Rod Dreher's Blog, page 154

‘He Waits’: A Pandemic Sermon Of Rare Power

I wish a happy Easter to all my readers from the Western churches. Today is Orthodox Palm Sunday, so we are a week behind you all this year. Our Easter (Pascha) will be next Sunday. That means that yesterday was, for the Orthodox, what we call Lazarus Saturday: the day we celebrate Christ’s raising his friend Lazarus from the tomb. Lazarus Saturday is the last day of Lent (though we continue to fast through Pascha), and this final, greatest miracle of Christ prefigures His passion, death, and resurrection. Here is the story of Lazarus from the Gospel of John, Chapter 11:

Now a man was ill, Lazarus from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who had anointed the Lord with perfumed oil and dried his feet with her hair; it was her brother Lazarus who was ill. So the sisters sent word to him, saying, “Master, the one you love is ill.”

When Jesus heard this he said, “This illness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was ill, he remained for two days in the place where he was. Then after this he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.” The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you, and you want to go back there?”

Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in a day? If one walks during the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if one walks at night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.”

He said this, and then told them, “Our friend Lazarus is asleep, but I am going to awaken him.”

So the disciples said to him, “Master, if he is asleep, he will be saved.”

But Jesus was talking about his death, while they thought that he meant ordinary sleep.

So then Jesus said to them clearly, “Lazarus has died. And I am glad for you that I was not there, that you may believe. Let us go to him.”

So Thomas, called Didymus,* said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go to die with him.”

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days.

Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, only about two miles away.

And many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them about their brother.

When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him; but Mary sat at home.

Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. [But] even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise.”

Martha said to him, “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.”

Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live,

and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

She said to him, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.”

When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary secretly, saying, “The teacher is here and is asking for you.”

As soon as she heard this, she rose quickly and went to him.

For Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still where Martha had met him.

So when the Jews who were with her in the house comforting her saw Mary get up quickly and go out, they followed her, presuming that she was going to the tomb to weep there.

When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her weeping, he became perturbed and deeply troubled, and said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Sir, come and see.”

And Jesus wept.

So the Jews said, “See how he loved him.”

But some of them said, “Could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man would not have died?”

So Jesus, perturbed again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay across it.

Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the dead man’s sister, said to him, “Lord, by now there will be a stench; he has been dead for four days.”

Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?”

So they took away the stone. And Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you for hearing me.

I know that you always hear me; but because of the crowd here I have said this, that they may believe that you sent me.”

And when he had said this, he cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”

The dead man came out, tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face was wrapped in a cloth. So Jesus said to them, “Untie him and let him go.”

Well, yesterday, in Christ the Savior Greek Orthodox Church, in Bluff City, Tennessee, a young priest, Father Stephen Mathewes, preached on this Scripture. Someone in the congregation — in their church jurisdiction, they are allowed to have the liturgy if only a small number of people come — filmed it. Sit down, you need to see this. It takes him four minutes to chant the Gospel passage, because he has to hesitate to compose himself emotionally. The sermon itself follows, at about the four minute mark, but you’ll want to first listen to Father Stephen reading the Gospel. The entire thing takes 14 minutes. It will be the most extraordinary 14 minutes you will spend today, most likely:

In the sermon, Father Stephen helps us to understand what the Lazarus story has to say to us in this time of waiting, and suffering, with the pandemic. To my Christian ears, it is a passionate, muscular, unsentimental reason for HOPE, and one of the best homilies I’ve ever heard in all my life.

Here’s a little background, to help you understand, perhaps, the emotion behind Father Stephen’s reading and preaching. His wife is chronically ill with a very serious autoimmune disorder. He has had to spend Lent living away from her and their three children, so he can tend his flock through the pandemic without risking bringing a death-dealing virus to his beloved. Father Stephen has been living with his parents, Father Gregory and Khouria Frederica Mathewes-Green, for five weeks, so he can serve while keeping his family safe. He knows the pain of waiting rather acutely.

Watch that sermon, or at least listen to it. Even though most of you Christian readers are celebrating Easter now, you are doing so under conditions of lockdown and suffering. The priest’s words can and will get you through what’s ahead. Promise. Send them to everyone you know who needs a word of hope.

UPDATE: A reader said that I accidentally posted a link to a Tony Spell interview instead of Father Stephen’s sermon. Oh no! It’s fixed now.

The post ‘He Waits’: A Pandemic Sermon Of Rare Power appeared first on The American Conservative.

Pandemic Diaries 25

My daughter Nora decided to make her grandmother some tea cakes for Easter. This is was an opportunity for her brother Lucas, who has his learner’s permit, to get some practice driving with Dad in the co-pilot’s seat, so we set out for the country to deliver them. After we dropped off the cookies to my grateful mother, Lucas asked if he could take a quick spin to St. Francisville, six miles north. Off we went. We drove to the top of Catholic Hill to have a look out over the river bottom, to see how high the Mississippi is in the current flood. This view will mean something to people who have been down for Walker Percy Weekend:

I asked the kids to turn around so I could take a photo of them in front of the Catholic Church. Then I asked them to turn around backwards so I could take a shot to illustrate this blog post (you know that I don’t show my family’s faces on this blog). I started to hurry them along so we could get out of the parking lot before people started coming for Easter late services … and then I realized there would be no Easter mass here this year.

What a year.

On the way out of town, we stopped for a photo of Self in front of the town’s Social Distancing Sasquatch:

 

I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS!

Hey, I should tell you that Disqus is not working for everybody right now. I’ve fielded a number of complaints. We are trying to figure this out. I’m so sorry. Disqus is the devil, as we all know.

What’s going on with y’all? The Pandemic Diary entries are slowing down a lot now. The first one is from yesterday — sorry, I didn’t think to post the Diaries last night.

From Nashville, Tennessee:

Some context: My regular parish is Assumption Church, the home of the Latin Mass community in Nashville. Mass in the extraordinary form was first offered weekly only about 7 years ago. Now the church is regularly filled to the brim each Sunday. At last year’s Solemnity of the Assumption, in recognition of the parish’s growth, the bishop installed the first diocesan pastor at the parish in 35 years.

But this March has seen a double dose of suffering. Two weeks before the coronavirus shut down Masses for good, Nashville was hit by a tornado that passed about 50 yards from Assumption. I am sure you saw the stories of our pastor rushing into the Church in the middle of the storm to preserve the Blessed Sacrament, and the pictures that showed the resulting destruction of several stained glass windows. Unfortunately the church was not spared from major structural damage. The result is that even before the coronavirus struck here, we were cast out of our church, and we will remain cast out for long after life returns to semi-normal.

And yet Holy Thursday 2020 will be remembered for the rest of my life. In the evening our pastor celebrated privately the Maundy Thursday Mass in the empty parish hall next to the church. He then set up the altar of repose in the grassy yard outdoors next to the hall. And all evening, one by one, parishioners came to our desolated home to keep watch with Christ.

No one stayed too long, so that everyone who wanted to come could find a solitary place with ease and avoid being too close to others or breaking the restrictions on the number of people in gatherings. We knelt in the grass far from each other and prayed, then silently returned to our cars. It was a catharsis after so many weeks away from our damaged church. It struck me that here we were, suffering in this time of sickness and death, and hurting from the damage to our spiritual home that will take many more months to fix–and we gathered in a garden to pray as Jesus did in His agony, praying for an end to the suffering and death, praying with Him for all of us.

As I got up to leave I saw a police car pull up on the street and an officer step out of the car. I wondered for a moment if he was coming to see what this small gathering was about. He entered the grassy yard, and then he knelt in silent prayer. I crossed myself, glanced at the two lighted windows of the Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart in the facade of the church, and drove home in the dark.

From Massachusetts:

It’s been one month since Governor Baker declared a state of emergency. At the time Massachusetts had only 92 confirmed cases, but in a month that number grew to 20,974, with 2,100 new cases per day. It’s a small number for a state of seven million, but the growth is scarily impressive nonetheless.

Massachusetts was expecting the surge in the middle of next week, but computer models have pushed it out to April 20th, with 2500 new cases per day. After the 20th models predict the curve trending down.

The good news for medical workers is that the state set up a PPE (masks, face shields, etc) sterilization center in Somerville. This allows recycling of PPE to protect healthcare workers, and makes the state more independent of supply chains. This is required because the state of New York seized 3 million masks passing through the port of New York on their way to Massachusetts. I guess emergencies bring out the true nature of man.

On a personal level, my family is doing well, but this pandemic still had a feeling of unreality to it. Which is odd because I personally knew it was coming, and we’re a month in. While we still have a lot of food, supplies of fresh fruits and veggies are starting to run low. A shop at the end of next week is likely, and I’m not looking forward to it. The supermarket has a distinctly dystopian vibe because various shelves are picked clean.

From Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania:

I’ve been thinking about Holy Saturday more than usual this year. The experience of knowing that something has been lost, that when we emerge the world will be different, but not knowing yet what it will look like – in some ways we’re all experiencing a long Holy Saturday.

I wrote a poem as I was reflecting on some of these things:

HOLY SATURDAY

Housebound

on the Sabbath,

not allowed

to see the body,

say goodbye,

anoint the dead;

not allowed

to touch finality

and move on.

 

What grief

for Mary

on the other side

of Saturday

to find

an empty tomb.

From Dayton, Ohio:

During the quarantine, my wife and I decided to buy A Hidden Life and watch it together.

It was overwhelming.

