On Mary (or, Six Words, Seven Words)

I'm very fond of the old carol "Away In A Manger." It's simple and sweet, with a sort of childlike wisdom and piety about it, and the melody is nicely hummable. But I have questions about one of the lines: "The little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes." That can't be right. He was like us in all things but sin; obviously He cried and pooped and spat up like the rest of us. In fact, as my old pastor Fr. LaValley once observed, Our Lord's dual nature is perfectly summed up in six words: "And Jesus wept" (John 11:35), showing his humanity; and "Lazarus, come out!" (John 11:43), showing His Divinity. (It does puzzle me that we never see Him laugh, but that's a whole separate blog post.) Anyway, the little Lord Jesus definitely made crying.

There's a bit in The Everlasting Man where G.K. talks about how you never see statues of Christ in His wrath, and how it's probably just as well because that would be terrifying, but it's extremely important to keep it in mind all the same. Even as we sit here at our computers, you and I, the Day of Judgment is getting closer, and we'll both of us be hearing either "Well done, thou good and faithful servant," or else "I never knew you, ye accursed." In a similar way, you never see images of the Blessed Virgin holding a sobbing Christ-child, and it's just as well, because we turn to our Mother for comfort and peace. But it's also good to remember that her task and burden was not to lug around a golden facsimile of the human form, impervious to pain and passion, but to feed and bathe and swaddle an infant born to poverty. Because she never sinned, she can't have given in to anxiety or annoyance, but there's no doubt that they beleaguered her as much as they do every loving parent.

I mentioned once that having a cat had given me daily occasion to ponder how asinine we must seem to the Host of Heaven, always thinking we're on the wrong side of the door. Likewise, having a child has given me (if it's not too audacious to say it) a fresh emotional insight into how Our Father must feel about us. She hasn't done anything whatsoever, apart from simply being my daughter, to make me love her; but as God gives me strength, I would eye-gouge a grizzly bear for her, let follow what might. Her crying rends my heart, and the tiniest flicker of her smile warms the pit of my stomach. Small wonder that Love Himself was willing to suffer and die for her.

Sonya doesn't talk yet. (She's been outside the womb seven weeks.) But when she's hungry or frightened or lonely, Ellie or I will lift her up and hold her close and rock her back and forth, and then she hears the seven words that matter most: "I'm here. You're safe. I love you." When little Lord Jesus was crying in the manger, Mary said those words—not in Aramaic or in Latin, but with her arms and with her warmth; and his human nature heard and was comforted, even as His Divine Nature held her back, and murmured those same seven words to her.

On Ignorance (or, My Hands Tie My Shoes)

Ever see Boondock Saints? These two Irish Catholic brothers decide to start shooting all the criminals in Boston, and wacky hijinks ensue. It's a fun movie, but I've always been confused by the beginning. As the film opens, we're in the middle of Mass and the priest is saying the Our Father. I'm pretty sure Catholics do that. It's odd that he's the only one speaking, though. Not even one single person in the congregation is joining in? And then he blows right past "deliver us from evil" and goes straight on into "For Thine is the Kingdom and the Power &c." without any liturgical embolism like, you know, "Deliver us, O Lord, from every evil, grant us peace in our day, in Your mercy keep us safe from all distress," and so forth. I guess he's really in a rush to get to Communion. But wait, now another guy's getting up, a monsignor (that's a thing, right?) and he's giving—the homily?! Where the hell are we? What part of the Mass is this?

In my experience, most people who attack the Faith are attacking something else entirely, which they've mistaken for the Faith, and which I would typically join them in attacking if they would listen to me for a moment or two. We had a friend called Olivia back in the day who once asked me how I could believe that the Pope is never wrong about anything. And when I said, "Liv, honey, that's not what Catholics believe," she objected that her info came from her college philosophy professor. Now, I'm sure that nigh on every teacher who's ever drawn breath has been stuck teaching a subject outside his or her field from time to time. But for mercy's sake, this was in the year 2000. We had the Internet.

Problem is, you can't use the internet, or any other resource, unless you know that you don't know. If I'm writing about (say) the Crimean War, then I'm conscious of my ignorance and I can invest 0.72 seconds to learn that it ended in 1856. But if I'm writing about World War II, then obviously there's no need for me to fact-check because everybody knows that World War II ended in 1944.

We think we know things. We think we know things that we don't, and we base beliefs and opinions on faulty premises, and we end up with dangerous conclusions. In the ancient days, the Oracle revealed that the wisest man in Athens was Socrates: the man who knew he didn't know. 'Course, it's a bit different now that Truth is one of us; there's a few things I'm willing to say I know. And I can't teach a child how to navigate the Earth while constantly qualifying every lesson with, "But remember, this might be totally wrong." Sometimes you just have to take a swing and hope you're not too far off the mark.

