But I Wore the Juice!

On 19 April 1995, a man named McArthur Wheeler robbed two banks at gunpoint, making no attempt whatsoever to conceal his face from the security feed; and when the police came to his door, scant hours later, he said incredulously, “But I wore the juice!” As it transpires, Mr. Wheeler had discovered that lemon juice renders ink invisible—and, working from this premise, had attained the conclusion that a man doused in lemon juice must therefore be invisible to cameras. A Cornell professor, David Dunning, was so struck by Wheeler’s confidence in his own magnificently imbecilic stratagem that he and his assistant Justin Kruger went on to conduct a major psychological study of the interplay between knowledge and self-assuredness, ultimately concluding that the less one knows about a given subject, the likelier one is to think that one knows all about it.

 

Theology, experience, and common sense all attest that the same inverse proportion holds true in the moral sphere. Not only does sin darken the intellect and deaden the conscience, but the Thomistic principle of connexio virtutum (ST I-II q. 66 a. 2) means that a deficit in any one virtue diminishes our capacity for all the others as well—and, of course, the more we sin, the less receptive we become to transformative grace, hence the likelier to sin again. “To the one who has, more will be given; from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Matt. 25:29).

 

This accelerating descent from cesspool to whirlpool would be a deadly peril even if human nature were left to its own devices; but in the supernatural warzone of daily life, the danger is exponentiated by invisible leviathans seeking to hasten our downward spiral to oblivion. We ought to be able to recognize these spirits as deceivers; unfortunately, “discernment of spirits” (1 Cor. 12:10) is a gift of the very Spirit from Whose grace the man in the maelstrom has removed himself. In other words, the more we morally blind ourselves through sin, the easier it becomes for agents of darkness to blind us even further.

 

Only Socrates, the wisest man in Athens, knew that he knew nothing: the less we know, the more we’re apt to think we know. Glimpsing only the very topmost tip of the titanic submarine monolith of ice that is the global skein of religious, political, economic, and cultural machinations at work behind every well-lit snapshot we see in the news, we’re hardly in a position to guess which surfacing bubble is the result of vast, chthonic forces moving in the deep, and which is the result of a nearby guppy’s hiccup.

 

I recently wrote a post arguing that immortal deceivers, if they exist, might very well act irrationally—either because they want throw us off their scent, or because existing in Hell has literally driven them insane. (Think of the Devil encountered by Ivan Karamazov, who swears his only desire is to be a 300-pound peasant woman and light a Christian prayer candle in simple faith!) For this reason, I believe the distinction we naturally tend to draw between “a crazy conspiracy theory” and “a theory” is less useful than we think.

 

To recapitulate: you can’t get smarter if you’re too dumb to know you’re dumb, and a bad person left to himself will do bad things and thus get worse. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that moral badness retards the intelligence and opens one’s soul to demonic influence—which in turn leads to accelerating worsening, thus opening one’s soul all the more, and so on, in a downward spiral that only leads to one place. With our flawed finite intelligence and flawed concupiscent consciences, we aren’t able to see the “big picture” and comprehend how every minuscule happenstance of ordinary life slots together to fabricate the giant stage of worldly affairs; but one thing we do know is that it’s bound to be stranger than we can possibly imagine. No fictional character would rob a bank while covered in lemon juice.

 

 

Now, with all that being said, I would like to direct your attention to the following: He-Man and the MOTU Proprio.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Drinking, Part 2 (or, Escaping the Silver Chair)

I am a sinner. I’m also a Catholic, and one of my duties (or more specifically, one of the seven spiritual works of mercy) is to admonish my fellow sinners, to warn them away from their own sins. Now, Our Lord sternly cautions us against denouncing a sin of which we ourselves are guilty: “You hypocrite, first remove the beam from your own eye; then you will see more clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5)—but my understanding of this remark is that, in pointing out the sins of others, we must never become self-righteous. We mustn’t denounce the person committing the sin (as distinct from the sin itself), as though we were in a position of guiltlessness. But Jesus isn’t saying that, if you are (for instance) a heroin addict, it would be wrong of you to encourage other addicts to quit.

Let’s follow that example. If one addict encourages another addict to quit, what is the second addict quite likely to say? It’s a rhetorical question we’ve probably all asked: “Who are you to tell me that?”

