A 'play-world' which licks your 'real world' hollow...

I don't know yet for sure, and I'll have to ask God when I see Him if I'm right, but I can't help thinking that my feeling of being in perpetual exile, of always being on the outside observing (and taking notes), and never having a real home, has been one of those backhanded graces we sometimes hear the saints writing about.

I've spent my whole life looking for the door to Narnia, trying to get home. Because, brother, this just can't be it.

A few days ago, I was talking to one of the LifeSite staffers, and he said that he had never paid much attention to Narnia. He read one or two of them as a kid, but never gave them much thought. They're just kid's books right?

I was shocked. How could a Christian not know?

I said that nearly all my Christian formation came from those books as a child, and that they still form the framework for how I understand the Faith. I know the Chronicles of Narnia the way some Protestants know the Bible. (Yes, I know that's bad, but it's the truth.)

And I know I'm not crazy or dumb, because this man also takes them really seriously. And he's really smart and knows lots of stuff.

As a friend, and fellow Narnian, Gregory di Pippo pointed out to me the other day, the average lifespan of ordinary children's books is, from hard-cover first edition to paperbacks in the remainders bin, maybe, at most, 3-5 years. The Chronicles of Narnia have never gone out of print since their publication in the early 1950s. They have sold +100 million copies and been translated into 47 languages.

I said to my colleague that Puddleglum's famous Profession of Faith was probably the most important expression of the answer to Modernia's obsession with secularism that I'd ever seen. I told him I'd post it.

~ * ~
The Green Witch, the Lady of the Green Kirtle, the Queen of Underland, has captured Eustace, Jill, Puddleglum the Marsh Wiggle, and Prince Rillian, whom she has held for ten years, and all of whom she wishes to use as tools in her plans of conquest.

She has spun an enchantment, a sweet web of lies about not just Aslan, but about the very nature of reality. The world, she says, is only what she says it is; there is no real world but her world...It would be so easy to give in, and is such a struggle to fight...

But Puddleglum, the wet blanket, the one who has never let himself be distracted from the quest, has broken her spell, and stamped on her sweet, cloying, enchanted fire with his cold foot.

"The sweet heavy smell grew very much less. For though the whole fire had not been put out, a good bit of it had, and what remained smelled very largely of burnt Marsh-wiggle, which is not at all an enchanting smell. This instantly made everyone's brain far clearer. The Prince and the children held up their heads again and opened their eyes.

Secondly, the Witch, in a loud, terrible voice, utterly different from all the sweet tones she had been using up till now, called out, "What are you doing? Dare to touch my fire again, mud-filth, and I'll turn the blood to fire inside your veins."

Thirdly, the pain itself made Puddleglum's head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought. There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic.

"One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have.

Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.

And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."

That has been my private manifesto since the first time I read it when I was nine years old.

I've spent my whole life feeling like an exile, longing, yearning to go home, and looking for the door that will take me there.



~

How then shall we live?

I've been involved in an interesting discussion in the last couple of days, which can be viewed here and here and in which it was my great pleasure to play the role of "gadfly".

It is one I enjoy enormously. There is little that bores and exasperates me faster than the usual inbox fare of these big Professional Catholic sites where someone writes an article that is meant to provoke discussion and receives a chorus of: "Great post Steve!" "Wow Steve! I've never heard it put that way before..." "I wish I were as eloquent as you are Steve, because you've really said what I've been thinking..."

Nnnggg..!

Yes, and who really cares what you've been thinking, since it is clear you have nothing interesting to say about it.

It is commbox love-ins like these that makes the gadfly in me break out of his cocoon and make a beeline straight for any exposed flesh. Given that no one in our times has been taught how to have a friendly disagreement, I find it is quite a simple matter to make things more interesting. The plodding earnestness of the New Orthodox Catholics is just too easy a target, too juicy a bit of meat, to leave alone. The fact that they, mired as they are in their own private version of political correctness, can't abide the slightest dissent and have no sense of proportion or humour, really only adds to the fun.

