for whom the bell tolls today

John Donne

I had not really meant to write about this but the resurrection is really about death and then about resurrection. How to die, how to see a friend die, and then to understand how to live. That is the story of doubting Thomas really. Not about doubt at all but about how to grasp reality. His friend really had died. That is common fact, historical fact. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate (the Apostles’ Creed). “Jesus’ body decayed (.82 red)” - The Jesus Seminar’s consensus.

He had died. What did it mean? What did it mean, then, that he had lived, and how he had lived? That was the question, those were the questions, that occupied the disciples after Jesus’ resurrection. 

And so they began to understand. Who he really was, who they really were, what there was to do next, after there had been nothing to do because after all he was dead and we were all going to die. But now, how are we to live?

Jesus’ reality comes stronger, now, knowing that he ‘had’ to die, to fulfill his mission he had to stay true, even though that could and did mean accepting death, execution at the hands of another corrupt administration. The chief priests and the scribes, the leaders so-called of the people, the people they were betraying, with their every breath, handed him over oh so gladly to the Roman authorities, the occupying authorities, who were the means, the instrument, the engine of execution

But he himself was the engine of understanding. He took, as the gospels give him to us, all of human experience, humanity, life itself, into himself, and made it whole and wonderful and sane even as it hurt beyond belief. Yes, others have suffered more, as many were executed his way, as he was executed, by the Roman authorities, in their thousands. And that may be exactly the point. 

He did not have to do it. He did not want to do it. He wanted to live and he wanted to live life in its fullness. And so he did.

And he did not keep it to himself. Miraculously he shared it with us.

(All this came to me in part as I was listening to the comments halfway through the second episode of “Hemingway” the PBS series. One of the writers got it right, one got it wrong, about what “for whom the bell tolls” means: I think the latter had not understood where it came from. Albert Camus did, or would have. The plague. That is where it came from. John Donne, Meditation XVII, the epigraph to “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, as I memorized it in eighth grade (but had yet to understand). John Donne was writing about people dying in an epidemic, a pandemic, the plague, as it hit London in the 1660s, - as Pepys memorialized it in his diary - and so “the bell was tolling for all of us, in Europe and the United States” is wrong: it is about death, it is the mark, the memorial, the moment, the announcement, of some one particular dying. And Hemingway got it right, and his character Robert Jordan got it right, and John McCain reading it got it right, it is about that particular death and therefore, therefore, about our own, our own humanity, and therefore our own life.) 

And so we live. Knowing what it is at last to die, we begin to know what it is to live.

***

From Meditation XVII, John Donne, (1572-1631), and from the epigraph of Hemingway’s novel:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. 

***

The whole thing: 

Meditation XVII

XVII. MEDITATION.

PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

https://www.online-literature.com/donne/409/

The Magic Airplane

When he awoke we heard the sound of the plane arriving. He emerged from the back in the usual amount of time, coiffed, buffed, dressed, ready for the day: and it was a special day. It was January 20th. He had given his inaugural speech, welcomed the anticipated applause, and then, unexpectedly, gone to bed. 

We had been traveling since the pandemic turned to panic. We, his trusted advisers, had thought it best for his safety and health and the health of the nation that he turn to the most secure environment available. And so three weeks before Election Day, we boarded the airplane, and flew. 

Out the windows we could see the clouds passing, as we flew through the stratosphere, high above the earthbound menace.

The rumble of the jet engines and the occasional bump noise of in-flight refueling assured all aboard that we were on course and safe. 

The cheering crowds he saw on the ever-present video screens, and constant reports from his advisers on the ground, together with [video conferences with his cabinet and court, and] the prompt response to his electronic comments on his favorite television shows, kept him in good spirits, ready to command the nation he overflew.

But then the day arrived. He had been asleep for awhile. 

When he awoke we heard the sound of the plane arriving. He emerged from the back in the usual amount of time, coiffed, buffed, dressed, ready for the day. 

As we gathered in the aisle we were instructed to proceed directly into the secure tunnel. And so we deplaned at last, and he got into his secure limousine and was taken to his destination.

