On Playing Pretend

November 18, 2011 By Marc 7 Comments

Go read something else, I don’t know if this makes any sense.

I suppose admitting to playing ‘dress-up’ as a child is these days akin to admitting a flamboyant homosexuality. But from what I understand — which is admittedly little — homosexuality has become a positive thing! (No, really, I read it on a blog!) And thus, in the proper English tradition, I shall keep calm and carry on.

Now ladies, you must realize that for little boys there is nothing less frivolous and more solemn than donning a spidey-suit or a spongey, Roman breastplate. There is nothing ironic, sentimental or self-aware about playing Cowboys and Indians. There is no awareness of dress-up being dressed-up.

After all, children have such a good idea of who they are that they either laugh at, or are simply confused by that angst-filled self-question, “Who am I?” The fact that he cannot answer the question — besides by giving his name — is no evidence of a child’s self-ignorance, but of his self-knowledge.

Think about it: The perfection of the virtue of patience isn’t to think ‘I am being so patient right now’. No, it is simply to be patient. Likewise, the self-awareness of a child isn’t one that can answer the question, “Who am I?” or think on ‘who he is’. No, of course not. He simply is. He is far too busy living in the Present to evaluate it.

We all ran – if I remember correctly – without shoes on hot asphalt under God’s sun, and there wasn’t much more to it. We knew exactly who we were. This seems to be evidenced by the fact that a 4 year old having an existential crisis would freak us grown-ups out.

The reason the child can wear a costume and wear it not as a joke, nor for an occasion, and without a trace of awareness of wearing anything unusual is this: If the question “Who am I?” is bizarre to him, then so is the question “Who am I not?” An adult cannot –without great effort — put on a Roman centurion’s outfit and be a Roman centurion, for an adult is lost, asks the question of the stars, “Who and what am I?” and thus is always aware of his not-being a Roman centurion.  A child, who doesn’t even bother with the question “Who am I” is a Roman centurion.

This seems to be why we ask children running in costume, “And who are you today?” and rarely, “And who are you imitating/pretending to be today?” We know innately the innate self-knowledge of a child. This is why make-believe was so fun and is so missed – it was real. We were not pretending, for there was no pretense. Is was not that we used our imaginations to the point of belief, it was that we believed our imaginations, for we had not yet learned to question ourselves. We didn’t play dress-up — only an adult could do that. We simply dressed up.

We look back with nostalgia, but we forget that there was no real thought that “I am pretending” in our make-believe. We should learn from this, I think. So often we are once-removed from what we are actually doing: I am praying. I am in love with this girl. I am reading a book. (Oh, that one is the worst.) Or perhaps: I am a writer. I am an artist. I am a Catholic.

Christ said that unless we become like little children we will never experience Heaven, and I do believe he was referring to this life as much as the next. Unless we become like little children we will always feel estranged from ourselves, always outside looking in. The answer is to live in the Present moment, to always and only be who and when we are. Everything else is a lie. For if we are really praying, we cannot think “I am praying,” or else we’ve finished prayer and begun a self-evaluation. Those truly in love don’t think “I’m in love” except as afterthought, because the moment you think it, the moment your thinking about yourself, which seems the opposite of love. If I think “I am a writer” I am certainly not writing.

We need to live our lives as we once played pretend. How? By being Saints. As far as I can tell, the only difference between a Saint and a child is that a Saint works for his innocence, while children are blessed with it. Isn’t it funny? The doom of every man is to start where he wants to be, fall off, and spend the rest of his life trying to get back.

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How To Convert

November 4, 2011 By Marc 14 Comments

The common view of religious conversion seems to be this: There are many ways one can stumble towards the gentleman we call God. And on the surface, I agree. After all, rainbows and relationships have lead men to faith, as have Holocausts and heartaches. Collins converted at the sight of beauty; Walker Percy at the sight of a Jew in New York City. Dorothy Day became a Catholic by a series of small and slow steps; St. Paul by one big fall, simultaneously off and onto his ass.

But it is necessary to dive deeper. For a rainbow is meaningless without our light-translating eyes, as is a relationship without our participation. A Holocaust is horrifying, but only if we have the heart to be horrified. In each instance of conversion the Self is the thing that matters. To say it coherently: A conversion occurs because an external event reveals the truth about the internal self. There may be multiple and varying facets of conversion, but there only one way to conversion, and that is through the human person. Namely, you.

And does this not make sense? The Blessed Sacrament aside, what is the most perfect image of God on earth? Where is the evidence for his existence? I hold that the greatest mass of evidence for the existence of the Creator lies in the strange creatures said to be made in his image and likeness. Ourselves. You want God? Look in.

Conversion, then, can be described quite simply as an act of seeing ourselves. Not looking at ourselves, mind you. We do that way too often, an act of bogus self-assessment, an intentional glance in a mirror and a ridiculous summation of all the things that don’t matter one bit: “I’m Joe, I work in a factory, I listen to hipster music, I look good in these jeans, I’m a social conservative…”

No, no, no. Conversion is seeing ourselves, all our shams and poses stripped away. Conversion to the Jew-God-Belief must be akin to accidentally looking in a mirror, to seeing ourselves as if for the first time, to walking down the street, looking into a shop window, stopping, and thinking “Who the hell is that? He looks so – ah. It is I.”

Take the example of the Universe surrounding us. There are two ways to go about it: One is to look – and you will walk away an atheist – and the other is to see – and you will walk away a believer.

