My Sweet Lord
Growing up in the 50s when the elementary school’s nuns could still dance a mean doctrinal jig with no leg showing, by eighth grade graduation I was a thoroughly indoctrinated Roman Catholic.
I was in college the first time I heard George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord and still felt feeling–back of my mind–a touch uneasy about Harrison’s eminently sincere praise of a ‘pagan myth’ as Sister Mary Joseph might have said.
I was nominally a hippie in college, so I wasn’t totally lacking appreciation for a Western man’s reach beyond his upbringing. Though I was granting him benefit of the doubt–the way you politely condescend–since his lyrics were undeniable. I was a few feet out the church door, though not yet miles gone. I’d shed the cassock and left the church chimes at the altar. Still, I wondered, why would a rock musician sing a chant like a Hare Krishna?
I really want to know you. Evidently, he really did.
Harrison was the consistent Beatle, modest, more reticent than his famous mates, able to step back from the coronation to search toward–he was scratching at something larger. Lennon was the Beatle quickest to sniff out hypocrisy–being more popular than god–but Harrison appeared to be less angst-driven. He was in his gnomish facial hair days when he wrote this one. I believe it was a Rolling Stone article that said Eric Clapton did the signature riff on the studio recording of My Sweet Lord.
This was two maybe three years before Derik and the Dominoes.
That song Clapton artfully named after my dog–while he’d really intended it for Harrison’s wife, Patty, that one? I could easily grasp Clapton’s horny grief better than Harrison’s reach. Though I’d never stolen someone’s wife, Clapton’s mortal sadness felt more immediate than did Harrison’s praise to a deity (absent best I could tell).
Myth: “A purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions, or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena. Properly distinguished from allegory and from legend (which implies a nucleus of fact) but often used vaguely to include any narrative having fictitious elements.”
from OED
The part of the definition I’d take issue with is “purely fictitious” in referring to religion. Fictitious like it doesn’t mean much.
Myth has aspects of philosophy’s search, or it’s just cream puff fantasy.
Tolkien’s mythology is a tale of loss–lost time–lost world. I wonder sometimes if Tolkien’s editor insisted Frodo and Samwise make it to Mount Doom and gets collected by the eagles so that the story ended on the upbeat. Recall at the story’s end Frodo cannot live out his days in Middle Earth, wounded by the evil that pierced him.
Tolkien’s Silmarillion goes much further down that path and is the deeper story for it. What Tolkien had witnessed in World War I trenches never left him.
Harold Bloom regards the Old Testament as a foundational book. The point hadn’t occurred to me, but if you consider how influential the Bible has been through the centuries to the West’s literature, its plays, paintings, sculpture, it’s hard to argue the point. Moreover, Bloom paints an interesting picture:
“The J writer was the original author of what we now call Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, but what she wrote was censored, revised, and frequently abrogated or distorted by a series of redactors across five centuries… These revisionists… seem to have been scandalized by Bathsheba’s ironical freedom in portraying Yahweh. [Jehovah] J’s Yahweh is human–all too human; he eats and drinks, frequently loses his temper, delights in his own mischief, is jealous and vindictive, proclaims his justness while constantly playing favorites, and develops a considerable case of neurotic anxiety when he allows himself to transfer his blessing from an elite to the entire Israelite host.”
From The Western Cannon by Harold Bloom
Now that’s a bad ass deity, if not exactly the Jehovah taught me in elementary school. It’s no wonder the nuns always insisted the New Testament was an improvement over the Hebrew text. Only a man could be that tempestuous, and only a woman would write that about him. If you extrapolate that back to the question of a just god verses the world’s injustice, it seems Bathsheba’s version wins.
Which recalls the NY Times opinion piece, The Pandemic and the Will of God.
When it comes to seeing deeper than storytelling to what the myths might import, it can still be a close thing, still interested to read how often metaphor is wielded in service of a furious search for meaning.
Seems before we climbed down from the trees or stepped outside sheltering caves, we were busy pursuing dream animals to worship.
Why is still a question, but denying the centuries of work at mythmaking by how many cultures is a waste of breath. Perhaps we should simply enjoy what it’s brought us–a world of art and letters.
The medieval world is often described as one of superstition, plagues and early death. A good flavor of the time can be found in Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror.
Yet Chartres Cathedral in France or York Cathedral in England–chose either–can stand as high watermarks in Western culture. In the history of architecture, they stand as monuments we hope our own time’s best efforts reach.
Fay Jones’s Thorncrown Chapel in the Ozarks, or SOM’s Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, perhaps?
If you ask what these modern expressions have in common with the gothic monuments of Europe, the answer is ‘light’–the most spiritual expression an artist can offer. If one can’t find a spiritual connection in these places, then something inside may be broken.
We Need New Enemies to Hate On
It must be difficult to let go of our most important myths, seeing how we’ll snarl and bite at anyone who says different. Could be one more leftover from when our frog brain ran the operation. Your myth–my anathema, sad to say. ribbit.
