When we look back on the past, it is sometimes tempting to think of historical events as having a certain inevitability: because they happened in the way they did, it was necessary that they happen in such a way. With the aid of hindsight, we can discern how certain cultural movements or personalities influenced particular events or individuals and draw out connections and causalities that may even have been latent at the time. In itself, this can be a useful and fruitful exercise, especially when we consider the providential hand of God who is able to draw good even out of the evil actions of men.

In undertaking this exercise, however, it is always necessary to recall that the human beings involved in historical events acted freely, making contingent decisions whose consequences they had the opportunity to either consider or ignore. Just as we ourselves are free at the present moment to decide whether to continue to spend our time contemplating the mists of history as we peruse this blog or to give way to some more fruitful activity, so too the individuals whose lives and works we consider had the freedom to choose how they would respond to the situations in which they found themselves.

When we look back on an event that has happened, it is helpful to consider not only that it happened, but also to consider what motivations and circumstances contributed to an individual’s decision to act well or ill. What they have written they have written, but it is fruitful to consider not only the words that have been preserved but the anguish and joy that went into them.

One phenomenon that is fruitful to consider, both in past events and our current circumstances, is that of doubt. Often times, we think of doubt as something unhelpful or distracting, something that takes away from the self-confidence and drive that is indispensable for achieving greatness. In the 2010 On Heaven and Earth, a book-length dialogue between then Cardinal Bergoglio and Rabbi Skorka of Buenos Aires, our present Holy Father articulated a different view of this matter:

The great leaders of the people of God were men that left room for doubt. Going back to Moses, he is the most humble character that there was on Earth. Before God, no one else remained more humble, and he that wants to be a leader of the people of God has to give God His space; therefore to shrink, to recede into oneself with doubt, with the interior experiences of darkness, of not knowing what to do, all of that ultimately is very purifying.

In his recent biography of St. Francis of Assisi, for instance, Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P., devotes ample attention to the doubts and crises that plagued St. Francis throughout his life. Far from detracting from Francis’s sanctity, Thompson suggests that an accurate understanding of the difficulties that Francis went through in deciding how to act are of tremendous importance for appreciating his life and witness:

It is, I think, misleading to assimilate him to some stereotyped image of “holiness,” especially one that suggests that a “saint” never has crises of faith, is never angry or depressed, never passes judgments, and never becomes frustrated with himself or others. Francis’s very humanity makes him, I think, more impressive and challenging than a saint who embodied that (impossible) kind of holiness.

Doubt can be a source not only of indecision but more profoundly of purification, for it forces us to consider more deeply the motivations and circumstances of the exercise of our freedom. Doubt is not something to be sought for its own sake, but when it comes we can make the most of the experience by entrusting ourselves to the Lord who is able to make all things work together for the good for those who love him.

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Image: Henry Walton, Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

Life in prison without parole. With this sentence the murder trial of Kermit Gosnell has come to an end. Yet another horrific, unmentionable injustice has been addressed by our nation’s legal system. The murder of infants had tipped the golden scales of justice, but with the piercing percussion of a swift gavel strike, the balance was restored. Next case. Could it be that justice is so easy?

No matter the sacral trappings of his legal authority, man’s judicial machinery has always been rather crude and cacophonous in its operation, sputtering and lurching forward, stretching a palsied finger to balance the unbalanceable and right the unrightable. We have known all along that the pure and polished scales are held only by the gods. They hang from the outstretched arms of Justitia, Themis, and Dike, far above the grasp of Judy, Brown, and Mathis.

Intuitively we know that justice requires more than we mortal men can muster. Who can truly fix the shattering blow of the murder, the betrayal, the lie? The shattering impact of injustice forever marks the past, its shards slice through the fabric of the future, and its stain lingers presently on the soul, debased and alienated by its vicious act. How can Gosnell give back the life he took from Baby A, Baby B, Baby C, Baby D, and the countless unlettered babies he slaughtered inside and outside the womb? He cannot. Restitution is impossible. A thousand lives spent in a thousand prisons will not restore what he has taken, and neither would his execution restore the balance. For justice we must look to another.

