An Ego the Size of the Universe

Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Tuesday

Reprinted from March 13, 2017 with changes

If you’ve ever read Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps you will know what episode came to mind when I heard about Donald Trump boasting of his large ego at last week’s national prayer breakfast. As you read through his comments, let me know if you can detect any sign of spiritual searching or if you can explain why various church leaders would have laughed and applauded as Trump delivered them:

They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego. Beating these lunatics was incredible … the first time they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.

So who has the bigger ego, Donald Trump or Zaphod Beeblebrox?

Beeblebrox is the irritating cousin of protagonist Ford Prefect in Hitchhiker’s Guide. In the scene I have in mind, Beeblebrox has been captured by the fiendish Gargravarr, a Frogstar prison warden whose mind and body are undergoing “a trial separation likely to end in divorce.” Beeblebrox appears to have unlimited self-confidence, but “unlimited” only goes so far as a descriptor when one is subjected to Gargravaar’s “Total Perspective Vortex.”

Adams describes how the Vortex works. It all has to do with a sense of proportion:

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day. And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

We have here the classic death-of-God existential horror show. If humans are merely a random biochemical event that occurred on an infinitesimally tiny pebble hurtling through the vast reaches of interstellar space, then our lives are meaningless. Some existentialists cushion themselves against this demoralizing truth by counseling us to live as though our lives have meaning, even if they don’t. This, however, can be seen as no more than a cowardly coping mechanism. The Total Perspective Vortex is designed to cut through such rationalizations and show us how small and insignificant we truly are.

This is in fact how the Vortex works with Mrs. Trin Tragula:

To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a “sense of proportion.”

Mrs. Tragula would have survived, however, had she an ego the size of Beeblebrox’s. Think about it this way: if we see ourselves as more or less on a par with our immediate surroundings, then we feel neither too big nor too small. It is a perspective we are familiar with. If, on the other hand, we were suddenly shown the entire universe, the only way we could hold on to a sense of proportion and stay sane would be (drumroll!) if we had an ego as big as the universe!

This proves to be the case with Zaphod Beeblebrox. Gargravarr is stunned to see what emerges from the Total Perspective Vortex:

He waited for him to flop forward out of the box, as they all did.

Instead, he stepped out.

“Hi!” he said.

“Beeblebrox…” gasped Gargravarr’s mind in amazement.

“Could I have a drink please?” said Zaphod.

“You…you…have been in the Vortex?” stammered Gargravarr.

“You saw me, kid.”

“And it was working?”

“Sure was.”

“And you saw the whole infinity of creation?”

“Sure. Really neat place, you know that?”

Gargravarr’s mind was reeling in astonishment. Had his body been with him it would have sat down heavily with its mouth hanging open.

“And you saw yourself,” said Gargravarr, “in relation to it all?”

“Oh, yeah yeah.”

“But…what did you experience?”

Zaphod shrugged smugly.

“It just told me what I knew all the time. I’m a really terrific and great guy. Didn’t I tell you, baby. I’m Zaphod Beeblebrox!”

While Trump’s ego may not be as large as the universe, it is big enough for him to deny that millions voted against him in 2016 and again in 2020. He thinks he is “a really terrific and great guy,” and his wounded ego led him to sic his followers onto the nation’s Capitol building and all that has followed. 

In short, he would give Zaphod Beeblebrox some stiff competition.

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Trump, a Gulliverian Midget amongst Giants

Gulliver and the Brogdingnagian king

Monday

I continue to be astounded, not at the egregious things that Donald Trump continues to spew, but at how Republicans act as though it doesn’t matter. In a comment last week he complained that Americans are allowing the ICE killings of Renee Good and Alex Petti to overshadow his magnificent accomplishments. In doing so, he reminded me of Gulliver in Jonathan Swift’s satire.

First of all, here’s the quote:

You arrest thousands of rapists. You arrest thousands of the worst people. You arrest the drug dealers. I mean, we had drug kingpins. We had murderers. Thousands, no incident. We bring ‘em back to their country. Two people it’s bad. I hate it. I hate even talking about it. Two people out of tens of thousands,” Trump said during Wednesday’s interview. 