Without exaggeration, it was one of the greatest aesthetic moments of my life. It ranked right there with my reading of The Divine Comedy, and Anna Karenina, and The Lord of the Rings — but it was concentrated down to only three hours, instead of spread over several days.

I still feel like I’m processing my reactions to it.

To misquote CS Lewis, here are beauties which pierce like swords and burn like cold iron.

It’s a movie which will break your heart while healing it.

So thank you from the bottom of my heart for reviewing it, and pushing me to watch it!

It’s most important effect to me right now is how it made me pause and reevaluate exactly what I’ve  been setting my affections on these past several months.

I started an online business narrating Christian audio books, and had been swept up in the pursuit of bigger and better and “more”.

This quarantine, coupled with A Hidden Life, made me pause and savor the small things again. It made me reevaluate what I want to do with my life. Excellence in the small things, the fundamentals, is more important than “success” in their absence.

My wife and I both work in industries that have been shut down by the governor, and we’ve seen our income reduced to virtually zero. But we’ve both been picking up odd jobs like DoorDash, and we’d been able to save about a years worth of expenses before the quarantine hit. God was gracious to us in that….

All to say, I’ve been viewing this quarantine as a gift of sabbath rest from God. I’ll work as hard as I need to, but as of right now, God has shut most money making doors. We’ve also stopped paying attention to the news. We’re enjoying this moment of rest God has forced us into.

I love poetry, so I whipped up a sonnet about this Quarantine – with a capital “Q” – after a talk with our next door neighbors.

We were both out getting our gardens ready for planting, and after about an hour of chatting, they remarked how very “zen” we seemed about Corona. Not out of a blasé disregard for the havoc and death it’s wreaked, but a “calmness” that allowed us to still enjoy life.

So my wife and I were able to share our belief that Christ still reigns supreme from his throne, despite the madness that has revisited the human race.

And then I wrote a sonnet about my confidence in Christ, and how that confidence opens up the possibility of joy even in the midst of darkness.

I thought you might enjoy it.

COVID-19
 
Right now, if I say “quarantine” to you, 
I’m sure that it’s a packed and loaded phrase:
A straining suitcase of a word, with two
(Perhaps) small clasps alone to hold the craze. 
Maybe you lost your job this month, like me, 
And now you wonder what will happen next. 
A few fear governmental tyranny. 
We all are cautious, worried, and perplexed. 

I’ve started taking walks again outside. 
I went and baked some bread, from scratch, today. 
I paused, and watched “A Hidden Life” and cried. 
And now I listen when my children play. 

Our God’s upon his throne. He reigns supreme. 
He has not been usurped by Quarantine. 

Y’all can rent A Hidden Life on Amazon streaming for $5.99, by the way.

From Upstate New York:

Long time secular reader of your blog checking in here, from the northern edge of the New York City contagion zone.

We’re about as far out of the NYC cluster as you are out of the New Orleans cluster.  Far enough for a little comfort now, but as you know there are no real barriers other than housing density and face to face contact.

First, I submit a photo I took a few days ago, as the full impact of the pandemic was starting to sink in.  We are standing in the front lawn of a Catholic shrine near Canajoharie, NY.  It’s a shrine dedicated to Kateri Tekatwitha, a Mohawk Indian woman who I believe was the first Native American canonized by the Catholic Church.   As you can see, they are doing their level best to maintain their function as a shrine, while avoiding making the current epidemiological situation worse.

Readers, ponder this one for a few moments, whether or not you practice Catholicism, or any organized faith (no on both counts for me).  Tekatwitha was a survivor of a smallpox epidemic that devastated her tribe, killed her immediate family and left her badly disfigured. Her shrine is largely closed, thanks to a rapidly spreading epidemic from a foreign land, to which the current local population has no immunity.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme, doesn’t it?

Second, an incident that happened a few minutes before the photo was taken.  I was short a couple of hitch pins, small metal rods that connect my compact tractor to the implements that make it useful during spring planting.  Because the virus, the dealership has closed its showroom and its walk-up parts desk, and now meets its customers in the parking lot.  It’s a smart move.  As the store manager told me, their average farm customer is a 50- or 60- something male, a high risk cohort even before you account for smoking, obesity, and a host of other factors.  I fall squarely in the middle of that risk assessment group, with a couple of added risk factors.  Bravo to ‘em.

So I’m standing in their parking lot, waiting for the parts guy to deliver about 15 dollars worth of totally routine hardware.  Standing next to me is a  50-ish dairy farmer, there to pick up something only a little bit more substantial.  I’d never met him before.

“Never thought I’d be buying tractor parts at a drive-through window”, I say.

“Guess this is the real deal, huh?” he replies, looking at the ground and shaking his head slowly.

Yup, we Yankees are taciturn people.

Later that afternoon, I find out that in a county of roughly 25,000 people, we’ve had 16 confirmed CoVid cases.  At least a few of them are NYC people who own vacation properties up here, places that they bought so they could get away from it all.  In this case, they’ve brought it all with them.

But it turns out one of those local cases is a guy I know, and used to ride the school bus with. I just heard today that he’s out of the hospital, and likely to fully recover.

But yes, this is the real deal.

Please write me a Pandemic Diary if you feel so moved. I will be especially interested to hear how Easter was for you. I am at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. Please remember to put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line, and to mention from where you write.


UPDATE: 

From Missouri:

This is not a Pandemic Diary in the sense of someone suffering with Covid-19, treating them, or living among the populations of infected people. Just a guy in a rural Midwest county with a fairly low infection rate at present that is in his fourth week of serious social distancing. Nearly complete isolation, in fact. My wife and I are empty-nesters that used to see our adult kids, and one sweet granddaughter, regularly. We are all lucky enough to still be employed or in business. I don’t have the challenges that many others are experiencing. But isolation brings its own challenges.

Your post about this Mournful Moment is right on. Loved your account from Alexander Ogorodnikov about his time on death row for the crime of being Christian in Soviet Russia. How terrible would it be to live that life in those times?  How hard would it be to focus on anything but worry about when it will be your turn? And his ability to be a help to others in spite of that is inspiring.

I can see how this disruption and isolation allows Christians to focus their minds about the way they want to serve. I am taking advantage of this weird circumstance to inventory my entire life: how I spend my time, what I eat, what I miss, who I miss, and what I want to change about the life I lived before this stuff. I am choosing to use some of this time to better myself and the way I move through this world.  I am exercising more than ever, eating well, and missing the time I used to spend with my family.

I think it is a universal, human response to this type of threat that we think hard about our lives. About the way we want to live. About the people we want in it. I haven’t had the kind of hard sacrifice of Mr. Ogorodnikov, but my world has been changed in many ways that I don’t like.

I hope that you and yours stay safe. In the spirit of resurrection, I hope that we all come out on the other side with a determination to make ourselves and the world around us a little better.

From Philadelphia:

Making memories. We attended Philly cathedral’s Easter Vigil in our basement television area. My husband wore a suit. He recently shed 25 pounds doing Exodus 90 with some guys from work and church. He looked mighty fine! Several of our daughters donned their finery, as did I. The littles were in comfy play clothes and had blankets on hand because they’ve all fallen asleep during the vigil in the pew before so they knew what to expect and how to prepare.

Archbishop Nelson Perez was the celebrant. He’s very down to earth. There’s a kindness about him that makes me smile and want to call him Uncle Skippy, which I mean only with affection and absolutely no disrespect. I greatly appreciated the formation and formality of Archbishop Chaput. And I welcome the tenderness of Perez. Two very different gents. And what I wouldn’t give to see the thought bubbles of Cathedral Rector Fr. Dennis Gill as he assists at these live streamed Masses!

I hope I don’t sound cheeky. It has been a long Lent, and tonight at the Vigil and in my home the joy was palpable. One of our older daughters is planning to attend a 9am Mass tomorrow with her missionary group via zoom, so all during tonight’s Mass she was up in the kitchen preparing a feast. It was such a delight to sit down with the whole family after the Vigil and enjoy a wonderful meal. Even the sleepy littles made it though they were not nearly as chipper as the big girls. Normally we go to a local diner after the Vigil Mass, but I adore this homebound version of the evening.

Looking forward to celebrating the entire octave of Easter with my dear husband and our lively brood!

The post Pandemic Diaries 25 appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Meaning Of This Mournful Moment

Hello all. It’s a gorgeous mild spring day here in Baton Rouge. It’s a good thing that today is not Holy Saturday for us Orthodox — it is the opposite of mournful outside. But today is a dark day for you Catholics and Protestants, though tonight, you will see the light of Resurrection.

This morning I had a long phone conversation with someone who is thinking hard about religious conversion, but just doesn’t quite know what to do next. After we finished, she told me that this lockdown has forced her to face squarely some difficult questions. A couple of hours later, I heard from an Orthodox friend who said that his unbelieving mother has found the faith. Said my friend, “This pandemic is forcing a lot of people to think hard about their lives.”

No doubt. Ross Douthat writes in his new column, about the need to find meaning in all this:

This need is powerful enough that even people who officially believe that the universe is godless and random will find themselves telling stories about how their own suffering played some crucial role in the pattern of their life, how some important good came from some grave evil. And it’s a need that religious believers must respect and answer: We can acknowledge the mystery, with Martin and Wright, while also insisting that in their own lives people should be looking for glimpses of a pattern, for signs of what a particular trial might mean.

The personal and specific element is crucial here, because the Christian tradition offers not one but many different explanations for how suffering fits into a providential plan. In some cases — the miser growing old alone, the dictator consumed by paranoia — the wicked may suffer as a kind of fitting, self-created punishment for their sins. But then in other cases suffering may be a gift to the righteous, given because their goodness means that they can bear more of its hard medicine, its refining fire. (There is a longstanding Christian tradition that finds it more theologically perplexing when good things happen to good people than when bad things do.)

