Don’t feed on the redhearts only

One of the great benefits of having teenagers in the house (WE HAVE FOUR TEENAGERS IN THE HOUSE) is that you get constant updates on the things you do strangely, or poorly, or stupidly, or wrong. It’s pretty great. 

Today, on the way to school, I was waiting for Eight O’Clock Bach to come on the radio, and they were playing some silly little French pieces with a flute, and a lot of airy runs and pointless meandering, and I said, “Ugh, could this sound more French?” 

One of the kids asked in an exasperated voice, “Well, why do you listen to music you don’t like?” It seemed like the height of stupidity to them, and I can see why.
 
But as so often happens when I am challenged, I discover I’m not actually a complete moron, and I really do have a guiding principle for my behavior. So I said, “Because I believe in exposing myself to things that are not my favorite!” 
 
This is absolutely true, and I think my parents deliberately raised me to think this way, especially my father. I remember going to art museums and never skipping the modern art galleries, even though they were, to put it mildly, not my father‘s favorite. We tramped through and probably obnoxiously proclaimed our opinions about the piles of lightbulbs and penis couches and whatnot; but we didn’t skip them. I also remember going to concerts of John Cage and Philip Glass, and also of less-talented composers who were heavily influenced by Cage and Glass, if you can imagine. And we would always debrief afterwards. 
 
And sometimes we just complained, but usually we talked about why we didn’t like what we didn’t like. We talked about what people might find compelling about it, and why it wasn’t enough to make it worth it in the end, for us. And sometimes we did like it, and we talked about that, too. The key was, we didn’t encounter art that wasn’t our style just for the sake of enduring it. We really looked and really listened, and we really thought about it, and hashed it out. At least that’s how I remember it.
 
My kids have grown up in an era where everything is tailored to follow their tastes, and where everyone is expected to curate their own list of favorites This is considered the sensible and normal and sane thing to do. Why would you not? Why not make a playlist solely of things you enjoy, and stock your shelves with your favorite foods, and subscribe to only your most well-tested channels? 
 
Let me be clear, this is not a moral question. There’s nothing wrong with making playlists of music you like! But it is a question of what you are doing to yourself, and what richness you may be missing, if you live your whole life this way.
 
And also what will happen when you come up to some unpleasant thing that you really can’t avoid, but you haven’t built up a habit of enduring. 
 
Part of the answer is something I remember reading in C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra. Ransom, who has found himself sent as an emissary of some kind to an alien, untouched planet, is wandering around figuring out how to survive on a literally unstable landscape, and discovering which growing things are good to eat. Some of them are more to his liking than others!
 
He made his way gingerly towards the coast, but before he reached it he passed some bushes which carried a rich crop of oval green berries, about three times the size of almonds. He picked one and broke it in two. The flesh was dryish and bread-like, something of the same kind as a banana. It turned out to be good to eat. It did not give the orgiastic and almost alarming pleasure of the gourds, but rather the specific pleasure of plain food–the delight of munching and being nourished, a “Sober certainty of waking bliss.” A man, or at least a man like Ransom, felt he ought to say grace over it; and so he presently did. The gourds would have required rather an oratorio or a mystical meditation. But the meal had its unexpected high lights. Every now and then one struck a berry which had a bright red centre: and these were so savoury, so memorable among a thousand tastes, that he would have begun to look for them and to feed on them only, but that he was once more forbidden by that same inner adviser which had already spoken to him twice since he came to Perelandra. “Now on earth,” thought Ransom, “they’d soon discover how to breed these redhearts, and they’d cost a great deal more than the others.” Money, in fact, would provide the means of saying encore in a voice that could not be disobeyed. (Perelandra, chapter 4) 
 
This is a slightly different phenomenon than what I was talking about. The plain berries aren’t bad; they’re just plain. Still, he has to compel himself to keep on accepting them, rather than skipping past them to get to the redhearts. He is not on earth; he’s in a different kind of place, where some things are better than others, but at least so far, everything is good.
 
I thought, too, of the little story of “The Magic Thread,” where a young boy is given a magic ball that is his own life, spun out in thread. When he comes upon something in his life he’d rather skip, all he has to do is tug on the thread, and he’ll instantly find himself past it. 
 