“And you get bad publicity. Nobody talks about all of the murderers that we’re taking out of our country,” he continued.

In other words, he is accusing the American public of having “a nice, unnecessary scruple.” Which is the accusation Gulliver levels at the giant king of the Brobdingnagians in Book II of Gulliver’s Travels.

A small man, both literally and morally, Gulliver seeks to impress the king by offering him the secret of gunpowder. It’s like Trump thinking he can impress people by bombing multiple countries or kidnapping the Venezuelan president:

In hopes to ingratiate myself further into his majesty’s favor, I told him of “an invention, discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder, into a heap of which, the smallest spark of fire falling, would kindle the whole in a moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up in the air together, with a noise and agitation greater than thunder. That a proper quantity of this powder rammed into a hollow tube of brass or iron, according to its bigness, would drive a ball of iron or lead, with such violence and speed, as nothing was able to sustain its force. That the largest balls thus discharged, would not only destroy whole ranks of an army at once, but batter the strongest walls to the ground, sink down ships, with a thousand men in each, to the bottom of the sea, and when linked together by a chain, would cut through masts and rigging, divide hundreds of bodies in the middle, and lay all waste before them. That we often put this powder into large hollow balls of iron, and discharged them by an engine into some city we were besieging, which would rip up the pavements, tear the houses to pieces, burst and throw splinters on every side, dashing out the brains of all who came near. 

I’ll get to the king’s rejection of Gulliver’s offer in a moment. First, however, let’s compare Gulliver’s bafflement with Trump’s. Trump can’t figure out how people can be so dumb (“narrow principles and views,” to use Gulliver’s words) as to reject his gift to them. On the one side, there are “thousands” of rapists, murderers, and “worst people” arrested. On the other, two dead Americans. 

Now to Gulliver:

A strange effect of narrow principles and views! that a prince…should, from a nice, unnecessary scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no conception, let slip an opportunity put into his hands that would have made him absolute master of the lives, the liberties, and the fortunes of his people! 

Of course, there’s nothing that Trump desires more than to be an absolute master. The Brobdingnagian king, by contrast, proves himself to be truly big by expressing more of an interest in the welfare of his people:

And he gave it for his opinion, “that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

As for his opinion of those who lionize violence:

He was amazed, how so impotent and groveling an insect as I” (these were his expressions) “could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines…”

An impotent and groveling little man.  To be big, you have to put your country first.

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The Sin above All Sins: Harm Thy Brethren

Tulsidas

Sunday

At a time when many white nationalist Christians are rationalizing governmental brutality, “True Religion” by the great 16th century Hindi poet and reformer can help those who wish to regain their moral center. Tulsidas goes to the heart of the matter with his simple message, “Serve thy brethren.” The poem was translated from the Sanskrit by Mahatma Gandhi when he was in prison for opposing British colonial rule.

I came across the poem in Poems of War Resistance, an anthology that my father published at the height of the Vietnam War.

True Religion
By Tulsidas
Trans. by Mahatma Gandhi

This and this alone
Is true religion-
To serve thy brethren:

This is sin above all other sin,
To harm thy brethren:

In such a faith is happiness,
In lack of it is misery and pain:

Blessed is he who swerveth not aside
From this straight path:
Blessed is he whose life is lived
Thus ceaselessly in serving God:

By bearing others’ burdens,
And so alone,
Is life, true life, to be attained:

Nothing is hard to him who, casting self aside,
Thinks only this—
How may I serve fellow-men?

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From Secular Humanist to Christian Believer

Friday

Today in my on-going memoir I examine how a staunch secular humanist could, upon reaching his forties, become an Episcopalian. Prior to conversion, it was not unusual for me to ask, “Who needs religion when one has literature?” After all, both are symbol systems that we use to understand the world, and I considered literature’s system to be richer and more complex.

I was raised in the heart of the Baptist Bible belt thinking that everyone in the world was Episcopalian. That’s what it was like to grow up in Sewanee, Tennessee, home to a college and a seminary owned by 28 southern Episcopal dioceses. But my Congregationalist father lost his faith after witnessing Dachau during the war while my mother, whose family was Episcopalian, had a bad back that couldn’t handle the hard pews. Consequently we didn’t attend church.