Then in still other cases, suffering is bound to some purpose beyond the self. Before Jesus heals a blind man, the disciples wonder whose sin made him blind, and their master’s answer is stark: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” There is no retreat to mystery here; the man was born blind just so that the Messiah could heal him.

That is a hard saying of Christ’s, yet I heard something similar in Moscow late last year, from Alexander Ogorodnikov, the anti-Soviet Christian dissident. From my post about that meeting:

[Ogorodnikov said:] The first prison I was in was the most difficult jail you could be in. It was where they sent people who specifically needed to be broken. As one of the employees of the jail who had rank, a colonel or something, said we’re not here to whack you, we’re here to bleed you out, drop by drop.

They sent me to Tver. This was a jail where people were shot. They put me on death row, even though I didn’t have a death sentence. It seems that they told the other prisoners, okay, don’t actually kill him, but if he dies, we will give somebody else their freedom. When I went into the cell and looked at the gusy that was there, I told them, “Listen brothers, I was sent here to help you meet death, not as criminals, but as men with souls that are going to meet their Maker, to go meet God the Father.”

Given that they always took people to go be shot really early in the morning, many of these prisoners spent all night waiting for the knock at the door to see who would be called out. So of course they didn’t sleep. Neither did I. I helped them turn this night of terror into a night of hope. I told them I am a layman, I can hear your confession — they were confessing to me what they had done. I told them I couldn’t absolve them, but when I die and go before the Lord, I will be a witness to your repentance.

If I wanted to describe their confessions, I would need Dostoevsky. I don’t have the words myself. I told them that God is merciful, and the fact that you are expressing what you have done, and that you are denouncing it, that your regret and repentance is washing and purifying. When they would be shot, they would die as purified people.

When my jailers understood that me being in that cell wasn’t breaking me, it was only making things worse, they took me out of death row.

They moved Ogorodnikov to solitary confinement. Then something mystical began to happen.

I felt very clearly someone waking me up in the middle of the night. Very clear, but softly. I had a very, very clear vision when I woke up. I could see the corridor of the jail. I could see a man being taken out of in chains, but I only saw him from behind. Still, I knew exactly who it was. I understood that God sent me an angel to wake me up so I could accompany that man in prayer as he was being taken out to be shot. I understood that if God was showing that to me, that He was asking me to pray a kind of funeral prayer for that condemned prisoner as he was going to his death. I understood that the prayers of this prisoner and I had been heard, and that he was forgiven. I was in tears.

This mystical awakening in the middle of the night didn’t occur with all of those prisoners, only with some of them. I believe it was to show that those prisoners had been forgiven. I would literally feel someone touching me on my skin to awaken me, even though I was all alone in the cell.

He wondered why in these visions he was not allowed to see the faces of the condemned.

The answer came to me in a different prison, in solitary confinement, God revealed why I had been seeing them from behind. In that prison there was an old prison guard. This was a small prison. He was the only one. All the cells were empty. This old man was on duty — he was clearly a pensioner, they let him work at night because he was lonely.

One night, he opened the door and came into my cell, which was forbidden. He had absolutely crazy eyes. The guard said to me, ‘They come at night!’ And I understood. I said to the guard, you need to tell me this now, you need to confess.

He said that when he was a young guard, they would gather 20 or 30 priests who had been in this prison, take them out of the prison, then bind them to a sled so they would be pulling it, like a horse team. The guards made the captive priests pull the sled into the forest, running all day until they found a swamp.

Then they organized the priests into two columns of men standing single file. The old man back then was one of the guards that formed a perimeter around the priests to prevent them escaping. One of of the KGB guys walked up to the first priest. He asked him very calmly and quietly, “Is there a god?” The priest said yes. The KGB man shot him in the forehead in such a way that his brains covered the priest behind. He calmly loaded his pistol, went to next priest, asked, “Does God exist?”

“Yes, he exists.”

The KGB man shot him in the same way. Not one of those priests denied Christ.

Meaning they all died. Ogorodnikov fought back tears telling me this.

When he composed himself, Ogorodnikov said the old prison guard said that the KGB had not blinded the priest before shooting them. Memory of the eyes of the men facing execution that night tormented the old guard. He asked for the night shift at the prison because in his mind, he was visited by those he saw murdered that night in the forest. He was clearly going insane.

Here’s what Ogorodnikov learned from that half-crazy old man’s testimony: that the eyes of the men being led to be shot were full of horror. In his mystical vision of them going to their execution, “God didn’t let me see their faces because I couldn’t bear the terror there.”

“You learned that you weren’t suffering in vain,” I told him. “If you had not been in that prison to witness to those men, and to pray with them and for them, what would have happened to their eternal lives?”

This is indeed what Ogorodnikov learned. That story, by the way, will be in my new book. Now, you may ask yourself: was Ogorodnikov like the blind man of the Gospel, whom God allowed to be born blind so that he could be healed, and God’s glory be thereby made manifest? Yes, it sounds like it. How fair is that? Well, if you ask that question, it won’t be long before you get to the question of why it was necessary for God to take the form of a mortal man and suffer death, then rise from the dead, for the salvation of mankind? These are great mysteries — saving mysteries, in fact. They are not mysteries that can be satisfactorily solved by logic. They can only be lived.

Douthat points to this excellent First Things essay by the Dominican Father Thomas Joseph White, which talks of the mystery of this moment. I applaud the FT editor Rusty Reno for publishing this essay, which, as Father White notes in his opening lines, runs in stark contrast to the views of the crisis that Reno has been advocating. Excerpt:

Christians ought to treat this pandemic as an opportunity to learn more about God. What does it mean that God has permitted (or willed) temporary conditions in which our elite lifestyle of international travel is grounded, our consumption is cut to a minimum, our days are occupied with basic responsibilities toward our families and immediate communities, our resources and economic hopes are reduced, and we are made more dependent upon one another? What does it mean that our nation-states suddenly seem less potent and our armies are infected by an invisible contagion they cannot eradicate, and that the most technologically advanced countries face the humility of their limits? Our powerful economies are suddenly enfeebled, and our future more uncertain. Priests and bishops are confronted with a new obligation to seek interiority over activism as their sacramental ministry is rendered less potent, and laypeople have to find God outside the sacraments in their own interior lives, discovering new ways to be grateful for what they have rather than disdainful in the face of what they lack. We might think none of this tells us anything about ourselves, or about God’s compassion and justice. But if we simply seek to pass through all this in hasty expectation of a return to normal, perhaps we are missing the fundamental point of the exercise.

Finally, what can Christians do to console both their religious and secular neighbors? What about the people heroically risking their own lives to serve others at this time, or those who are ill and afraid, especially those who do not have a religious recourse or perspective? What about those grieving, or those who are isolated? How can we be creative in our hope and empathy? Bishops, priests, and laity alike should work together in the coming months to discern how we can safely return progressively to the public celebration of sacraments, and have interim steps of public worship in limited ways. But we should also be thinking about how to communicate Christian hope and basic human friendship and compassion to people who suffer, in our words and gestures, both individually and collectively. The life of the heart is as real as the life of the mind, and in our current moment, for however long it should last, charity is itself the most basic prophetic activity. “By this they will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). I’m citing him because in this and in every other case, his authority comes first.

Read it all. It’s terrific. The best thing I’ve read about the meaning of this moment anywhere.

I wish you all a profound journey to resurrection. There’s no way to it that does not pass through Golgotha. This is a time of testing for us all. Let the pain and suffering purify and strengthen you, not destroy you. None of us has chosen this pandemic, but we do have the power to decide how we will respond to it.

The post The Meaning Of This Mournful Moment appeared first on The American Conservative.

Tony Spell: I’ll Cover Up COVID In My Church

A new Houston video podcaster, Jess Fields, scored a lengthy interview with Pastor Tony Spell of the Life Tabernacle in Baton Rouge. The whole thing is here, and I encourage you to watch it. He breaks some news:

It’s infuriating, of course, but also very telling. Let me say straightaway: if you think Tony Spell, who is white, is a standard middle-class megachurch Evangelical, you are wrong. Spell is a Pentecostal who pastors a church that is quite multiracial, and that reaches out to poor and working class people. He’s the real deal on that front. Trust me, in Baton Rouge, there are no social advantages to going to Tony Spell’s church.

At around the 13:00 point, Spell rages against the unfairness of the virus, and how it is hurting the feelings of so many people. Think, he says, about the people who are told that this or that person is “non-essential” or the high school senior who is told that she can’t experience the joy of walking across the stage at graduation, “all because of a false narrative.”

The parallel with progressive secular “critical justice” people is plain. He seems to believe that because facts (about the virus and epidemiology) offend a narrative he prefers to believe, than those facts must be part of a “false narrative.” He blames “media terrorism” and “government terrorism” for this.

Spell says that coronavirus has a “99.3 percent recovery rate” — a flat-out lie. The death rate is not 0.7 percent; according to the WHO, the global mortality rate is 3.4 percent — that’s five times greater than what Tony Spell claims. It’s greater in some places around the globe than in others, of course. The annual mortality rate from seasonal flu is 0.1 percent.