The old goddesses were destroyed when the light of Christ revealed their nihility, but their scales did not fall into just any mortal hands. They were caught by the Word made flesh, to whom all judgment has been given by the Father. Of course, his mission is firstly that of rescue and ransom: “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit” (1 Pt 3:18). But when the time of repentance draws to a close, when the cup of God’s patience finally overflows with the blood of martyrs, infants, and marathon spectators, justice will be definitively served. On that day, the unjust will reap the eternal isolation to which every act of injustice inherently tends, and those justified in Christ, his love alive in their souls, will enter the eternal communion to which every act of charity inherently tends. Finally, our every desire for justice will be satiated by the One who alone is perfectly just.

There is hope even for a murderer. His life sentence will neither save him nor his victims, but he could still turn to the God of love, the God of mercy and compassion. He could allow his sins to be carried by the Savior. He could devote his life to penance. But if he does not choose to die with Christ, confess, repent, carry his cross and come after him, then he risks the fate of the final impenitent and may indeed carry his injustice right through the gates of Hell. For the sake of their immortal souls, pray God that all murderers be brought to repentance and know the infinite mercy of God.

When righteous anger rises within us, let us look forward to the day of Christ’s return to judge all nations, and let us call to mind that without God’s saving grace, our own injustice is as irremediable as that of a murderer. Our sin cannot be undone, but it can be forgiven. Our past cannot be changed, but it can be redeemed. Our victims may even become our brothers and our sisters in that land where every tear is wiped away. Let this then be our hope. Christ is making all things new, and one day soon, on a day like today, his perfect justice will be established forever.

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Image: Roland Meinecke, Justitia

To many Christians, recent legal restrictions such as the HHS mandate seem like a “soft persecution.” It is tempting for us to portray such restrictions using the language and imagery of martyrdom. But is it accurate at all? One scholar, writing recently, thinks that contemporary Christians have the whole thing wrong—the history of martyrdom and its application today. Don’t we risk making a ridiculous comparison?

The ancient Christian writer Origen always sticks close to the root meaning of “martyr,” which is “witness.” In his Commentary on the Gospel of John, he says that, “everyone who testifies to the truth, whether he presents his testimony in words or deeds or in whatever way would correctly be called a ‘witness.’” But in the Catholic Church, it is “the custom of the brotherhood… to give the name ‘witnesses’ in a special sense only to those who have borne witness… by the pouring out of their own blood.” The early Church began to restrict the term “martyr” to a select group, as other early texts testify.

Origen’s definition of true “witness” is not narrow. It extends to any conceivable way one could testify to the truth about Jesus Christ. St. Thomas Aquinas has similar thoughts. He says that, “all virtuous deeds, inasmuch as they are referred to God, are professions of the faith… and in this way they can be the cause of martyrdom.” Thomas notes pointedly that this is why the Church celebrates John the Baptist as a martyr, “not for refusing to deny the faith, but for reproving adultery.”

To suffer as a Christian extends far beyond a confession made with words. It includes “also to suffer for doing any good work, or for avoiding any sin, for Christ’s sake, because this all comes under the head of witnessing to the faith.”

So is the language accurate?

Martyrdom is an act of fortitude—the virtue of dealing well in the face of death. By it, man keeps unreasonable fear or recklessness from overwhelming his resolve to stand fast in the good of reason. It includes bearing lesser evils as well. “Fortitude behaves well in bearing all manner of adversity,” Thomas says.

When the Christian suffers lesser evils than death, but does so for Christ’s sake, it seems to bear the same relationship to martyrdom that such suffering would bear to fortitude in general. While such “soft persecution” is certainly far from martyrdom, it is not ridiculous to see it on the same continuum.

Our Lord gave us this beatitude: “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (Mt 5:11). When Christians bear mockery, scorn, social exclusion and loss of wealth for refusing to compromise with the Gospel, we indeed share in the blessing Christ promises us. The Epistle to the Hebrews reminds the baptized of such things: “You endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated.”

It continues, “For you had compassion on the prisoners, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one” (Heb 10: 32-34). Although we aren’t given to die for Christ, we can still follow the martyrs in following Christ, the true Lamb, wherever He goes.

