Good-bye, Daddy

Fifteen years ago next week, on my mother's 85th birthday and exactly one week before Ash Wednesday, my father died.

Some months later I wrote a short memoir about my parents, death, dying, and faith. I say I wrote it, but at the time it felt like I tore it out of my chest. It is the most real thing I have ever written. U.S. Catholic magazine published it for Ash Wednesday 1996. Today, the day before Ash Wednesday 2010, I share it with you.

To dust you will return

From U.S. Catholic (March 1996), pp. 34-36, © 1996 LaVonne Neff

The deacon dipped his thumb in the ashes and marked my forehead with a cross. It was Ash Wednesday 1995, and I was having no trouble remembering my mortality. Less than 24 hours earlier, I had buried my father.

Nine or ten years ago, my father began showing signs of forgetfulness. Nothing serious, I thought. I have trouble remembering things myself.

A year or two passed, and his memory lapses became more noticeable. “I may have already mentioned this,” he would say, and I would cringe, knowing he was about to embark on a story he had just finished telling five minutes ago. Maybe he needs his thyroid checked, I said to myself.

In 1989, when my parents were 79, my husband and I flew 2,000 miles to help them close up their condominium and move into a retirement apartment. My father met us at the airport. He could not remember where he had left the car, and on the way home he got lost three times. As we packed and moved their things, we continually ran across small portents: a comb neatly tucked in a shoe, a pan lid on the bookshelf. In the pantry, next to 17 jars of Metamucil, were 37 bottles of hand lotion. And everywhere were reminder notes scrawled in my father’s hand: “Harold phoned.” “Go shopping.” “The bread is in the refrigerator.”

Self-righteousness

I believe everything I wrote yesterday: torture is always wrong. No matter what.

However, last night I got to thinking about how very easy that is for me to say. I have never tortured anybody. I have never wanted to torture anybody. I have never even pulled the wings off a butterfly.

Nor am I in a position where I have the power to torture anybody, or to decide that anybody should be tortured, or to judge whether or not torture is legally permissible.

So, yes, torture is always wrong. But it's not something I've ever personally struggled with, so in making that judgment--the right judgment to make! and one that every Christian should agree with!--I can very easily slip into self-righteousness. I am right! (And I am, of course.) Those other Christians are wrong! (As indeed they are.) I am so much better than they are. (Whoa... not likely.)

Here's what I'm thinking I should do: pick a book of the Bible, any book. Read it for its big ideas. Try to identify its major ethical teachings, whether they are explicitly stated or implicit in the stories related. Look especially for areas where I clearly do not measure up. Ask myself why not, and see if I can do something about it--change an attitude, change a habit, add or subtract some activity, whatever.

I say I should do that. I don't know if I will. I expect it would be ever so much more difficult than saying torture is always wrong. Though of course it is very wrong, without exception.

Torture and white Christians

I am distressed by the Pew survey showing that of all religious groups, white evangelicals are most likely to approve of torture and white Catholics are second most likely. Yes, Catholics had the Spanish Inquisition and Puritans had the pillory, stocks, and branding, but I’d hoped we’d gotten past all that. Perhaps the survey results are just one more indication that the doctrine of total depravity is correct.

Fortunately, the survey doesn’t tell the whole story. The post by Mr Neff on CT’s LiveBlog notes that in 2006, Christianity Today magazine ran a cover story called “Five Reasons Torture Is Always Wrong,” and in 2007 a wide range of evangelical leaders signed a document called “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror.” Many evangelicals are appalled by torture and have been speaking out against it for years.

Likewise, the Catechism of the Catholic Church said in 1997 that "Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity," and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a document in February 2008 that began, "The Church stands firm in denouncing torture as it undermines and debases the dignity of both victims and perpetrators. Pope Benedict XVI said 'the prohibition against torture cannot be contravened under any circumstance.'"

What would the world think of Christians if we stood up for human rights for the poor as well as the rich, for the unborn as well as the born, for the old and sick as well as the young and healthy, for women and children as well as men, for the guilty as well as the innocent, for immigrants as well as citizens, for gays as well as straights, for Muslims as well as Christians, for enemies as well as friends—even when doing so is unpopular among our friends or downright dangerous, and even when we disagree with the people whose rights we are protecting?

Most Christians, thanks be to God, already stand up for human rights in most of those situations. Unfortunately, all of us (being human) find some causes more compatible than others, and all of us have blind spots. Perhaps the Pew survey will challenge us to reexamine our attitudes in those areas where our politics and the views of our friends may be at odds with the teachings of Jesus.

Scarpetta and the God's-eye view

I have now listened to 12 of Patricia D. Cornwell's 16 Scarpetta mysteries. Though my two worst high-school classes were home ec and driver ed, I spend much of my life in the kitchen or behind the wheel. Keeping a long series going is a great way to keep myself going as well. But I'm done with Scarpetta for now.

I had been warned that the Scarpetta series is graphic and gruesome. "Oh well," I thought, "I'm a big girl. I can deal with it." And it really wasn't all that hard to deal with--the bloodiness was mostly in the forensics lab where Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of Virginia, explored the body cavities of the dead. Not lunchtime material, maybe, but technically interesting. Besides, the plots moved right along, and the characters--feisty Scarpetta; her conflicted niece, Lucy; bigoted, vulgar, but good-hearted Pete Marino; enigmatic Benton Wesley--quickly became my friends.

