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.

Something there is about a wall, that wants it down, or not, as the case may be

I am perplexed, which should not come as a surprise to anyone, by a great many things these days. I suppose it’s because I’m getting older; I am 56 now and the world makes less sense to me now than it did when I was sixteen. Of course, for most sixteen year old males the world’s lack of sense is not perplexing; figuring out how to get laid is. I don’t imagine that the subject has gotten any simpler in the forty years since it was my primary obsession, but time has a way of giving you other things to think about, most of which revolve around paying bills you’d rather not pay.

I am perplexed, for example, by the Federal government’s curious inability to build a fence.  Since the beginnings of human civilization one of the few things that governments of all ideological bents have been good at is the building of walls, fences, moats, and various and sundry other ways of making getting from Point A to Point B as annoying and cumbersome as possible. In the Scriptures, for instance, we see the Children of Israel’s way into the Promised Land blocked by the towering walls of the city of Jericho and we rejoice a few verses later as those sonically challenged walls come a-tumbling down, although it is at times like this that one must wonder if issuing government contracts to the lowest bidder is such a good idea, especially as this lowest bidder’s next job was building the levees around New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. It perplexes me that no one in the Corps of Engineers noticed that building walls of any sort were not this particular bidder's strong point. Some things are just a dead giveaway, but one must never underestimate the government's desire not to see what is directly in front of it, I think. 

In another, perhaps more germane example, the first Qin emperor of China, the great and more than vaguely loony Qin Shi Huang, the man who united all the warring Chinese states into one great empire, decided that the people of the northern grasslands and the Gobi Desert were not worth the time and effort of conquering–that lot was simply too lumpen, don’t you know—and so to keep them at bay and off the freshly mown grass he decided to build a wall between his newly unified empire and the barbarians. And so it was that the Great Wall of China came to be. The Great Wall stretches for two thousand miles across northern China and for the most part it worked as advertised. Oh, on occasion a Mongol horde would get through and China would have to suffer through the hacking, slashing, raping, and pillaging that such breaches afforded, but in the main, the wall did its job and kept the barbarians out and the tourists and their money in.

And in the interests of fairness I should point out that the Romans built not one, but two walls across Great Britain to separate Scotland from England. Large sections of Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall still exist and you can go see them, if you care to see that sort of thing. The Romans built the walls to keep the Scots and Picts from raiding what was then the Roman province of Britannia, a fact that I am sure boosted the ego of many a Scottish and Pictish war chief until someone explained to them that the Romans regarded Caledonia—the Latin name of Scotland—as a great festering pile of pig manure no one in their right mind would want in the first place.

For even more Roman fence-type fun, we have the Limes Germanicus and the Limes Moesiae, which the Romans built to keep the Germans out of the Empire, the Limes Arabicus, which kept the Arabs out of the Empire, and the limes at the edge of the glass, which keep the margaritas out of me. To go a bit further afield, the British built the Lines of Torres Vedras, which successfully kept the French out of Portugal, and the French built the Maginot Line to keep the Germans out of France, which was somewhat less successful. The Russians built the Iron Curtain; its most visible manifestation, the Berlin Wall, was pretty effective until the East Germans got tired of looking at in 1989. The Iron Curtain’s less visible manifestations were the heavily defended borders between members of the Warsaw Pact, a harder to understand phenomenon given that no Bulgarian was going to risk his life and already limited freedom to defect to Romania.

Most recently, of course, we have the Israelis and their antiterrorist fence or wall or whatever the correct word for the thing is. The Israelis erected the whatever it is after waves of suicide bombers began striking inside Israel after 2000 in the wake of the second Palestinian intifada, the Israelis working on the entirely reasonable assumption that if the bombers couldn’t get into Israel they couldn’t kill anyone with a bomb. The dramatic drop in the rate of suicide bombings in Israel would seem to bear out this assumption, but the critics remain, of course; empiricism has never been popular amongst the chattering classes. There’s just something about facts and figures that makes your average idealist’s skin crawl.

All of which leads us back to the question of why the government of this our Great Republic cannot build a fence along the country’s southern border. I have heard all sorts of reasons for this peculiar handicap. Building such a fence is technically impossible is one reason I’ve heard, as well as that fence-building is a racist macroaggression, and the one I like the most, building the fence would cost too much. First, as to the questions of costs and possibility, it seems to me that if the first emperor of China can build a gigantic wall that you can’t see from outer space two thousand years ago then there is no reason why the government of this our Great Republic cannot build a chain link fence that you can see from Mexico with the naked eye.  Chain link fencing is a much easier material to work with than truly humongous blocks of stone and we could probably put a chain link fence up in much less time than it took the Chinese to build the Great Wall. The fence will have to come with all the electronic doodads beloved of the surveillance state these days, which will cause all of the usual cost overruns that we must expect whenever the government tries to do anything. But what of it? This country, after all, has spent trillions of dollars over the past fifty years trying to eliminate poverty and the poverty rate hasn’t budged an inch, and yet we continue to spend money on trying to eliminate poverty. If we can spend trillions of dollars on something we know isn’t going to work, we can certainly spend a few million on something that might; you never know, after all. Milton might be alive, he said, making an allusion so obscure that not even the guys on The Big Bang Theory can figure it out. Well, maybe Sheldon would catch it.

As for the racism of it all, well, I don’t know about that. Every country has immigration laws and I’ve always had the idea that if everyone else has immigration laws we should have them too. It’s only fair, you know. And we should get to enforce them like everyone else. After all, Mexico has no qualms about shipping Hondurans back to Honduras if they catch them working in Mexico so why should we debate sending Mexicans back home? And if sending people back where they came from is racist, does this make the Mexican government racist as well? If this is the case, then this country should be doing everything in its power to stop the hordes of racist Mexicans from coming into our country, lest they infect our unsuspecting citizenry with their low, vile, and altogether contemptible racism. I hear, though, that this is not going to happen, as our Illinois Incitatus will be declaring shortly that the immigration laws are whatever He says they are on any given day, and that it will please His Elective Majesty to let these poor benighted wretches into this country. I suspect, however, that the poor benighted wretches will have to wait for November for the good news. The former junior senator from Illinois will not want to rile up the bitter clingers until after the midterm elections.  In a world filled with much confusion and perplexity, our prairie solon’s need to pander for votes is the one thing we can all count on. In this He is as true as the North Star, a mother’s love, and my dentist finding something expensive to fix at every checkup. Thus it ever was, saith the sages, and thus it ever shall be.