JRL +

Redeeming the Time

https://www.nga.gov/collection/highlights/fragonard-young-girl-reading.html

What are you reading? A good question, these days. One of my answers is, the complete Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler detective stories. Another is War and Peace.

War and Peace tells the story of people - a people - facing a period of unprecedented catastrophe.

What is the American equivalent of that epic period - though not that novel?

The Second World War would be my guess, as well as the Revolution and the Civil War.

The Civil War particularly has lodged in our consciousness - and our movie theaters. Even more so, the Second World War. It is still within living memory, just barely, and there is plenty of literature, film, and biography about it.

For the British public perhaps the Napoleonic Wars and the World Wars serve a similar function.

For us though in our generation as Americans (north Americans)  the Great Depression and World War II are the ones.

Leo Tolstoy wrote of his grandparents’ time. He wrote after his own experience as a soldier, and indeed at the time of writing the newspapers were filled with accounts of a contemporary crisis: the American Civil War. You can almost tell which battles he was reading about as he wrote.

And so it takes a while to understand what you, or your grandparents, went through. Great grandparents may be too far back; hence the loss of interest in the Spanish American War or the Great War, even though people like me have met veterans of those conflicts … in our youth.

Someday soon the Vietnam War era may be equally remote, as its survivors take the stage as grandparents, great uncles, and strangers with a story to tell. 

But what are you reading, or have you read, about the Great Depression and the second war?

I’d recommend two I have read recently: 

Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, by David M. Kennedy, published in the Oxford History of the United States. (Oxford, 1999).

And more remarkably perhaps an older work, in the narrative history mode,

Redeeming The Time: A People's History Of The 1920s And The New Deal, by Page Smith, Volume 8 of A People's History of the United States. (McGraw-Hill, 1986)

Why these two? There’s always Churchill, by and about. And later works, by newer historians.

And why Page Smith? Because, for one thing, his was the only narrative history of the United States published in a drought of some decades. 

(Jill Lepore deplores the lack of a one-volume narrative history produced during that period, and a lack of awareness of the great “city on a hill” sermon by John Winthrop given aboard ship on the way to the new Massachusetts Bay Colony. As a student at Cowell College, where Page Smith was founding provost, and our campus newspaper was the City on a Hill Press, I can assure you that lack was not palpable.)

Page Smith taught us about the adversity the American people imbibed during the economic disaster that befell them during the period following the Great Crash of 1929 and lasting until the war machinery, war economy, and War Production Board revved up in 1940-1945.

Revved up - but did not revive - the previous economy. Some things changed forever, some for good.

But what people endured and many survived may have made the nation stronger, more unified, to confront a later challenge. In their case that was the menace of totalitarianism, Fascism and Nazism, and the military adventurism of the Japanese regime of the time.

Collapsing empires and economies after the 1914-1018 war, along with flu pandemic and other causes, had left the societies of the world exposed to the threat of extreme chaos and government by the ‘strong’ - read, ‘the extreme’.

In their time - the Great Depression was followed by the Second World War. In our time waiting in the wings behind the challenge of the coronavirus-19 pandemic crisis is the ongoing reality of the climate crisis. 

(See The Economist cartoon, April 23, 2020).
https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2020/04/23/kals-cartoon

Prof. Katharine Hayhoe (Texas Tech) calls climate change a threat multiplier: behind every other crisis and challenge of our time lies this one big fact: the world is changing irrevocably, our atmosphere becoming carbon-dioxide soaked and our lands parched, frozen, or flooded.

We cannot go back to pre-industrial populations and consumption patterns. There are nearly eight billion of us now, as she points out, and we need sustainable energy to replace the carbon-dependent fossil fuels on which our industrial civilization was built. 

Maybe we can work on that. And may in time we can find some insight as well as comfort in looking at what people have gone through before.

For me personally I first read War and Peace during a time when I was not sure how to finish college (though I did, returning to the course I was pursuing in History, Religious Studies, and Literature) : I read it in a cold room at night in a club chair in my parents’ living room. Later I read it again, in another room, in another translation. (Constance Garnett the first time, later Maude, now Pevear/Volokhonsky and Anthony Briggs). 

