcendence. The space seemed filled with immanence, dense and numinous and wholly other. I even liked the Tridentine Mass, for, as I followed the priest’s words in my missal, Latin on one side, English on the other, I acquired a fair proficiency in a language that connected me to a deep slipstream of religious, political, and scholarly history.
What, then, caused my falling away? Perhaps it was that I was a young man who, like most young men, was self-absorbed and resistant to externally imposed obligations like Sunday and holy day church attendance, confession, Communion at Easter, inactivity on Good Friday afternoon, and self-abnegation during Lent. Perhaps it was that I was a young man who came of age in the 1960s, when the zone of what counted as religious behavior and spiritual practice widened considerably. Perhaps it was an unacknowledged form of rebellion against my parents. Perhaps I simply grew tired of the inconvenience of getting dressed for Mass, finding a parking spot, sitting in an wooden pew for an hour, listening to wooden sermons delivered by men who appeared to lack the most basic knowledge of public speaking, and enduring the mad scramble out of the parking lot at the end of Mass. Perhaps it was the artificiality of the enforced community spirit at Mass, the handholding and the exchange of the sign of peace. Who knows? One Sunday, I decided, for some reason, not to attend Mass. No shaft of lightning knifed its way from heaven to strike me down. On subsequent Sundays I made the same decision for the same unknown reason. It cascaded, and eventually I fell away from the Church altogether.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “fallen away.” On the one hand, it is haunted by negative associations: the headlong fall of Lucifer from heaven; the Fall of Man; the fall of pagan Jericho before Joshua’s 600,000 man army; the fall of Saul, the envious, witch-consulting first king of Israel; Solomon’s fall into idolatry; the fall of the Roman Empire; the fall of Saigon; the 2008 fall of the stock market. The sense here is that some purposeful unrighteous act, or failure to act, sets a perpendicularly downward trend in motion, a precipitous and irredeemable decline from potentiality, from the fruition of good. On the other hand, the phrase can also suggest passivity, an absence of fault, a being acted upon rather than acting. We fall in (and out of) love; we fall into a swoon; we fall into bad company or misfortune or madness. The mustard seed fallen by the wayside did not choose the inhospitable ground. It is a perplexing phrase, “fallen away,” linguistically uniting two opposing conceptions of human agency without so much as a glimpse of synthesis in sight--much as the Catholic Church positions its adherents between the two worlds of matter and spirit. The difference, and it’s a big one, is that the Church asks them to find a point of unity, a dialectic synthesis known by the more familiar name of “faith.” No non-overlapping magisterial here, no compartmentalization, but, rather, a deep grammar of being in which two separate languages find expression in the same tongue.
It is not typical for a religion to refer to its erstwhile adherents as “fallen away.” Non-practicing, nonobservant, one-time, former—but not fallen away. Evidently, the fallen away tribe is special as well as large. I do not know why it is special, any more than I know why it is large or how I became a member of it. What I do know is this: we are all wayfarers, and later rather than sooner we discover that our wayfaring is really a pilgrimage. Like Chaucer’s pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, we tell stories to make the going easier. But eventually the destination comes in sight and the serious business begins. Having pilgrimaged for many years, I find that being poised between the two worlds of matter and spirit is serious business for me now. I’d like to find that common grammar. It would seem you can leave the Catholic tribe, but it never quite leaves you.
We are tribal creatures. Some of us belong to the Democratic tribe, and some to the Republican tribe; some to the Green Bay Packers rooting tribe, and some to the cat’s eye marble collecting tribe; some to the vegetarian tribe, and some to the Jimmy Dean pancakes and sausage on a stick tribe. I was born, raised, and educated in the Catholic tribe. Now I am a member of what some claim is the even larger tribe of fallen-away Catholics.
I find it difficult to explain, even to myself, why I joined this tribe. It was not political, even though I disagreed with the Church’s stand on contraception, abortion and sexual orientation, which put me in the very large tribe of Americans who ignore uncongenial edicts from Rome. It was not sociological, even though I thought women should be ordained and priests allowed to marry. It was not academic, even though I could not accept a historically contingent document like the Bible, its component books assembled first at the Council of Hippo in 393, debated at subsequent councils, and finalized as infallible at the Council of Trent in the 16th century, as the divinely-inspired, inerrant word of God. It was not especially doctrinal, even though I found the Augustinian conception of original sin, an iniquity bequeathed to posterity by his conviction that all humanity was present in Adam, a stunningly unfair insult to human dignity and a punishment out of all proportion to the offense of intemperate fruit eating. Besides, what was up with God’s ironic comment on Adam’s fate: “the man has become like one of us.” Us? Doesn’t the Apostles’ Creed recited at every Mass begin, “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth?” And the notion of the Holy Trinity! Why, it did not simply rattle the latch of logic; it burst open the door. How could one Supreme Being be, at the same time, a composite of three persons. If God was, as Aquinas said, esse, being itself, utterly transcendent and, as Anselm said, “than which beyond thinking cannot go,” was a triune God contradictory in that it made God a being in triplicate?