Nevertheless I ended up singing in the church choir after my sixth-grade teacher, a grim woman who used to complain about the Supreme Court outlawing the Lord’s Prayer in public schools, marched the class across the street to audition and I was in. After that my father started attending church, although I learned later that it was to support the desegregation efforts of the rector, not my singing. 

From those two years in church, I carried away the impression that God is angry all the time. To this day I can recite the grim 1928 confessional, since replaced: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.”

Years later, in Donald Schier’s “20th Century French Novels” class at Carleton, I read Roger Martin du Gard’s Jean Barois, which follows a character’s trajectory from “The Faith” through “The Doubt” and “The Struggle” to “The Faith Again” (to cite the four section headings). I remember thinking that Jean Barois felt more like real life than a novel and also that there was something wrong with how the protagonist comes to his beliefs. Barois starts off as a member of a pious family, splits with religion and his devout wife over science, becomes a political radical during the Dreyfus affair, and eventually finds his way back to religion when he is dying of tuberculosis. 

Barois throughout is contrasted with his mentor Marc-Elie Luce, a noted philosopher and member of the Senate, who warns him against going too far, whether in politics or religion. I remember thinking that Barois lacks Luce’s moderation as he swings between one extreme and the other.

While I wasn’t raised religious like Barois, I do remember the moment in adolescence that I learned about Darwinian evolution and dismissed religion. I think I got this from reading Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s play Inherit the Wind, about the Scopes trial, along with Irving Stone’s biography Clarence Darrow for the Defense, who defended the Dayton, Tennessee science teacher. I rooted for science, booed fundamentalist religion, and figured I didn’t have to take religion seriously.

On the other hand Julia, whom I met in college, was the descendant of Moravian missionaries and grew up in the Iowa church founded by her great-great-great grandfather. For her, church and community were one and the same and part of her fundamental identity. When we moved to Atlanta for graduate school, she switched to the Episcopal church since Moravians were hard to find, and when we moved to Maryland, she took our children to the Episcopal church that sat next to the college where I was teaching. Unlike intolerant Barois with his wife, I took her faith seriously, even if I didn’t share it.

I was also impressed with the existential questions that church attendance sparked in my three young sons. I didn’t see such conversations happening anywhere else in their world. I was also impressed with the rector, who had been dean and president of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific before ending his career at St. Mary’s Parish and so had an academic mindset I could relate to. We met to converse every one or two weeks and, while he never pressured me to join the church (which I appreciated), I began earnestly exploring religious issues.

Of course, as one who taught early British literature, I was well acquainted with what Christianity and Anglicanism meant to the authors. A couple of years ago C.S. Lewis scholar Rob MacSwain, who teaches at the Sewanee seminary, gave a talk in which he contended that Anglicans/ Episcopalians don’t do systematic theology the way that, say, Catholics, Lutherans, Moravians, and Baptists do. Rather, they conduct their theology through literature. 

MacSwain’s talk was about how Lewis explores questions of faith through his fantasy and science fiction, and I immediately applied the idea to other authors. Among British Anglicans who use their art to explore spiritual issues are Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spencer, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Lancelot Andrewes, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keble, W.H. Auden, R. S. Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, Lewis, Malcolm Guite, Rowan Williams, and Philip Pullman. 

The tradition goes so deep in the English tradition that even authors who are not Anglican can be seen as using literature in this way, such as John Milton, John Bunyan, and J.R.R. Tolkien. And to these can be added American Episcopalian authors, such as John Steinbeck, James Agee, Tennessee Williams, Madeleine L’Engle, Margaret Wise Brown, and Mary Oliver. So I suppose I was being given a religious education without knowing it. 

