Bush’s Nightmare (Rant 109)

Cowboy Cookies. All their fault. Baked by First Lady Laura Bush, her own recipe, absolutely delicious, the President devours them before going to bed. Alas, this once they play the most powerful man in the world a tricky trick. As he slides gently into Morpheus’ arms, George W. Bush has a dream – nay, a nightmare, and…



Oh, Fr Frank, easy to guess. The state visit to Britain is marred by ugly demos. More and more US soldiers get killed in Iraq. Country sinks into civil war, anarchy and chaos. The economy worsens. He doesn’t get re-elected…



Nope. Wrong dream and wrong scenario. UK visit is a qualified success. Iraq stabilises. Ogre Saddam is spotted in his lair at last and ‘terminated’. The President scrapes through the next election. Not bad, eh?



Really? What’s this nightmare then?



Blacks, chiefly.



Eh? What! Bush is not a racist. You can’t pin that on him…



Sure. But over into the Pres’ incubus:



‘Mr President, Mr President, wake up! Louisiana has just announced it’s joining the Islamic Emirate of Amrika. The twelfth state to secede. You have to make a statement.’



‘My, oh, my! I’ve got me a problem. It’s against the constitution. What’s the matter with these black converts? Why don’t they like our great country?’



‘Mr President, you’ve had it coming a long time. Remember Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, the basketball player? Converted to Islam from Southern Baptism. Back in ’96, he refused to stand up when they played the Star Spangled Banner. And Muhammad Ali, formerly Cassius Clay, rejected Army draft. America, he declared, was ruled by Zionists, ‘really against the Islamic religion.’ And, before that, the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad. Malcom X. Louis Farrakhan demanded a separate state for black Muslims some years ago. Well, they’ve got it now.’



‘Ha! That’s the damnedest thing! What the hell! Can’t we get Colin Powell and Condy Rice to do something? They’ll dish it out to them.’



‘Sorry, Mr President. You forget you dismissed Powell after you got re-elected in 2004. Your Secretary of State now is Ariel Sharon. Everybody kept saying he might as well have held that job – so he got it. Unfortunately, he won’t be able to help much with this.’



‘By golly! My Middle East friends then. The Saudis. They’ll help. Aren’t they keepers of Muslim holy churches or something? I’ll phone my friend King Saud. Get him to put in a good word with our blackies…’



‘No, sir. Again, your memory lets you down. The Saudi monarchy was toppled years ago. All the Royal Family was slaughtered in a coup. Radical Islamists took over. Jaysh Bin Laden, Osama’s son, is now Commander of the Faithful in Arabia. And Egypt, Syria, North Africa, all the regimes of the region have either voted Islamists in or succumbed to popular insurrections. It all started with your invasion of Iraq. It radicalises everybody. They now call themselves the reborn Muslim Califfate.’



The President groans. ‘My, oh, my! It never rains but it pours. But I know what. Tony Blair. Let’s phone him. (He’s got blacks too.) The British always have an ace up their sleeve. He’ll have ideas. But it’s a little cold in here. Isn’t the heating on?’



‘No more Middle East oil, that’s why, Mr President. And Britain isn’t too reliable these days. King Charles III is Defender of the Islamic Faith. Prince William is married to a Moroccan princess. Because of the birth-rate, most of the country is now populated by Muslims. Tony Blair is semi-retired – runs Harrods’ pet shop department part-time. Takes order from boss Mohamed Al-Fayed. Specialises in poodles. Kind of a joke amongst Brits: ‘It serves him right’, they snigger.



Total despair spreads over Bush’s face. He takes his face in his hands, is silent for a while. Then he asks, wearily: ‘Is there no hope left, Herb?’



‘From Iran, perhaps, sir.’



‘Iran? The axe of evil? And nuclear programs. You kidding?’



‘No, sir. It’s about this Mahdi guy of theirs, sir.’



‘The Mad…a mad one? Amongst the ayatollahs? It figures.’



‘Not quite, Mr President. The Mahdi means ‘the right-guided one’. A kind of Muslim messianic deliverer. One who comes to rule before the end of the world. One who restores peace and justice. All Muslims believe in him, notionally, but Shias especially. And imminently. We got this promising Mahdi project going right now…’



‘But how can a Muslim Shia deliverer deliver me from my current woes, I ask you?’



‘Well, sir, it’s an idea the CIA have got. Based on this old British novel, Greenmantle, by John Buchan. A ruse German spies got up to during WWI. They got wind of Muslims in the British Empire being stirred by expectations of the Mahdi’s return. The Mahdi would mount a holy war against the infidels. Defeat them and drive them out. So, the Germans made sure a Mahdi turned up, you see.’