In The Last Precinct (book 11), however, Cornwell made a big change: she switched from the previous books' past-tense narration to a breathless present tense. Essentially a retrospective on Black Notice (book 10), The Last Precinct deals more with Scarpetta's inner turmoil than with outside events, and present-tense narration can be an effective way to get into a character's mind. Still, I thought, the story suffered--but maybe Cornwell would find her footing in the next book.

And then in Blow Fly (book 12), the tone changed entirely. Still using present tense, Cornwell began writing in the third person with an omniscient narrator. For me, that was the coup de grâce. This book, though dealing with the same characters as the two previous books, had become almost unlistenable. I listened anyway, feeling sick. Why, I wondered, should the narrative shift make such a difference?

And then I understood: from the God's-eye view, everything is visible and everything is present. I could see Scarpetta (though not as often as I wished), but I could also see murder, kidnapping, torture, and dismemberment taking place on stage, from the viewpoints of the people committing these acts. I could enter into the minds of several sociopathic, narcissistic, thoroughly evil characters as they plotted new crimes. I did not feel terror--I knew Scarpetta would emerge relatively unscathed to star in the next books--but I felt extreme revulsion.

Nevertheless, I went to the library and checked out book 13, Trace. It too uses present tense and an omniscient narrator. Soon I was in the mind of yet another psychotic criminal, one described by a reviewer as "one of the creepiest villains to come along since Silence of the Lambs." Enough! I said, and pulled the cassette out of the player (our car is very old).

The God's-eye view is not for the faint of heart. Even God got tired when he looked down and "saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually" (Gen 6.5). According to the biblical tale, that's when he decided to drown nearly the whole lot of us.

I'm going to return Trace to the library in a few minutes. I'm thinking I'll trade it in on an audiobook by Lisa Scottoline. I'm hoping her point of view is restricted. Sometimes one should avert one's eyes.

What are we supposed to care about?

Apathy--acedia--my favorite of the seven deadlies, yet often so hard to identify. Where is the line between culpable laziness and sabbath calm? Between hardness of heart and holy detachment? Why is the tortoise praised, but the sloth reviled?

"Twenty Days of Apathy," Heidi Neff's recent show in Brooklyn, looks at le vice du jour through a series of striking--and unsettling--drawings and paintings. Here's what she wrote about the show:

Heidi Neffʼs search for meaning has always inspired her work, but it is increasingly hard for her to know what she is supposed to care about.

Through sources such as CNN Breaking News, we get constant reminders that people are dying in wars and natural disasters alongside celebrity gossip. Britney Spearsʼ latest breakdown gets equal weight with a tsunami that killed over 170,000 people.

Neffʼs paintings based on illuminated manuscripts seek to explore and reflect this conundrum by putting Internet-based headlines and news stories within a more intimate context.

Her most recent drawings and paintings juxtapose headlines and to-do lists or other diaristic drawings of non-eventful days. By doing this, she hopes to expose her own apathy and possibly find a way out of it.

Truly God, truly man

It took the Christian church more than four hundred years of constant discussion to agree to a formula explaining just how Jesus could be both God and man, without leaning too far in one direction or the other. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 issued a definition that has been accepted by most Christians ever since: Jesus is “truly God and truly man,” “consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity.”

The men who framed the Chalcedonian confession had to get past two stumbling blocks that, according to their way of thinking, made the union of God and man almost unthinkable.

First, good Hellenistic philosophers that they were, they were convinced that God is completely unchangeable. If God cannot change, he cannot suffer and he certainly cannot die. How, then, could Jesus be fully God and yet suffer and die on the cross?

Second, for reasons that I have yet to figure out, the church fathers apparently believed that all sexual pleasure is seriously sinful. A woman could conceive a child without sin, but a man could not beget a child sinlessly, and the sin of sexual pleasure transmitted original sin to the descendants of Adam and Eve. How, then, could Jesus be truly man and yet remain untainted by original sin?

Pope Leo I (the Great) came up with a way to get past both barriers. Several years before the Council of Chalcedon was convened, he had written a letter to the Bishop of Constantinople explaining how Jesus could be simultaneously God and man. His letter became known as the Tome of Leo, and the whole thing is worth reading.

Leo allowed that God might not be quite as unchangeable as the god of pagan philosophy: “The Lord of the universe veiled his measureless majesty and took on a servant's form. The God who knew no suffering did not despise becoming a suffering man, and, deathless as he is, to be subject to the laws of death.”

But Leo did not give up his belief in sexually transmitted damnation. Jesus’ birth, he wrote, was unprecedented, “because it was inviolable virginity which supplied the material flesh without experiencing sexual desire. What was taken from the mother of the Lord was the nature without the guilt.”

This is a far cry from the word of Wisdom in Proverbs 5:18–19:

Let your fountain be blessed,
and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
May her breasts satisfy you at all times;
may you be intoxicated always by her love.

Oddly, the church has often identified Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible with the Word in the New Testament. Even the dour old bishops did that, but they seem to have missed some of the connections. I'm still looking for early Christian writers with a wholesome, hearty, Hebrew view of sexual love.