I literally, and I'm using a gravely injured adverb correctly here, literally don't know how to tie my shoes. I do it every day of my life, and have done since I was like what, five? Six? But that knowledge is not contained in my intellect or accessible memory. My hands know. When it comes time for me to teach Maggie Rose to tie a pair of shoes, I will first have to sit down and relearn the skill by watching myself do it. I find that absolutely fascinating. Our Sensei used to hide advanced techniques inside of beginners' rote movements, and when it came time for them to learn the more complicated maneuvers, he'd say, "You already know this; you just don't know you know." Socrates in the Meno elicits a complex mathematical proof from an illiterate slave boy with a series of basic questions. Sometimes we know more than we think.

Wait, weren't you just saying we know less than we think? Put down the bourbon, Toner. Ha, joke's on you, I'm not drinking bourbon. It's Jamesons left over from St. Patty's. But anyway, note the denominator. It's when we're prideful—oh, that silly 2,000-year-old bastion of philosophers, I can breezily find holes in their logic that no one's ever noticed before—that we tend to overestimate ourselves. It's when we're being humble—how could I, a lowly blue belt, already have Dim-Mak strikes hardwired into my muscle memory just from practicing First Kata?—that we discover greater wisdom within us than we suspected. That's the really interesting thing about so much of Jesus' advice. It's always, of course, designed to make us holier (you take the lowest place at the banquet because humility is the root of all virtue); but it also tends to conceal surprisingly shrewd pragmatism as well. It's precisely when you choose to start at the bottom that you're likeliest to be told, "Friend, go up higher."

My niece Lily being adorable as usual.

On Beauty (or, I Could Just Eat You Up)

What do you do with a sunset? You can gaze and forget yourself, sublimated, called forth from your isolated being into the furnace of Deity—watch it gutter like a swamp fire, fade, and drop you back to earth. You can paint it, answer its life-giving blaze with your own small creative powers, slap a frame on it, hang it somewhere, leave it for the spiders. You can take a picture of it, fumble for a grip on its majesty, stuff the eye of God into your phone and hope to reawaken the awe with the tap of a screen. What do you do with it?

In our wiser moments, we remember that Beauty isn't there for us to use it like a toaster oven. It was there before us and it would be there if we were not; it would be closer to the truth to say that we are there to serve Beauty's purposes than the reverse, but that's not quite true either because there's nothing for which Beauty needs us. We are simply permitted to behold it (not to hold it), and the only proper answer is gratitude. And despite my lemme get your attention opening paragraph, gazing and painting and taking pictures are perfectly honorable responses to the sunset, as long as the intent is to honor it rather than to possess it. Beauty comes to us in its own season, and not at our whistle; if we receive it with joy and trust and patience, it'll stay and glimmer quietly below our waking minds.

So all that being said, what emerges as the basic error behind the sin of lust? Obviously, the desire to possess the other, but not the actual person: only the beauty of the person, as if that could be detached and put in our pocket. That's why, as others have pointed out, a man will go to a strip club although he wouldn't go to a restaurant where they slowly unwrapped a burger, waved it around, and then put it away again. Tacitly, he believes that a woman's beauty is a thing he can pull off of her like Peter Pan's shadow and consume without any need of her. You can make the same philosophical mistake with a sunset, but it's less pernicious because you can't get your hands on the sun. A man who sleeps with a woman in the desire to ingest her beauty and discard the person like a peanut shell, actually does the opposite: her beauty can't be owned and his desire therefore won't be satiated, but her personhood can be progressively devoured until she's an object in her own eyes as well as his.

But here's the insane part. You can't hold a sunset, you can't consume a woman's soul. But the source of all beauty, Beauty Himself, has made Himself physically consumable. A tiny wafer, the sort of thing you might gobble by the dozen while you watched the Super Bowl—a commodity. Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, all fit easily in your wallet like a silver dollar. Bizarrely glorious indignity. Now life's question: what do we do with it? What do we do with Him?

MAMA CHIMES IN: The Infant on the Cross

by Ellen RM Toner

Back in 2010, I started teaching British Lit to 10th graders. Lots of good plays, novels and poems, but far and away the thing I was most nervous about and way over-prepared for was Hamlet. I mean, it’s Hamlet. For the rest of their lives, or at least for a good long stretch, everything these kids knew or thought about this play would grow out of how I showed it to them. I was their introduction to it, and I sure as hell better not screw it up.