‘No, I don’t see , Herb. Call me dumb, but I don’t get it. A Shia fanatical holy warrior unleashing a crusade…oops, that word again - you know what I mean – this kind of guy would be pure poison, surely?’



‘No, sir. Not if he rallies the faithful to holy struggle against Sunni, anti-Shia fundamentalists in the Middle East, Pakistan, America, all over the world. (They don’t believe the Mahdi is identical with the Shia Hidden Iman, for one thing, but we won’t go into that.) Once we have divide the enemy camp, we can then rally our troops and fight back.’



‘Oh, can we? That’s great. By the way, what troops of ours are you talking about? Marines? Navy Seals?’



‘Er - Mr President, we thought of more ideological crack units. Something like Jerry Falwell. Southern Baptists. Christian Zionists. Boys from Mossad. They’d be best suited for the job to fight Muslim hordes back. Nurture back our blacks who have defected to the Emirate. Bring democracy to the Middle East…’



‘There is some error with this reasoning’, it begins to dawn on Bush. He is about to belt it out when feisty barking from pooches Spot and Barney wakes him up. As the nasty nightmare fades away, the President is hugely relieved.



‘Oh, the Lord be thanked! It was only a crazy dream. Laura, pass me some more of those Cowboy cookies, please.’

Survival (Rant 108)

Once upon a time there was a king. A man who hankered after knowledge and wisdom. He therefore summoned the wise men & women of his kingdom. ‘Make me an encyclopaedia that includes everything mankind should know’, he ordered. The fellows dutifully obeyed. In due course, they produce the result – say, in a 100 volumes. Alas, the king told them off: ‘Are you joking? Life’s too short. I haven’t the time to read all that. Condense it. Make it shorter.’ Off the wise ones went. Laboured again. Returned with a 10-tome affair. ‘Still too long!’ the ruler growled, ‘Shorter!’ Crestfallen, the encyclopaedists tried once more…You’ve got the picture by now. The king really was a difficult man to please. Again and again, more brevity was demanded of the royal scholars. Until, the insatiable monarch really commanded the impossible. ‘Put it all in one word!’ One single word to express, distil the sum of universal human wisdom. Crazy, isn’t it? Yet, the much harassed wise men, after taking counsel, complied. Returning to the king, in fear and trembling, they offered him that one word. And, lo and behold, he was much pleased.



What could that word be, gentle reader?



I am not keeping on tenterhooks – the answer is: survival.



Disappointed? I hope so. The answer will vary as people vary. Like an inward mirror, the quiz must reflect your own mind’s values. Still, as answers go, survival ain’t too bad. You can see why it would appeal to those in high places. ‘Survival’ must be a thought very much on poor Prince Charles’ mind right now…



Father Frank, please, give that unhappy man a break. Instead, why don’t you tell us what word you would choose?



The same: survival.



Yak! Can’t be serious! Something so earthbound, evolutionary, material. You, a priest. Really!



Ah, you are jumping to conclusions. Physical survival – I mean not that. Rather, it is post-mortem survival…geddit it?



Oh! What a relief. Life after death. Yes, that belief does become a clergyman. But it raises a few problems. For one thing, unlike bodily survival, why should we care? You know Lucretius’ short answer to that, no doubt?



Indeed I do. ‘When we are, death is not. When death is, we are not. Hence, death can be nothing to us.’ Ergo, Lucretius contends in On the Nature of Things, death is nothing to worry about.



Seems pretty neat…



Aye, too neat. Lucretius, a follower of Epicurus’ atomistic philosophy, was a materialist. The soul, for him, wasn’t deathless. And his cosmology a priori ruled out Providence. He made no allowances for the possibility of a God who apportions rewards and punishments in the afterlife. That’s why his argument is fatally flawed. I wonder what he is thinking now – if he has not perished, as he expected. By the way, a modern, logically tougher Lucretius might be Wittgenstein. ‘Death is not an event in life. We do not live to experience death’, he gnomically wrote in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Deep down, he too suffered from tiresome, reductionist metaphysics…



Sounds like an unpleasant disease, Fr Frank. But how do you construe your post-mortem survival then? I mean, what exactly survives after death? Not the body, surely…



Personal identity, that’s it. Whatever survives, it must relate to that. And personal identity, to mean anything, must mean my identity, the identity of me as a person. That is why, for example, great Schopenhauer’s laboured proof of eternity misses the point. That notorious misogynist claimed that personal identity was what Hindus call Maya, illusion. Albeit a necessary illusion, brought on by our being trapped in the causal and spatio-temporal frame of our cognition. In actual reality, sans the human conceptual apparatus, there is no ‘I’, no self, no personal identity at all. Survival can’t be of me, because there is no real ‘me’ in the first place. Hence, it must be impersonal. Tough.