(Long Aside: There was, of course, simply no way at all that I could have resisted the temptation of saying What I Really Think about breastfeeding in public. It's a fairly straightforward syllogism: I hate hippies and all of their pomps and works. Hippies started the whole "lets expose our private parts in public to shock our parents and then demand that society change its attitude towards our 'natural and beautiful' body parts" movement that I remember so well from childhood. One of the major themes of the early hippies was the demand to breastfeed in public. The hippies have, through these apparently small discrete incursions, destroyed nearly the entirety of the Christian social agreement that once sustained Western Civilisation. Therefore, I think women need to keep their clothes on in public in order to preserve Christendom. So when I saw a cluster of admiring NOCs congratulating Steve on how wonderfully he had come to the defense of the practise, using exactly the same rhetoric I remember only too well from the furry-armpitted, fright-haired harridans of my earliest memories ... well, it was just too much to expect me to resist. I was certain Steve wouldn't mind.

I will grant, perhaps, the excuse that most of the NOCs are too young to remember the hippie movement themselves, and were for the most part raised in safe middle class neighbourhoods in which they had no direct exposure to the filthy hippies and their Crusade for Indecency. It is perhaps somewhat understandable that they would not realise they were dutifully reciting and defending the hippie doctrines that have slithered quietly into every aspect of our lives and destroyed Western Civilisation. But take it from me who remembers well life on the hippie West Coast in the early 1970s and her mother's grubby, patchouli-doused friends talking about their plans: the determination to force the rest of the world to accept the "beautiful and natural" phenomenon of breastfeeding in public is a manifestation of the feminist hippie movement slithering into Christianity and I won't have it.

Also, breastfeeding involves bodily fluids. Anything that involves bodily fluids needs to be kept out of public view.)

Now, wait. What was I talking about?

Oh yes, the discussion at Steve's Inside Catholic column. Jeff Culbreath is someone whose blogging I have enjoyed for some years now and with whom I've discussed many of these kinds of issues in a list we used to belong to. I would say that most of the writing by Catholics, especially traditionalist Catholics, that I find interesting and important is focused on this question of how to live, knowing what we know, in a world that knows nothing of it.

I make light of it and poke my stick into the hornets' nest because the question is an important one that needs to be taken seriously. It can't be left to the mutual admiration societies that cluster into commboxes. Steve and I and a few others have been working on this, almost as the main background theme of all our writing in the last five years. Some of us believe that it is counter productive, not to mention more or less impossible, to remove oneself off to the woods or the country to attempt to re-create a Catholic utopia where all the ladies wear long skirts and all the kids can converse in Latin.

Others disagree.

But the bigger question is one that remains.

Just how do we live as Catholics in a situation like the one we have? What is the proper "balance" of living in but not of the world? How much of the world, and which particular bits, can we take in? What must we reject and of what may we say, "yes, this is part of the human endeavour of which I am naturally a part"?

How do we get the proper perspective on a culture in which we are ourselves completely steeped, to which we owe the very shape of our thoughts?

This raises other questions. Can we have friends "in the world"? Non-Catholic friends? Can we hope for the salvation of our non-Catholic loved-ones?

Do we set ourselves up as arbiters of who qualifies for membership in the Elect? If so, according to what criteria and by whose authority?

Does it matter that we are, while being systematically forced out of public life in the secular world, at the same time deliberately withdrawing ourselves from it? Is this exclusion and withdrawal a bad thing or a good thing? Should we fight it or help it?

There are all sorts of solutions, some better than others, but none The Right solution. Many retreat. Many give up the struggle. Many join groups that help them withdraw, like the SSPX. Some go out of their way to live near a place where there is some safety and the protection of something like a monastery or an Oratory. Some just try to go it alone.

Catholics in general, and traditionalist Catholics in particular, have a habit of looking to the past for precedent to figure out a way to cobble together a method of dealing with the problem.