Sonya is a snuggle-bug. She’ll be totally passed out cold, and as long as you stay in the same room, preferably right next to her, she’s good. She doesn’t really sleep at night unless one of us is holding her. As she’s not even 5 weeks old, we figure she’s entitled to such behavior. But what that means for us is lots of walking and rocking and singing in the wee hours. Circling through the downstairs rooms the other night, I was singing her one old folk song after another, and wondering if The Twa Sister Ballad, like so many other songs I love, was maybe a little dark and depressing for a newborn. And then it hit me. Oh my gosh. I get to teach her ALL THE SONGS. When she grows up and goes off on her own, hopefully she’ll spend some time with music-y people somewhere along the way, and she’ll be able to say, “Oh yeah, my mom used to sing me that song,” and it will have sunk into her subconscious and helped to form the way she sees the world, the way she comes to know beauty, silliness, joy, love, and yes, sorrow. For the great gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad / For all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad. There are few things out there, I’d argue, so very cathartic as a good sad song. Except of course a good tragedy (thanks, Shakespeare!).

Last Sunday we heard the reading of the Passion at Palm Sunday Mass, and it hit me again, as Sonya uncomprehendingly heard the words for the first time, that one day they will be as familiar to her as they are now to me. The rituals of Holy Week, the somber liturgies and aching meditations on the greatest tragedy (and comedy!) the world will ever know, will all be a part of the fabric of her life. And I wanted to wrap her up and run out of the church, because it’s one thing to talk about the vicarious catharsis of songs and poems, but the suffering of Christ on the cross is one that she will have to learn to share in, to accept, to embrace, to own, or she won’t be whole. And I have to be the one to show her that. Hamlet is so… trivial.

I’ll be honest. Even though I have 4 younger siblings and 20 nieces and nephews, I always kind of thought babies had it made. Eat, sleep, and the giants all around you cater to you, clothe you, change you, carry you… but wowza. Sonya has to work so hard. Everything she does is brand-new, and most of her daily required activities turn her entire person bright red in her straining efforts (yes, you know what I’m talking about). She had to have a little surgery on her mouth when she was only 5 days old, and now that her incisions have healed, we’re finally beginning to teach her to nurse, with lots of training wheels, because her poor mouth isn’t as strong as it should be. And I wish that there were some magic trick to make this and everything else all easy for her, because she gets so frustrated and angry and sad and doesn’t know why or what any of it means. But this is her first step to learning the Cross, to becoming whole, and all I can do is try to help show her the way forward. That’s life, kiddo. But, as I discovered after 7:23 on February 22nd, more truly and overwhelmingly than ever before, Good Friday is always followed by the victory of Easter Sunday. It’ll all be okay, sweet girl.

On Joy (or, My Cup Runneth Over)

When I was a kid, we had one of those big green garbage cans that you roll down to the end of your driveway on Thursday morning for the trash fairies. I don't know what they're actually called, because my dad—a meticulous grammarian, word-lover, and nationally respected scholar of military ethics—always just called it the green thing. This past Wednesday evening, as I was rolling my green thing down to the end of the driveway after going through the house turning off left-on lights, it hit me again: I'm a dad now.

In truth, of course, I've been a dad since a piece of me fell in love with a piece of Ellie and the Holy Spirit gave those pieces a Sonya-soul. But it feels a lot different to hold a child in your arms than to look at a lump in a belly. It feels different to look into eyes that have just recently beheld the Lord God saying, "Hey, kid—here's a universe. Go play." And yet, it's bizarre how fast we accustom to things. After untold millennia yearning for the skies and dreaming of flight, we finally invent the airplane; and a few decades later, we're slumped in the stratosphere reading the paper and sipping our tea, bored.

Sonya's a beautiful girl, and endlessly funny. But we've got Baptismal certificates and Social Security numbers to figure out, dental complications to deal with, jobs and laundry and shopping to do, and through it all we have to keep striving to grab the odd snippet of sleep. There's not much time to sit and luxuriate. And come to think of it, that is probably all to the good. (I've had occasion before to note that God is actually pretty smart.) I don't have room in me, yet, to encompass the fullness of this joy and this vulnerability. So He parcels it out to me at unexpected moments, quite often when I'm thinking about something other than myself. There's a reason we have Purgatory. The solar empyrean would scorch us blind if we didn't have time to adjust.

Tonight, though, my beautiful wife is dozing at my side and my beautiful daughter is dozing in the crook of my arm. My idiot cat is curled up on my legs, John Wick is on YouTube mowing down endless waves of superhumanly loyal incompetent henchmen, and my PBR is nice and cold. I do not deserve all this. Domine, non sum dignus. But I will try. I will try to be worthy of this love of which I have blundered my way into stewardship. I know, believe me I know, it'll hurt and be hard, but I'll try to keep trying, I'll try. And for tonight—for this tiny momentary glimpse of Eternity—I am a very happy man.

