Sunday school lessons...really

As I sat half-listening to the lector[1] at Mass on Sunday morning—my mother and the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church insist that I go to at least one Mass every year unrelated to someone getting married or dropping dead—it stuck me how much of the Christian Bible, that portion the bitter clingers refer to as the New Testament, is actually mail, twenty-one pieces of first class mail, in fact. I thought this a bit odd at the time. The Buddha found the path to enlightenment while sitting under a bodhi tree, Moses got the Good Word from a bush that burned without burning, thereby causing and preventing forest fires in one fell swoop, and the archangel Gabriel had to tell Muhammad to recite three times before the Prophet finally got the point and started reciting. But Christianity? Christianity comes to us via the faith of the Apostles, the sacrifice of the martyrs, and the exertions of the Roman post office.

Such a reliance on the post office, however, creates a number of problems for the serious student of Christian theology and early church history. Take, for example, Saint Paul’s understanding of the Trinity. We would understand his view of this key Christian concept much better if the post office hadn’t delivered his umpteenth letter to the Ephesians to an Athenian potter named Aristophanes, who intended to return the letter to the post office, he really did, but he unintentionally dropped it on the floor of the Registry Room at Ellis Island while on his way to his uncle’s diner in Chicago and a new career in dish washing. Miss Bridget McGuire of Ballinalee, County Longford, Ireland, found the letter on the floor a few hours later next to an Armenian newspaper and a half eaten falafel and dropped the letter into the nearest mailbox. St. Paul’s umpteenth letter to the Ephesians wound up in the dead letter file at the James A. Farley Main Post Office in midtown Manhattan where it rests to this day next to the letters to Santa Claus. The poor service did not go unnoticed; St. Paul called the post office to complain as soon as he got to Corinth; the Corinthians had a working payphone in the agora; and the answering machine he got promptly put him on hold. He was the 117th caller in the queue, but prayer and divine intervention moved him up to third, behind a gladiator salesman and an actor phoning in his performance of Oedipus Rex. He finally got an operator, who took his complaint and, as soon as the call was over, threw the complaint into the wastepaper basket. Sometimes having the Almighty on your side just isn’t enough.

And then there is the question of what books did or did not make it into the New Testament. I speak here of the Gnostic Gospels, which may not have made into the biblical canon solely because someone thought that they were junk mail and threw them into the trash. There were few moments in ancient Roman life more annoying than going out to your mailbox in anticipation of seeing this month’s Playboy’s Girls of Pompeii issue with the Caledonian redhead with the admirable assets in the centerfold that you’ve heard so much about and coming away with a dense theological tract you didn’t ask for in the first place. The early Church Fathers, on the other hand, did not much care much for the Caledonian colleen or her assets, no matter how admirable they were, and the Fathers determined that, as soon as they had their doctrines worked out and ready to go, they would go forth in a spirit of love and charity and convert the Caledonians to the True Faith, the better to make sure that shameless tart put some clothes on.

The Gnostic Gospels were themselves a cause of many complaints; the Gnostics mailed so many Gospels that they were clogging landfills throughout the Middle East. People simply weren’t interested in what the Gnostics had to say and chucked out their gospels along with yesterday’s newspapers and the other junk mail. The officials at the recycling station at Nag Hammadi announced that they weren’t going to take the Gnostics’ gospels anymore; they didn’t have the room for them, and they asked the post office to stop delivering them. The post office agreed and the outraged Gnostics immediately sued, saying that the post office was infringing on their civil liberties. The Gnostics might have won the case–they had a strong case and a very good lawyer–if the Roman Empire hadn’t fallen while they were waiting for the judge to set a court date. Timing, as they say, is all.