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Image: Fyodor Bronnikov, Martyr on a Circus Ring

What does our fantasy life say about us? Do thoughts determine our character, or is it only actions that count? The question has been asked and answered in various ways. Movies like Minority Report have played on the intuitive notion that punishing someone for a crime they have not yet committed is unjust. Or consider a 1961 episode of the Twilight Zone, “A Penny for Your Thoughts,” in which a bank clerk gains the ability to read thoughts. He “hears” an old trusted employee, Mr. Smithers, plotting in his head to rob the bank. Mr. Smithers does not actually rob the bank, because he is too afraid, but the aged employee does, however, admit that he thinks about doing it everyday.

So, how far removed are our thoughts from our actions?

Dr. Cindy LaCom, the director of Women’s studies at Slippery Rock University, worries about the effect pornography is having on men. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, LaCom writes about the recent incident in Cleveland where three women were held captive for 10 years:

We live in a world where the “Fifty Shades” trilogy (which has sold over 70 million copies) presents male domination over women as “erotic,” where the porn industry generates more annual profit than the National Football League, where 30 percent of Web traffic is porn. I am surprised at the lack of national dialogue about the pornification of our culture.

But sadly, in a world that endlessly replicates and sexualizes male domination of women, I am not surprised that this “fantasy” narrative has been literalized. Though there are doubtless myriad factors that contributed to this nightmare crime, I hope that one positive outcome is broader critical analyses of how pornography normalizes the domination and degradation of women in pervasive and damaging ways.

Dr. LaCom thinks that fantasizing about dominating women leads some people to actual carry out that fantasy. Obviously, the case in Cleveland is an extreme example. Many people have awful fantasies they never plan on actually fulfilling, like Mr. Smithers at the bank. But what we imagine does change how we act, and it says something about us if our fantasies are pure.

Pornography is a particularly strong example, because not only is it sinful in itself, but it inclines us toward sin. Even if it does not encourage the sort of violence that Dr. LaCom is concerned with, the lust which it fosters harms our perception of reality. It focuses us downward and makes people objects. In lust we forget God and shift our attention to the pleasures of the body. As St. Augustine says of his father in the Confessions II.3.6:

His glee sprang from that intoxication which has blotted you, our creator, out of this world’s memory and led it to love the creature instead, as it drinks the unseen wine of its perverse inclination and is dragged down to the depths.

The images we take in, particularly those that we associate with pleasure, remain with us. Augustine wrote his Confessions more than ten years after his radical conversion and baptism, but in Book X, he laments the effect his previous life of sexual sin has had on his memory. In his dreams he is reminded of his misspent youth, and is forced to re-confront his temptations.

Lust is called a capital vice, because it is born of a desire that points to a very powerful pleasure. So strong can this desire become, that we are led away from our true end: happiness with God.

In charity, the chief among the virtues, we love God above all things. But to love God, we must call him to mind. If our fantasies take us away from God, if they fix our desire elsewhere, they cost us the one most precious thing.

Christ warns us in Matthew 15 that it is deep within ourselves that our sins find their root.

It is not what enters one’s mouth that defiles that person; but what comes out of the mouth is what defiles one.
. . .
The things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile. For from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, unchastity, theft, false witness, blasphemy. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile. (11, 18-20)

But lest we fear that we have turned our minds over to evil, that we have absorbed too much of the filth of our culture, God’s mercy is powerful. What we cannot do on our own, God can do in us. As Augustine prays, “On your exceedingly great mercy rests all my hope. Give what you command, and then command whatever you will.” He continues,“Yes, Lord, you will heap gift after gift upon me, that my soul may shake itself free from the sticky morass of concupiscence and follow me to you.” (Confessions X 29.40; 30.42)

A clean mind dedicated to the Lord should be our goal, even if like Mr. Smithers we don’t plan to ever fulfill our fantasies. With God this purity is possible.

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Image: David Teniers the Younger, The Temptation of Saint Anthony

First Communion season is upon us. Young boys and girls in their white suits and white dresses line the aisles of churches across the country. Some come with smiles a mile wide, and others with lips nervously quivering. Why all the fuss?

Transubstantiation!

If the Eucharist isn’t really Jesus’ Body and Blood, then it’s all nonsense, and the suits and dresses are just for show. If the Eucharist is simply a symbol of God’s love for us and nothing more, then there’s no need for such tra la la. But . . . if the substances of bread and wine are really converted into the Body and Blood of Jesus, then the whole situation changes. If Jesus, the Lord of the Universe, really comes down on the altar at Mass, then the children are right to tremble with nervous anticipation as they approach to receive his Divine presence.