Now, not all of these authors explored religion in church-approved ways—Wordsworth’s magnificent poem Intimations of Immortality was attacked for its vision of a soul existing prior to birth (“trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God who is our home”)—but that helps make MacSwain’s point: literature can explore spiritual questions in powerful ways not available to systematic theology. Hopkins, who when he converted to Catholicism, at first thought he must give up poetry to do so but (thankfully!) later concluded that the two need not conflict and wrote some of the most memorable religious poems in the language. For his part, Pullman describes himself as “a Church of England atheist, and a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist, because that’s the tradition I was brought up in and I cannot escape those early influences.”

So back to my own conversion. There were two key moments. One was when I realized that Jesus was not a man with all the answers but rather someone who was undergoing his own growth process. The temptation scene in the desert, for instance, I now saw as an internal struggle where Jesus—having realized from his baptism at the hands of John the Baptism that he has God within—is meditating on what this means and doesn’t mean. Once I saw Jesus as someone grappling with life’s big questions, I could relate to him more.

The other moment happened when, in one of my conversations with Pregnall, I was expressing existential frustrations about the sterility of the world. He replied, “I sense that you long for mystery.” The observation hit like a thunderbolt. I didn’t find this mystery in my early love affair with Darwinian evolution—back then I was most interested in finding solid answers and mastering the unknown—whereas I now realized that Christianity provided a framework for articulating my sense of wonder. I now thrill to the language in the Book of Common Prayer, which touches parts of me that Enlightenment science fails to reach.

Not that I see a conflict between science and religion. Scientists, to reach conclusions, must bracket off certain aspects of existence to answer their questions—for instance, the soul and art—which is where mystics and poets make their home. We need all of the above.

With my new interest in Christianity, I enrolled in the Episcopal Church’s “Education for Ministry,” which Pregnall was teaching. EFM is a four-year course that dives into Old Testament, New Testament, church history, and theology. “Ministry” refers to everyone who wants to live a Christian life, not just official ministers. The program was developed by the Charlie Winters, the father of my best friend in middle school, and features several pedagogical tools that I would incorporate into my college teaching. 

The most significant of these was exploring how insights gained from a Biblical passage can be used to guide one’s daily life. As the current EFM textbook explains it, “A reflection that does not end with implications for our own lives as ministers in the world is incomplete.” Thanks to EFM, I started encouraging my college students to use their literary insights as life guidance, coming up with a three-step process of “immerse, reflect, act” or IRA: immerse yourself in the work, step back and reflect on it, and (to quote Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”) “change your life.” It was as though I was treating literature as holy scripture.

I took over teaching the EFM class after Pregnall unexpectedly retired with heart problems, which gave me the opportunity to try out the new approach. In my college classes, meanwhile, I was finally figuring out a way to make literature meaningful for my students, my lifelong goal.

As far as church attendance was concerned, I felt at first as though I had betrayed something, although I wasn’t sure whether it was the secular humanism, academe, or my secular family.  Kneeling in prayer involved crossing some invisible barrier. Since I was determined to be proactive rather than rebelliously reactive, I opened my heart to the faith, which now seems to be just part of who I am.

Nor has my commitment to reason lessened. There’s a saying amongst Episcopalians—when you enter the church, you don’t check your mind at the door—which traces back to Elizabethan preacher Richard Hooker’s contention that faith rests upon the three-legged stool of scripture, tradition, and reason. Each serves to uphold and critique the other two in a dynamic way. I still believe fervently in the necessity of critical thinking, even while acknowledging that there are things like Christ’s resurrection that defy worldly logic. I don’t know at all about how this manifestation took place, but I know that it had a transformative influence on his followers.

I’m fond of quoting Hamlet’s “there is more on heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.” He is saying this to his philosophy student friend to explain the ghost of his father, who has shown up demanding revenge, but it can also be applied to many of life’s mysteries. I think that people who require scientific certainty in all things sometimes reduce the world, just as fundamentalists often reduce God to something that they can control. Reductive science and reductive religion are coin sides of the same impulse.

It is always good to remind ourselves that God is not only bigger than we think but bigger than we can think. The winds that began blowing through the universe with the big bang–creating along the way conscious beings capable of producing works of stunning beauty—will always stymie our encapsulation attempts. I believe these winds operate on me as a miniscule speck living upon a miniscule speck within an incomprehensibly immense universe, even as they (to shift registers) “move the sun and the other stars.” Dante calls this force Love, which isn’t a bad place upon which to rest one’s identity.