Well—the question doesn’t really make any sense. Who am I? I’m a rational human being. But you must know that already, or you wouldn’t be trying to reason with me. Yes, I’m a sinner like you, but how does that disallow me from warning you against sin? If a heroin addict says that heroin is bad for you, does it cease to be bad? If a murderer tells you that murder is evil, does it become good? Reductio ad absurdum.

But the point goes even deeper than that, because not only can any rational person give moral counsel, but a practitioner of a particular sin can often give particular counsel about that sin. In some ways, even if he’s not (for example) a cop or a doctor, a heroin addict is uniquely qualified to explain just how bad for you heroin can be. The murderer, in some ways, is in a uniquely knowledgeable position to explain the evil of murder. And yes, of course we already know that murder is evil; but the habit of virtue is, precisely, the practice of constantly reminding ourselves of what we already know. That’s why we need to say the Our Father not once a lifetime but once a day (at the absolute least). That’s why we need to go to Mass not every time someone dies or gets married, but every single week. That’s why, in C.S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair, Puddleglum and the children repeat Aslan’s instructions every night before they go to sleep.

And speaking of The Silver Chair—the titular furniture is quite simply the most brilliant metaphor for addiction I’ve ever seen in a story. In case you don’t remember or (gasp!) haven’t read it, let me give a very brief summary. Jill and Eustace, a girl and boy from our world, are summoned to Narnia and charged by Aslan to rescue Prince Rilian, who is under a witch’s spell. Aided by Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle (a sort of demi-frog), they find the witch’s lair and try to rescue the prince, but he turns out to be a horrendous fop who kowtows to the witch’s every command—except at night. At night, his true self is able to emerge from the quicksand of her sorcery and call out for help; but he can’t escape because his false self, the person that the witch has turned him into, willingly locks himself into a silver chair every evening. When the true Rilian awakens, he thrashes and fights to break free until finally, exhausted, he slumps back down into the witch’s power, and in the morning she releases him from the chair once again. And every night, the duration of true Rilian’s resurfacing grows shorter.

That is exactly, exactly, the experience of an addiction. Countless stories try to encapsulate this theme—Jekyll and Hyde, the Incredible Hulk, the legend of the werewolf—but none of them (to my mind) capture it as well as Lewis. The image of a man’s true soul writhing and shrieking in a trap that he voluntarily put himself in!—while his false self slowly takes possession of more and more hours of his day—it is hauntingly accurate. And Rilian cannot get himself out of the chair. He needs the children. He needs Aslan.

I’m an alcoholic. (Hi, Jamey!) It has taken me forty-four years to acknowledge that fact. I brought great pain to my wife and my children. But now, praise God, I am out of my silver chair. Of course, many alcoholics occasionally swear never to drink again; I don’t entertain the fantasy that it will be easy to quit. But I have finally taken the first step, and I was made able to do so because Aslan sent me two beautiful children and a startlingly wise and intelligent wife.

(Wait. In this scenario, Ellen equates to the Marsh-wiggle? Not an ideal analogy. Sorry, babe. I love you.)

But that’s off-topic. Forgive me. The point is, the witch is not truly a witch, in the sense of a mortal woman fiddling about with hexes. She—it—is a devouring serpent in human form, and we know whom she represents. Her magic, the spell that she casts over men, can be almost anything: for me, alcohol; for another man, gambling; for another, social media. And obviously, not all these things are bad in and of themselves—the name of the wicked enchantment is, simply, immoderation.

Now here’s the key part. To break an addiction, it takes more than mere non-action. It takes positive activity of a counter-balancing kind. Every vice is the perversion of a particular virtue; to thwart the vice, we need to practice the virtue. Chastity does not mean “no sex before marriage”—that is simply one of the fruits of the active pursuit of the virtue of chastity. (Remember Lewis’ description of the Green Lady lying down to sleep in Perelandra: “Sleep was not something that happened to her but an action she performed.”) If I truly want to quit drinking, it’s not enough for me to sit down and say, “I’m not going to have a drink.” I need to get up and go do something else. Go for a jog, say my rosary, read a book, write a book, play with my kids, go swimming. Anything but alcohol.

