South Bend, Again

It was pleasant to visit South Bend for a few days this week. Officially, my stated reasons for the visit were gastronomical: Madame Chen's (the best Chinese food in the world, so far as I know) and the South Bend Farmer's Market. These were both worthwhile. But it was a pleasure to visit with friends as well, and to play the Fritts (oh, how I've missed playing a tracker instrument!), and to see campus. I was struck by how nice it was, just being in South Bend again. I assure you that the climate does not appeal to me, nor the charm of the city. More than anything it was like seeing an old friend again — not a particularly close friend, but someone worth seeing nonetheless. After a certain amount of time one becomes aware of those little annoyances (or indeed, great glaring flaws of personality) that have prevented closer friendship. But before that happens it is very pleasant, indeed.

Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining our culture's incurable mobility: we long to be somewhere else because we are constantly overstaying our welcome. What we must learn is how to be at home. To do this we must become comfortable not only with a particular place and its particular people, despite their flaws, but also with ourselves. Introspection requires a certain stability, and stability encourages a certain introspection. Doesn't it?

Augustana, Revisited

This evening I attended the Augustana Choirs and Orchestra Christmas concert. What's that, you well may ask, a Christmas concert in the first week of Advent? Madness! you may correctly observe. But it was an enjoyable concert, for the most part, nonetheless. There's a certain percentage of Christmas schlock that is required to satiate the blue-haired little old ladies, but fortunately there was some real repertoire as well. My favorite was Respighi's L'adorazione dei magi, part of his triptych on Botticelli themes. I do believe the more I hear Respighi the more I like him.

Returning to Augustana, whatever the circumstances, has always been pleasant for me: I feel at home there in a way I never will feel anywhere else. Notre Dame had its benefits, of course, but I never felt like a part of that community (if such a large school can be called a "community" at all). The arguments I heard — and took part in — there could interest me intellectually, but there was ultimately a disconnect somewhere: what is it to me, if the Basilica uses chant or guitars? It's not my Basilica. It was easier to take a step back and observe the pettiness and uncharity at Notre Dame. There's no less pettiness and uncharity at Augustana, of course — indeed, there may be more, per capita — but it is somehow more tolerable because it is a place I think worth fighting for; it is home. And home, for all its frustrations, is still preferable to anyplace else.

Ars Itineris?

Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, XXVIII. "On Travel as a Cure for Discontent":

Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate. Though you may cross vast spaces of sea, and though, as our Virgil remarks: "Lands and cities are left astern," your faults will follow you wherever you travel. Socrates made the same remark to one who complained: he said, "Why do you wonder that globetrotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason which set you wandering is ever at your heels." What pleasure is there in seeing new lands? Or in surveying cities and spots of interest? All your bustle is useless. Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.

Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to his nephew Peter Carr, 10 August 1787:

[Traveling] makes men wiser, but less happy. When men of sober age travel, they gather knowledge, which they may apply usefully for their country, but they are subject ever after to recollections mixed with regret — their affections are weakened by being extended over more objects, and they learn new habits which cannot be gratified when they return home. Young men who travel are exposed to all these inconveniences in a higher degree, to others still more serious, and do not acquire that wisdom for which a previous foundation is requisite, by repeated and just observations at home. The glare of pomp and pleasure is analogous to the motion of the blood — it absorbs all their affection and attention, they are torn from it as from the only good in this world, and return to their home as to a place of exile and condemnation. Their eyes are forever turned back to the object they have lost, and its recollection poisons the residue of their lives. Their first and most delicate passions are hackneyed on unworthy objects here, and they carry home the dregs, insufficient to make themselves or anybody else happy. Add to this that a habit of idleness — an inability to apply themselves to business — is acquired and renders them useless to themselves and their country. These observations are founded in experience. There is no place where your pursuit of knowledge will be so little obstructed by foreign objects, as in your own country, nor any, wherein the virtues of the heart will be less exposed to be weakened. Be good, be learned, and be industrious, and you will not want the aid of traveling, to render you precious to your country, dear to your friends, happy within yourself.

Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness, p. 43:

[T]he world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home."

Graduate Transience

As for the graduate student, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

In these last few weeks at Notre Dame, now that my recital is over and I have only seven more pages to write about Sarum chant and its influence on English polyphony, things have turned bittersweet. ("Bittersweet": another overused word. Oh well.) One becomes aware of how brief two years actually is. Yesterday I had my last class; today I had my last lesson and cantored for the last time at the Basilica. Wandering around before Mass, I saw some saints in the windows I hadn't noticed before: Margaret (with snake), Mechtilde, Jerome. At lunch I happened to run into some fellow sacred music students, and afterwards we basked in the sun and shot the breeze, enjoying some Gemütlichkeit. (An aside: the first recorded use of "shoot the breeze" is from 1941, but beyond that nobody is quite sure where the expression comes from. How many other etymologies have we lost?) This is exactly the sort of thing one can do in a community, and it is exactly the sort of thing that is cut short when graduate study concludes and we scatter to the ends of the earth. How can we hope to have real community without some semblance of rootedness? The Benedictine vows of stability, conversion of manners, and obedience are much better things than we give them credit for.

