Peacock-thoughts for a Pandemic Sunday

Peacock by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Charis in the World of Wonders
Ignatius Press, 26 March 2020

It's quiet in the village today. My amaryllis is silently, slowly opening. Though we're near the hospital, there is little traffic going by, and a good many Sunday villagers are or have been or will be snug in a comfy chair, watching the streaming services of their local church... or not, as they choose. 

At top, see a Clive Hicks-Jenkins peacock with its tail furled, one of the chapter division images for Charis in the World of Wonders. Peacocks have been a natural for symbolic bird since ancient times and for many cultures. Those eyes. The splendor of the shaking, unfurling fan. The rich, glitter of color. The piercing cry.

The early Christians adopted a belief of the ancient Greeks that the peacock was connected to immortality. Aristotle believed that the flesh of the peacock did not become corrupt after death. Perhaps ancient Greeks never let peacock leftovers last long enough to find out! But many years later, St. Augustine made experiment of the meat and agreed with Aristotle, finding that the flesh became only a little drier over time. Curiouser and curiouser!

Our modern image of a medieval royal table probably includes all sorts of weird, fantastic platters of food, including swans in plumage and peacocks with the great fan attached and spread. Desiring to have your own medieval feast, you might follow this advice:

A pecoke

Cut hym yn necke and skald hym 

cut of þe fete & hede 

cast hym on a spete 

bake hym well 

the sauce ys gynger.

That's a recipe from fifteenth-century England (Pepys MS 1047), by way of godecookery. The site also suggests that you not eat a peacock because it is tough and stringy. For myself, I would recommend that you not eat peacock because the peacock is beautiful and will give you a great deal more pleasure when rustling its tail of stars.

Nevertheless, godecookery offers a fourteenth-century sauce for your inedible peacock: poivre jaunet, from the 14th century Le Viandier de Taillevent. Grind up ginger, long pepper, saffron, an optional bit of cloves with verjuice, all toasted and then infused in vinegar or verjuice. Verjuice (Middle French "green juice") is a juice to pucker your mouth. Press some sour fruits like crabapples or grapes not yet ripe, and maybe even add some lemon or sorrel juice. 

Now you have it; take your scalded and spitted and stringy peacock and slather him in a sharp yellow pepper sauce. Tada! Here is the immortal flesh, preserved in acid and spice!

Paintings or mosaic work with peacocks appears as early as the third century A. D. in Roman catacombs. Part of this seems to be bound to the earlier idea that the flesh of the bird does not decay and holds some sort of immortality; that thought becomes a symbol wandering into regions of eternal life and resurrection. Part must be bound to the idea of leaving the earthly body and receiving a glorified body and soul, for the peacock in his fully revealed green and bronze and cobalt pomp and magnificence is an image of radiance and splendor. This sumptuousness finds its culmination in the peacock as symbol of Christ, who did not decay in the tomb and is transfigured and glorified.

 The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius by Carlo Crivelli, 1486
National Gallery.jpg (Public domain Wikipedia)
I see a kind of triangle between the source of God-radiance in the sky,
the figure of Mary at prayer, and the peacock with its tail pointing toward Mary.

Flannery O'Connor was child-famous at the age of five for her backwards-walking chicken, a buff-colored Cochin Bantam, and later for her writing and her love of peacocks, kept on the farm at Andalusia. And given O'Connor's Catholic faith and the great fan of symbolic meanings associated with the peacock, that's not surprising. Her "Living with a Peacock" is a marvelous thing, and you should go and read it right now. The dressing ("A gray bantam named Colonel Eggbert wore a white piqué coat with a lace collar and two buttons in the back.") and addressing of chickens, the aloof habits of peacocks, and much more are delightful. Her first peacock arrives with no tail but "carried himself as if he not only had a train behind him but a retinue to attend it." Here, go! And if you need a nibble to entice, here is one:

When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing haloed suns. This is the moment when most people are silent.
“Amen! Amen!” an old Negro woman once cried when this happened and I have heard many similar remarks at this moment that show the inade­quacy of human speech. Some people whistle; a few, for once, are silent. A truck driver who was driving up with a load of hay and found a peacock turn­ing before him in the middle of our road shouted, “Get a load of that bas­tard!” and braked his truck to a shat­tering halt. I have never known a strut­ting peacock to budge a fraction of an inch for truck or tractor or automobile. It is up to the vehicle to get out of the way. No peafowl of mine has ever been run over, though one year one of them lost a foot in the mowing machine.