Is there a precedent for our current situation? I think not an exact one. As someone said, although we are indeed returning to a variation on pre-Christian paganism, complete with child sacrifice, lawlessness and philosophical fatalism, there is a vast difference between a virgin and a divorcee. A Christendom that has spurned Christ in her maturity is not the same bride that was wooed in her innocence.

So, how are we to see our times? How are we to interact with our non-Catholic, paganised neighbours? Do we approach them with disdain? Do we not approach them at all?

Is it possible for a Christian to make use of the things of the pagan world that are, through the working of the Natural Law, still under the headship of Christ, though He is unknown?

Can we read Truman Capote? Do we dare laugh at the bawdy jokes on Boston Legal, or empathise with the moral struggles of Alan Shore? Can we see goodness in films and music that is not specifically Christian?

Did the early Christians read the Classical writers?

Augustine derided the pagan entertainments of his youth, but was he entirely right? (Terribly daring, I know, to question so venerable a Doctor).

The fact is, I do not know the answers to these questions. But I believe this is the essence of our task, having been stuck in these almost inconceivably dreadful times.

I'm a child of this civilisation. I'm even a child of the hippie generation, and I'm sure am also unconsciously greatly influenced by that movement. I want to know the world, not reject it. The world is full of human beings, and there is nothing so interesting and wonderful to a misanthrope like me as human beings.

I can't help it. I love the world.

And I understand that it was not entirely repugnant to the Father either.

As often happens,

Steve and I seem to be thinking about the same things at the same time. (Except when he's thinking about 'Merican politics or electronics, which I really never think aboot, eh?.)

"

This is why, despite my own temptations to just shut off the TV and move to the boonies I can’t. Correction - that’s partially why I can’t. Part of it is that I’m simply drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I want the city. I want to go see movies. I want to sit down once in a while with a beer and a good real-time strategy game. I want to be a part of everything that’s going on, to get right square in the middle of it and separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe that’s dancing the edge a little too much for some, but anything else just isn’t living as far as I’m concerned. If I were still single, I’d move in a heartbeat to New York or Rome or Tokyo. Or even Los Angeles. Because whatever assessments we have about the good and bad things that stem from our culture, that’s where the culture is coming from. And we need to be aware of it to know where it’s headed, and what we can do.

And I can’t, can’t, can’t stand hiding from it. It’s not who I am.

This is why I get uppity about arbitrary anachronisms, or the adoption of homeliness as a fashion statement by Catholics. We shouldn’t be throwbacks just because we’re afraid of today. We shouldn’t adopt the look of the FLDS because we’re afraid of immodesty or impropriety. We need to work to be the best we can within the parameters of what’s going on, right now, every day. And it’s possible, I know, because I see it. It’s out there, often unwittingly. There are people with no connection to our belief system out there wearing modest clothes because they find them fashionable, or making good art because it’s beautiful, or making and enjoying good food because it delights the senses."

We struggle to find a balance between belonging to the world and belonging to Christ. We are children of the world, our cultures, our nations and the love of those things is one of the natural goods. As Bart Simpson once said, "How can we be a community if we don't watch the same shows?"

I see that I have aroused questions.

Good.

The Great Escape

I think the saddest thing about this noxious and pathetic display is how far the fantasy is from the reality. Why do such deviancies attract such a pathetic lot of flabby, pastey, podgies? (The delicate-of-constitution among our readers may want to decline the link.)

I was having a discussion the other day with my long-time blogging buddy Steve about the attractions of fantasy. Fantasy, in various manifestations, has become the mainstay of our culture. People are drawn into its sticky entanglement and seem to prefer to stay there. It doesn't seem to matter what particular way your fantasy world manifests itself, as long as it keeps you well-insulated from reality.

We were discussing this in the context of the Trad fantasy world, wherein the Catholic confessional state is somehow going to be magically restored, schools will start teaching kids Latin again, the Vatican will renounce VII and women will go back to wearing long skirts and bonnets.

Steve writes that he knew someone in childhood who was a big Tolkien fan:

"The kid had an imagination. He learned those elvish runes from the back of the book and he would write on his wall calendar with them, making little notes to himself about what he was going to do...It was cute, the kid who spent half his life in a fantasy world of his own creation...