No, none of these account for my membership in the tribe of the fallen-away. In fact, I considered most of the Church’s teachings morally resonant: the sanctity of free will and conscience that summoned us to exceed what, by nature, we were; the buttressing of revelation with intellect and reason; the emphasis on individual accountability, the recognition that the body, like everything else in the created order, is inherently good; the notion that evil is an internal lack or absence resulting from a failure to act in accordance with the good present in things, the idea that charity should infuse every aspect of our lives. Moreover, the rituals, mysteries, and symbols of the Mass and other services—the resurrection and ascension, the miracle of transubstantiation, the infusions of grace, the stations of the cross, the priestly vestments, the blessing of throats, the anointing with ashes, the burning of incense, the votive candles, the statues, the indulgences and prayers for the poor souls in purgatory, the stained glass windows and vaulted ceilings and soaring organ music—enchanted a world I saw as desperately disenchanted. Just being in a church during Mass seemed a small, sublime experience of transcendence. The space seemed filled with immanence, dense and numinous and wholly other. I even liked the Tridentine Mass, for, as I followed the priest’s words in my missal, Latin on one side, English on the other, I acquired a fair proficiency in a language that connected me to a deep slipstream of religious, political, and scholarly history.
What, then, caused my falling away? Perhaps it was that I was a young man who, like most young men, was self-absorbed and resistant to externally imposed obligations like Sunday and holy day church attendance, confession, Communion at Easter, inactivity on Good Friday afternoon, and self-abnegation during Lent. Perhaps it was that I was a young man who came of age in the 1960s, when the zone of what counted as religious behavior and spiritual practice widened considerably. Perhaps it was an unacknowledged form of rebellion against my parents. Perhaps I simply grew tired of the inconvenience of getting dressed for Mass, finding a parking spot, sitting in an wooden pew for an hour, listening to wooden sermons delivered by men who appeared to lack the most basic knowledge of public speaking, and enduring the mad scramble out of the parking lot at the end of Mass. Perhaps it was the artificiality of the enforced community spirit at Mass, the handholding and the exchange of the sign of peace. Who knows? One Sunday, I decided, for some reason, not to attend Mass. No shaft of lightning knifed its way from heaven to strike me down. On subsequent Sundays I made the same decision for the same unknown reason. It cascaded, and eventually I fell away from the Church altogether.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “fallen away.” On the one hand, it is haunted by negative associations: the headlong fall of Lucifer from heaven; the Fall of Man; the fall of pagan Jericho before Joshua’s 600,000 man army; the fall of Saul, the envious, witch-consulting first king of Israel; Solomon’s fall into idolatry; the fall of the Roman Empire; the fall of Saigon; the 2008 fall of the stock market. The sense here is that some purposeful unrighteous act, or failure to act, sets a perpendicularly downward trend in motion, a precipitous and irredeemable decline from potentiality, from the fruition of good. On the other hand, the phrase can also suggest passivity, an absence of fault, a being acted upon rather than acting. We fall in (and out of) love; we fall into a swoon; we fall into bad company or misfortune or madness. The mustard seed fallen by the wayside did not choose the inhospitable ground. It is a perplexing phrase, “fallen away,” linguistically uniting two opposing conceptions of human agency without so much as a glimpse of synthesis in sight--much as the Catholic Church positions its adherents between the two worlds of matter and spirit. The difference, and it’s a big one, is that the Church asks them to find a point of unity, a dialectic synthesis known by the more familiar name of “faith.” No non-overlapping magisterial here, no compartmentalization, but, rather, a deep grammar of being in which two separate languages find expression in the same tongue.
It is not typical for a religion to refer to its erstwhile adherents as “fallen away.” Non-practicing, nonobservant, one-time, former—but not fallen away. Evidently, the fallen away tribe is special as well as large. I do not know why it is special, any more than I know why it is large or how I became a member of it. What I do know is this: we are all wayfarers, and later rather than sooner we discover that our wayfaring is really a pilgrimage. Like Chaucer’s pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, we tell stories to make the going easier. But eventually the destination comes in sight and the serious business begins. Having pilgrimaged for many years, I find that being poised between the two worlds of matter and spirit is serious business for me now. I’d like to find that common grammar. It would seem you can leave the Catholic tribe, but it never quite leaves you.
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