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Sunday
“Trump’s biggest reveal,” the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser recently wrote in an article entitled “The Sycophancy Must be Televised,” “is what he shows about those around him; he is a mirror, and not a flattering one, for other people’s souls.” Glasser was reporting on what she describes as “the longest, cringiest Trump Cabinet meeting yet,” in which Trump underlings competed with each other in a flattery contest.
At the same time that I was reading the article, I was looking over this Sunday’s Biblical readings, all three of which warn against exactly such behavior. More on those in a moment, along with a Joseph Fasano poem about what it takes to hold on to one’s soul
Glasser’s article provides examples of soulless sycophancy that are so spectacular they bring to mind the toadies that groveled before Stalin and Hitler:
[F]ew on Tuesday could top the Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who invited Trump to come see his own “big, beautiful face” mounted on a huge, Putin-style banner flying on the outside of her department’s headquarters. “You are really the transformational President of the American worker,” she told him. Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, offered some stiff competition, though, as she waxed poetic about Trump’s contribution to the history of the Republic. “I do believe we’re in a revolution,” she said. “1776 was the first one, 1863 or so with Abraham Lincoln was the second. This is the third, with Donald Trump leading the way. And we are saving America.”
The winner in the soul-betraying contest, Glasser writes, was Trump’s global envoy Steve Witkoff, who told Trump
that he already should go down in history as the greatest of all peacemakers. “There’s only one thing I wish for,” he said, “that the Nobel Committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate” ever for a Nobel Peace Prize. “Your success is game-changing out in the world today, and I hope everybody one day wakes up and realizes that,” he concluded, a finale that caused the entire Cabinet to break out in applause.
Of course Ukrainians and Gazans, not to mention many Israelis, see the situation differently.
In today’s Old Testament reading, one sees the Jewish scribe Sirach calling out narcissists like Trump:
The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord;
the heart has withdrawn from its Maker.
For the beginning of pride is sin,
and the one who clings to it pours out abominations.
St. Paul, meanwhile, enjoins his Jewish audience, “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” And finally there’s Jesus addressing his Pharisee host at a dinner party: “[A]ll who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted…. [W]hen you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
Jesus at various times in the Bible informs people of the hells that they create for themselves when they sell their souls—this is also the theme of Dante’s Inferno—but in his advice here he is also, like Sirach and Paul, showing us the way back. The kingdom of God awaits us in the here and now if we follow his guidance.
For his part, Fasano, a Mary Oliver-type poet whose lyrics I have discovered on his Bluesky timeline, provides his own guidance in “Instructions for Having a Soul.”
Fasano acknowledges that our soul can get dirty and that, if neglected, will turn on us. “Starve it,” he writes,
and the mind, the flesh is empty;
the world breaks down; symphonies go unwritten;
the rockets fall; the children die
in flames.
In our anguish over having lost touch with our souls, we become hard and cruel. We distract ourselves from our own suffering by feasting on the suffering of others. I think of Faustus’s interaction with the Old Man in Christopher Marlowe’s play, who shows Faustus the way back to his soul, only for Faustus to attack him for doing so. First, here’s the Old Man:
Ah, stay, good Faustus, stay thy desperate steps!
I see an angel hovers o’er thy head,
And, with a vial full of precious grace,
Offers to pour the same into thy soul:
Then call for mercy, and avoid despair.
After a moment of hesitation, Faustus then silences him, instructing Mephistophilis,
Torment, sweet friend, that base and crooked age,
That durst dissuade me from thy Lucifer,
With greatest torments that our hell affords.
To which the Devil’s henchman replies,
His faith is great; I cannot touch his soul;
But what I may afflict his body with
I will attempt…
I imagine Fasano as the Old Man:
Instructions for Having a Soul
By Joseph Fasano
Take it out in the rain sometimes.
It has vast, invisible wings that gather dirt
and need rinsing.
When it tries to kill you
that is because you’ve forgotten
to let it look into someone’s eyes
for longer than a minute.
It needs that the way a bee needs nectar
in the early morning dew.
Every so often, take it on a journey.
Let it read long, hard books
and let it stare into the depths of the sea.
Yes, you can give it chips and whiskey
but from time to time let it kneel
in a place that is holy
like the simple cathedral of the willows.
All it wants is to live, to keep becoming.
Nourish it, and it puts down roots, it opens.
But starve it, and the mind, the flesh is empty;
the world breaks down; symphonies go unwritten;
the rockets fall; the children die
in flames.
Listen. It is not too late to wake it.
Say the names of the wild, the forgotten things:
bluebird, red wolf, robin; violet, child, clover.
You cannot save the world but you can open
the window for the trapped wren in the cellar.
Read a book to a blind man, to your father.
Tell a child you do believe her anger.
Make your life the first life that you save.
Looking into another’s eyes. Reading a long, hard book. Wandering amongst willows. Showing a child you are listening to her and taking her seriously.
There are many ways to replenish a soul.