The barbarian hordes who replaced the Romans had no use for literacy or Christian theology and hence had no use for post offices, regarding all three things as vaguely effeminate Roman notions that no good barbarian would care to indulge in. When a barbarian wanted to send a message, he would go to the person he wanted to talk to and talk to them, or, if the message was sufficiently serious, he would cleave the other person’s skull open with an axe. Skull cleaving was a much more effective way of getting one’s point across than writing a letter and trying to remember if I and J were still the same letter or were they different now, and why hadn’t Thomas Edison invented the W yet? It didn’t really matter in the long run, as the barbarian hordes were, as mentioned, illiterate, and probably dyslexic as well, so the destruction of the Roman post office was a cost effective way to solve the problem: in a world where there is nothing to read, then the literate, the illiterate, and the dyslexic are all one and the same, and if they are all one and the same, then there’s no point having a post office to remind them that they aren’t. Barbarian hordes are more than vaguely socialistic that way, I think.

Of course, the end of the Roman post office was a boon for the Church. With no one to deliver their epistles denouncing each other as fools, louts, mountebanks, and ignorant calumniators stuffed with Irish porridge[2], the bishops had to hit the highways that still remained--not very many, all in all, as most good barbarians didn't believe in wasting good money on infrastructure--and go to ecclesiastical councils all over Europe in order to clarify what it was they believed. The people of the Mediterranean basin joked about the endless procession of bishops going hither and yon to councils, racking up frequent donkey miles at the Church’s expense in the process. The bishops would smile when they heard the joke, and they would bless the peasants telling it, before having them all flogged to within an inch of their lives for their insolence. Didn’t these poor schmoes understand that an unlimited expense account and the prospect of years and years of Club Med vacations was a powerful inducement for young men to enter the priesthood, especially those young men who found crusading in the Holy Land a bit of a chore? There’s only so much hacking and slashing of Saracens you can do before it all becomes routine and you want to do something more interesting with your free time. There were a lot of those guys back in the day; the lengths some people would take to stay away from Vietnam were truly astonishing.

[1] The lector, in case you’re interested in such mundane stuff, is the guy (or gal) who gives the first and second readings from the Bible during the Roman Catholic Mass. The order is: first reading from the Old Testament, then a Psalm, in which he (or she) reads a part of the Psalm of the day and the congregation answers with a line from the same Psalm, and then the second reading from any part of the New Testament that isn’t the Gospels. Only the priest reads from the Gospels, followed immediately by the priest’s homily for the day. Catholic homilies are usually much shorter than Protestant sermons, largely because the whole point of Mass is the stylized re-enactment of the Last Supper that follows the homily and is not, as it seems to be the case with our separated brethren, an opportunity to listen to some overweight man in an ill-fitting polyester suit giving you his opinion about what the day’s reading meant at the top of his lungs. Nobody is interested in what the priest thinks about the Gospel reading; we want him to get on with Mass so that we can beat the traffic to Wal-Mart.

[2] An actual quote from Saint Jerome about the heresiarch Pelagius, for whom Jerome clearly had no use.

The Rhinoceros, a meditation on theft and the modern world

I do not wish to complain here, a statement which, if you have been following these screeds for any appreciable length of time, you know to be an untruth somewhat larger than the dog ate my homework and a bit smaller than a campaign promise, but I do believe that petty thievery is a nuisance as well as a misdemeanor and that someone should do something about it forthwith. I am referring to my missing copy of the National Geographic, specifically the October 2012 issue, which a certain someone who shall remain nameless [yes, if you’re reading this, I mean you, smartass] lifted from my bathroom not too long ago. For those of you unfamiliar with the issue, the cover story reported on the plight of the rhinoceros in our modern world. The rhinoceros is a homely beast, as Ogden Nash quite rightly pointed out many years ago, and for human eyes he is not a feast, but as long as our prepoceros rhinoceros retains his horn, poachers will overlook the beast’s homely visage in the same way a down on his luck gigolo will overlook the girth of a three hundred pound heiress with a falsetto voice and a diamond-studded wart on her nose. 