The following day at school, Peter sat daydreaming about what he would do with his magic thread. The teacher scolded him for not concentrating on his work. If only, he thought, it was time to go home. Then he felt the silver ball in his pocket. If he pulled out a tiny bit of thread, the day would be over. Very carefully he took hold of it and tugged. Suddenly the teacher was telling everyone to pack up their books and to leave the classroom in an orderly fashion. Peter was overjoyed. He ran all the way home. How easy life would be now! All his troubles were over. From that day forth he began to pull the thread, just a little, every day.

You can imagine how this goes. He finds himself pulling on the thread of his life more and more, skipping over difficult and boring and laborious times more and more often. And it’s not only because he’s selfish or lazy: Sometimes, as he grows, he pulls on the thread to skip over the painful spells for the people he loves: The teething and trials of his babies, and the sickness of his beloved wife. 
 
But of course as he skips and skips, he finds himself older, sicker, and more feeble, and “as soon as one trouble was solved, another seemed to grow in its place.” The more he skips, the less he finds there is to enjoy, until he finds himself at the end of his life, everyone moved away or dying or dead, the thread all pulled out. Oops. 
 
There’s less here to consider than in the Lewis book. The “magic thread” is more of a simple “stop and smell the roses” idea, because if you don’t stop because you think there might be a thorn, you’ll miss the roses; that’s all. In Perelandra, though, there are no thorns. It’s an unfallen world, untouched as yet by death or sin. And yet Ransom still feels impelled to stop and make his way through everything that is given to him. What’s that about? 
 
I haven’t read the book in a long time, but I believe it has to do with accepting our relationship with God: Who we are is receivers, and it is our place to accept what we are given. Either with intentional thanksgiving, or with radical acceptance of his will. The fallenness in that scene was not the existence of the plain berries; it was Ransom’s initial idea to reject them because they weren’t good enough.
 
One happy secret is, making your way thoughtfully and attentively through the parts you never would have chosen give so much more savor to the redhearts. It happens in little ways, like with music. Bach is always Bach and always something I want to listen to, but man, a Brandenburg Concerto is a thousand times more satisfying if you’ve just sweated your way through Trois Petites Pièces du Augusta Holmès.
 
And it happens in bigger ways. If I weren’t in the habit of leaving the radio on through my less-favorite parts, I think I would find it a lot harder to have teenagers in the house, with their winsome habit of telling me how weird and dumb I am all the time. The truth is that all of my kids are my favorite, and they all have dear and wonderful and compelling virtues and attributes, and I really do want to be with them. But their virtues are much easier to note and appreciate when you are in the habit of patiently enduring and accepting . . . you know, the other bits. This habit of acceptance is one of those muscles you can use to lift all kinds of loads.  
 
So that’s why I listen to music I don’t like. As I said, it’s not a moral issue, except in that it’s the kind of thing that trains you for the times when it is a moral issue: When it’s not plain berries or subpar flute music, but it’s the suffering and sorrow and struggle that comes into every life, especially the life of someone who’s chosen to seek God. By the end of Perelandra, as I recall, Ransom is put in a place of accepting far more painful realities than eating a berry that doesn’t taste exquisite. And he does it. 

 
The “inner adviser” that spoke to Ransom is the same one who speaks to us in our world. I hear the message, “Don’t feed on the redhearts only.” So, I try. 
 
Image: Edited version, original via Wikimedia (Creative Commons)

Make me a channel of legitimately sourced quotations

Emily Stimpson, bless her, once swatted down a story I’ve heard my whole life.  Stimpson says:

[T]he election of our wonderful new Holy Father, Pope Francis, has triggered an avalanche of people talking about the first Francis and his injunction to, “Preach the Gospel always. If necessary, use words.”

But see, here’s the thing. St. Francis never said that. We don’t know who did. But it wasn’t Francis. It’s not in any of his known writings. It’s not in any of his companions’ writings. It’s not in anyone’s writings about Francis for the first 800 or so years after his death.

Someone invented the quote and put it into poor St. Francis’ mouth. And ever since then, people have used it as an excuse to not evangelize with words, to not have the uncomfortable conversations or say the unpopular things.

I have also learned, to my great relief, that there is no compelling reason to believe that St. Francis ever wrote the spiritually flaccid “Make me a channel of your peace” prayer.