Fields asked what he, Spell, would do if he were Louisiana’s governor. He said, “We have to keep our nation going … we need hope … .” In other words, we have to stay in motion, even if it kills us. Where’s the hope in that? That’s false hope. Spell says he would say, “If you have symptoms, stay at home — that’s common sense.” But scientists tell us that people can be infected for 10 to 14 days without showing symptoms, during which time the infected person can infect others. Spell is just wrong here, and dangerously wrong.

He bangs on about the “rights” that the Constitution gives us, and that we all have the “right to happiness,” which for them means going to church. There you go: rights, rights, rights. Nothing about duties. Nothing about serving others, and the common good. Spell says they’re ready to die for their faith. OK, fine — but what’s at issue here is Spell’s eagerness to make other people die for the Life Tabernacle’s rights.

Not far past the halfway point, Spell says that he expects people to test positive in his congregation, but if that happens, he’s not going to tell others in the congregation, because he doesn’t want the sick to be stigmatized. He says, “I don’t want them to be excluded like they’re lepers when they do come back.”

Can you believe that? He intends to keep it quiet if someone tests positive. He’s willing to let people who have been exposed to this virus by contact with confirmed virus patients live in ignorance — and unwittingly spread it to other! This is malicious crackpottery. Later, Jess Fields asks Spell how he justifies busing in all those little children — 675 on a weekly average — knowing that those kids could be going back home and spreading the virus to their families.

Know how he responds?

“Our faith is so strong that we’re not going to live in the narrative of the ‘what ifs’. … This is such a false narrative that is being pushed by the media terrorists.”

Tony Spell is simply denying fact — the kind of facts that will get people killed. He goes on to say, “Children are carriers, but they’re not affected by this virus, from what we’re being told today.”

(Wrong. There have been at least three pediatric deaths, according to the CDC — which is good news, of course, but kids are affected by it, and again, they can carry it to those who are more susceptible.)

Listen to that entire interview. Tony Spell has created a narrative in which he is somehow an amalgam of George Washington and Ignatius of Antioch. He keeps bringing up both the early church martyrs and the Founding Fathers. In this Fields interview, he says that Christians who are staying home from their churches are a bunch of cowards.

The thing that keeps coming back to me as I listen to this pastor is how much he stands on rights. Nothing ever about duties, about self-sacrifice. Just a #MAGA Jesus version of, “I’m going to do what I darn well want to do, and don’t you dare try to stop me, or make me feel bad about it!” How is that all that different from the Social Justice Warriors?

What would you say to Gov. John Bel Edwards? Fields asks. Spell says:

“This is about a socialistic government taking our freedoms away from us as God-fearing Americans.”

This from a pastor who refuses to consider that all those little children he’s busing into his services could carry the virus back to their communities, and who said he would hide infections from others in the congregation, because he doesn’t want people to have negative thoughts. Where is the basic Christian charity here? The common sense? The care for the common good?

UPDATE: “Greater love hath no man than this: that he would refuse to tell his friends that they have been exposed to a deadly virus, because it’s more important to own the socialistic libs.” — the Gospel According to Tony Spell

UPDATE.2: I wonder what Tony Spell, who thinks this is all pretty much a big hoax, would say to this ICU nurse, Jennifer Cole, who posted on Facebook:

I lost a patient today. He was not the first, and unfortunately he’s definitely not the last. But he was different. I’ve been an ER nurse my entire career, but in New York I find myself in the ICU. At this point there’s not really anywhere in the hospital that isn’t ICU, all covid 19 positive. They are desperate for nurses who can titrate critical medication drips and troubleshoot ventiltors.

I’ve taken care of this man the last three nights, a first for me. In the ER I rarely keep patients for even one 12 hour shift. His entire two week stay had been rough for him, but last night was the worst. I spent the first six hours of my shift not really leaving his room. By the end, with so many medications infusing at their maximum, I was begging the doctor to call his family and let them know. “He’s not going to make it”, I said. The poor doctors are so busy running from code to code, being pulled by emergent patients every minute. All I could think of was the voice of my mom in my head, crying as I got on the plane to leave for this place: “Those people are alone, you take good care of them”. I was the only person in that room for three nights in a row, fighting as hard as I could to keep this man alive. The doctor was able to reach the family, update them. It was decided that when his heart inevitably stopped we wouldn’t try to restart it. There just wasn’t anything else left to do.

Eventually, he gave up. It was just him and me and his intubated roommate in the next bed. The wooden door to the room is shut, containing infection and cutting us off from the rest of the world. I called the doctor to come and mark the time of death. I wished so much that I could let his family know that while they might not have been with him, I was.

I shut the pumps down (so horribly many of them), disconnected the vent, took him off the monitor. We didn’t extubate him, too much of a risk to staff. Respiratory took the vent as soon as I called. It’s just a portable one, but it’s life to someone downstairs. The CNA helped me to wash him and place him in a body bag, a luxury afforded only to those who make it out of the ER. Down there the bodies pile up on stretchers, alone, while the patients on vents wait for the golden spot my gentleman just vacated. We’ll talk about the ER another time. My patient was obviously healthy in his life. I look at his picture in his chart, the kind they take from a camera over a computer when you aren’t really prepared. A head shot, slightly awkward. I see someone’s Grandpa, someone’s Dad, someones Husband. They aren’t here with him. My heart breaks for them.

I fold his cute old man sweater and place it in a bag with his loafers, his belongings. I ask where to put this things. A coworker opens the door to a locked room; labeled bags are piled to the ceiling. My heart drops. It’s all belongings of deceased parents, waiting for a family member to someday claim them. A few nights ago they had 17 deaths in a shift. The entire unit is only 17 beds.

These patients are so fragile. It’s such a delicate balance of breathing, of blood pressure, of organ function. The slightest movement or change sends them into hours long death spirals. The codes are so frequent those not directly involved barely even register them. The patients are all the same, every one. Regardless of age, health status, wealth, family, or power the diagnosis is the same, the disease process is the same, and the aloneness is the same. Our floor has one guy that made it to extubation. He’s 30 years old. I view him as our mascot, our ray of hope that not everyone here is just waiting to die. I know that most people survive just fine, but that’s not what it feels like in this place. Most of the hospital staff is out sick. We, the disaster staff, keep our n95 masks glued to our faces. We all think we are invincible, but I find myself eyeing up my coworkers, wondering who the weak ones are, knowing deep down that not all of us will make it out of here alive.

A bus takes us back to the hotel the disaster staff resides in, through deserted Manhatten. We are a few blocks from Central Park. We pass radio city music hall, nbc studios, times square. There is no traffic. The sidewalks are empty. My room is on the 12th floor. At 7pm you can hear people cheering and banging on and pans for the healthcare workers at change of shift. This city is breaking and stealing my heart simultaneously. I didn’t know what I was getting into coming here, but it’s turning out to be quite a lot.

Jennifer Cole, from her Facebook page

The post Tony Spell: I’ll Cover Up COVID In My Church appeared first on The American Conservative.

Charles Murray: God Is America’s Only Hope

Jonathon Van Maren did an interview with Charles Murray, the libertarian political and social thinker (and religious agnostic) who believes that only a religious revival will save America now. Excerpts:

“The Founders were not really super orthodox,” he observed. “They were all nominally Christians, but they wouldn’t pass the litmus test for a lot of evangelicals today. But they were absolutely, emphatically agreed that you cannot have a free society with a constitution such as the one they had created unless you are trying to govern a religious people. If you do not have religion as the controlling force, then the kinds of laws we have could not possibly work.” Without religion, Murray told me, there was simply no “intrinsic motivation” for people to behave morally — and no definition for what constitutes moral behavior in the first place.

The current experiment that the West has embarked on, in Murray’s view, has an expiration date: “I cannot believe that the secularization of society is going to continue indefinitely. We have never had an advanced culture, in the history of the world, that is as secular as contemporary Europe. I would say that it is the test case, the canary in the coalmine. And so Sam Harris, who I like and respect, will say that as a secular humanist society, they’ll do just fine and they’ll do just fine over the long term. My own sense is [that they won’t.] You cannot have a free society, a society that allows lots of individual autonomy, without some outside force that leads people to control the self. And I think the increasing Muslim minorities in those countries are probably going to accelerate the exposure of the degeneracy.”

Murray says that American exceptionalism is now meaningless, that the US is a country

“… where [our] ideals are basically, we’re gonna be a rich, powerful country and you’ll still have Americans say USA, USA at sports events and so forth. But to the sense of the American Way of Life, which was something that was in common use until fifty years ago, well, it will be meaningless or already is meaningless.”

Read it all. 

Murray says that the solution is to do as he has done, and move out to live in a small town

which is run just as Alexis de Tocqueville described in the 1830s. There are all sorts of places like that around. It’s really easy to live in traditional America, and that’s true no matter what your ethnicity is, no matter what your economic status is.

I wish that were true, but it’s not. Maybe it’s true for Murray’s town, I dunno, but the idea that it’s “really easy to live in traditional America” is romantic nonsense. I’m surprised that someone of Murray’s intelligence can believe that. Murray lives in Burkittsville, Maryland, pop. 151. I’m sure it’s a great place with lovely people, but how on earth can you say that “it’s really easy to live in traditional America” based on your experience of your rural town of 151 people?

Does Murray not realize that television and the Internet have reached all corners of America? I come from a great small town, one that’s in a conservative part of America. I wrote a book about its virtues. But let’s be honest: kids there are watching porn on their smartphones too, and the advance guard of the Sexual Revolution has arrived even there (gay couples attend middle school dances). As someone who has lived in small towns, medium-sized cities, and big cities, I have found no Mayberry anywhere to which people can retreat. What made (and makes) my hometown such a wonderful place, as revealed in the story of my sister’s cancer, was not its smallness, but the powerful sense of community there. You could have that in a big city too, under certain circumstances.