"But you see, he was a kid. The [Trads], they have families. Bishops Fellay and Williamson, they have flocks...

"These people all live in fantasy worlds, where brave-sounding words and misplaced bravado are supposed to mean they are part of something special. And here's the pope - this wonderful, blessed, pope - trying to welcome them back in and even making it easier for them to get there. And they're throwing temper tantrums and composing love ballads to idiocy and grabbing hold of their sword hilts and trying to find some way, any way, not to be forced to grow up and get on with it."

"That's bad for us. Isn't it?"

One day I came across a little group of people living in the States who call themselves the "Plain Catholics" (who have a blog, naturally). They were Catholics who had taken a look at the Amish and decided this was a good thing. A comforting fantasy scenario in which to live full time. The women dress in Amish style clothes and wear those charming little caps, they build their own barns...But they're Catholics, see. So it is way better than being Amish. Right?

Now, I'm sure these people are very nice and kindly... hang on, disclaimers like this always sound false and trite don't they? I'm not sure of anything of the sort. Frankly, they sound like loons. They sound to me like people who just cracked under the Fantasy World temptation.

I've seen a lot of it, especially in the Catholic world where we feel completely ringed around by an unimaginably hostile and horrifying Real World. There are lots of fantasists, Catholic Enclavists, who want to go off, and who have gone off, into the woods to create a happy and comforting little Catholic world, well insulated from Outside. The kids are homeschooled, the women commonly wear the trademark shapeless plaid jumper/white t-shirt and sneakers combo, the men work at home, the books on the shelves are all from Ignatius or Angelus press, the jokes are clean and not very funny, conversation is always holy, the horrors of the squelching, seething pornographic world Outside are clucked at primly and the introduction of ironic humour is a wild and somewhat scandalous sensation.

Sound familiar?

But I think this sort of thing is just a different manifestation of the same impulse as our podgy leather-clad friends in the link. It's just another form of the same denial and rejection of The Real. I remember well the hippie world on the Left Coast. The people in it, all of whom indulge regularly in some form of video game/sci-fi fanaticism/historical re-enactment group narcotic in addition to living in Vancouver, all regarded their self-created world to be superior to the one occupied by the rest of the world. Feminism, pro-liferism, political activism and right up to involvement in occult and esoteric or quasi-religious/psychological [New Age] practises are all in this category. Make anything into a replacement for The Real and you've fallen into fantasism.

What are its characteristics? A close-knit group of people, a rejection of the "world outside the group", adherence to special distinguishing behaviors, dress, diets, activities that set your group apart from, and usually in opposition to, the World Outside. Not many go as far as the "transsexuals" and actually have significant bits of themselves sliced off and bind themselves to a lifetime of body-altering chemicals, but loads of them like to dress up and "live the dream", and talk about "going full time". The goal, however you go about it, is to enclose yourself into another, more congenial world.

I am old enough to remember when all this started. It wasn't the 60s. In the 60s, people were just experimenting, seeing what they could get away with. It was the 70s and up that it really took hold. The concept of the "lifestyle choice" was born then, and grew into its current state of permanent adolescence in the 80s.

I replied to Steve:

Yes. It's bad. How bad?

My mum got into the fantasy world and lived in it all the time I lived with her. It was a hippie fantasy world, but it was the same prison, just a different cell block.

[After leaving home so early ], as the time has gone by, and I've slowly managed to shake off the remnants of my mother's make-believe world, I've come to realise that it was not just a survival thing to leave home, but it was the thing that saved my soul too. Divorced from reality, means divorced from grace.

I've seen lots of forms of it. Sci fi nerds, computer geeks, lots of Tolkein nerds, SCA people, even people who are fanatical fans of television shows. Even people in the pro-life movement have created a little bubble universe around them, which I hear happens a lot in 'Movements" and "Causes". Political parties do it too.