We can assume that these misattributions were honest mistakes:  somebody once upon a time said something that somebody else liked, and somebody else said, “Hey, that sounds like something St. Francis would say,” and somebody else took it to mean that St. Francis did say it, and so on, like a centuries-long game of telephone.  But no matter what the intentions, sloppiness with attributions can lead to real trouble, especially if the person to whom the quote is misattributed has some influential heft.

Even if you’re sure you have your attribution right, quoting people rightly can be tricky.  A few days ago, someone posted an inspirational image on Facebook.  Before a backdrop of cattails in the sunset, it said in golden script,

“It is in God’s hands. One must be content to leave it there. One must have Faith.” — C.S. Lewis

Something about that chewy use of the impersonal “one” made a gong go off in my head.  Did C.S. Lewis really say that?  The sentiment was too vague to be called false, exactly, but it sounded . . . chewy.  So I looked it up, and it turns out the quote is from Perelandra, where Elwin Ransom has been transported to an unfallen planet ruled by an unfallen Lady and her absent husband.  To Ransom’s horror, Hell has sent a representative to try to tempt the Lady into defying God.  It describes the thoughts that go through Ransom’s mind as he figures out what to do next — what God (Maleldil) wants from him. The quote in question is in bold:

He, Ransom, with his ridiculous piebald body and his ten times defeated arguments – what sort of a miracle was that? His mind darted hopefully down a side-alley that seemed to promise escape. Very well then. He had been brought here miraculously.He was in God’s hands. As long as he did his best – and he had done his best – God would see to the final issue. He had not succeeded. But he had done his best. No one could do more. “‘Tis not in mortals to command success.’ He must not be worried about the final result. Maleldil would see to that. And Maleldil would bring him safe back to Earth after his very real, though unsuccessful, efforts. Probably Maleldil’s real intention was that he should publish to the human race the truths he had learned on the planet Venus. As for the fate of Venus, that could not really rest upon his shoulders. It was in God’s hands. One must be content to leave it there. One must have Faith ….

It snapped like a violin string. Not one rag of all this evasion was left. Relentlessly, unmistakably, the Darkness pressed down upon him the knowledge that this picture of the situation was utterly false. His journey to Perelandra was not a moral exercise, nor a sham fight. If the issue lay in Maleldil’s hands, Ransom and the Lady were those hands. The fate of a world really depended on how they behaved in the next few hours.

So, yeah, Lewis said that, in the same way that Shakespeare said, “To thine own self be true”: through the mouth of a character who’s immediately proven wrong. It was not a recommended course of action; it was an illustration of the sort of lies we can tell ourselves when we’re trying to get out of something.  Attributing the shorter quote to C.S. Lewis without context is only half a step above the Hollywood promoter who prints posters that say, “Critics say ‘[Y]ou’ll love this movie!  It’s full of … good scenes!”‘” when the critic’s actual words were, “If you’re a grade A moron, you’ll love this movie!  It’s full of nonsense, and has no good scenes!”

And of course, some people don’t even bother to be technically accurate.  Have you heard the story that Pope Francis, when handed the papal mozzetta, said waspishly, “Wear it yourself!  The circus is over.”  That quote turned out to be made up out of whole cloth,  either by someone who really did regard Benedict XVI as some kind of bling-happy, medieval vulgarian, or by someone who maliciously wanted to portray Francis as someone who saw Benedict that way.  Either way, there is no evidence that Francis said it — and, more importantly, there is no evidence that he is the kind of person who would say something like that.

As Shakespeare once said, there’s the rub.  Consider the purported source.  Listen to your spidey sense.  If you see a quote by a famous person, and it either sounds the tiniest bit “off” to you — or, conversely, if it makes you think, “Oh man, that’s exactly the kind of thing I knew he was thinking all along, and now we’ve got him” — then think, and do a little research, before you forward it to all your friends!

As Marie Antoinette once said, “Famous people say enough stupid things on their own without you making stuff up.”  Well, I bet it sounds better in French.

***

This post originally ran in a slightly different form in The National Catholic Register in 2013.

Chasing pleasures and chasing God

All licit pleasures can lead us to God. All licit pleasures can prepare us to enjoy the eternal presence of God. That is what pleasure is for: to teach us, to form us, to remind us of what we once knew before our forefather Adam brought darkness and distance and forgetfulness between us and our creator. It is perverse to try to prolong pleasure past its purpose. It is profound to try to submerge ourselves in the source of all pleasure.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly here.

Photo by Katya Austin on Unsplash