Jesus Himself tells us,

I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh. (Jn 6:51)

Thus, Holy Communion is all about eternal life. Jesus really becomes present in the Eucharist because He loves us and desires for us to spend eternity with Him. It is true that the Eucharist is a sign of God’s love for us. Yet it’s so much more than that. God has loved us enough to become truly and substantially present, hidden under the appearance of bread and wine, so that we might consume Him and be changed into Him. In the Confessions, St. Augustine hears the Lord saying,

Nor shall you change me, like the food of your flesh, into yourself, but you shall be changed into me.

In the Eucharist, He comes to us so that we might come to Him.

The brief life of Blessed Imelda Lambertini vividly shows this. Bl. Imelda became a Dominican nun at the age of nine and begged for two and half years to be able to receive First Communion. Since she was too young by the Italian standards of the time, she was asked to wait until she was twelve.  On the Vigil of the Ascension in 1333, when Imelda was yet only eleven years old, the Lord granted her wish and came to her in a striking way. After Mass, she was found adoring a host which was floating above her. The chaplain was brought in, and to this young girl, wearing her white Dominican habit, he gave First Communion. She died upon consuming the Host. The Lord, truly present in the Eucharist, changed her life in an instant. Her soul, full of joy, was brought to heaven where she participates in the eternal life of God.

This is what the Lord offers to each of us when we receive Holy Communion, whether it be our first, our fiftieth, or our last: He offers us eternal life. In the Eucharist, He comes to us so that we might come to Him.

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Image: Théophile Emmanuel Duverger, La Premiere Communion

The Greeks thought heroism and beauty belonged together. The Iliad, the Odyssey, and many myths are full to bursting with beautiful heroes doing beautiful things—and ugly things, but still doing them beautifully. They demanded that their heroes be beautiful, which is why so many statues and busts commemorate the politicians, leaders, and wealthy men of the day as models of physical perfection—even when we know them to have been dumpy, hook-nosed, or puny in real life.

God has never worked like that. He almost seems to prefer to choose unimpressive people as his representatives. David may have been “ruddy” and “handsome,” with “beautiful eyes” (1 Sm 16:12), but he was still a simple shepherd, as was the prophet Amos; Ezekiel’s outlandish physical prophecies would hardly qualify for Mr. Universe talent routines; and if the apocryphal Acts of Paul are to be trusted, Paul was “small of stature, with a bald head and crooked legs.”

Pope Francis gives an interesting insight into this dynamic in his 2010 book On Heaven and Earth. There he speaks of Moses as we see him in Exodus 3, in all the splendor of his vocation and all the banality of his ordinariness:

Moses meets God when he is eighty years old, having already grown a belly; he tended his father-in-law’s sheep and all of a sudden, a burning bush, astonishment. He says, “I have seen God.”

Pope Francis’ Moses is delightfully prosaic: a potbelly hanging over his belt, still huffing and wheezing from clambering up Mount Horeb, looking a bit ridiculous leaning forward with his hands on his thighs trying to catch his breath—and then he sees God. This is the man God has chosen to deliver his people from slavery. Not a Hercules with a chiseled jaw and a silver tongue, but a potbellied old shepherd with a stutter and a checkered past.

In the Church, we meet many more potbellied-Moses types than strutting-Hercules types. God generally chooses to put his treasures in flawed and even broken vessels, and that is how he invites us to encounter him. This is a mystery. Surely, we think, more people would come to God if his beautiful message wasn’t so often sullied by flabby, ugly messengers: boring preachers, short-tempered confessors, impersonal bureaucrats, tacky musicians, ideological liturgists, and on and on.