The rhinoceros has fallen afoul of Adam Smith, yes it has, and now the poachers’ inexorable need for specie is threatening the species’ existence.  There is a huge demand for rhino horn in Asia, where people believe that ground up rhino horn will cure just about any disease you care to use the stuff to cure, and in the Arabian Peninsula, where guys think that rhino horn knife scabbards are chick magnets.  That a rhino’s horn is nothing more than a really stiff bit of hair does not affect anyone’s belief in the medicinal value of the thing, although I suspect when the poachers run out of rhinos to send along, the buyers in Asia will start buying up the sweepings off the floors of Chinese barbershops and selling that as rhino horn.  Hair is hair, after all, and if a rhino’s horn can cure your colon cancer faster than a speeding surgeon then why can’t your own hair do the same thing at half the price?  I also suspect that until the fashion changes, the guys in Yemen and other wild places will not give up their scabbards, and waiting for men’s fashions to change is like watching Bill Clinton give a speech; you know it must come to an end eventually, but you also know that the continents are slowly drifting towards one another and that North America will smack into Asia before Bill finally says the words, in conclusion, with any degree of veracity.  Fashion rules the world, people, and don’t you ever forget it; the Yemenis will give up their rhino horn scabbards when fashionable American women give up their Manolo Blahniks and not before. 

But I know that our Artful Dodger [and yes, I know who you are, smartass, don’t play innocent with me] did not purloin the October 2012 issue of the National Geographic so that he learn of the plight of the endangered rhinoceros, or if he did, he is a much more sensitive young man than his behavior; he thinks passing gas should be an Olympic event and routinely practices for the event at every opportunity; would otherwise suggest. I think, however, that we can skip this possibility; it does strain my credulity more than you can imagine; and go straight to the heart of the matter: Rio de Janeiro.  Along with the other articles in that now-vanished issue, there was a long essay on modern Rio, and as with any long essay on modern Rio, there were any number of photos of very attractive young women at the beach wearing bikinis.  For many another city, the prevalence of photographs of very attractive young women wearing bikinis might seem a shameless attempt to use sex as a municipal marketing tool—one can hardly imagine such a strategy working for Boise, for example, or for Des Moines, although it might work for any ski town in the Grand Tetons, especially if you’re French—but Rio is a tropical beach city and so the presence of photos of very attractive young women in bikinis is not only in keeping with the subject matter, but a necessity if the National Geographic is to portray life in the Brazilian metropolis accurately.  An accurate portrayal of life in modern Rio de Janeiro is not, however, why this junior league Jesse James, this flatulent little Billy the Kid wannabe from down the street swiped my copy of the October 2012 issue of the National Geographic, no, it isn’t.  He wants to look at the pictures. 

I don’t want to sound unduly harsh here, which is another whopper like the one I started this jeremiad with, but the boy’s parents are devout Roman Catholics, very devout Roman Catholics, which is why they get on so well with my mother.  They tolerate me because I’ve been helping the kids with their history homework for free and it makes no difference what deity you worship or what language you speak, getting something for nothing sounds good in all of them, a fact that explains the ongoing popularity of socialism despite that philosophy’s never-ending record of failure in every country that has tried to implement it.  Now, the parents are devoted to their kids, even the gassy goniff, for reasons that I am not sure I fathom, and they want them to do well in school.  But while the boy does well in math and science, getting him to remember what happened on 7 December 1941 is a bit of a struggle; he knows that someone attacked someone on that date, but he isn’t sure whether that was the day our German allies attacked China or if that was the day the South won the Civil War at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  It was something like that, you know, and it was all so long ago, you know, what difference does it make [actual sentence, folks, straight from the kid’s mouth. Sort of makes you wonder what the hell his history teacher is doing to earn his/her/its salary, doesn’t it]?  So the kid was in my house just after Thanksgiving trying to get my help explaining the effect of the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso on Napoleon’s decision to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States for chump change [the answer, in case you’re interested, is none; Napoleon couldn’t have cared less about any promises he gave the Spanish in that treaty. He needed the money].  I’m not sure how or when the kid made his move; it may have been when I was in the bathroom, or when I was on the phone to my alma mater, explaining why I was not going to send them a donation this year; but whenever it was, at some point when I wasn’t looking, he made his move. 