Did he persuade many people?



No, apart from a few misguided young men who went on to commit suicide.



Here, despite my proud BA in philosophy, I must side with the hoi polloi. Call me bloody selfish, I wouldn’t care a two-pence for a survival that wasn’t a survival of me. Would you?



Er…not much, Fr Frank. But the body disintegrates at death. What survives then? The soul?



The soul does survive. It is the necessary condition of personal identity. Plato saw that. However, necessary does not mean ‘sufficient’. My survival as a disembodied soul is not fully the survival of my self. Because this Fr Frank communing with you in cyberspace is not simply a pure mind or soul – it is also a body (an aging, at times aching one, alas…) – crucially so. And mind+body= the human person. St Thomas Aquinas, a fellow, bulky Italian, put it in pellucid Latin: ‘Anima mea non est ego - I am not my soul’. Christianity is often accused of being other-wordly, detached from materiality. Aquinas refreshingly teaches that matter, the body, is an essential condition of being human. It takes more than an ectoplasm, an ‘astral body’ or a disembodied spirit to make a full human person. That matches the ordinary pub wallah’s intuitions, I bet. Plus my own…



I follow you. But, in the post-mortem life, the soul is separated from the body. How then does the person, the real ‘I’, survive?



Here helpfully revelation steps in. The Christian faith affirms the resurrection of the body. The redeemed life of the blessed in Heaven will include restoration of the whole psychophysical organism – bodily resurrection – because Adam and Eve were created by God not as ethereal spirits but as embodied beings, as full persons. (Islam also teaches Qiyamat, the resurrection of the body.) Goody.



And what kind of body precisely shall we have at the resurrection, pray? Our body aged 20? 40? 60? As infants, or what?



You ask for precision. With Aristotle I’ll reply that it is the mark of the educated person that he/she asks for no more precision than the subject matter allows. (St Augustine wondered whether the resurrected person would be spherical, because a sphere is the perfect shape - I care little for that.) Maybe the Lord will reassemble the same atoms making up our earthly bodies, revivified in a wondrous way, quien sabe? St Paul in I Corinthians hints at a glorious mystery: the risen body will be new. St Clement of Alexandria says that the redeemed ‘will shine like the sun’. Stupendous stuff.



But can we really believe that, Fr Frank? Honestly? Would it not be more spiritual, more mystical to give up this problematical, mythological stuff? To believe instead in eternal life here and now?



God forbid. A religion that did not believe in a life beyond the grave would be no religion: it would be atheism in disguise. The ultimate liberal cop-out. I can see how it might hugely appeal to a secular, faithless world, of course. What a beacon are Christ’s comforting words here: ‘Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world!’

Cities of the Plain (Rant 107)

What’s the name of the most famous city in the Holy Land? Come on, absurdly easy quiz, Fr Frank – wouldn’t pass muster on Chris Tarrant’s ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ show. Jerusalem is the answer, obviously, what else?



Yeah, but that was only a warm-up, my friend. What are the names of the two next most famous cities?



I can hear the deafening silence. Think, think…No use? Let me give you a clue. Two towns in Southern Palestine. Of them only memories, but very tenacious ones, remain. Their ruins probably lay beneath the dead waters of the Dead Sea. Still no joy? All right then. It will set a few bells alarmingly ringing: Sodom and Gomorrah.



Er…Fr Frank, we get you. This is a prelude to a rant about today’s consecration of openly gay bishop Gene Robinson in New Hampshire, is it?



Yes and no. Of that egregious episode, a temptation is to imitate sourpuss art critic Brian Sewell’s verdict on the Turner Prize, ‘none of us needs to be serious about it’ – and, stifling a yawn, perhaps add, with the March hare: ‘I am tired of this. Let us change the subject.’ Unfortunately, such cavalier posture might overlook that event’s potentially dire effects. Think of the warnings by third world bishops that Christianity’s enemies are now free to portray it as an immoral religion. They fear a frightening spate of violence, murder and mayhem on innocent Christians living in partibus infidelium. Will their blood then be on Gene Robinson? Up to his conscience to decide. But Sodom and Gomorrah’s dark spell on history and culture transcends present, preposterous Anglican shenanigans. It is too important a matter to joke about it. Because at the heart of the Bible’s message of salvation – no less.