And as for the question of “Who are you to tell me?”—well, I’m an alcoholic. This is why, in AA, we have sponsors. I can tell you that you need to quit drinking, because I need to quit drinking too. Let’s tell each other, and keep telling each other every day. In the words of St. Francis of Assisi, “Let us begin again, brothers, for up to now we have done little or nothing.”

Praise God! And let us begin again.

 

Kermit, Mulan, Pancakes, Flying Saucers, Perelandra, Goethe, Simulations. . . dogs and cats. . . living together. . .

About twenty years ago, at a family gathering, my cousin Jesse and I discovered that the Chinese-made Kermit the Frog doll recently given to one of our younger cousins had two left hands. We amused ourselves by spinning a tale in which “Commie Kermie” was the first probing tentacle of a plot to weaken America by disordering our children’s comprehension of reality. Sheer silliness, of course.

 

In 2020's live-action Mulan remake, Disney officially praised the government of Xinjiang Province, home to 60,000 Uighur women forcibly sterilized by that same government—home to well over a million detainees in “political re-education” camps where Muslims and other religious minorities are forcibly indoctrinated with government ideology—home to Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, placed in control of Xinjiang in 2016 after his highly successful tenure in the Tibet Autonomous Region, where the nightmarish practice of political protest via self-immolation went from a single incident in 2009-2010 to eighty-six incidents in 2011, the year Chen assumed power there. Such is the government which receives two sinister thumbs up from Walt Disney & Co.

In ages when the rational principle is, if not ascendant, at least extant, a useful distinction can be drawn between a crazy conspiracy theory and, simply, a theory. I propose to take it as axiomatic that ours is not such an age, and please note the reason for this: because that very axiom could itself be labeled a crazy conspiracy theory, meaning any defense of it would automatically beg the question. There is certainly a mordant irony there, but I don’t say it as a joke; I say it to illustrate the immediacy with which logic is flipped against itself when confronting, not the non-, but the anti-rational. It’s like a baseball game where the umpire is openly batting for the other team.

 

In his book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Russian priest Fr. Seraphim Rose examines a number of spiritual deceptions that have planted deep roots in modern culture. One such phenomenon is the ever-prevalent, ever-persistent narrative of the Close Encounter—a definitive go-to topic for those who yearn to be dismissed as psychotics or charlatans—but Fr. Rose revivifies this subject with the fascinating theory that the putative extraterrestrials encountered by otherwise ordinary folk are in fact nothing other than demons, adapting to the “scientific” superstitions of our age. (Consider, for instance, the ostensible materialist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s oddly strident insistence that we’re all living in a simulation, or the late Carl Sagan’s desperate search for alien life. Any potential transcendence will do, as long as it can still scoff at Christianity.) Fr. Rose analyzes multiple accounts of ETs and UFOs, isolating a key commonality: the bizarre and nonsensical behavior of the “aliens.” In 1961, for example, a Wisconsin farmer reported being approached by small, floating humanoid entities who handed him four pancakes.

Fr. Rose suggests three reasons for this type of behavior. 1: Even the most credible witness will inevitably meet skepticism when reporting an event that seems whimsical and absurd. If the “aliens” wish to sow harmful uncertainty, then it makes perfect sense to be nonsensical. 2: Sudden exposure to extreme irrationality or strangeness can temporarily disorder the victim’s sense of reality, thus rendering a subject more susceptible to various forms of hypnotic suggestion. This kind of behavior could therefore be a precursor to attempted mental conditioning, brainwashing, or even possession. And 3: Such entities, supposing they exist, might not be feigning the lunacy they exhibit. Perhaps whatever mode of existence they now endure has quite simply shattered whatever mode of intellect they once enjoyed. Remember the Un-man from C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra. And if that seems implausible, consider that German euthanasia clinics are now denying “service” to suicidal would-be Werthers who test positive for COVID-19 ("Come back when you are healthy and we kill you then, guten tag!”): is that sane?

 

Now let’s revisit Commie Kermie in the light of this third conjecture from Fr. Rose. Is it so far-fetched that a global heathen empire might have demonic intelligences sitting in key positions? Is it far-fetched that such creatures might hatch plans which appear neither good nor evil but simply nuts, at right angles to all coherent goal-seeking comportment? I really don't think so. In short, just because a theory is insane, that doesn't mean it's inaccurate.