Portland & Seattle

Late Saturday evening I returned from a trip to the Pacific Northwest: the Notre Dame Liturgical Choir went on tour, and I joined them. (My instinct, before we left, was that spending a week with a crowd of undergraduates would be insufferable, but it turned out to be quite enjoyable. One is always pleasantly surprised with Notre Dame students.)

In Portland I got so far as writing the first draft of an entry (dated 12 January), which I present here.

I suppose I might as well send you, dear reader, greetings from Portland, Oregon, where I am currently on tour with the Notre Dame Liturgical Choir. In many ways it is a pleasant city. The climate is at least comfortable: today a dusting of sleet was considered sufficient cause to shut schools down early. (The day we left South Bend, two feet of snow had fallen, with talk of more to come.) I spent several hours at Powell's Books, and suspect that I could've been there considerably longer. (Among the eleven books I purchased were the Bainton biography of Luther, a memoir of Antarctic exploration, a book about Prester John.... I suppose I shall have sufficient reading material for a while, now.)

I'm not sure I saw enough of Seattle to judge it properly, but from what I saw it seems a beautiful city (near-constant rain notwithstanding). Both cities are replete with two extremes of people: hipsters and yuppies on one end, and the homeless on t'other. (A more waggish observer than myself might observe that the only difference in attire between hipsters and the homeless is that hipsters choose to dress that way.) In both cities an awful lot of the people are from Somewhere Else.

There is an undercurrent of desperation in the major cities of the Northwest. For a century-and-a-half now, these cities have been the final destination in that great exodus from points eastward (Europe, New York, Iowa): all those people, leaving home in hopes of a new and better life in the West, find themselves facing the open Pacific, with nowhere else to run to. What is the end result of an incurably mobile society? We might observe it first in the cities of the West.

And yet Portland and Seattle are in several ways quite pleasant. People there are at least aware that recycling and public transit are Good Ideas. The seafood is excellent (a welcome consolation for one who views red meat with increasing — though not yet total — distaste). Though chain restaurants and cafés are ubiquitous, there are also some very good local places to be found nearly everywhere. There are some simply excellent organs to be found in that part of the country: we visited Paul Fritts's workshop and he took us on a tour of several important instruments in the area. (Fritts has the beady eyes and quiet demeanor that are apparently required for organ-builders, but he seems a nice fellow.) All in all, I can't say I've firmly made up my mind about either Portland or Seattle. While there is much to criticize, there's much to admire as well. I hope to travel to both cities again.

A Grief Deferred

This past weekend I visited home. The occasion, like most funerals and some weddings, was not a particularly happy one, but, like funerals and weddings, it provided a good opportunity to reunite with family. (The thing about having a large extended family — my mother is one of ten children — is that one rarely gets to see all of them together. It is genuinely pleasant to see all these people together, enjoying, for the most part, one another's company.) The most difficult thing about the whole affair, for me, was driving back to South Bend on Sunday: every time I return to South Bend I become more aware that I don't belong there. It was worst this time because the grief of this past occasion is still not fully computed and dealt with, and my absence from home isn't going to help. Lo and behold, Peters just wrote about the locality of grief:

We are going to travel some, all of us, and that, I suppose, is good. It is what I call a limited good. But we do the living no good, and the dead no honor, if we disregard our place. We should be home as much as possible. There are griefs to bear everywhere, and to some degree we can bear them anywhere — even distant griefs. But home is where most of them are — and where we bear them most fully, and best.

Home is unpleasant, in a few ways: certainly, I cannot deal with family all the time. (You are aware, no doubt, of the myriad specific ways in which family can be irritating.) But right now it looks like the minor irritations family can provoke are far preferable to the weight of guilt I feel for being away.

Opinions; Home

It is the singular misfortune of conciliatory, or cowardly, men—and honesty compels me to include myself among their ranks—to be paralyzed in most matters of opinion. This is not to say that we are devoid of opinions; no, indeed. But to strongly voice almost any opinion is enough to make enemies with someone, and the coward seeks to avoid this. Among the irreligious, therefore, one opts not to voice any excess of spiritual conviction; among the liberally-minded one cannot risk being perceived as reäctionary; among the Lutherans it is wise to downplay Catholic sympathies. But the reverse is also true: mention not your doubts among the devout, nor your questions among the conservative, nor your Lutheran tendencies among the Papists. Perhaps it would be an easier matter if I were fundamentally on one side or t'other. It's safe enough, I suppose, in either opposing camp, but dangerous to venture in the no-man's-land between them. Now, here I thought adulthood was a time for solidifying one's prejudices; perhaps that means I'm not an adult yet.