And doesn't this sound like an O'Connor encounter with strange grace from her stories?

An old man and five or six white-haired, barefooted children were piling out the back of the automobile as the bird approached. Catching sight of him, the children stopped in their tracks and stared, plainly hacked to find this superior figure blocking their path. There was silence as the bird re­garded them, his head drawn back at its most majestic angle, his folded train glittering behind him in the sunlight.
“Whut is thet thang?” one of the small boys asked finally in a sullen voice.
The old man had got out of the car and was gazing at the peacock with an astounded look of recognition. “I ain’t seen one of them since my grand­daddy’s day,” he said, respectfully re­moving his hat. “Folks used to have ’em, but they don’t no more.”
“Whut is it?” the child asked again in the same tone he had used before.
“Churren,” the old man said, “that’s the king of the birds!”
The children received this informa­tion in silence. After a minute they climbed back into the car and con­tinued from there to stare at the pea­cock, their expressions annoyed, as if they disliked catching the old man in the truth. 

What stops so many is that galaxy of eyes in the shivering fan of feathers. O'Connor's people, black and white, instinctively grasp what a medieval man or woman felt about the peacock. Awe in the presence of the utterly strange and beautiful knocks at their doors. Symbolically for the medieval Christian, the spread feathers expresses the overwhelming, beatific vision of God. For them, the feathers made an analogue to God's glory.

Further, the eyes suggested the all-knowing nature of God, who sees and fathoms both the depths of all things and even what we may regard as things of the surface and small like the death of a sparrow or the number of hairs currently residing on your head. Interestingly, the peacock is also the vanquisher of serpents in medieval bestiaries, and also a bird immune to poisons. That means that the peacock stands in relation to the serpent as Christ stands in relation to the devious snake in Eden's garden.

I found this shot of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church (San Francisco)
on Pinterest, and can't seem to find the photographer...

The peacock still lingers in our world as a resplendent symbol of majesty, particularly in the Orthodox church. The rich double peacock image above shows the part of an Orthodox church called the Beautiful Gate, used by clergy, with its deacon doors or angel doors on each side. As is usual, Christ is on the right and the Theotokos on the left of the gate and doors.

I'll end with a poet who reached for the effulgence of the peacock and the preternatural nature of its cry. Here's a snip from a poem:

 And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
 .
 The colors of their tails
 Were like the leaves themselves
 Turning in the wind,
 In the twilight wind.
 They swept over the room,
 Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
 Down to the ground.
 I heard them cry—the peacocks.
 Was it a cry against the twilight
 Or against the leaves themselves
 Turning in the wind,
 Turning as the flames
 Turned in the fire,
 Turning as the tails of the peacocks
 Turned in the loud fire,
 Loud as the hemlocks
 Full of the cry of the peacocks?
 Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

In "Domination of Black," Wallace Stevens sweeps together darkness and autumn, deathly hemlocks, the gathering planets (so like the unfurling galaxy-tail of the peacock), and the idea of turning... all set against the memory of the preternatural cry of the peacocks. The otherworldliness of that stands opposed to dark and year's end, autumn and the hemlock, long associated (via funereal plantings and by the hemlock--not really the same hemlock as ours!--drink of Socrates) with death in the West. And this turning of autumn leaves in the wind, of flames in fire, of feathers in firelight is, not so surprisingly, a motion familiar to the peacock, who turns as he shivers his fantastical milky way of eyes.

And here's an image mixing peacock and leaves--
could not find peacocks in hemlocks!
Peacock in the Woods - 1907  (Public domain Wikipedia)
by Abbott Handerson Thayer (August 12, 1849 – May 29, 1921)

The world and words this morning

After reading student calls for "reporting and tracking microaggression from faculty" and the need for "cultural humility training" for professors, and after reading the morning news of the latest people murdered for their incorrect thinking, incorrect beliefs, or incorrect efforts to help the plight of others in their faraway countries, I felt a little beaten down. The world seemed lacking in beauty and goodness.

Being rather silly at times, I had the urge to eat the last chocolate bunny. Unfortunately, the consumption of chocolate bunnies solves very little. Doesn't help.

Coming across a little passage of Nabokov helped. It had beauty. It had goodness. It was suffused with love, the work of a creative being reaching toward someone he cherished.

Three years have gone--and every trifle relating to father is still as alive as ever inside me. I am so certain, my love, that we will see him again, in an unexpected but completely natural heaven, in a realm where all is radiance and delight. He will come towards us in our shared bright eternity, slightly raising his shoulders as he used to do, and we will kiss the birthmark on his hand without surprise. You must live in expectation of that tender hour, my love, and never give in to the temptation of despair.

