Preventing Grace
I am seriously closing in on the end of my online school year. There are all kinds of things we have to do in June but the class portion, with finals and papers and quizzes and panic, that is all about to wrap up. Just two more panic stricken days and then we all, or rather I, collapse. Did I say that already? So the blogging has been pretty dumb around here because I’ve been preoccupied for sure. But also because the internet is dumb.
In fact, I have kind of a double life going on. During the day, waiting for children to remember the names of whichever goddess Odysseus was ‘being faithful in his marriage with’ (hahahahahahahahahaha, that was a joke) I scroll around the Internet muttering to myself ‘What a stupid time to be alive.’ I don’t want to overuse my new favorite word, but everything is a farce. Then, at night I go to bed and read PG Wodehouse and other older works of timeless literature, in this case, Black Lamb Grey Falcon, which I’ve been trundling through at no great speed for about eighteen years because I don’t ever actually read it. But I picked up again this week for the Usual Attempt. I do love it. It’s just so fat, it’s hard to hold open at night when I’m tired. And also her writing is so beautiful it just makes me hate modern life even more.
I mean, in the evening to read this,
“We walked along the quay that runs around the point of the little peninsula, following the walls, and then went up a steep little street, close-packed with palaces, which thrust out balconies to one another or were joined by bridges, into the town. We found it like a honeycomb, it was dripping with architectural richness, and it was laid out in an order such as mathematicians admire. But the spirit was riotous, the honey had fermented and turned to mead.”
but then in the morning to wake up to the foul image and then lame apology of Kathy Griffin, or this breathlessly excited report about gay vultures raising a baby, just makes me depressed.
It’s not that I’m nostalgic for the past. West traveled through the Balkans right before World War II and there is an ominous brooding thread through her whole unwieldy tome. It’s not like humanity has gotten worse over the intervening years of terror occasionally interrupted by prosperity. It’s that so much of it is just so ugly.
I’m just having my usual complaint. I guess I don’t mind Evil that much if it’s expressed in an interesting way. Evil ought to be scintillating, alluring, trying to draw you in with some promised dark beauty. But it keeps over playing it’s hand. Evil isn’t So fascinating that if it’s badly expressed I will have any time for it.
Of course, the truth should be a poignant and light filled thing, something that draws you forward by its true unshadowed beauty. But the violence and ugliness have exhausted everyone, even those ones who used to know how to look and find a vision glorious. Most of us Christians descend into moralizing preaching finger wagging–or so this writer thinks, accusing even Rod Dreher of something as base as ‘spiritual pornography.‘ I think he doth paint with too broad a brush. Christians who don’t find themselves recoiling from the brash onslaught of cultural wickedness must needs wake up and see what is going around them.
But the response, though I desire it powerfully to the depths of my soul, shouldn’t be to withdraw. Nor to capitulate and drink exclusively from the foaming cup of social media. It must be to try to regain strength to see the bright hue of truth. Not to wag the finger at Kathy Griffin but to click away from her violent wish and head ever more sharply up the narrow path, the rocky and lonely way that leads to salvation.
And now back to Odysseus, faithless and wicked man, though completely fascinating. Pip pip.
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