Ah, but perhaps there is one issue where I'm content to be disagreed with. Allow me to elucidate. For a young person my age, with college education (and mind you, I am inclined to put the word "education" in quotation marks), the inevitable topics of conversation with people I haven't seen for a good while are What I Have Been Doing With Myself and What I Plan to Do With Myself. The answers, of course, are that only a year ago I received a degree in music, and that I intend to complete my masters in sacred music. Inevitably next in the conversation comes the question of where I intend to move away to in order to find work. I'm quite tired of this assumption. (Interestingly, it is perhaps most prevalent in rural communities, where the permanent leaving of the educated young is more regular than the return of the swallows to Capistrano.) Let it be known henceforth, then, that I do not subscribe to the idea that I need to move away in order to make something of myself. I disagree, yes, I disagree with this notion, and I wish to disabuse people of it. I want to stay home. Home, in this sense, is not my parents' house—which would drive me to madness, if not parricide—but rather the area I've known all my life: patria mea.

The difficult thing about unpopular convictions, besides the alienating effect they have on those with differing (that is, wrong) ideas, is that they must be reflected in one's own life, lest one be branded a hypocrite. I can only hope this staying-at-home thing works out, eh?

The Promise of Living

The promise of living with hope and thanksgiving

Is born of our loving our friends and our labor.

The promise of growing with faith and with knowing

Is born of our sharing our love with our neighbor.

The promise of living, the promise of growing

Is born of our singing in joy and thanksgiving.

No, that there's no verse by Mr Berry, though the sentiment is certainly akin. (He doesn't care to rhyme that much, anyway.) It's from The Tender Land, Aaron Copland's unfortunately neglected opera. It's sung to an original countermelody against the revivalist tune Zion's Walls, which he also arranged. (It so happened that I conducted that arrangement today in class; it's solid.) I wonder if the lyricist who wrote those words happened to believe them; can it be that intellectuals once had that sort of optimism, that sort of trust in the goodness of the human spirit? If so, what has changed?

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More devout readers, or at least the more liturgically inclined, will note that today is the Feast of the Annunciation. Over at the Episcopal lectionary I frequent, a Mr James Kiefer has written a fine meditation for this day.

A Threnody for Naperville

Is it possible to feel nostalgia for a time one has never directly known? For that, I suspect, may be what I feel every time I commute past the suburbs of Chicago. (I drove home yesterday for my Spring break, you see.) In my mind I can see the farmsteads and villages and acres and acres of woods and fields that once occupied that region. The strip malls and McMansions there now represent the death of all that went before: anything that was unique, or particular, or even praiseworthy is now overwhelmed in this monotonous sameness, this standardization.

Even the farmsteads, it must be admitted, represented a sort of death, for before them was nothing but prairie and virgin forest, mile upon mile, century upon century. But that first death was reversible; field passes swiftly enough into prairie. This second death is far more permanent. What hope is there for Naperville now that it is committed to a world defined by Wal-marts and highway off-ramps? It is a blessing, at least, that this world cannot long endure. I am an optimist in the sense that I know there is a sort of justice in the long term. Even if the world continues to run on oil after I am gone, I know that it cannot do so forever.

"These times we know much evil, little good / to steady us in faith." Indeed.

The Left End of the Porch

For all the things the Front Porchers get correct, there certainly are a lot of stupid comments made there. (Environmentalism equals communism, for example. Or, Obama is Kenyan.) Every few weeks, upon becoming enraged by an assortment of asinine comments posted at FPR, I resolve to stop reading the site. And then I see something like this article, which reminds me why I started reading it to begin with.

All the same, I'd say there's a dangerous amount of teabag-level crazity present among certain commenters. It's my humble opinion that we need a few more people on the left side of the Porch (like Mr Russell Arben Fox, one of the few posters sane enough to admit that de gummint isn't intrinsically evil). I tire of the self-righteousness of those reactionary Front Porchers who assume a localist attitude must necessarily entail belief in the One True Church (whichever particular brand they prefer, be it Papist, Greek, or Calvinist), complete denial of the Democratic party (communiss, all of 'em!), and disdain for any culture beyond that of small-town America. I will not forsake Bach and Mahler, thank you.