Now this praise and image of glory expresses a son's love for his father. It also expresses a Christian belief in a creative, bright realm beyond this life--not a very popular concept among intellectuals when he wrote those words. Although you may be thinking that I'm wandering away from the original topic (the effect of too much chocolate, perhaps), this homage does have something to do with free speech, correct or incorrect thinking, and variety of opinions:

V. D. Nabokov, a lawyer and professor and athlete and editor of a progressive newspaper, was a liberal who was convinced change was overdue in Russia, but he eventually came to abhor and then oppose the bloody revolutionary chaos that arrived. Elected to the first provisional parliament ever formed in Russia, he was a courageous man, a hero to some. When he leaped up to shield a political enemy who was speaking at a rally in Berlin, he was shot to death by a pair of assassins. Their intended victim walked away unharmed    --both passages from a review of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Larry Woiwode in Books and Culture

First, I note again the beauty and goodness and warm love in the passage of a letter written to Vladimir Nabokov's mother. Second, I note that V. D. Nabokov was a liberal and a progressive who lost his life--who gave his life--in defending a political enemy. Third, I note the calls for campus tribunals and training. Fourth, I note the slaughter going on around the world in the service of abolishing incorrect beliefs and thinking.

Word power

This page in the nigh-infinite library of the web is devoted to words arranged in the right order. Here are heartfelt, powerful words of anguish, beauty, and forgiveness--words that reveal the heart and soul, the mixed tangle of feelings, and the chosen determination to hew close to the injunction, "Love one another."

"You have killed some of the most beautifulest people I know. Every fiber in my body hurts.... May God have mercy on your soul...We are the family that love built."

The response by "Mother Emmanuel" church to the shootings reminds me so much of the words from the Old Order Amish to the shooting of ten girls, ages 6 to 13, at the Amish West Nickel Mines School back in 2006. They were shot at close range, execution-style, and five of the girls died on the spot or soon afterward, while the others were seriously injured. The Amish expressed forgiveness and comforted the family of the killer. The thought of an Amish man holding the killer's father in his arms makes an indelible picture.

M. R. James / Michael Chabon

Merry 10th day of Christmas...

I've been reading Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories (Oxford University Press, 2002), a collection of the ghost stories of M. R. James, a writer I've gone back to from time to time. The twelve days of Christmas are always a good time for reading James, as many of his stories were written as Christmas Eve entertainments at his college. This Oxford World's Classics edition has an introduction by Michael Chabon, and I was interested though not surprised to see that he especially admires the particularly good tale, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad."

Parkins, the professorial protagonist of the story, does not believe in the supernatural of any kind at all:

     'Apropos of what you were saying just now, Colonel, I think I ought to tell you that my own views on such subjects are very strong. I am, in fact, a convinced disbeliever in what is called the "supernatural".'
     'What!' said the Colonel, 'do you mean to tell me you don't believe in second-sight, or ghosts, or anything of that kind?'
     'In nothing whatever of that kind,' returned Parkins firmly.
'Well,' said the Colonel, 'but it appears to me at that rate, sir, that you must be little better than a Sadducee.'
     Parkins was on the point of answering that, in his opinion, the Sadducees were the most sensible persons he had ever read of in the Old Testament; but, feeling some doubt as to whether much mention of them was to be found in that work, he preferred to laugh the accusation off.

The young, rather humorless professor is barren of interest in any form of the supernatural that might intervene in human life, whether it be second sight or ghosts or God. He knows as little of ghosts as he knows of the Bible, and at several points has trouble following the Colonel, who is a firm Anglican and suspicious of popery cropping up in the local vicar. We know right away that Parkins will get his comeuppance before the story is done, and powerfully so.

I've read a good bit of both M. R. James and Michael Chabon and must say that I find it fascinating the way Chabon both praises James for his adept use of the supernatural in fiction and yet rejects what is supernatural in the man's biography. He is astonished at the happy life of M. R. James--that he was so happy, despite the element of the supernatural in his life:

     M. R. James presents a nearly unique instance in the history of supernatural literature--perhaps in the history of all literature: he seems, for the entire duration of his life (1865-1936) to have considered himself the happiest of men. His biography, insofar as it has been written, is free of the usual writerly string of calamities and reversals, intemperate behavior, self-destructive partnerings, critical lambasting, poverty, illness, and bad luck. His childhood, though it sounds to modern ears to have been a tad heavy on devotional exercise, Christian study, and mindfulness of the sufferings of Jesus and his saints, was passed in material comfort and within the loving regard of his parents and older siblings; the candlelit gloom of the paternal church was counterbalanced, if balance were needed, by ready access to the beauties of the East Anglian countryside that surrounded his father's rectory.