The Last Ship

“There’s trouble in Midgard again,” said the Watchman.  “They need a Hero.”

“Very well,” replied the Director.  “This is a job for Chase Hardrock.”

“But sir, Mr. Hardrock is out on leave.”

“Balls.  Send in Bob—from Accounting.”

“Er. . .  yes sir.”

And so, Bob from Accounting set out on his great Adventure.  The Galleons had sailed when he came to the harbor, and he barely caught the last ship for Midgard—a little sloop called the Joy and Hope.  “Thanks for waiting,” he puffed, as he came bustling up the gangplank.  “I almost forgot my calculator.”

The grizzled old captain gave him a strange look.  “You won’t be needing that, son.  Where’s your Sword of Power?”

“My—my what?”  Bob nervously adjusted his tie and clutched at his folders, half-suspecting another practical joke.

“Little man, do you understand what you’ll be facing on Midgard?”

“Well, er—not specifically, but it sounded pretty serious.  Some kind of auditing nightmare, no doubt–maybe another tax evasion scandal.”

“I’m afraid not, my friend.  You’ll be facing nothing less than the very Lords of Hell unleashed upon Earth:  demons of flame and dread, serpents whose gaping jaws will scrape the land and sky, slavering hounds asnarl with dire and glittering fangs of malevolence.  The ground itself will tremble beneath the tramping feet of the legions of the damned, and against them, for the sake of all mankind, you will stand alone upon the field of final battle.”

“Oh,” said Bob, rather faintly.  There was a long, long silence.  “Well. . . I guess I’ll just have to do the best I can.”

On Meeting Sonya (or, How Much More)

I didn't know it was possible to fall in love so deeply and so fast. It couldn't be, unless Love Himself had made me His lightning rod. Our long-awaited treasure, Sonya Magdalena Rose, finally saw daylight on February 22nd after a short but grueling night labor. To the grass and trees, that dawning was the same as any; but not for me.

I find myself addressing herself primarily in rhetorical questions—"Do you want to see Mama? Do you want to go see your Mama?"—and parallel phrases—"My beautiful girl. Oh, my sweet girl." I've observed that nearly all parents instinctively do this, but I'm thinking of one parent in particular. In the Psalms, our Father speaks almost entirely in rhetorical questions—"Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? or who can stand in His holy place?" (Psalm 24:3)—and parallel phrasing—"Powerful is Thine arm; strong is Thy hand, exalted is Thy right hand!" (Psalm 89:13). I take this to corroborate my suspicion that God is loving her through me. I know I love this girl more than my own capacity for love allows, and therefore I must have been infused, enfathered by the Father, made into a vessel of Himself whereby He graces her. The angel called Mary "full of grace" because she never sinned; but from the time of her Baptism up until her first real sin, Sonya too will be full of grace. Like Joachim and Anne, Ellie and I are the stewards of a holy soul, and only the Lord can love her as she should be loved. So He fills us with His love, to love her with.

But oh God, this infusing does not come without cost. To excavate my soul, to make room in my shallowness for the depth of His love, my Father has to dig and tunnel and blast. He has to break through the floor of my being and carve new caverns in the breathing, bleeding, weeping bedrock. Before her birthday, I thought I'd be crying when I first held her in my arms; but at that joyful moment, I only felt tired and pleased. It wasn't till later that day, when she started to cry the heart-rending wails of a hungry child, that I broke into sobs. And they were sobs of grief, because at that moment I realized what it meant to hear my daughter's pain. I will see her heart rent so many times in the years to come, and every time will rend my own. This deepening capacity for love must mean a widening vulnerability to sorrow.

And oh God, I accept and embrace it forever with all my strength. Cliches exist because certain things are simply universal. A hundred people have told me in the last nine months that, as difficult as pregnancy and parenthood may be, it will all be worth it when I hold my baby girl. It's utterly true. A trillion men have looked into a daughter's eyes and said they've never seen such beauty. It's utterly, utterly true. I've known this girl for a matter of days—hours—and I would suffer and die for her with praise-hymns in my heart.

As a wordsmith, Jesus was very fond of the phrase "how much more": "If you who are sinners know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in Heaven give good things to those who ask Him?" (Matthew 7:10). And if I, most decidedly a sinner, can love Sonya this much, then how much more does He love her? Another rhetorical question—but one that He answered on the Cross.