Why, I wonder, does Murray think that small town life protects people from ceasing to believe in God? It might have done so to a certain extent when I was a kid, in the 1970s. Even people who didn’t go to church, or go to church that often (like my family), still professed belief in God. We only ever heard the word “atheist” when one of the networks would do a piece on Madalyn Murray O’Hair. But today? Look, half a century ago, there wasn’t any real social penalty to be paid in my town for not going to church, though nobody would have ever called themselves an atheist. There is still no social penalty for not being a member of a church, and no one would stand on the street corner and brag about being an atheist, but if someone said they didn’t believe in God, it wouldn’t be a scandal.

To be clear, I’m not saying this as a criticism of my hometown, or of small towns. I’m a booster of small towns! I live in the city now, but if our little church had been able to make it there, I’d still be living in that small town. I’m just trying to inject a note of realism here. Small-town people are just as caught up in modernity as the rest of us. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when my wife and I lived in New York City, it was a running joke with us on the plane back home after holiday visits that it was nice to be getting back to Brooklyn, where everybody lives nice, clean, bourgeois lives. We would have caught up on all the juicy small town gossip while visiting down in Louisiana, you see. The joke was that of course all this and more was going on behind the nice brownstone façades of our neighborhood, but it was a lot easier to remain ignorant of it in a big city than in a small town.

It’s also the case that a lot of small town in “traditional America” — though happily, not my own hometown — are really suffering from economic and social breakdown. Take a drive up through the Mississippi Delta in northern Louisiana, as I did a few years back for my kinsman’s funeral. Country towns that had once been thriving under agricultural economies are now ghost towns. It was a real shock to me, seeing that; I realized that if I had come from a town like one of them, there would have been nothing to return to. We all know too about how the scourges of opioids and meth have hollowed out a lot of small towns. Despair is not bound by geography. People who want to leave the cities to live in small towns might genuinely have a calling, but they should be as realistic as possible about it, and not assume that in so doing, they are escaping back to a Tocquevillian utopia.

Of course I agree completely with Murray that the country will not hold together absent religion. Philip Rieff — who, like Murray, was an agnostic — believed the same thing. Rieff was a sociologist and a sophisticated social critic. His argument was that without a reference point in transcendence — and not transcendence as a lofty abstraction, but as something felt to be a real reality — that society cannot do what society’s must do to survive. I’m not going to go into all that again here — if you’ve read this blog for a while, you know the argument. Rieff’s contention is not theological, but sociological and psychological.

The problem, though — and Murray no doubt groks this — is that you can’t force yourself to believe in God because it’s good for you, and for society. What Murray tells Van Maren is simply a restatement of John Adams’s famous line: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Adams meant that liberal democracy works because people have learned how to govern themselves personally, having internalized the moral values of religion. They can be trusted with liberty not because they are saints, but because they know how to order that liberty in their personal lives.

The usual objection at this point is, “So you don’t think atheists can be moral?” It’s obvious that some atheists behave with more exemplary Christian morality than do many Christians. That is beside the point entirely. The more serious question is, “How does an atheist determine what is moral?” On this point, see Nietzsche.

Besides, the more or less post-Christian countries of Scandinavia live peaceful, orderly lives, despite having little or no religion. We’ll see how long that lasts. The habits that came into being in large part through Christianity may fade in time. I recall a visit around 1990 I made to visit a friend in a tiny Dutch farming village near the German border. My friend’s father had been a Catholic seminarian in youth, but left to marry. He spoke no English, but my understanding, via his daughter, my friend, was that he was sorrowful over the collapse of Catholicism in their country. At breakfast on my last morning there, before my friend left for work, she told me that a farmer friend of her dad’s had committed suicide the previous night.

The father couldn’t communicate this to me. As he drove me to the train station, we passed by beautiful farmhouses, set in pastures of emerald green. It was the most serene, orderly scene imaginable. But as we drove down the country road, the older man pointed to various houses, and said simply, “Suicide. Suicide. Suicide.” He was telling me about all his neighbors who had killed themselves. Why? They lived in a peaceful, prosperous, orderly middle class nation. And yet, they had found life to be not worth living. This is a very serious problem, and not one that can be settled by pointing to the GDP, the crime statistics, and other measures of material progress.

Anyway, read all of JVM’s interview with Murray. As you know, especially if you’ve read The Benedict Option, I believe it’s going to get much worse before it gets better. The greatest task facing Christians in post-Christian America is to establish ways of life that allow us to endure this new Dark Age, and that ultimately show the country the way back to God, when people decide they want Him again.

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Death Before Touching Evangelicals

Unbelievable — but then, all too believable. From the NYT:

Plans to turn the Cathedral of St. John the Divine into a vast coronavirus field hospital were abruptly shelved on Thursday, with public health officials saying that a leveling off in virus-related hospitalizations in New York City had made them reassess the need for the project.

But behind the scenes, Episcopal leaders said they were upset by the role played in the project by Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical humanitarian organization whose approach to L.G.B.T. issues runs counter to that of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, which is based out of the cathedral.

Samaritan’s Purse is led by the Rev. Franklin Graham, who has been criticized for anti-Muslim and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. rhetoric and whose organization is based on a statement of faith that includes a belief that “marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.”

The Episcopal Church did not realize that Samaritan’s Purse would be involved in the project when it offered the use of the cathedral to Mount Sinai Health System last month, and the slowing rate of hospitalizations might have created an opportunity for all parties to step back from a fraught situation, officials said.

The project was intended to turn the church, which describes itself as the largest cathedral in the world, into a 200-bed medical facility. If the need for hospital space increases, those plans may be reactivated, but Dean Clifton Daniel III, the cathedral’s leader, said he thought Samaritan’s Purse would not be back.

The “oops, it’s not needed” is clearly a face-saving story for the cathedral leadership. These liberal Episcopalians would rather not treat terribly sick people than defile their cathedral by welcoming conservative Evangelicals there to aid with the nursing.

What appalling, appalling people, these latte-liberal Episcopalians. They are willing to force sick people to wait for a place to rest than to defile their cathedral with the presence of Franklin Graham. I get that they really do not like conservative Evangelicalism. But can’t they put that aside temporarily for the sake of treating the very sick? Conservative Evangelicals aren’t particularly fond of liberal Episcopalians either, but that’s not the most important thing at this moment, is it?

Consider: in 1993, that same cathedral hosted a “Gaia Mass” in which its priests and congregation chanted praises to Egyptian gods. Terry Mattingly, who was then an Episcopalian, and who was present for this ceremony, recalled:

But, for me, the most symbolic moment of the service came at the offertory. Before the bread and wine were brought to the altar, the musicians offered a rhythmic chant that soared into the cathedral vault:

OBA ye Oba yo Yemanja

Oba ye Oba yo O Yemanja

Oby ye Oba yo O O Ausar

Oba ye Oba yo O Ra Ausar

 

Praises to Obatala, ruler of the Heavens

Praises to Obatala, ruler of the Heavens

Praises to Yemenja, ruler of the waters of life

Praises to Yemenja, ruler of the waters of life

Praises to Ausar, ruler of Amenta, the realm of the ancestors

Praises to Ra and Ausar, rulers of the light and the resurrected soul.

— From the printed worship booklet for “Liturgy and Sermon, Earth Mass — Missa Gaia,” distributed on Oct. 3, 1993, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Then the congregation joined in and everyone sang “Let all mortal flesh keep silence.”

Yemanja and Obatala are Yoruba gods who are also worshiped in voodoo. Ausar and Ra are ancient Egyptian deities.

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is a place where pagan gods have been praised in worship, but which will withhold participation in medical care if it has to welcome conservative Evangelical Christians under its eaves. Think about that. I don’t know what they are, but these Divine people are not Christians. There is no grace in them.

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Pandemic Diaries 24

I think my little dog Roscoe, above, speaks for all of us these days.

Here’s the happiest thing that happened around my place today: the Carolina wren babies left their nest! What a blessing it was to watch it happen from behind the glass of our front door (their nest was in a flower pot on the porch). Notice the white wisps on their heads:

There’s something funny about this baby wren hopping out of its nest and onto the back of a graven avian idol:

News from you now follows…

From Wentworth, New Hampshire:

I appreciate you opening up your blog to share some of what folks are experiencing during this strange time.

As you shared, any of us who still have jobs with the unemployment numbers continuing to rise should feel abundantly blessed, and I do.

Still, this crisis has arrived at a difficult time for my family. Inspired in part by some of the stories you’ve shared on this blog about your return to Louisiana, as well as writing by Wendell Berry, and others, my wife and I, and our nine-month-old daughter, moved back to our home state of New Hampshire in early March, bringing us closer to family and into our first house. We’ve looked forward to investing in relationships with family members we’ve mostly only seen at major holidays as we’ve lived our early and mid-20s like many do—somewhat listlessly, in cities, chasing jobs, and loosely, “experiences,”—away from the people and places who shaped us in ways we’ve never fully given credit.

We’re disappointed because of missed opportunities to begin opening our doors to family and new friends during this time. Hopefully we can get back to it all soon enough. As a Catholic, the bigger challenge, which others have mentioned, is entering fully into the Easter season without a physical liturgy. I can only hope the absence of a full experience of the Mass leads myself and others to truly cherish it when it returns. What a beautiful sight it would be to see more churches full in a few months, alive and joyful with the sights, sounds, and smells we recall each time we gather to worship. That’s my prayer.

