Our friend and ally Hugo

After insulting the USA and every prosperous country in the world, Hugo Chavez must seek medical treatment in that other socialist paradise, Cuba. I pray for him, his family, and his country. Nonetheless, the irony of a caudillo suffering in Cuba might make a fiction writer out of me yet. Jose de Cordoba comments:

'Mr. Chávez, who considers himself to be Fidel Castro's spiritual heir, provides Cuba with up to 100,000 barrels a day of cut-rate oil, making the island's economic survival largely dependent on Mr. Chávez's largess.

'"The two Castro brothers, who were Catholics once, must be burning a lot of candles, praying for Chávez's survival," says Riordan Roett, head of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.'

Why so many books about the Nazis still?

Philip Kerr:

'I first started writing about and researching the subject in the mid-1980s. And to this end, a Jewish-American friend, Allen Reichmann, kindly arranged for me to meet with his father, a plumber and a survivor of Auschwitz. We drove to the family home in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, where Mrs. Reichmann had prepared dinner. After we'd eaten, I listened with fascination as Mr. Reichmann explained how he and his brother had moved through the Reich, from one camp to another, installing luxury bathrooms in the homes of senior SS officers, including one Josef Mengele. That's almost a novel in itself. (They liked avocado-colored bathroom furniture.)'

Talk about truth stranger than fiction! Can you imagine living safely in Washington Heights after surviving the Holocaust as a Jew installing luxury bathrooms in the homes of SS officers? I must agree with Mr. Kerr that the Nazis were the greatest evil of the 20th century, though the Leninists and Maoists crowd the top of the list. Their love of death, and their ability to persuade people of all backgrounds to leave their moral scruples behind and kill innocent people for ideology, power, and the thrill of cruelty should always be studied.

What bugs me the most today, however, is that fascists in Islamic countries read the same texts, plot the annihilation of the Jews, hate Western civilization as it was passed down to us, and consider the death of millions to be the beginning of a new millennium. Readers of this blog know that I don't spit bile about Islam, though I will criticize it and its followers. Nonetheless, fascists who hijack the religion of one billion people in order to bring death to innocents need to be called what they are: fascists. There is not a dime's worth of difference between Baathism and Nazism, except that the Nazis gained power over more people.

David McCullough on the teaching of history

'Mr. McCullough began worrying about the history gap some 20 years ago, when a college sophomore approached him after an appearance at "a very good university in the Midwest." She thanked him for coming and admitted, "Until I heard your talk this morning, I never realized the original 13 colonies were all on the East Coast." Remembering the incident, Mr. McCullough's snow-white eyebrows curl in pain. "I thought, 'What have we been doing so wrong that this obviously bright young woman could get this far and not know that?'"'

Read the rest here by Brian Bolduc.

"The War Against Girls"

It is worse than ugly. Jonathan Last writes about Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection, a study of the effects of sex selection on human populations:

'Ms. Hvistendahl argues that such imbalances are portents of Very Bad Things to come. "Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live," she writes. "Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent." As examples she notes that high sex ratios were at play as far back as the fourth century B.C. in Athens—a particularly bloody time in Greek history—and during China's Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century. (Both eras featured widespread female infanticide.) She also notes that the dearth of women along the frontier in the American West probably had a lot to do with its being wild. In 1870, for instance, the sex ratio west of the Mississippi was 125 to 100. In California it was 166 to 100. In Nevada it was 320. In western Kansas, it was 768.

'There is indeed compelling evidence of a link between sex ratios and violence. High sex ratios mean that a society is going to have "surplus men"—that is, men with no hope of marrying because there are not enough women. Such men accumulate in the lower classes, where risks of violence are already elevated. And unmarried men with limited incomes tend to make trouble. In Chinese provinces where the sex ratio has spiked, a crime wave has followed. Today in India, the best predictor of violence and crime for any given area is not income but sex ratio.'

Music and Memory: Part 20

Pentimento at work with song and pen:

'People need to hear Brahms; they need that stirring, rushing, choking, devastating beauty, that beauty that makes their veins throb with teeming life.'

The Existential Crisis

I start this post reflecting on one of my favorite little books, I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven. The main character is a young Anglican vicar sent north up the coast of British Columbia to some isolated Indian peoples in a beautiful but stark part of the world. Nothing in his life could have prepared him for it, and his bishop declares his challenge in speaking of a young Indian: "In his eyes you'll see a look that is in the eyes of all of them, and it will be your job to figure out what it means, and what you are going to do about it. And he will watch you- they will watch you- and in his own time he will accept or reject you."

When the vicar meets the young Indian two pages later, the narrator notes: "There was a pride in his eyes without arrogance. Behind the pride was a sadness so deep it seemed to stretch back into ancient mysteries Mark could not even imagine, and he felt the small thrill of fear, of anticipation, which a man knows if he's lucky enough to meet and recognize his challenge."