I find it intriguing that there's no thought at all that there might be a causal connection; that a childhood steeped in the supernatural realm might actually be a shaping force behind his moral adulthood, professional and literary accomplishments, and general steadiness. There's no sense that the beauties of the creation might be matched by the church (which might not be so gloomy after all) and the beauties of a creator.

In this way, Chabon portrays himself as a kind of Parkins--a characteristic M. R. James protagonist who has turned his face away from the supernatural. If Michael Chabon were a character in a James story, he would very soon find his comeuppance.

On the second day of Christmas--

Clive Hicks-Jenkins,
The Comfort of Angels Attending the Dying

This blog is a literary one and not a political one; I tend to leave any comments about politics to facebook or twitter pages, and even there I usually focus on other things. Some people have a vocational call to work toward social justice and to spread understanding. My vocation is in the realm of sub-creation, making stories and poems that I hope reflect the joy and sorrow of wandering the world in the short space between birth and death. In subterranean ways, these too may help one soul understand the worth of another.

But I could not help but mourn that Christmas Day 2013 meant a celebration of death to many--that it meant ongoing slaughter in a Christian community two thousand years old, abandoned by our media. More attacks on Christians in Baghdad killed 37 on Christmas Day, 24 of them emerging from church after worship.

That great Power, our mainstream media, has chosen to turn the proverbial blind eye; it has been deaf to Christian cries for help from Syria and Iraq and elsewhere. Perhaps that is why we ordinary people of the West have not spoken up. If you know nothing about the ongoing genocide of Christians in the Middle East, please dig around on the internet and educate yourself about the scouring of this ancient, vulnerable community. We little people, banded together, can sway our world; we can demand for the media to be better and nobler than it is, if we only will.

Many are the strange chances of the world … and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.  Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Pigs and pearls

I'm still thinking about Flannery O'Connor's prayer journal, published in time for Christmas gift-giving, and why that publication might have been a fairly bad idea. R. T. aka Tim brought it up on his new blog, A Commonplace from Eastrod, and there I simply said that the book was part of that unclean effort to trawl through a writer's remains and find something, anything publishable.

Long ago I was asked for my manuscripts and papers by a librarian at Wilson Library at UNC, and I replied that I was not sure that I liked that idea, and that I would think about it. I'm still not sure, though in a sense one would be lucky if anybody actually wanted to trawl through one's remains in hopes of finding a bit of ambergris in the beached corpse! Certainly a great deal has been published that would have been better to remain as rare library research material for academics or else destroyed. I'm still wondering whether it is not better for writers to burn the dross and leave the gold.

So one reason to dislike the publication of the prayer journal is that it was a private thing, not meant for people but intended by O'Connor solely for the maker of the prayers and the Maker of the maker of the prayers. Flannery O'Connor was guided by that purpose and her audience was one, or three-in-one. Some words are meant for a wide audience; some are not.

But there is another, stronger reason not to publish the journal, and it is one that surely compelled O'Connor in her writing: the well-known biblical injunction not to cast your pearls before swine. In the Bible, the kingdom of heaven is compared to a great, wondrous pearl. So when a Christian like Flannery O'Connor is enjoined not to strew pearls before pigs, she is being cautioned not to offer what is holy where it will be debased and muddied: "Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you" (Matthew 7: 6, NRSV.) And no, it doesn't mean people are pigs...

O'Connor the writer, reading that familiar line, knew that it was asking her to know her audience, and saying that it is wrong to be the cause (don't strew your pearls willy-nilly!) of other people trampling on what belongs to God. What is holy can be muddied and torn by people with no sympathy or understanding, and that can lead to rejection and scorn for the one who offers the pearl. Well, that's familiar as part of the story of Christ, isn't it? Interestingly, the gospel record shows that Christ was willing to say the most astonishing things to people just-met but was rather close-mouthed and oblique with unsympathetic questioners. Moreover, the gospel shows us the peculiar power of story. Parables often carry the freight of meaning; they tell the truth but tell it slant--that is, stories protect the pearl yet reveal it to those with eyes to see, ears to hear.