But if we are honest with ourselves, we will realize that we too are often limp, wheezing, and potbellied in our faith. The ascent up Mount Horeb looks daunting and exhausting; and besides, talking to burning bushes is sure to mean more work for less pay. So we stick to our routine on the lowlands, confident that we can be Herculean messengers of God without needing to prove it to anyone by scrabbling around on mountaintops. And meanwhile, it’s just possible that those flabby-minded weaklings around us are thinking the same way about themselves and us…

Yet that potbellied Moses really did lead the Israelites out of Egypt; a crotchety curmudgeon like Jerome became a saint; and even people with spectacularly bad taste can get into heaven. God does not leave us alone in our mediocrity. The reality of the Holy Spirit’s presence within us is unveiled when we begin to recognize that God bestows his grace in and through imperfect vessels (including ourselves). God does not love me because I am beautiful, or because I am a spiritual hero: anything of beauty or spiritual heroism that I possess comes about because God loves me, because he comes to vivify my flabby spirit and free me from the hobbling weight of my sins and pettiness. What matters is not my spiritual athleticism: what matters is that I have seen God.

This is an invitation to mercy, of course—recognizing that others are as limp and frail as I, and that we all desire union with God at some level, however clumsily we may be pursuing it. But there’s more to it, as well. God didn’t just want the Israelites to have mercy on poor, potbellied, stuttering Moses; he wanted them to follow him, to see God’s grace in him, to allow him to bring them into an everlasting covenant with God. God invites us to encounter him as he dwells in others, not in spite of their weaknesses, but in and through their weaknesses. Moses has seen God, and God dwells in him; perhaps God desires to astonish me with the light of grace that pours out of the cracks in that broken vessel. If I see that light, if I am astonished, then I too have met God; I too have been taught love by one of God’s potbellied heroes.

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Image: Potbellied Hercules. Photo by author.

And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.
—Acts 1:9

What are we to make of the Ascension? To some it may seem little more than a neat, miraculous way for Jesus to bid goodbye to His disciples. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, however, in his book Jesus of Nazareth, helps us to understand this mystery in a deeper way. In particular, he highlights the importance of a detail we might otherwise regard as insignificant: the presence of the cloud. Benedict calls this “unambiguously theological language” and recalls the instances throughout Scripture when the presence of a cloud marks some great event: the Exodus from Egypt (when Israel was led by a pillar of cloud through the desert), the Tent of Meeting (where Moses often conversed with the Most High, who was concealed in a cloud that filled the dwelling), and the Transfiguration (when the Father’s voice was heard coming from a cloud).

The cloud, then, is a symbol of God’s presence. Jesus’ ascension into it, according to Benedict, does not mean that He was transferred to some “remote region of the cosmos,” but rather that He entered “into the mystery of God.” Christ became incarnate for a specific purpose—to redeem mankind—and to accomplish this purpose it was not necessary that He remain on earth forever in bodily form. He returns to the higher reality whence He came.

St. Gregory of Nazianzus explains in one of his orations that the Blessed Trinity was revealed to us in stages. Men had to be prepared gradually to receive the great mystery that is the Trinity. God was proclaimed Father of His people Israel in the Old Testament. Then Christ the Word was manifested in the New Testament. Since every word conveys knowledge, Christ the Word brought knowledge of the person of the Father and revealed to mankind the inner life of God. But God wanted to share with us more than mere knowledge of Himself. He wanted to share His very life with us. And, for this, the Ascension prepared the way.

Christ ascended into heaven in order that the Holy Spirit, who is the mutual Love between the Father and the Son, would come and draw us into the life of divine love. The Holy Spirit is the impulse or inclination of the Father towards the Son and the Son towards the Father. Through grace, this impulse of Love dwells in us by the gift of charity. This participation in the life of the Trinity means that Christ is nearer to us now than He would be if He had remained on earth to walk among us in bodily form. It’s no wonder, then, as Pope Benedict says, that the disciples returned to Jerusalem after the Ascension “with great joy, and were continually in the Temple blessing God” (Lk 24:52–53).

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Image: Giotto, Ascension

Have you ever been to a portrait gallery? It’s extraordinary, really: a bunch of people walking around for hours, looking at face after face after face. And do you remember your old class photos? Rows upon rows of faces, staring back at you. And if you’ve ever been to a bureau to get a driver’s license, you have probably noticed the same remarkably consistent pattern—you need your face on a card to get your hands on the wheel.

Indeed, everyone is interested in faces. That peculiar arrangement of symmetrically placed visual and auditory organs with a nasal bump and an oral cavity has a power that captivates us. They engross us because they reveal us to each other. Somehow, our faces “speak” our selves.