From all this, I take away two things. Firstly, we are in danger from even more directions than we expect: when your enemy is genuinely mad, there’s no way to predict his movements logically. We have to lose the tendency to scoff at potential attacks that might seem utterly ludicrous. Vigilance is key. But, secondly, we are also protected by the fact that when the enemy’s plan is truly mad, then—well—it’s probably not going to work. Consider once again the German euthanasia clinics: two insanities, colliding, produce an actual good! We can’t merely sit back and wait for evil to destroy itself, because it would unfortunately devour many good things along the way; but it’s good to be reminded that, one way or another, it will be destroyed in the end.

The New Jerusalem

 When Ivan Karamazov says, "If there is no immortality, then everything is lawful," he means it to be shocking. The point is that without eternal punishment, there's really nothing to stop us from murdering people if we feel like it. But he forgets to listen to what he himself is saying, because the whole proposition depends on the word "if." His unspoken premise, of course, is that there is indeed no immortality--but, luckily, he only thinks that because he's being a stupid-face.

 

There's really no point in doing anything if it's not eternal. But here's the beautiful thing: if anything truly is eternal, then that means everything is eternal. Either nothing matters, or absolutely everything does. I've talked before about the care and craft that God, the Master Builder, puts into every molecule of this world. We in turn put care and craft into every detail of our daily lives, even if we often do it automatically, by sheer force of habit. (Force of habit's not always bad, after all.) When we throw on our clothes and go to work in the morning, we're building something.

The great medieval cathedral builders used to place a tiny gift at the top of the tallest steeple when construction was finished, a little present just for God. (That's also why we put on our best clothes for church: wrapping ourselves as presents for Jesus.) In Tomie de Paola's Legend of the Poinsettia, the heroine learns that every gift is beautiful because it is given, and the weeds she offers to Baby Jesus turn into magnificent flowers. Every weed, every pebble, that we offer to God is becoming a piece of a cathdral, a flowering city that we're building together. That may sound a bit trite, but that's because it's an image of truth, a furtive memory we all have in the back of our minds. The Plans of the Architect, which we glimpsed before we were born.

 

When we look back at our lives from the summit, we'll see we've been dragging ziggurats up massive slopes. Every hardship, a buckle in the harness. We spend our lives maneuvering titanic chunks of masonry--but unlike Sisyphus, our toil is not in vain. When we throw on our clothes and go to work in the morning, we're chiseling filigree into some nook of the Great Cathedral. Wasted work? There's no such thing. God loves it. And in the New Jerusalem, our friends will have an eternity to stumble across the little details that we ourselves have forgotten about and say, "Oh hey, that's cool." Our work, our work, our daily bread: we're building the New Jerusalem.

Chickens and Chain Mail

For many fans of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, the “making of” featurettes are almost as fun as the films themselves. In the extended documentary of The Two Towers, we get to see a great deal about how New Line Cinema created the Fighting Uruk-Hai, the goblin horde that assails our heroes at Helm’s Deep. One of the things that strikes many people as nearly insane is the level of detail that went into their clothing and, in particular, their armor. For every single one of the hundreds of extras who worked on these movies, entire shirts of real, functioning chain mail were hand-forged: shirts that could not even be seen in the films because they were usually covered with cloaks!

Why put in so much “needless” work? Well, bear with me. My beautiful bride has a long-time love affair with ducks and chickens which I have always found endearing, though slightly baffling, and a few months ago, we finally decided to start keeping a few chickens of our own. In the process of learning about how to tend them, we have watched various documentaries, including one called The Natural History of the Chicken.

This film reveals profound depths in the physical and (yes, I know how it sounds) psychological underpinnings of the chicken. I know, love, and respect these creatures far better now, despite the fact that I still feel as though God had an uproarious time inventing them. It’s just a silly little bird. Why put so much care and craft into every feather? No one’s going to notice. Most of the feathers can’t even be seen!

Well, now you see where I’m going with this. You may not see every ring of the Orcish armor, nor every feather of the chicken’s plume. But we can feel the love, the absolute love, that went into every molecule of these things. Why put in so much needless work? Because it’s needless! Because love gives itself in superabundance. Because chain mail is cool and chickens are fun and God is so in love with us it’s insane!