Why I'm glad I bought a radio

This morning I was listenin' to the ol' radio, when what should I hear but the dulcet tones of Mr Wendell Berry! On the Diane Rehm show, of all places. P'raps you might find it edifying to listen to the interview.

Ave, Patria

This past week I've been back home in the Quad Cities. After waiting months to get back, keeping this return in mind as my goal throughout all the busi-ness of graduate study, I must say it's a bit disappointing in some ways. Places change, even in a few months' time. Trees are cut down; concrete is poured. Even the potato soup at the Belgian Village was rather sub-par yesterday (though I remain hopeful that the clam chowder will be good this weekend). We nostalgize places, and they disappoint. People, it is true, can also disappoint; but so far they haven't. It has been reuniting with friends that has been most rewarding about this homecoming.

I'm still not entirely certain what one's relationship to a place should be. One can admire a place. But should one claim to love a place? I know that this particular corner of Illinois/Iowa is not the greatest place in the world, except by virtue of it being mine, and of me being its. "We admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons", Chesterton reminds us. I sometimes wonder whether love ought be reserved for people: only the heartless choose their friends with reason, and families are of course beyond one's choice. But then, our homeland (patria, a fine Latin word: the land of one's fathers) is also given us. Only those few born in a place like Vienna, or Madison, or Moab, can love their place for reasons. The rest of us, born in a world of places that are indeed quite mediocre when judged by their objective merit, must love our place without reasons.

In any case, it's good to be home.

Church Community, cont'd

Either Peters has been reading the comments of this-a-here web-log or there's something in the air. In the midst of a discourse on writers and place, he drops this gem:

It can hardly be a matter of bewilderment to anyone who has read O’Connor’s work, especially the letters and the lectures, that this woman of formidable intellectual abilities was fiercely loyal to the Church Universal and stubbornly committed to attending daily mass at the local parish, where gossip was sure to be high and intelligence low. O’Connor knew that although we participate in universals we don’t inhabit them.

We must make do with a particular place, with all its annoyances. Yes. But I wonder whether this is a defense of one's local church (Flannery was born into Catholicism), or a defense of the Church Universal?

Creed and Community

A little while ago I was pondering the Church Divided. There's certainly no shortage of choices for the discriminating prospective churchgoer; we Christians have proven ourselves better at division than charity. But before discussing these choices I'd like to back up and analyze, if briefly, what constitutes a "Christian".

What, or who, is a Christian? In the broadest sense—that of the census, for example—one's status as a Christian is decided merely by self-appellation. But this is problematic enough that I'd rather ignore it and move on to the next sense, that of creed. Let's agree, for argument's sake, that there is a set of beliefs expected of Christians. (In a better age than this one we could've agreed that said beliefs were articulated in the Creeds of the Church; such is not the case nowadays. I will not, however, go so far as to exclude those who would deny, for example, the Virgin Birth: perhaps it is a matter of integrity for them.) Etymologically speaking, our word "creed" comes, of course, from the Latin credo, "I believe", the first word of both the Nicene and the Apostles' Creeds. You will note that it is singular. (It is curious that the Roman Catholics altered this to "we believe" in their current English translation; however, the new translation coming out soon will correct this.) Belief, then, is a personal decision: though we express the creed communally, it is by its nature an act of an individual. The Protestants are generally more insistent about this. Kierkegaard, for example, emphasized that we relate to God as individuals, we attain truth as individuals, we are judged and saved as individuals. There's a good deal to be said for this.

But at the same time, no man is a church unto himself. The sacraments—let's also assume that Christians have those, shall we?—are by their nature administered communally. Paul, in his first letter to Corinth, insists that we are baptized into the mystical "body of Christ": we cannot exist as independent individuals and remain a part of this unity. Once we have established that to be a Christian is to belong to a community, we must then ask ourselves what constitutes a community.

The Sage of Kentucky calls a community a "membership", a term he borrows from Paul (whom, he adds, he doesn't always approve of!). This implies that an individual is not only accepted by the community, but also that he knows himself to be a part of it. Elsewhere we are reminded that community is necessarily local, even though it belongs to a larger order of things:

A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation.

(That's from Berry's Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, by the way. It's worth a look-see.) Very well, then: when we say Christians belong to a community, it is necessarily the particular church they attend, with all their fellow congregants—the people who, in better times, we could've assumed are all neighbors anyway. Here, then, is the first problem with Christianity in these United States: a Christian "community" no longer need be defined by close proximity. That is to say, it is no proper community at all.

But how, you may ask, can we balance the imperative for a real community with our personal integrity: that is to say, should I attend the nearest church possible, regardless of its doctrinal errors? That's the question. It's late; let's continue this some other time.