I think it's a product of The Collapse. We don't hold together any more as a society. People don't belong to anything, not even their families. They certainly don't belong to their countries (Britain has been horribly deracinated, and no one in this country knows why). The world has become so radically horrible, and there are so few natural ways of creating cohesiveness, it's natural we should try to build enclaves.

Yes. It's bad, but I think I understand it.

But yes, it's really bad.

It's why it is so very difficult to make people become Catholics. I got a note from a recent convert once who asked me what to make of the disaster that he saw in the Church. He wanted to know if he ought to go along with what was going on in his parish, out of obedience or something. I told him that above all, the pursuit of the Catholic life, holiness, is the dedication to The Real to the exclusion of anything false. Falsehood, self-deception, hiding from The Real, is hiding from God. And if you persist, I've learned from first hand experience that it is possible to hide from Him in a self-created fantasy prison right up to the moment of death.

The body as a piece of Samsonite

This was quite good, I thought:

But there are more profound reasons why the pill is so disruptive of marital happiness. It has to do with the nature of sexuality itself. Sex, we tell our audience, is a mystery which can never be reduced to biology. It has a meaning far beyond the physical act of love. You recall the scene in The Graduate when Mr. Robinson confronts young Benjamin Braddock about his adultery with Mrs. Robinson. Benjamin defends himself by saying that it was no big deal: "Mrs. Robinson and I might just as well have been shaking hands." Mr. Robinson gets even more upset, and rightly so; because behind Benjamin’s statement is a gnostic separation of spirit and flesh, of heart and body, which even the dimmest of cuckolds can sense is utterly wrong.

The problem goes back to Descartes, or maybe even Plato. Our culture has been able to turn sex into a casual activity because it has separated personhood from the human body. Most people have the idea that their real self is somewhere inside—the proverbial ghost in the machine—and that what they do with their bodies doesn’t make much difference. But this has never been the view of the Church, which teaches that the body is not a mere appendage, but is as much a part of us as our soul. After all, in the Nicene Creed we don’t say that we believe in the immortality of the soul, but in the resurrection of the body. In a very significant way, we are what we do with our bodies.

What she said...

By the definition of those who hate me, I am a racist, not because I hate, but because I love too much, because I love my native land in whose earth I can trace my line back a thousand years, for which my ancestors fought and in which their bones are buried. To them, I am a racist because I love my people, a race which has done more to benefit mankind and the greater good than almost any other which has walked the earth.

Let them call me racist I will not renounce my love for my land and my people, even if, as a result I must accept the ugly words my enemies throw at me.

Sarah: M of A.

My mum was buried in Vancouver, a fact which saddens me. I received a call from my cousin in Surrey, who asked if it would be OK to plant a rose bush in the family plot there in her memory.

I haven't gone to visit the Lindsay's yet, and I want to do so soon, now that the weather shows signs of improvement. I was the first in all my family's history to have been born away from the sacred native soil, and I want to make up for lost time.

What do we mean by "belief"?

"When I was a small child," writes Caryll Houselander in her book The Reed of God,

"someone for whom I had a great respect told me never to do anything that Our Lady would not do; for, she said, if I did, the angels in heaven would blush. For a short time this advice 'took' in me like an inoculation causing a positive paralysis of piety. It was clear to me that all those things which spelt joy to me were from henceforward taboo ­ blacking my face with burnt cork, turning somersaults between props against the garden wall, putting two bull's-eyes into my mouth at the same time-all that was over! But even if I faced a blank future shackled with respectability, it was still impossible to imagine Our lady doing anything that I would do, for the very simple reason that I simply could not imagine her doing anything at all.

The inoculation of piety wore off quickly, and so completely that when the sunset warmed the sky over our tangled garden with a pink glow, I thought that it must be the faint reflection of the rosy blush that suffused all heaven!

"This would not be worth recording but for one thing, namely, that the wrong conception of Our Lady which I had is one that a great many other people have, too; a very great many people still think of Our Lady as someone who would never do anything that we do."

Hence The Reed of God, 1944 was written to contemplate the Blessed Virgin Mary that we may imitate her.