Armor and Waycloak

One of the many, many bits of wisdom the Church has accumulated through the centuries is the use of small bodily gestures by the faithful. People laugh, I think, because we do these things--genuflecting, dipping our fingers in the holy water, and so forth--without thinking about them, but to do them without thought is exactly the point. We don't think about breathing either, unless something's off-kilter. When we're upset or scared, then we have to focus: breathe in--breathe out. It's no accident that Ki, the word that Westerners use to mean life-force or energy, really means breath: just as it's no accident that pneuma, wind, also means the Holy Spirit.

My dad likes to tell a story about a lady he knew when he was a boy, who taught him to let a few droplets of water fall from his fingers when he blessed himself at the holy water font in the vestibule. Why? As a little offering for the thirsty souls in Purgatory. The punchline of the story is that he met her again, many years later as an adult, and told her he had always remembered her teaching him that--and it turned out she herself had forgotten it in the interim! He was given the gift of being able to teach it back to her.

 

My wife taught me something when we were dating: when you make the Sign of the Cross, don't just flick your fingers around. What you are doing is donning the Armor of Righteousness and the Waycloak of the Pilgrim Church, so cover your torso with bold movements. Yes, it ought to be reflexive (unless something is off-kilter!), but reflexive doesn't mean unintelligent. Drawing your sword in the face of a dragon is reflexive.

 

Eternity is always happening now, in the small bodily moments. That's the whole point of us, of souls in dust--it's why we're neither beasts nor angels. It only makes sense to train your body to worship the Lord of Hosts, just as we do with our minds and hearts and souls. So when you make the Sign of the Cross, brothers and sisters--raise it high.

He-Man and the MOTU Proprio

Just hear me out. This article's premise may sound like something that began as a ludicrous joke and then snowballed--and that's because it is--but when I followed the thread long enough, it brought me to a far deeper level of the labyrinth. So, first, let me explain the joke.

Back in the 80's, there was a cartoon called He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I haven't watched it since I was a kid, so I've managed to remember it being awesome. Now, a few weeks ago, Netflix created a reboot called simply, Masters of the Universe (or MOTU), in which--spoilers--the putatively titular character, He-Man, is immediately killed and replaced by Teela, the infinitely perfect female character who is better than all of the males at absolutely everything. It's Woke. Fans aren't happy.

You're welcome.

Also a few weeks ago, Pope Francis issued a type of proclamation known as a Motu proprio, "On his own initiative," which means in effect that it's the answer no one wanted to the question no one asked. In this particular document, entitled Traditionis Custodes (Custodians of Tradition), he upholds Catholic tradition by decreeing that there shall be no Traditional Latin Mass in any parish where it's not already celebrated; and that, furthermore, in any parish where it is celebrated, it shall continue to exist only at the discretion of the bishops, many of whom hate the Traditional Latin Mass. It's exactly as subtle, and exactly as honorable, as shooing emancipated slaves away from the democratic process by enacting a law that you can only vote if your grandfather voted.

Now, how does the confluence of Roman legalese with English acronym represent anything more than a slightly amusing pun? Because it's just one visible swirl of the Butterfly Effect: a stray gust from the hurricane raging through dimensions we can't perceive. In the Middle Ages, folklore held that God allowed demons to tempt us, but compelled them to give one warning sign, however clandestine, of their true nature--hence the phrase "showing the cloven hoof." I mean, I'm not suggesting the Supreme Pontiff is working directly with Netflix (although who knows? Gone are the days when a useful distinction could be drawn between a crazy conspiracy theory and, simply, a theory), merely that pop culture and theological doctrine represent two sides of a single pincer. Attacking tradition under tradition's guise and using He-Man to push toxic femininity: it's the same insidious hoofprint.

As finite creatures, we can't see "the big picture." Yes, if Providence exists at all, true randomness is out of court--either everything connects or nothing does--but for daily functioning on our own assigned scale of being, we rightly distinguish between essentials and accidents. To fash ourselves rummaging for synchronicity in the leaves of tea or the guts of birds, "Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry" (The Dry Salvages), is foolish and, also, forbidden. But every now and then, when you're going about some more or less innocuous business of your own, a piece of shrapnel from the larger cosmos hits you on the head. I dunno, maybe it's just a coincidence. Except--it's not.