And I’ve read the Iliad and the Odyssey the same way, during several times of transition, in multiple translations. And even the Aeneid, though the soul-searching and travelogue give way to first a jilted queen and then a lot of slaughter. Sheesh.

Pepys’ diaries, as read by Kenneth Brannagh, also tell of a time of plague and fire: the 1660s in London. Perhaps Robin Hood, read aright, is a source of comfort in the right time and culture. 

If another King John comes along.

sociable solitaries

"They are sociable solitaries..." 

Just now I was reading the Economist magazine's lifestyle quarterly 1843 and discovered a brief but pungent article on the place I go for my annual retreat, the Immaculate Heart Hermitage at Big Sur, known as New Camaldoli. It is the westernmost outpost of the Camaldolese Hermits, a contemplative Benedictine order. After a visit, observing how their mostly solitary days of work and prayer are punctuated by common prayer at lauds, matins, mass, and vespers, the author describes these monks as "sociable solitaries." Fairly accurate about some things, service times, for example, the article does not give as distorted or sensational an account of contemplative life as we might some times find. Vogue once covered an extended retreat I was on, and I've wondered if they did as well. 

What we find in the "postcard from Silicon Valley" is enough to cause us to want to inquire more deeply into a life of balance, of community and solitude, witness and prayer. 


Nat Segnit, "Postcard from Silicon Valley, Some of our critics call us the hot-tub monks", 1843, April/May 2020, 31-32.
https://www.1843magazine.com/upfront/postcard-from-silicon-valley/some-of-our-critics-call-us-the-hottub-monks accessed March 27, 2020.

And here is where I get down to it a bit more: 

Camaldolese Benedictine Hermits have over a thousand years of practice with 'social distancing' - and more important with balance. The Camaldolese Threefold Good of community, solitude, and witness, will play out differently for people outside monastic enclosures. We connect with friends and neighbors at a distance, sometimes through electronic means, telephone, or letter, and sometimes en paseo, that is, as we pass each other on our evening walks. Witness takes so many forms. Care for each other, however expressed, is one of them. And of course Camaldolese Benedictines are much more concerned with solitude than isolation. Perhaps we can learn, through newly adopted very old practices, such as sacred reading, contemplation, and prayer, how to turn simple isolation into something more profound.

My thought is that we can - with help - turn from forced isolation to chosen solitude. At least to some extent. As we would in Lent - or Ramadan, or other fasting periods. This happened to me this year: my doctor had me begin a low-carbohydrate Mediterranean style diet last summer, which I got serious about around Labor Day. So I made it into a Lenten practice. But this was not elected solitude. 

What I am doing now, in this time of pandemic isolation, are the intentional practices of solitude of Camaldolese Benedictine Oblates: daily prayer, weekly Eucharist and annual retreat. God willing I'll be able to go to New Camaldoli this summer for the retreat... 

In my home we have a community of two and say daily prayers together. As for weekly Eucharist, I commend "Spiritual Communion" and the prayer of St Alphonse of Liguori:

O Lord, in union with the faithful at every altar of your Church where your blessed Body and Blood are being offered to the Father, I desire to offer you praise and thanksgiving. I believe that you are truly present in the Holy Sacrament. And since I cannot now receive you sacramentally, I pray you to come spiritually into my heart. I unite myself to you, and embrace you with all the affections of my soul. Let me never be separated from you. Let me live and die in your love. Amen.

A contemplative nun from Summit, New Jersey, offered her own thoughts on how we can turn to resources of chosen solitude at a time of forced isolation. "First, you need to establish structure.... Second, be intentional and love others.... Third, use this time for self-reflection and relaxation.... Stop. Be still. You can either waste this period of social-distancing and be frustrated, or you can choose to make it the best it can be."  (Sister Mary Catharine Perry)

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/03/im-a-nun-and-ive-been-social-distancing-for-29-years-here-are-tips-for-staying-home-amid-coronavirus-fears.html