Flannery O'Connor seems to feel in a similar way about art and writing in her essays: “Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.” Without eyes to see and ears to hear, one never grasps the pearl of art. And in O'Connor's view, that understanding is limited to those who will take the trouble to grapple with stories. What is regarded as the difficulty of her stories can be seen as a way of obeying the injunction not to cast pearls before swine. Only those who will take trouble to understand will, in fact, receive them.

 * * *

For further comments and some sharp arguments against me, go to Pigs and pearls, part 2. Some of them have a better grasp than I do on those pigs and pearls!

Marly talks to Richard Dawkins

Faux-talk no. 2

   BATTER my heart, three, person’d God; for you

   As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;

   That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend

   Your force to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.

     --John Donne*

My first talk of this peculiar sort was with Seth Godin. I enjoyed it so much that I have decided to seize Richard Dawkins for my next! (I'm pondering Benjamin Franklin for faux-talk no. 3.) Blogging being what it is, a quick-and-dirty activity, I have pilfered my Dawkins-quotes from a real-Richard-Dawkins interview and from brainyquote.com.  I hope that my e-Richard will not mind if I tease him a bit, though I am a little frightened when I remember that militant atheists often appear deficient in the small matter of having a sense of humor.

Disclaimer: I have read numerous articles about Richard Dawkins and interviews with him, but I have never read his books.  Second disclaimer: I believe I am safe in asserting that he has never read any of my books either—or, indeed, any stray poem or story of mine.

As in the conversation with Seth Godin, I have the good luck of being the blogger, and so I get to have the last word!

Delightful.

*

Professor Richard Dawkins:

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

Marly:

One reason why fairies and magic are so very popular these days is precisely the decline of religion. That is, magic whispers to us a simple thought, that there is more to the universe than meets the eye—perhaps in particular, more than meets the science professor’s eye.

Professor Richard Dawkins:

It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

Marly:

That’s an amusing remark.

It’s human nature; people always think that their own field hogs more than its share of public ignorance. All you have to do is look at many blogs and at people’s choice lists for book of the year and so on to find out that, yes, people do freely and openly and even happily and with gusto confess their ignorance of literature.

A perennial favorite in the world of social media and blogs is the confession of “great books I should have read but haven’t read,” which people find amusing. Long threads invariably ensue. (Here, I go on record as confessing that I doubt that I will ever read Frank Norris’s trilogy, though I have read excerpts, and I have read McTeague several times. And I liked it, so you would think that I might at least work my way through the first book of the trilogy. See? We like confession.)

Furthermore, all you have to do is look at what people buy in the way of books to discover that many of them are not actually acquainted with or interested in literature.

Professor Dawkins:

I think my ultimate goal would be to convert people away from particular religions toward a rationalist skepticism, tinged with . . .  no, that’s too weak . . . glorying in the universe and in life. Yes, I would like people to be converted away from religion to skepticism.

Marly:

A strange thing I observe is that every believer has often experienced doubt, but not every doubter has experienced belief. So believers are quite acquainted with skepticism, and doubters are by necessity in a parlous state of ignorance about faith. I suspect that leaves the believers with a pronounced advantage in the area of understanding.

Professor Richard Dawkins:

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

Marly:

Let’s look at a particular person in our time instead of institutions and great masses of time.  Most of us have trouble compassing many institutions and great expanses of time. 

I am thinking of a certain man who has been both an unbeliever and a believer. He is perfectly ordinary, of above-average intelligence, although he has once heard an unearthly voice (I expect you think that makes him stupid or mad, and I don’t suppose he would care if you said so) and often felt transfigured by an influx of what he calls spirit—the Holy Spirit, to be precise. He does attend church because he thinks worship and being part of a community are important. He strives after discipline, devotion, study, and communion with God.

Now, since you don’t have faith, it’s very hard to convey to you what he might possibly mean by communion with God—by the great rushing flood of consciousness that pours through him like a greeting from another world.

But it seems, Richard Dawkins, that this experience is the sort that one desires more and more after the first encounter. Good adjectives for his state in communion: over-powering; bright; sweeping; ecstatic.

Now if you could have an overpowering experience of ecstasy, bright and sweeping, would you object? And if you, Richard Dawkins, tried to explain it away, would all that explaining make such an experience less vital and powerful? And if, as you say, there is no good or evil and so on, why would you want him to stop having this experience of communion, which is a big, potent, and exciting thing in his life and transforms him for the better?

Ah.

According to your lights, there is no good or evil, and so this can’t actually be a good experience, can it? It’s just an experience, however thrilling.

So stick a neurological explanation on the experience, as though having a description of bodily responses explained them away, and get on with your campaign, Richard Dawkins!