Because of this, to have a face is to be open to others, accessible to others, there for the taking, there for the knowing. To find oneself with a face is to discover oneself as a being-for-others, something that is made to be communicated. Every face you see in a portrait gallery or on a driver’s license or in a facebook profile is looking back at you expectantly, waiting to be known and perhaps even desirous of knowing you.

This is why bad guys cover their noses and mouths with bandanas, why the Phantom of the Opera is spooky, and why hostages with black bags over their heads look so dehumanized. To hide one’s face is to hide one’s self. What a desolate world it would be if we all hid our faces. How we would thirst for the sight of a face!

How wondrous it is, then, to walk down a crowded street, to sit at a crowded dinner table, to look through family photo albums. Faces everywhere! Disclosures of selves everywhere! Face after face, revelation after revelation. So many self-disclosing countenances, each of them charged with meaning, desiring to be known, and desiring to know. To live in this world is to be a member of a vast network of faces communicating and revealing to each other.

Part of the joy of heaven will be its faces. Like here, there will be faces everywhere. But our heavenly faces will be lit with the divine light, which will make them brilliantly knowable, and they will shine with the joy of at last being fully known and fully knowing.

But here’s the craziest thing of all. In the midst of this multitude of faces, one of them will bespeak not a finite self, but the Divine Essence. For, strangely enough, our Creator has chosen to enter the great compendium of faces. And we will be quite content to spend an eternity pondering it.

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Image: Icon of Christ the Saviour in St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai (The oldest known icon of Christ Pantocrator)

Last week I reread The Great Gatsby for the first time since a summer vacation in high school. With the buzz about the upcoming film (out this Friday), I wanted to revisit what I vaguely remembered to be a good but sad story.

In my first go, I was simply excited to read a grown-up book with grown-up language, but left, in the end, disheartened by Gatsby’s loss of his pearl of great price: Daisy. A few years under the bridge, and in my second reading I fixed upon a different motif. In a word: Desire.

Gatsby grew up a sentimentalist of the worst kind, possessed by large ambitions and “colossal vitality.” When he met Daisy at a young age, he placed the full burden of his infinite desire on a single woman. There is a scene in which he pauses before committing all to her, when he knows that if he “forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. . . . Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” Separated by war, she marries another, and he spends his years building up an ever more godlike image of her in his mind, which no person could possibly live up to.

The story is in some way about every man, for every man is a dreamer of what once was and what might be. Deep within, each of us awaits a certain “something” we cannot name, something to make life great and full and beautiful. There is a sort of promise life offers, however unclear, which we’re still waiting to discover. Some call the culprit Beauty, which stirs us and awakens our relentless restlessness. C.S. Lewis puts it best in a sermon:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

But it is not only momentous occasions—hearing some music for the first time or falling in love at a young age—which aggravate our secret yearning. Life itself has done so from the start: The most restless residents of humankind are children, and they happen to be the most indomitable of all dreamers, expecting so much magic from a life which is, at bottom, mortal.

Or is it? For it is precisely this expectation which Christ addresses in the fishermen of Galilee. From this perspective, his invitation to leave everything and follow him doesn’t come off as demanding as we might think. Perhaps in that moment he leaned in with one of Gatsby’s reassuring smiles and whispered, “Because whatever it is you’re looking for, old sport . . . we both know you haven’t found it yet.”

Years later, Gatsby moves to Daisy’s neighborhood, spending his summer evenings throwing ostentatious parties for the denizens of 1920s Long Island in hopes that she might wander into his life again. They do meet, but the affair is short-lived. She fails to live up to his image of her, and after an ensuing series of tragic events, she returns to her husband and Gatsby is shot dead in his swimming pool. Yet we are told that “Gatsby turned out all right in the end,” and certainly not because all but three characters show for his rainy funeral. Perhaps it was well with him because it was good for his earthly kingdom to crumble to pieces. That morning he shouldered his swimming raft, the narrator tells us, with a new spring in his step, again set free to seek something great.

All of our art, all our stories, are an exercise in this longing. We may call it nostalgia or whatever word we’d like, but we’re looking for a fullness we haven’t fully found yet. The Fitzgeralds’ own real-life fairytale turned foul. Scott had met his own Southern belle in Alabama and fought desperately to win her. Their marriage proved disastrous. A youth squandered with riotous living in France, a spree of infidelities, and soon Zelda lost her mind. The last words of the novel are likewise the epitaph on their common grave: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly to the past.”