I’m pretty sure I know why he took it; when I was his age, and I know that nothing causes the eyes of the young to glaze over more quickly than someone prefacing their remarks with the phrase, when I was his age, I’d steal copies of Playboy from mailboxes in the apartment complex over the hill from us. The sap was starting to rise and I wanted to ponder the reason why the sap was doing anything at all; I was very interested in science at the time. And then there are his parents, who would probably chastise him heavily if they caught him with a copy of Playboy in his room. The parents are very nice people, don’t get me wrong here, but I’ve been to their house and it is a bit like going back to the Catholicism of my youth. The place looks like a Catholic tchotchke shop, what with rosaries and candles and portraits of the Blessed Mother draped all over everything.  There’s no Internet in that house, and no magazines that show too much skin, nor blasphemous books nor books with four letter words beginning with f in them; there’s just righteousness, godliness, and Roman Catholicism in copious amounts from the cellar to the attic and everywhere in between.  And while righteousness and godliness are good things, no two ways about it, there’s only so much of the Good Book you can read before you want to read a Bad Book, which leads directly to the theft of my copy of the October 2012 issue of the National Geographic. If you can’t find a Bad Book, you have to make do until you can find one. 

I suppose I should be amused by the 1951 of it all; in an age where thousands of young women routinely negate any chance they may have had of achieving high elective office here in this our Great Republic by appearing in Internet porn, there is something curiously retro about someone stealing a National Geographic just to look at pretty girls wearing bikinis. And yes, I suppose I should be amused by the curious workings of postal karma, in which I, a magazine thief in my youth, am now victimized in the same way that I victimized others forty years ago, completing the cycle of yin and yang, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, so on and so forth ad infinitum.  I suppose I should be, but I’m not, so here’s the deal, you pimply faced farting machine: bring the damn magazine back or I will tell your mother that you’ve got it, at which point I will enjoy watching your mother kicking your flatulent adolescent rump into low space orbit. I am not kidding, buddy boy; cough it up or else!

DAZE OF HEAVEN...NOT REALLY: And so it’s Friday the thirteenth, a day wherein I usually feel as if I should have stayed home in bed, largely because today is one of those days, like, April 15th, when I know that the cosmic powers that be are out to make my life miserable. Birthdays are sometimes like that as well, but a miserable birthday applies only to the supposed celebrant—the rest of us can go on as happy as clams, which is the sort of thing you do when you are caught up in the bivalve lifestyle—whereas Friday the 13th and April 15th are all purpose let’s screw them over days that apply to the populace as a whole. Even Groundhog Day can’t equal the annoyance value of the other two dates; if you live in North Dakota, you know you’re in for six more weeks of snow, ice, sleet, and freezing your ass off whether that stupid rodent saw its shadow or not, and if you live in Miami, then you couldn’t care less one way or the other if the oversized rat saw his shadow: you’re basking in the sunshine one way or the other. The good thing about Friday the 13th and April 15th, of course, is that these are the two dates every year where you are not paranoid. The rest of the year people will think you have some sort of weird persecution complex if you spend your time worrying about what was going to go wrong today, but on those two dates, you and me and everyone else knows that your troubles are not psychological: they really are out to get you.

In any case (and yes, this is a whiplash of a segue, no two ways about it), I am relieved to hear that the State of Connecticut has decided not to take over the Roman Catholic Church. The state legislature was considering a bill that give financial control of Catholic parishes to the parishioners, leaving the bishops and priests with only an advisory role in how the church’s money was spent. The proposal died a swift and painless death after thousands upon thousands of Catholic voters let their elected representatives know that they would not remain their elected representatives if they passed the bill. Faced with the possibility of standing in the snow at an electoral Canossa, the state legislature did what any group of high-minded statesmen intent on serving the commonweal would do in such a situation: they caved in. In fact, the Connecticut state legislature caved in so quickly and so well that they’re thinking of doing an instructional video to show out of state legislators the up to date way to cave in. I’m glad they did cave, although I must admit that the idea of a state takeover of the Church intrigues me. Would such a takeover mean that if the Connecticut state troopers catch me speeding on I-84, and they will someday, I could forego paying the fine and getting the points on my license and just say three Our Fathers and a Hail Mary instead?