From Ireland:

So far it seems that Ireland has not been hit as hard as other countries in Western Europe. Now this may be because they’re behind the other countries on the curve, the measures taken by the government, or the relatively isolated position of Ireland compared to open borders continental Europe; or maybe it’s a combination of all three.

Personally my wife, our baby and me we’re all are doing alright, healthwise we’re fine. My wife and me are both not native to Ireland so we miss our families who are scattered all over the planet, but we stay in touch with everyone and we’re trying to stick to our schedules. Economically we feel the pain is coming. Just before it really broke out I accepted an offer from another company to start this month. A week ago they called me saying they don’t need me at least until Q3 and advised me to look for another job. My old employer might take me back for a while, but they will be hit hard as well. Not a great place to be, with my wife also not being able to work at the moment.

It’s interesting how quick life has changed. In December, just after our baby was born, we wrote down our goals and plans for 2020. We would have our belated wedding party, I wanted to change jobs, and hopefully by the end of the year we could buy our first house. Now it’s all upside down. The wedding is postponed, the job change turned out to be a dead end and buying a home is definitely not on the agenda for the coming while.

Since we were expecting our baby we have been way busier with our roots and history, where do we come from and what are the values we believe in. I come from a small Catholic village in the Dutch countryside where for generations everyone would be Catholic and follow the traditions and celebrations. I have several (older) family members who joined the convent. It’s bizarre how that all collapsed within a generation. When I was young I was an altar boy and we went to church every Sunday (as did most of the village). Then our village priest died, he wasn’t replaced, and this thing that was not just a spiritual home to everyone, but also crucial to the social cohesion of the town crumbled. They’re going to close the church in a few years. It pains me to think that certain family members and people I know will not have their funerals in the church of their ancestors. But it’s hard to blame to the diocese completely, people were losing their connection anyway.

And that includes me. I studied at an officially Catholic, but in reality extremely progressive university, where religion was frowned upon. We believed that religion wasn’t needed anymore. Everyone was doing great, we were living in a rich country, life was a party. But now the party might be over. Last year I started reading the Bible, as I was looking for something to hold on to, but also as I feel I’m part of a chain that my child now belongs to as well. And I saw how much damage was caused by the careless, free and modern way of living. The number of young people suffering from depression in Western Europe is staggering, and too many (myself in the past as well) thought another drink, pill or party would make the difference.

I felt a connection with the story of the Texas woman (PD13). I also tried to go back to church but felt disillusioned and isolated. Priest rushing through mass, and no openness to new people. But I have my daily schedule of Bible reading, I pray and I try to find my way back. I watched A Hidden Life and read In Solitary Witness, and it floored me. In some way I feel less worried now than before. I’m grateful for all we have, and pray that we get stronger every day. Your blog has been crucial to us being better prepared than we otherwise would have been. Thanks again for that.

From Rockville, Maryland:

Thanks for your writing which helps the faithful navigate the complexities of our own world. We are among the fortunate. I am a federal employee able to telework and avoid commuting into Washington DC. We have three children off from school with varying degrees of online class work. Our oldest is severely disabled and goes to a special school for kids up to 21 many of who have vulnerable medical conditions. We can only imagine sending her back once there is a vaccine available. Luckily we can take her for walks in her wheelchair in our green suburban neighborhood and for short drives. We used to live in South America where friends with special needs children are asking for therapeutic exceptions so caregivers can take autistic and other special need kids out for short walks, drives, etcetera. With military and police enforcing quarantines in many countries the type of flexibility we have is a blessing.

Our second daughter is a senior and is slowly accepting the prospects of no prom, no graduation and no senior trip, losing her part-time job and not being able to be a counselor at Catholic summer camp. We are still trying to support her decision about what college to go to in the fall, most likely it will be UMD and not a more expensive private school. We do not even want to look how much her college savings plan is worth as we only had enough to fund the first year of public university at the height of the stock market.  Our fifteen year old son is hanging in there with his extreme exercise and playing Minecraft with his friends at night.

In addition to being lucky enough to have a job we are a family of Roman Catholic faith. We all pray the Rosary every day at 3pm. My wife Martha prays the rosary in Spanish on Facetime every afternoon with a lovely elderly lady in our parish nursing home since she can no longer visit.  As we approach Easter, it was very important for us to watch the Pope’s ‘Indulgencia Plenaria’ just a little more than a week ago and receive the act of contrition.  What a solemn moment of the Pope and the glistening Holy Sacrament contrasted against the gray and rainy Rome sky in the midst of the worst moment of Italy’s epidemic.  There is so much programming available on youtube and the internet in general. While it all by no means replaces in person engagement, we have been exposed to so many different approaches and personalities that we feel that in itself is a blessing.

As parents of a lovely, but severely disabled child we would never be able to maintain sanity or perspective without our faith.  She is the beautiful cross the family carries that strengthens our collective resolve and binds us.  We pray for all those with special needs children in their homes at this difficult moment.

From Houston:

Houston is quiet – which is not the usual Houston vibe.  As folks say here in Houston, you don’t come here for the mountains and the scenery; you come here to work.  So, when the city is not working, it seems to forget its purpose.

At church, we continue to have Zoom worship, Zoom teaching of Sunday school, and Zoom prayer gatherings.  We are Presbyterians, so a form of liturgy is part of our heritage if not central to our worship.  Even so, the rhythm and cadence of worship, even over the internet broadcast is more comforting than I would have expected.  I have changed a lot of my opinions over these last few weeks.

I pray that our leaders have made good choices in this lockdown.  I live in and worship with a predominantly white-collar community where many have jobs that can be done, at least for a time, at home.  Sure, folks don’t like it, but they are getting paid.  As usual, the people on the bottom rungs of society, who are just trying to get by, are suffering most.  Every time I watch our leaders make a pronouncement and watch our media ask their obvious questions, I just wonder if any of those guys have lost a paycheck in all of this.  I guess we know the answer to that.  It is depressing to watch the blind leading the blind.

On the other hand, Houston has a vibrant restaurant community that is a wonder to behold in this time of crisis.  These restaurateurs are facing an existential crisis, but they are going down fighting and cooking up great deals.  Last weekend we enjoyed cassoulet and a bottle of French wine delivered to our door.  These are the best of times amidst the worst of times.

Presbyterians have in their theological arsenal the doctrine of “common grace,” which is that grace which God showers on the world simply because he loves his creation.  In the middle of all of this mess, I see doctors and medical professionals of great skill applying their efforts to care for others.  The Houston medical center is a city in its own right filled with technology and talent, focused on caring for the sick.  The fact that I know so many of these professionals are there because they love the Lord Jesus and seek to serve him fills me with awe.  Common grace.

Taking a step back, I have been reflecting this week on St. Paul calling us to be a new creation.  To me, this means the rules and limitations of the past at Easter were broken.  In Jesus’ words, we are born again.  We are resurrection people, and in our churches, we learn what it is to be this new type of person.  We learn the language, the socialization, what is essential, and what is not. We learn how to love.  We learn, in other words, how to live and how, ultimately, to die.

It is that last part we have forgotten.  When this is all the life we have, and it is threatened, especially from an external threat we cannot, it seems, control, we are lost.  When this over, that will be my lasting memory, watching people who are existentially lost, from presidents to restaurant workers, trying desperately to find their way.  Maybe there is a sermon in that (or perhaps a whole series of sermons).

From rural Minnesota:

So far, pretty quiet here for most people. The weather hasn’t been pleasant; it was 62 yesterday and my wife and I sipped wine on the porch till the wind picked up, but that was an aberration. This morning there is a dusting of snow on the bare trees. So we haven’t been outside much. It’s been quiet–but here it’s pretty much always quiet. The folks across the street don’t seem to practice much social distancing, and we eye them warily, like dogs off their chain.

My wife’s been home the last two weeks–she was offered a thirty-day furlough and after looking at the stimulus package benefits, she took it. She’ll get paid more than she did working, drive less, and stay out of the hospital where she could pick up the bug. Good deal. The kids are here half the time and with their mom half the time, which isn’t such a bad deal compared to us being in the same small house 24/7 or near enough. We’re all healthy. Things are fine.

Except they’re not. I work for a health care union, and instead of all the things I normally do–one-on-one meetings, meetings with management to work out plans, basic human interaction–I’m at my desk sixty hours a week trying to prepare for an oncoming storm that no one knows when it will hit. Horror stories with PPE–workers exposed because there aren’t enough tests and not enough masks, and then sent home without pay because they don’t have enough in their sick bank to cover a fourteen-day quarantine. An outbreak at a nearby penitentiary where they have no idea how to isolate the offenders and no easy way to keep the disease from spreading life wildfire among not just the prisoners but the staff as well. Workers told that their immunocompromised status doesn’t matter, they still have to come work, but hopefully your reused surgical mask will keep your co-workers from getting you sick and we will keep you away from the confirmed COVID patients. And at the same time layoffs, because our health care system is so messed up that these small rural hospitals have to rely on elective surgeries to keep the doors open and don’t have the cash on hand to wait until the surge comes–even hoping for a surge of patients so that they can have the revenue to keep the doors open.

I’m not on the front lines, thankfully, so it’s embarrassing to whine. But there’s such a sense of impotence as these problems mount and mount and all I can do is make phone calls and encourage people to work together and listen as a nurse says wearily, “I don’t even see the point of all this. We’re all going to get sick. We are all getting coronavirus. We just need to make things as livable as possible.” I’ve rarely been so busy; I’ve never felt so powerless.