As I think of the many Christian writers that I adore, I realize they were driven by the same longing for mystery that an Episcopalian rector recognized within me. Poetry, which brings together earthly and the transcendent, is as close as language comes to articulating that mystery. 

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Dante’s Inferno and My Cancer Biopsy

A 14th century illustration of Dante’s Ninth Circle

Thursday

Because I had a biopsy yesterday to test for prostate cancer, I’m feeling rather groggy at the moment. As a result, you’re receiving a shorter than normal post, this one about the character Dante and his guide Virgil in The Divine Comedy.

An explanation here requires some delicacy so here’s my effort to spare you. First of all, to gain samples, my urologist had to (as we used to say as kids) “put it where the sun don’t shine.” Thankfully, unlike the first time the procedure was performed, I was anesthetized. (Don’t ask me about that first time!)

The good news is that, although I won’t get test results for another week, the doctor didn’t find anything obvious. In order to reassure me, however, he had to venture first into a dark wood.

Which brings me to Divine Comedy. Satan presides over the ninth circle of Inferno, which is to say the level furthest from God. Dante has long since discovered that, to deal with his crisis of faith, he must first acknowledge/journey through the darkest features of humanity. In Inferno’s last canto, there is a literal 180-degree turn as he and Virgil climb through Satan to get to Purgatory.

“Through” is the operative preposition. The center of hell is the devil’s rear end, and the winds that buffet the travelers are clearly flatulence (as are the winds that blow in the infernal regions of Milton’s Paradise Lost). In a brief intermission between gusts, Dante and Virgil begin their journey down Satan’s thighbone, which scholars like Norman O. Brown see as a euphemism for the anus:

Then, as he [Virgil] bade, about his neck I curled
My arms and clasped him. And he spied the time
And place; and when the wings were wide unfurled

Set him upon the shaggy flanks to climb
And thus from shag to shag descended
‘Twixt matted hair and crusts of frozen rime.

And when we had come to where the huge thighbone
Rides in its socket at the haunch’s swell,
My guide, with labor and great exertion,

Turned head to where the feet had been, and fell
To hoisting himself up upon the hair,
So that I thought us mounting back to Hell.

Given that the earth is a globe, however, they are not mounting back up to hell but rather away from it. Dante concludes Inferno with encouraging words:

He first, I following; till my straining sense
Glimpsed the bright burden of the heavenly cars
Through a round hole; by this we climbed, and thence

Came forth, to look once more upon the stars.

So there you have it: my courageous doctor climbed through my round hole so that I can (hopefully for many more years) gaze upon the stars.

Okay, that’s enough.

More on Scatological Dante
In a past post I shared a delightful doggerel version Divine Comedy, written by my father, making clear the symbolism connected with Satan. You can read the whole thing here but here’s a sampling:

[Dante] put his dream in poetry
And gave it to the press
And it sold a million copies
And a million more I guess
And everybody read it
And began to look around
For the
Tower of Jesus the
Flower of Mary and
Satan the hole in the ground.

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Ralph Chaplin’s Poetic Call to Action

IWW organizer Ralph Chaplin

Wednesday

After seeing my post where I cited William Drennan’s “Wake of William Orr” to honor Renee Good and Alex Petti, a reader shared a poem by International Workers of the World organizer Ralph Chaplin. Most famous for the socialist anthem “Solidarity Forever,” Chaplin was arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917 for opposing America’s entry into World War I. He may have written “Mourn Not the Dead” in Chicago’s Cook County Jail in 1917.

Chaplin was radicalized as a child when he saw a man shot dead during the Pullman strike of 1894, leading us to wonder how many of our young people will be similarly radicalized by the actions of Trump’s goons. Chaplin would go on to work with Mother Jones during the bloody 1912-13 coal miners’ strike in Kanawha County, West Virginia in 1912-13. He must have felt horribly alone when war fever swept through the United States in 1917, when the public was willing to countenance the suspension of various civil liberties.