Professor Richard Dawkins:

What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?

Marly:

Spoken like a proper professor! 

Why is it that knowing much about one subject makes people think they are capable of pronouncing on any subject—or makes them assume other traditionally-studied subjects are lesser? (I say “traditionally-studied” because such odd things have crept in. Education majors. P. E. majors. Recreation majors. And so on.)

I do think it is a subject and that there are many interesting books in the library under that rubric, although I gather you fought against a named chair in Theology (after you secured your own named chair, of course, in your own area. Entirely wise and very understandable and 100% grade-A human.)

Most people who choose to have the experience of worship—and here I’m talking about Christians, because the village where I live is composed of Christians, agnostics, atheists, and a sprinkling of foreign students, some of whom are Buddhist or Hindu--don’t know a huge amount about Theology. They know about the Bible and study it; they do read a certain number of secondary-source books, mostly written for a lay audience; they seek after God; and they are involved in outreach and service to others.

A few can read Hebrew or Greek and are more scholarly. One studied medieval Latin but has moved away, alas. I find the presence of these students in such a tiny place to be surprising. Oddly enough, they have things to say that make me think that your ‘theology’ (note scare quotes) is a subject after all.

Perhaps you could attend a reputable Divinity School in your retirement and find out whether it is a subject or not—find out exactly what it is.

Professor Richard Dawkins:

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

Marly:

Thank you.

 

  

*John Donne, metaphysical poet and writer of masterful devotions and sermons (as Dean of St. Paul’s), whose words are still worth reading all these centuries later.

Mike-diary: an Asian Christ

Here's a bit of Lenten musing on religion in Asia, Christianity in particular. Like any discussion of religion flung out into the world, it will probably find a welcome and scorn in equal measure. Feel free to comment, either way! And thanks to those who have written emails about Mike's journal jottings--pleased to have some notes from interested novelists and readers.

Dispatches from Indochine (3/6/11)

Christianity holds a funny place in Asia. We really thought it hadn't taken. Perhaps this was because Christian missionaries always seemed to do better in places with more primitive religious traditions. It seems to be easier to turn an animist into a Catholic than say, convert a Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist. So while the effort was made, it seems to have been more of a pro forma operation. Translating some scripture, implanting some missionaries (poor, almost comic creatures in most modern westerners' eyes), building some small churches, in general "flying the flag" but not really opening fire with a cannonade of theological debate or forced conversions à la Cortez.

But after the colonial powers contracted, after Europe convulsed through two wars, after secularism became the fashion in places like Portugal and Scotland (once the hot, moist birth canal of missionaries), Christianity kept perking along in Asia. In some places, like Japan, it is mostly the educated, traveled upper class that embraces the Cross. In others places, such as China, it is the bon succor of the oppressed. In some places, like the Philippines, everybody is Christian. In Vietnam it is the faith of the middle class.

And they are not shy about their faith. In Saigon the most happening place on a Saturday night is not the night clubs like Apocalypse Now or Saigon, Saigon. It is the square outside the Cathedral Notre Dame. A rather large crowd gathers there at the heart of every weekend to pray the rosary for hours. Their Buddhist neighbors show up too, if only to watch or set up food stalls. And on Sunday morning the churches themselves are packed. The 9:30 a.m. service I attended held perhaps 1200 people, not counting those in the transepts or in the narthex. And new churches are being built all the time. The Church of St. Paulo and St. Pierre is just as large as Notre Dame and was only completed 6 years ago. And it was packed at noon. Packed.

So as Europe ages and secularizes, some westerners fret about the fate of Christianity. And I have no doubt that Europe will be Islamized. But since it will be a conquest of the already dying, I think that will be a hollow victory for the Muslims. Already, on any given Sunday, more Christians go to church in the country of China than in the continent of Europe. And the percentage of Christians is growing in every growing Asian state.

We owe this largely to the fervor of the Koreans. Much like the Irish of the Dark Ages, the Koreans have evangelized abroad during dark times, taken great risks and I would now credit them with a great harvest. They are still active and, along with Filipinos, are probably the most active force proselytizing among Muslims.

So if Christians lost, say, Sweden and gained China and India, who would not say it was a net gain? It only requires that we westerners understand that Christ is more than what we think he is. Perhaps we should be ready to accept him with an Asian face.

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Photograph of a doorway from the "old town of Hoi An, Vietnam" is courtesy of sxc.hu and Dutch photographer Timo Balk of Melbourne, Australia.