We’ve all done a good job of respecting those health care workers, but I’m still not sure we do it enough.

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The Big Kowtow

This is genuinely outrageous, a shameful kowtow:

British scientific journal Nature has apologised for associating Covid-19 with China in its reporting, saying that early coverage of the global health crisis by itself and other media had led to racist attacks on people of Asian descent around the world.

In an article published on Tuesday, the publication said that the World Health Organisation’s announcement on February 11 that the official name for the pneumonia-like virus would be Covid-19 had been an implicit reminder to “those who had erroneously been associating the virus with Wuhan and with China in their news coverage – including Nature”.

“That we did so was an error on our part, for which we take responsibility and apologise,” it said.

So now, because of the Chinese Communist Party, even one of the world’s top scientific journals has to pretend what is plainly true — that this global pandemic started in Wuhan — is not true? Here is a link to the actual editorial, in which the magazine’s editors condemn not Xi Jinping, but Donald Trump:

And yet, as countries struggle to control the spread of the new coronavirus, a minority of politicians are sticking with the outdated script. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly associated the virus with China. Brazilian lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro — the son of President Jair Bolsonaro — has called it “China’s fault”. Politicians elsewhere, including in the United Kingdom, are also saying that China bears responsibility.

Read it all. This groveling goes on and on. What Donald Trump is guilty of is what Steve Sailer calls “noticing” — in this case, noticing that the virus began in Wuhan, probably in the wet markets there, and that the Chinese Communist Party kept the disease hidden from its own people and the world. This is straight out of the totalitarian playbook: rewriting history to appease a dictator. China should be apologizing to the world, and begging forgiveness from the world for what its government did, and failed to do.

This is going to happen over and over. You watch. If Trump starts pushing US hard decoupling from China, and repatriating US factories from China, he will get re-elected, and will deserve it. It is imperative that we get out from under that rotten government’s boot right now. Three cheers for the Japanese government:

Japan has earmarked $2.2 billion of its record economic stimulus package to help its manufacturers shift production out of China as the coronavirus disrupts supply chains between the major trading partners.

China is Japan’s biggest trading partner. But the Japanese can see what’s happening.

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A Muslim Benedict Option

Shadi Hamid, who is one of the most interesting writers today, visited a Muslim community in rural Pennsylvania, and wrote about it for Plough. It starts like this:

In the 2000 presidential election, my parents, together with nearly everyone I knew in our largely immigrant Muslim community in suburban Pennsylvania, voted for George W. Bush. Republicans, they thought, were natural allies on matters of faith, family, and morality. It was then that many of our parents were becoming more religious on the heels of the Islamic awakening that had spread across the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s. As we entered our teenage years, concerns about the effects of Western culture became more pronounced. Even though my parents were becoming more integrated and somewhat more “Americanized,” that fear of cultural corruption was something I distinctly remember feeling in our local community.

As the writer Asma Uddin, who comes from a similar background, describes her own experience to me:

Most Muslim immigrant parents are always going to consider America more “liberal” than where they came from. So even if America was relatively more conservative back then, it wasn’t conservative enough for my parents. I think they worried less than I do about what their kids were learning in school or seeing in the media, but the general idea was the same: create a safe haven, a community within the larger community, that reflects your way of life.

Today, Muslim Republicans are a rare breed. After the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration’s support for surveillance powers under the Patriot Act cast law-abiding Muslim communities under a permanent cloud of suspicion. The rhetoric of “clash of civilizations” and “crusade” didn’t help. And then there was the Iraq War. Over time, Republican politicians stopped even trying to court a community that saw their party’s national security agenda as anathema. The election of Donald Trump, with his unapologetic anti-Muslim rhetoric, represented the culmination of a fifteen-year process. In Trump’s America, a Muslim Republican is likely to face accusations of betrayal.

But, he writes, as American Muslims have turned to the left, their children have become enthusiastic supporters of progressive social values, such as gay rights, that are inimical to Islam. Hamid writes that there is a debate going on within Muslim communities — out of sight of the mainstream — among Muslims who believe that their communities have been too quick to ally with the left, and to accept social progressivism without objection. More:

Ismail Royer, another prominent critic of Muslims’ leftward drift, writes that progressive organizations hope to “refashion Islam as a secular identity group centered on ethnic ‘brownness,’ and whose moral compass is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party rather than Islamic religious sources.” Similarly, the Islamic legal scholar Shadee Elmasry opposes identity politics and views the preoccupation with white Christian dominance as misguided. “I’m afraid many educated Muslims on the East and West Coasts have fallen into the trap that everything non-Christian is our ally. This is not the case,” he writes. He warns that liberals are simply “using Muslims as part of their diversity hammer to crush the white conservative establishment.”

These fears of cultural dilution and assimilation – in effect, of Muslims ceasing to be what they were – echoes the writing of a growing number of orthodox Christians who feel under assault from American secular culture and liberal politics. In The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher loses little time in describing what is at stake. “The hour is late. This is not a drill,” he writes in the opening pages. Like the traditionalist Muslims discussed above, Dreher sees the progressive push for acceptance of same-sex marriage and LGBTQ self-definition as representative of a more pervasive antagonism toward traditional faith. He warns: “The broader culture in which a child growing up here is immersed offers nothing normative, not anymore.”

Dreher’s arguments about a culture increasingly hostile to people of faith apply not just to Christians. Not surprisingly, his proposals to “form intentional communities of religious solidarity” have begun to draw interest among traditionalist Muslims. The ethos of the Benedict Option – reflecting “a historically conscious, antimodernist return to roots” and cultivating “a sense of separation” – is likely to travel far beyond its Christian origins

In a sense, Muslim communities “were doing the Benedict Option before the Benedict Option,” says Rashid Dar, a writer and former Brookings researcher. “You can call it the ‘Muslim Benedict Option’.”

Hamid pays a visit to Al-Maqasid, a Muslim Ben Op community in Macungie, Pennsylvania. These people really get the Benedict Option, I must say, certainly more clearly than do many Christian critics of the concept. For example:

Today Al-Maqasid is meant to be “a middle place”; one theme that comes up repeatedly is the notion of becoming strong at home to become strong out there, wherever that may be. As Dar puts it: “We want to engage with the world, but we want a place where we can live our lives as we want to live them, in our spaces. Once we have the freedom to do that, we can figure out how to engage with the wider society because we know our own principles and our own values. And we have breathing room.”

Read the whole thing. 

It’s really fascinating to consider the particularly Muslim difficulties that those believers have, living out Islam in a non-Muslim society and culture. Hamid talks about the blessing of American liberty — American Muslims, he says, are the freest in the world — but how this also, of course, challenges Muslims in the same way it challenges Christians: if people live in a society in which they are free to reject the religion, and see others rejecting it, how does the faith hold on to them?

This is the greatest challenge facing all religious believers in the modern, and postmodern, world. As Charles Taylor has so eloquently explained, what it means to live in “a secular world” is that it is not possible to be unaware of the fact that you could live as if God did not exist, and your ancestral religion is false. Even the truest believers cannot be unaware that their faith is in some sense a choice — this, in a way that someone in the medieval era did not grasp, because religious belief was so normative.

J.D. Vance has a great essay about his conversion to Catholicism. I’ll comment on it separately, but I want to mention here that in it, he writes about how his Appalachian family weren’t really churchgoers, but atheism was unthinkable to them. J.D. writes about how he embraced atheism at college:

I won’t belabor the story of how I got there, because it is both conventional and boring. A lot of it had to do with a feeling of irrelevance: increasingly, the religious leaders I turned to tended to argue that if you prayed hard enough and believed hard enough, God would reward your faith with earthly riches. But I knew many people who believed and prayed a lot without any riches to show for it.  But there are two insights worth reflecting from that phase in my life, as they both presaged an intellectual awakening not long ago that ultimately led me back to Christ. The first is that, for an upwardly mobile poor kid from a rough family, atheism leads to an undeniable familial and cultural rupture. To be an atheist is to be no longer of the community that made you who you were. For so long, I hid my unbelief from my family—and not because any of them would have cared very much. Very few of family members attended church, but everyone believed in something rather than nothing.

Boy, does that ever hit home with me. I’ve written many times before about how my folks weren’t big churchgoers, and we rarely if ever talked about God in the house. But the idea that one would see this as a sign that they weren’t Christians would have been literally unthinkable. When, back in the middle of my own college-age experiment with unbelief, I read Kierkegaard’s line about how when one is considered to be a Christian simply by having been born into a society, Christianity ceases to exist, I thought about my own natal culture.

Kierkegaard was talking about 19th-century Denmark, but he could have been talking about my people and my place. He taught that Christianity — real Christianity — always involved choice and consent. It required a personal relationship with God, not simply the following of moral rules or cultural conventions. In the kind of world I grew up in, this was simply not how most people saw it. I asked my dad once during this time how he knew he was a Christian. He told me that he figured that because he was baptized, he was a Christian. Theologically speaking, that was true, at least from a traditional, sacramental view of the faith. Baptism doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be a good Christian, or that you’ll go to heaven — we are all free to fail to live up to our baptismal promises — but it does make one a Christian.