Fortunately, his poem about “the apathetic throng” applies to fewer people today than it would have a year ago as increasing numbers of Americans are turning out to protest the ICE raids and other Trump assaults on democracy. For instance, Rachel Maddow reported  Monday on how even people in red states are managing to block the construction of immigrant concentration camps.

Unfortunately, we have many “cowed and meek” members of Congress that continue to allow Trump to have his way in all things. Having witnessed his ability to unleash his supporters on anyone who disagrees with him, they “dare not speak.”

Mourn Not the Dead
By Ralph Chaplin 

Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie — 
Dust unto dust — 
The calm sweet earth that mothers all who die 
As all men must; 

Mourn not your captured comrades who must dwell — 
Too strong to strive — 
Each in his steel-bound coffin of a cell, 
Buried alive; 

But rather mourn the apathetic throng — 
The cowed and the meek — 
Who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong 
And dare not speak!

For what it’s worth, history is watching and taking names. And providing a spur to action.

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How Homer Would Judge ICE

Odysseus metes out justice to the suitors

Tuesday

Of the many ICE horror stories emerging out of Minneapolis, there’s one that caught my particular attention because the agents violated a  sacred law that dates back to Homer’s time and earlier. Apparently four agents dined at a family-owned Mexican restaurant and then, after the restaurant closed, followed the staff home and arrested three of them.

To break bread in someone’s establishment and then turn around and abuse that establishment chills the blood. 

It is violation of a host’s hospitality, of course, that sets off the Trojan War: Paris runs off Menelaus’s wife Helen after the Spartan king has welcomed him into his home. It takes a crime of this magnitude to bring the Greek city states together to launch their assault.

Then there is the incident of Odysseus with the Kyklopês Polyphemus, although in this case it is the host who violates the laws of hospitality. Odysseus brings a goatskin full of sweet wine hoping to meet the cave dweller. What he encounters instead is a host who rejects the laws set down by Zeus, eating rather than entertaining his guests. Odysseus reports on their interchange:

“We would entreat you, great Sir, have a care
for the gods’ courtesy; Zeus will avenge
the unoffending guest.”

He answered this
from his brute chest, unmoved:

‘You are a ninny,
or else you come from the other end of nowhere,
telling me, mind the gods! We Kyklopês
care not a whistle for your thundering Zeus
or all the gods in bliss; we have more force by far.

The difference between the Kyklopês and the Greeks is the difference between barbarism and civilization. Odysseus describes them as “giants, louts, without a law to bless them,” which pretty much sums up ICE and Border Patrol agents.

Of course, the epic also features the ultimate abuse of a host’s hospitality, which Odysseus sums up when he returns to wreak vengeance. While I don’t wish for Trump’s federal agents to suffer the fate of Penelope’s suitors, I do wish them to be held accountable. Here’s Odysseus after he throws off his disguise and confronts them, bow and arrows in hand: 

You yellow dogs, you thought I’d never make it
home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder,
twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared
bid for my wife while I was still alive.
Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven,
contempt for what men say of you hereafter.
Your last hour has come. You die in blood.

As a democracy, our own “gods who rule wide heaven” are the Constitution and the rule of law, which ICE and Border Patrol are busily trashing. Contempt for these and “for what men say of you hereafter” pretty much sums up Trump and everyone following his example.

May there one day be a cleansing.

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Standing Up to Trump’s Nazgul

The Nazgul or Black Riders in Lord of the Rings

Monday

A literary quotation from Lord of the Rings has been making the rounds recently on social media. You can see why:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

I find it significant that Tolkien may have written the passage either immediately before or during World War II, with Hitler on the rise and England threatened. Although Tolkien always insisted that he was not writing allegory, it’s also true that history influences the shape that fictions take. It’s reasonable to think that Hitler is behind the creation of Sauron, Stalin as influencing Saruman, and their uneasy alliance as the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. Sauron’s storm troopers, after all, are the Nazgul.