Individual One looks up at the night sky and calls to mind several facts – the light from
the stars travels through both space and time to reach his eyes, the earth is not the center of the universe, in fact, it is not even a dust-mite in the universe, the Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter, we cannot comprehend the vastness of space, we are alone on this rock, it’s all so meaningless, how can there be a God who hold us in high esteem? Individual One looks, he makes his assessment; there is no conversion.

Individual Two looks up at the night sky and recalls the exact same facts. He too is struck by the apparent infinity of the universe, the utter worthlessness and laughable unimportance of the World. But then something happens: He turns and accidentally faces a mirror. What makes the 1000 light-year galaxy so tremendously great? It is not the number – who can conceptualize such a size? It is not the thing itself, for there is no rational reason we should be impressed by a Very Big Thing any more than a Very Small Thing. “What on earth? Ah – it is I.”

There is no conception of Frightfully Huge without me to project that conception. A planet might be larger than other planets, but it takes a human person to give it the quality of Unimaginably, Awfully Larger. As C.S. Lewis says,

“To puny man, the great nebula in Andromeda owes in a sense its greatness.”

There is no reason the size of the Earth makes it an unimportant dust-mite other than the fact that I have a conception of importance and of dust-mites, and I have given it to the universe around me.

If we were only material creatures, we would look at the distance between us and our workplace; 5 miles. We would look at the distance between us and the farthest galaxies we can see; approx. 1000000000 light years. We would move on; two distances, one much larger than the other, absolutely nothing more to it. But what does the mirror actually show? People freaking out, falling on their knees in despair over such a distance. People looking up and contemplating their existence.

In short, our actions admit that we apply the Spiritual to the world around us. They admit that we are spiritual creatures. The man pointing to the skies and saying our existence is meaningless is the greatest proof I can offer that our existence is meaningful. Conversion happens as a result of this – realizing there exists within you the conceptions of awe and majesty and terror and horror and that these are not of this world. What animal is thrown into existential crisis over the size of a mountain? What rational reason do we have to be awed?

So to the Christian hoping to win converts, the point is this: The overused, “How can you not believe in God? Have you never seen a sunset?” is close, but not close enough. The real question is, “How can you not believe in God? Have you never seen yourself seeing a sunset?”

To my Catholic readers, the point is this: We must show man himself. We must create beauty. What is art – poetry, painting, great novels, music, movies, myth – but a mirror held up in the face of man, calling him to “know thyself”? What is the experience of being overwhelmed by beauty but the acknowledgment that there exists That Which Is Too Much For Me? And if that does indeed exist, why on earth would I be able to acknowledge it, unless by some incredible and strange fact I am made in the image and likeness of That Which Is Too Much For Me?

To my atheist readers: convert.

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Distraction By Cuteness

October 9, 2011 By Marc 9 Comments

Perhaps this is a distraction unique to the solemnly-stodgy liturgical denominations, those in the odd habit of sitting in pews and looking forwards. I mean, of course, Distraction By Baby. There you are, happily staring down the liturgy, when over the shoulder in front of you rises a cherubic glitter of eyes and cheeks, some gurgle of joy or hunger – who knows which is which – and you are left with a conundrum. Baby or God?

But of course, such a distraction is never really a distraction, and there exists no such conundrum between a baby and God. Babies, after all, are the most beautiful things in the world. Therefore, one might as well gaze upon a baby as a work of stained-glass in order to lift his heart to the Creator. I understand it’s a strike against my writing career that I only ever quote the same writer, but whatever, let Gilbert talk:

But the humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.

I cannot help but agree, these midget creatures destroy depression faster than a handle of Walker Percy’s favorite bourbon.

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So there I was, in divinely inspired and rapt contemplation of a baby. Actually, it was a child-toddler-young thing with a few teeth and spacial-awareness. Regardless, I was watching this child squirm in his father’s lap, and I noticed something strange. The father had him pinned across the belly with a big, strong carpenter’s arm, covered in that manly fleece of hair that as a child I was always fascinated by – and am still at least mildly jealous of, though I have no doubts in my eventual attainment of manhood – full of the veined, muscled strength of a father. What was interesting was that the child was certainly straining, one would hardly argue that, but he was not straining to be free of his father. He’d squirm against the strong arm, look up at his father’s face and smile. He’d squirm again. He tried no new tactics, no slipping under his father’s arm, no new and original squirm. He just repeated the same motion of pushing against his father’s arm, feeling the resistance of it, and settling back in his father’s lap, smiling. The father paid no mind; he simply held his child.

The beauty of the thing was articulated thousands of years ago, by the Psalmist who said, “Your law is my delight.” As human beings, we want rules. We want freedom, of course, but we’d most especially like rules that allow us to be specially free. The Moral Law, when lived all around, keeps us free from fear. When lived by ourselves, it frees us from the slavery of addiction to sin. We push and strain, sure, but there is great joy in the strong arm of our Father, that embraces us and says, “no further, lest you lose your freedom and joy.”

The modern world would have the Father move his arm and let the child run off into the crowd. “Don’t pressure us with your morality!” they cry, pressuring us with that peculiar morality of relativism. But this I guarantee. Had the father in front of me moved his arm and allowed the child to slip off his lap, the child would have clambered back on again. If he were to never, ever impose his strong arm, the child would not have a father, nor the father a child, and neither would feel any more joyful, and neither any more free. Let us be delighted then, by the law of our God, who demands of his children all sorts of contradictions to the demands of the modern world. He asks for faith, hope and love, for instance, as well as His tougher requests for monogamy, purity and obedience. Let’s shock the world by remaining in His arms.

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