Scott Fitzgerald and Gatsby both fought to “change the past,” but that is precisely what Christ alone can achieve for us. Christ himself is our true “past,” our origin, come to find us and call us back home. If we don’t find him in this life, someone to answer and to bear our desire, then we run the same risk as this sad couple: their desire destroyed them in the end. They are buried together in the Catholic graveyard of Old St. Mary’s in Rockville, Maryland, just thirty minutes north of Washington. We should pray for them and for all who have yet to find the object of their endless searching.

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Image: Francis Cugat, The Great Gatsby Dust Jacket (1925)

“Words, words, words,” replied Hamlet with despair-filled irony.

In a social setting suffused and encompassed by words, sound bites, snippets, and advertising, the mind cannot help but be overwhelmed. There is also the further complication that many of these words are unhelpful; things are not always what they seem, what they profess to be. When one’s glance falls upon abortion clinics named “Women and Family Centers,” stores selling exclusively pornographic and fetishist paraphernalia called “Adult,” and rock stars naming their children Dweezil and Moon Unit, it can appear that beyond being merely deceptive, some names simply fail to communicate altogether.

The medievals spoke about language as composed of signs. The word is chosen to communicate an idea, an idea in the mind which comes from a thing. The word was the verbal fruit of an idea rooted in something real. In this sense, words were conventionally chosen by man for the express purpose of revealing something about the thing at stake. Some even held that the words themselves, beyond just acting as a vehicle, had some proper reality. We can think in this case of onomatopoeia. The word signifies something else but in a manner that incarnates the nature. Affirmed above all was the sense that words are profoundly rooted in the real. Words are the fruit of a tree rooted in the soil of things.

It seems that the present age, as adverted to above, has forgotten the realities at stake in its use of language. In a technocratic age, wherein man seeks to extend his reign over nature both vast and miniscule, an appreciation for things as possessed of natures has been relegated to the background of our scientific considerations. This is all the more true when we speak of mankind, wherein the talk of passion, authenticity, and tolerance predominates over accounts of man’s nature. The individual, the seat of subjective rights, is the basic unit of the modern world, and consideration for his social, political, transcendent nature is relegated to the status of secondary concern. It is an age in the desert, forgetful of the land from whence it came and the promise to which it is called.

In a travel journal from a trip to Ireland, G. K. Chesterton contrasts this profound cultural forgetfulness with the deep rootedness observable in a culture (in 1918) still mindful of its roots:

It is strictly and soberly true that any peasant, in a mud cabin in County Clare, when he names his child Michael, may really have a sense of the presence that smote down Satan, the arms and plumage of the paladin of paradise […] It is often said, and possibly true that the peasant named Michael cannot write his own name. But it is quite equally true that the clerk named John [archetypal product of the industrial age] cannot read his own name. He cannot read it because it is in a foreign language, and he has never been made to realize what it stands for. He does not know that John means John as the other man does know that Michael means Michael. In that rigidly realistic sense, the pupil of industrial intellectualism does not even know his own name.

In the current cultural climate, the last thing we are likely to hear is the candid admission that we have “lost our way,” or worse yet that “we do not know our own mind,” but the facts seem to betray that such is the case. As the exasperated Israelite prophets would readily attest, there is no limit to our forgetfulness.

The fact remains that man is a mystery to himself and without the grace whereby to see, he remains such, constantly railing against God and reality on account of his limitation. In this sense, man is capable of “forgetting his own name.” And, as implied in the discussion above, to forget one’s name means to forget one’s own nature. To take the argument to its grim logical terminus, it follows that without a “still point in this turning world,” the obstacle can seem insuperable. How does man get on track when the very memory of the way has been blotted from his heart?

The prophet Jeremiah offers hope:

But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, `Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jer 31:33-34)

Ultimately, the solution to man’s forgetfulness can be found only in the Lord’s gift—the new Law by which the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, is poured into the hearts of men: “Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.” Such is the grace accomplished for man by the Incarnate Word. To that end, we pray for a new Pentecost.

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Image: Bob Embleton, Words on the Cushendun Stone