For our own part, as we note resemblances between America today and 1930’s Germany, it makes sense that we would revisit Frodo and Gandalf’s conversation. The passage seems even more relevant when one reads what comes immediately before and after. Frodo’s remark occurs in response to Gandalf’s news update:

“But last night I told you of Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord. The rumors that you have heard are true: he has indeed arisen again and left his hold in Mirkwood and returned to his ancient fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor. That name even you hobbits have heard of, like a shadow on the borders of old stories. Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.”

While Trump hasn’t taken another shape, he has indeed returned following a defeat and a respite.

Gandalf then points out the stakes. Although Sauron’s plans are “far from ripe,” they are ripening by the day. He will be able to consolidate his power if he regains the ring of power, at which point he will be able to “beat down all resistance, break the last defenses, and cover all the lands in a second darkness.”

We can think of Trump in these terms as well. At the moment, he is experimenting to see how much he can get away with, whether it involves unleashing masked thugs on American cities, seizing voting records in Fulton County, defying court orders, or the like. When Gandalf recounts how Sauron has gained control of lesser rings, ensnaring the once “proud and great” men who possessed them, we can think of the institutions that Trump has coopted that were supposed to function as guardrails of democracy. These include the GOP, the Supreme Court, the corporate media (especially CBS and The Washington Post), the Department of Justice, an independent FBI, and others. “Long ago,” Gandalf says, “they became Ringwraiths, shadows under his great Shadow, his most terrible servants.”

And a little later, “These nine he has gathered to himself.”

It is fitting that it comes down to unassuming hobbits—or in our case, everyday citizens in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and now Minneapolis—to defeat Sauron. Although the outcome of our battle is far from over, some political pundits have already started talking like Sam Gamgee as they imagine history recording the people of Minnesota standing up to Trump’s Nazgul. Here’s Sam as he and Frodo sit at the foot of an erupting Mount Doom after the ring has been destroyed:

“What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven’t we?” he said. “I wish I could hear it told! Do you think they’ll say: Now comes the story of Nine-fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom? And then everyone will hush, like we did, when in Rivendell they told us the tale of Beren One-hand and the Great Jewel. I wish I could hear it! And I wonder how it will go on after our part.”

Trump has not yet consolidated all the power available to him. The next No Kings demonstrations are on March 28.

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Micah and Dickinson on Kindness

Emily Dickinson

Sunday

Today in church we will hear one of the most beloved passages from the Old Testament prophets. Many know the final lines of Micah 6:1-8, about justice, kindness, and humility, but what leads up to it is equally important because God (through Micah) is informing the people of what they don’t have to do. Although God “brought you up from the land of Egypt, and redeemed you from the house of slavery,” She isn’t asking a lot in return:

“With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?

Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,
with calves a year old?

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?

Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

This year those final lines—“do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God”– have provided our church with the theme for our Adult Forum, held every Sunday morning between the two services. We have heard or will hear faculty members from the Sewanee seminary talk about the commitment to justice as it appears in the Torah, the New Testament, Paul’s letters, and the Anglican/Episcopalian tradition. Also on the program are advocates for immigrants recounting stories, former members of law enforcement discussing violence, and our rector walking us through the Jewish tradition of welcoming “the stranger in our midst.” Speakers have shared their experiences working with urban homelessness and Appalachian poverty, and national experts have talked about René Girard’s theories of scapegoating and mimetic desire; Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s attempts to get the church to stand up to Hitler; and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Clarion Call for Justice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Although I say it as the chief organizer, it is an extraordinary program, especially for a church as small as ours.

The word from Micah’s passage that particular resonates with me is “kindness,” which puts me in mind of a Henry James declaration:

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

Kindness also gets mentioned twice in Wordsworth’s masterpiece Tintern Abbey, the first when it is present, the second time when it is absent. The “best portion of a good man’s life,” he writes, are “his little, nameless, unremembered, acts/ Of kindness and of love.” Later he assures us that the “quietness and beauty” of Nature can sustain us when we encounter “greetings where no kindness is.” This coldness he puts in the same category as “evil tongues,” “rash judgments, “sneers of selfish men,” and “all the dreary intercourse of daily life.”

In this spirit, then, I share a simple but powerful poem by Emily Dickinson about kindness: 

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

That, Micah assures us, is all that God’s asks of us.

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