Anyway, when I was a young man, and found my way back to Christian faith, I judged the cultural Christianity of my parents and their social milieu harshly. I don’t feel that way anymore, at 53, and it’s not because I think they made the right call back then — I don’t — but because it’s so easy for me to understand how they simply did not recognize how the world was changing, and how fast. Reading Charles Taylor gave me a lot of insight into the lack of social/religious understanding people of their generation in a Southern small town. But believe me, even though I’m a more devoutly practicing Christian than my folks were, I think all the time about what I might be missing in terms of preparing my children to be Christian adults in this post-Christian world. Once you realize how little control you have over what your kids will believe as adults, you understand what a crapshoot parenthood is.

However, in doing this Benedict Option work, I’ve come to see a couple of things. First, even though the secular movement of American culture has become far more distinct, and acute, since my parents were raising kids in the 1970s, there are still plenty of Christian parents who are just as complacent in their cultural Christianity as parents of my folks’ generation were — except they have far less excuse. The ordinary Christian mom and dad of 1973 did not know what was overtaking the culture. It is impossible not to know in 2020.

Also, I have come across Christian parents who seem to believe that because they cannot control how their kids will turn out on the faith front, that they should not do anything out of the ordinary to make it more likely that their children will embrace a mature faith. This, I think, is a cop-out. The goal of the Benedict Option is not to sequester children from the secular world entirely, but rather to create a social environment from them in which it will be easier for them to choose the faith as adults. When the Pennsylvania Muslim said this:

“We want to engage with the world, but we want a place where we can live our lives as we want to live them, in our spaces. Once we have the freedom to do that, we can figure out how to engage with the wider society because we know our own principles and our own values. And we have breathing room.”

… he could have been speaking in the voice of Marco Sermarini, one of the leaders of the Tipi Loschi, the Catholic community in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy. As readers know, I profiled them a bit in The Benedict Option. Marco and the other dads and moms in that community know that there is no way to force their kids to stay in the community, and to remain there in their seaside city of 50,000, especially when there are many more economic opportunities in Rome, Milan, and Italy’s bigger cities. What they hope to do is to show them a way of life that integrates God, family, and community, in a way that inspires these kids to love it more than they love what the world has to offer. And if the kids grow up and feel that they have a calling to live elsewhere, then they will go out into the world with the love of God, as Catholic Christians, planted deeply in their hearts, and having formed their minds. We really cannot expect more than that.

It’s interesting to reflect on how as a Christian in post-Christian America, I would probably feel better with the Muslims of Al-Maqasid as my neighbors than with nominally Christian people who fully accepted the immoralities of popular culture. But that’s the world we find ourselves in. And here’s a further strange thing, something I can’t quite figure out. I would feel more comfortable with these Muslims as neighbors than with hardline fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because if we lived around Christians, I would feel that my Christian children would have to constantly be on defense about their Orthodox Christian faith, whereas with Muslims, this would probably not be contested territory. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but these kinds of thoughts are the paradoxes of pluralism in post-Christianity.

Below is a short clip introducing Al Maqasid. My thought after watching it is: good for them; I want to have an Orthodox Christian version of this. If you’re a Christian, listen to this clip, and think about what a Christian version of this would look like, as a way of healthy formation and of evangelization to post-Christian, secular America. Again, if you want to see a great Catholic version, go to San Benedetto del Tronto.

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Our Pandemic Stress Baking French Friend

Good morning. Well, it’s morning to me. As you know, I’ve had a recurrence of mononucleosis, which is knocking me around quite a bit. I woke up at 12:30pm, and was tired. This stuff makes my mind foggy too, episodically. And this isn’t as bad a relapse as the original was, from 2012-15. Man, that was bad. I have no idea how I kept this blog going and wrote two books in all of that (except the second book was written after I was much better). But here we are. I saw the new unemployment figures this morning: 17 million Americans unemployed. If any of us still have jobs, we have no reason to complain.

After that jolt, this is going to sound off-key, but still, I think you’ll like this. My French friend Philippe Delansay is a Silicon Valley genius who started his own successful company. He’s now living in the Netherlands, his wife’s home country, with Beatrice and their kids, and an Italian exchange student. He normally flies to San Francisco once a month or so for work, but with the lockdown, he is housebound like the rest of us. Let me tell you, if you’re going to be cloistered at home, you want to do it with a guy like Philippe, who, being French, has decided to pour his passion into home bread-baking.

He has started a bread-baking blog, Flippin’ Yeast. And here is a link to his first video. The original is in French, but he has overdubbed it in English — that’s why the lips don’t match the words.

There is no more good-humored and companionable Frenchman than Philippe — and trust me, this man can cook. My daughter Nora has been baking a lot during the lockdown. I’m going to show her Philippe’s video, and we are going to try making a loaf of his pain de campagne on our own.

Here is a link to the blog itself (versus the overall site). Philippe is a computer scientist by training, so he will take a scientific approach to baking bread. It’s like being in the kitchen with Pascal and Descartes. Philippe says on his blog:

My dream for this blog would be to give life to an online community where people feel free to share and exchange with one another tips and tricks, suggestions and resources that could help everyone grow in their amatorial kitchen experiments. See you in the comment section!

Won’t you join him? Trust me, this is going to be good. Philippe really has the joie de vivre that makes cooking, and eating, and living, fun.

UPDATE: Oh joy, here’s a New Yorker piece by the great Bill Buford, on his experience learning how to bake bread in Lyon. Excerpts:

In Lyon, an ancient but benevolent law compels bakers to take one day off a week, and so most don’t work Sundays. An exception was the one in the quartier where I lived with my family for five years, until 2013. On Sundays, the baker, Bob, worked without sleep. Late-night carousers started appearing at three in the morning to ask for a hot baguette, swaying on tiptoe at a high ventilation window by the oven room, a hand outstretched with a euro coin. By nine, a line extended down the street, and the shop, when you finally got inside, was loud from people and from music being played at high volume. Everyone shouted to be heard—the cacophonous hustle, oven doors banging, people waving and trying to get noticed, too-hot-to-touch baguettes arriving in baskets, money changing hands. Everyone left with an armful and with the same look, suspended between appetite and the prospect of an appetite satisfied. It was a lesson in the appeal of good bread—handmade, aromatically yeasty, with a just-out-of-the-oven texture of crunchy air. This was their breakfast. It completed the week. This was Sunday in Lyon.

For most of my adult life, I had secretly wanted to find myself in France: in a French kitchen, somehow holding my own, having been “French-trained” (the enduring magic of that phrase). I thought of Lyon, rather than Paris or Provence, because it was said to be the most Frenchly authentic and was known historically as the world’s gastronomic capital. Daniel Boulud, the most successful serious French chef in the United States, was from there, as was Paul Bocuse, the most celebrated chef in the world. The restaurateur Jean-Georges Vongerichten had trained in Bocuse’s kitchen, as his sauce-maker. “Lyon is a wonderful city,” he told me. “It is where it all started. You really should go.”

Buford was taken in by “Bob,” a Frenchman who ran a tiny boulangerie across the street from the Buford apartment. Bob — real name: Yves — showed him how to make real French bread:

From our balcony, with a mountain breeze coming off the Saône, the smells of the boulangerie were inescapable. When you live here, you have no choice: Bob’s bread enters your living space. The boulangerie was the village equivalent of a campfire. It held the restaurants together. It united chefs and diners. It made the quartier a gastronomic destination.

Once, I asked Bob for his secret: “Is it the yeasts? Are they what make your bread so good?”

“Oui,” he said very, very slowly, meaning, “Well, no.”

I pondered. “Is it the leavening?” Bob always insisted that a slow first rise—called le pointage—was essential to good bread. Factory bread-makers use high-speed mixers to whip a dough into readiness in minutes. Bob’s took all night.

“Oui-i-i-i.”

“The final resting?” Bread gets its deeper flavor in its last stages, people say.

“Oui-i-i-i. But no. These are the ABCs. Mainly, they are what you do not do to make bad bread. There is a lot of bad bread in France. Good bread comes from good flour. It’s the flour.”

“The flour?”

“Oui,” he said, definitively.

I thought, Flour is flour is flour. “The flour?”

“Oui. The flour.”

Bob bought a lot of flours, but a farm in the Auvergne provided his favorite. The Auvergne, west of Lyon, is rarely mentioned without an epithet invoking its otherness. It is sauvage—wild—with cliffs and forests and boar. Its mountains were formed by volcanoes, like so many chimneys. In the boulangerie, there was a picture of a goat on a steep hill. It was kept by a farmer friend, who grew the wheat that was milled locally into a flour that Bob used to make his bread. The picture was the only information that Bob’s customers required. Who needs a label when you have a goat?

For Bob, farms were the “heart of Frenchness.” His grandfather had been a farmer. Every one of the friends he would eventually introduce me to were also the grandchildren of farmers. They felt connected to the rhythm of plows and seasons, and were beneficiaries of a knowledge that had been in their families for generations. When Bob described it, he used the word transmettre, with its sense of “to hand over”—something passed between eras.

Read it all. Can’t wait for Buford’s new book to come out: “Dirt,” about his experience learning how to cook French in Lyon. It will be published on May 5. The Lyon episode of Anthony Bourdain’s show is my favorite of all Bourdain’s work. It features a segment in which Buford takes Bourdain to Café Comptoir Abel, where they try, among other things, Lyon’s famous quenelles. Because of that episode, I stopped by Lyon with a New Orleans friend, on our way back from the Palio di Siena. James C. met us there. We went to that same cafe to eat. Here is the shot James took of me eating my first bite of quenelle. This, my dears, is what ecstasy looks like:

By the way, here is a ten-year-old BBC segment in which Buford cooks with Bob. Make sure you’ve read the New Yorker piece before you watch this, though. It’s more poignant that way:

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