Gosh, sounds like fundamentalism is beginning to rear its ugly head. What next? Leviticus? St Paul’s fulminations? The Apocalypse? St Thomas Aquinas’ sins against nature? Ulster’s Ian Paisley? The Taleban (RIP) or…what?



Abraham, actually. Yes, him. Patriarch Abraham. The father of faith – of all true believers. The figure the three monotheisms revere as their chief spiritual ancestor. The same man who prayed to God on Sodom’s behalf.



Wow! Never heard that. Did he really?



Look it up. Genesis 18, vv.20-33. The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah’s iniquity is so great that God threatens destruction. Whereupon Abraham intercedes to the Lord: “Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then destroy it? God softens, so Abraham continues – “Suppose there forty five…will you then destroy it?” And so insistently on, six times. Anyone who believes in the justice and mercy of God, as well as in the value of intercessionary prayer, ought to meditate long and hard on this splendid passage.



Still, God hardly lets Sodom off the hook. He later does destroy it.



Read and ponder on the next chapter. You will then discover something interesting. The emphasis is crucially on the men of Sodom’s sin against hospitality. The contrast is with Abraham’s earlier, friendly reception of three mysterious strangers (angels? Foreshadowing the Trinity?) by the oak of Mambre. Andrei Rublev’s celebrated Russian icon of the philoxeny of Abraham, the Patriarch’s loving welcome of visiting strangers, illustrates that mystical scene with minimalistic artistry. In this sense, it is true to say that Sodom’s behaviour sadly inverts our God-given duty of being hospitable to the foreigner, the refugee, the needy and vulnerable. But, again, the focus is maltreatment of guests, not sexuality. Something similar goes for Isaiah, Ezechiel and Christ himself - references available on request, folks.



Hmm, Fr Frank, pardon our saying this, but you have changed the subject after all. Admirably liberal but also very naughty of you…



Liberal, moi? What an atrocious slander. I shall prove it. I am taking up the gauntlet. There is no question that the Bible, church teaching and traditional moral theology all declare homosexual practice to be wrong. It stands to reason it must be so, with stronger reason, within the very ark of salvation, the Church. Even a distinguished, thoughtful, non-self-hating gay commentator as journalist Matthew Parris recently came out in support of this self-evident truth. Anglican liberalism has allowed gay clerical subculture to overreach itself. But, achtung! – never, never forget: Christianity is a religion of redemption. No one, no sinner, no matter how awful, is excluded from, is beyond God’s grace. Jesus’ ministry of course perfectly incarnates that. He got a lot of flak from the right-thinking, self-righteous, haughty Pharisees for his willingness to rub shoulders with sinners. Christ, ‘the friend of sinners’, may well be one of his official titles. OK, guys, I know, all this is unexciting theological old hat but it had to be said, just in case. And I’d rather be right with the Lord Jesus than stunningly original by myself.



So, what’s the way ahead, Fr Frank?



Abraham’s example shows it. To pray, to intercede constantly for the conversion of the scattered descendants of Sodom and Gomorrah, the ancient cities of the plain. Before you think this too pious or unreal, stop. The great Islamic Christian scholar, Louis Massignon, liked to refer to Sodom’s fault as essentially spiritual, ‘a desire for a perverse heaven without God’.(Might the West’s brazen enthronement of sexual desire at the centre of its culture, combined with rejection of religion, amount up to the same thing?) It follows that real remedies have to be spiritual too. He commended frequent reception of the sacraments, Holy Communion, spiritual exercises, retreats, pilgrimages, spiritual direction, a whole panoply of fine devotional practices – sometimes, why not, even marriage. Scoff at this as much as you like. I bet the ineffably stupid, heretical Church of England authorities would, too. To hell with them! I won’t.



Stoking up the fires, eh, Fr Frank?



Spiritual fires, for sure. Hellfire was never like gas fire. But God forbid I should close with that. Hellfire isn’t one of my things. I prefer a little story from those great characters, the Desert Fathers of Egypt. Set amongst a community of monks in a secluded oasis. One day they discover a brother had committed fornication with a woman. It causes grave scandal. ‘You are a sinner’, they sternly reproach him. ‘You cannot live with us. You must therefore leave our community.’ The wretched fellow bows his head and makes preparations to depart. At the same time, a very old monk, the holiest, most ascetical, most irreproachable brother in the monastery is seen as if he is about to go away too. Astonished, the brethren inquire: ‘What on earth are you doing? Where are you going?’ Quick is the answer:



‘I am leaving – because I, too, am a sinner.’