The Indians in the story hunt and fish for their sustenance in the very harsh climate of the Pacific Northwest. They know death, and they do not live their lives denying and defying their mortality. The challenge for the vicar is the existential crisis of knowing death is certain. How he faces this existential crisis will be the climax of his own life.

In our culture, we pretend we can dodge this certainty. Evading taxes, in comparison, is a cinch. If we are lucky, the existential crisis hits us when we lose someone we dearly love rather than at the moment of our own deaths.

This existential crisis follows me every day now, that is, the moral challenge of knowing that I am going with my mother to the grave. It was always there and jumps out of most pages of the Holy Scriptures, but I hid well from it until these past few weeks.

Now I cannot escape it. I was sitting in a deli last week where I eat frequently and was very aware that this life ends before we know it. I looked around me in the deli, saw the televisions tuned to ESPN, and heard conversations about every topic but death and our coming meetings with our Maker. I don't judge my neighbors harshly. I have not given eternity much thought either.

As Christopher Buckley says in Losing Mum and Pup, when your parents go you know "you're next." This week I went to the place where Mom died, a senior apartment building, to pick up her accumulated mail. I chatted briefly with the staff and then walked out the door to my car. I looked up at the five-story building full of seniors: "You're next!" spoke the unseen. School ends. Jobs end. Cars go to junkyards. Even Rome fell. I am going to die, and I would be highly unusual if I lived another forty-nine years.

If Mom is wrong about God, faith, the Church, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection, I should live my life for some Darwinistic purpose, perhaps in a way in which the end justifies the means.

If Mom and the Nicene Creed are right, however, I have a limited time to convert fully to the faith of our fathers. I must face the existential crisis. To reject Mom's faith is to accept the premise that life ends, if we are lucky, with a tombstone at cemetery having "perpetual care."

So where do we find our resurrection? The short answer is in Jesus the Son of God. While it is true that Mary, the Mother of God leads us to her Son Jesus, it is also true that Jesus, True God and True Man, is more than honored to give honor to those who honor Him, including His Mother and the saints, as exemplars of what He intended Mankind to be. The very nature of God is to be Man. God did not choose to be born of a woman, but rather, His being born of the Blessed Virgin is fundamental to His Being the Lord God Almighty.

Pagans felt these things without understanding them and built cults around fertility, harvest, hearth, and motherhood. Without the Holy Church, such veneration is subject to corruption, but the primal instinct to elevate motherhood to sacredness was breathed into us when God breathed on Man. We Catholics do not worship the creature, but the Creator, though we recognize it was God's very nature to perfect one woman to give birth to Himself.

Old fashioned obstetrics and gynocology were integral to the salvation of Man, just as they are integral to our being. I was born of a woman. My wife gave birth to the closest thing I will likely ever witness to my own resurrection, my daughter. My wife herself is a creative force of God. My mother is the closest thing I have ever known to the Blessed Virgin. Thus, Christ is revealed to me as a man by the women in my life, though they are shadows of what is to come.

Thus, in summary, the existential crisis of knowing I never was and cannot be in control of my own existence is met by the Resurrection. The Resurrection with a capital "R" reveals the Incarnate Triune Deity behind the creation of the world and my own birth. The God revealed to Moses through the Burning Bush intervenes in history. Every human birth is a cosmic event.

My mother loved God from the time I was small. She understood that her salvation was a gift from God through Jesus Christ. There was much she would have told me but she did not understand. There was much I could not hear. Now she understands and speaks profoundly in death. As T.S. Eliot wrote in "Little Gidding":

"And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."

[Above: Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, ca. 1601-02]

Praying with Saint Dominic

Many of you know my love for the Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia in Nashville, who prayed that we might have a child, and our child was conceived by the end of that same year!

These past months have been extremely difficult. I have never been this sad. I have never been morally exhausted in this way. People I love depend on me, and I have to carry on despite my grief. The Blessed Mother teaches me about my own mother, and my mother, being the teacher she always was, leads me to the Blessed Mother. In a way I cannot begin to describe, it seems as if the words in scripture "born of a woman" mean more than they ever have. Moreover, every woman I know well and love dearly seems to be pregnant with the mystery of "born of a woman" and the Virgin's role in God's plan of salvation. God loves mothers. He himself chose to be born of a mother, or, better said, it was His very nature to be "born of a woman."

Saint Maximilian Kolbe noted that if the Incarnation is more than the mind can comprehend, then the birth of God to a human mother is a mystery upon mystery! So in my sadness I think about my mother and what she reveals about the Mother of God.

I recently met several Dominican sisters who in their consecrated lives of prayer, study, and teaching show us the Blessed Virgin and Her Son Jesus. Saint Cecilia, pray for us.

More about the Sisters here.