The old religion wars are just worn out, like threadbare T-shirts used so long no matter how you wear them, inside or out, it’s time to retire them. They may have served a purpose once, but really, it’s probably time. Take the Muslim-Christian-Jewish death to thine enemy memes. How’s that been going recently?
Burn the sonsofbitches down, then what?
Oh yeah, then we can start on the Buddhists and Hindus–since they’re mostly dark-skinned hungry people speaking funny languages so no one knows what they’re saying. Meanwhile the Hindus in Delhi are having a go at their Muslim neighbors. One could say they are ignorant, though possibly they’re just fulfilling their version of a manifest destiny–kinda like how we chased the Native Indians across the continent, praise the lord and pass the muskets.
TIP: The best cultures to hate on are the minorities no one understands.
Back in the day, we had the native savages to either shoot or save and it didn’t matter which so long as the Europeans ended up top dogs. Only problem was they just gave up too easy and moved as far as they could to get away from the hoard.
And we gave them a nice desert out there, didn’t we? Go sit out there in your red rock country, but leave us the mineral rights.
And we gave the Jews New York City, right? And a good chunk of Connecticut. So now we owe them what in the land grab from the Palestinians? Good times.
We could have nipped that Muslim thing in the bud back when the Saudis put up with Standard Oil. Our British cousins–the ones we made give up their empire after World War II–may have had it right all along. Should have made the Bedouins keep to their tents and camels, and we could pump the crude.
Keeping the natives down is an excellent strategy. Worked for the East India Company–the Brits had a good run they still like to wax nostalgic over.
Regarding the Christian V. Muslim competition, back when it started we were all too closely related, and we let the Muslims steal some of our gospel–no strong publishing copyrights in the day–and they said Jesus was just another long hair prophet. They couldn’t even come up with their own god–they used the Jewish one instead–which we Christians did too, but we got there first…
Abu Dhabi
A few years ago, D dragged me kicking and screaming to Abu Dhabi, one highlight of which was an early tour of the newly opened Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Ateliers Jean Nouvel.
We had come to the land of heathens! as the nuns would say.
This museum is the first expansion of the Louvre outside of France. Sited in shallow water (water being sacred in the desert), and sheltered under a an arched dome, hot as Hades in April, with massive dust storms, still the experience was worth the long flight.
Courtyard in the Louvre Abu Dhabi 2018 photo by William E. Evans
Courtyard in the Louvre Abu Dhabi 2018 photo by William E. Evans
The stated purpose of Louvre Abu Dhabi is to prove the universality of art, and the museum does a fine job of it. When you’re drawing from the wealth of one of the world’s greatest museums, it’s probably harder to exclude objects demonstrating the point than to search for worthy ones.
Will their wealth sustain the United Emirates in 21st Century enough to rival the Arab world’s grand moments of the past–the calligraphy–the mosques of Istanbul and Cordoba? Time will answer that. Time will also answer the question, whether the animosities of Christianity and Islam will ever be let to die.
Egyptian Princess Hanuttawy, Louvre Abu Dhabi 2018 photo by William E. Evans
Egyptian Anubis urn, Louvre Abu Dhabi 2018 photo by William E. Evans
Chinese Buddha in the Louvre Abu Dhabi 2018 photo by William E. Evans
Weird Christianity
Last Sunday’s New York Times included a first-person opinion piece entitled Christianity Gets Weird–catchy title, that. The article takes the line of a retro-version of the stuff the nuns taught, Latin mass, Gregorian chants, gothic cathedrals, incense, the whole enchilada, and I’m thinking, well, I like a good chant now and again.
What seemed missing in the article was how this might lead to a meaningful spiritual moment–not that it can’t, only it went missing in the piece.
And how far is a fashion for medieval worships going to take you when you’re dying on a respirator?
Yes, I am the one who said I’d still be Roman Catholic if they’d put better emphasis on good choral works in massive stone places instead of occasionally celibate men telling women how to care for their vaginas and stay at home to make more babies.
The Times’ author, Tara Isabella Burton doesn’t attempt to argue this ‘movement’ is more than a social experiment. And she doesn’t suggest it’s a rapidly expanding movement, so she’s not trying to proselytize so much as report an interest.
Tara Isabella Burton is a cool name, Tara being very au courant and Isabella reminds of a castle somewhere in Spain. Perhaps the Latin side of the author took her away in the moment?
Jimi recorded a song, “Spanish Castle Magic” which was an innovative piece of music using jazz chording, though I can’t imagine he would have ever become a Weird Christian–he was weird all on his own.
Weird Christianity.
Well, it’s weird that the pacifist teachings of a Jewish mystic produced followers who proceeded to conquer as much of the world as they could before settling on the better parts–high on the hog as the expression goes–and falling back to preach that the rest of mankind should follow suit, only don’t take as much as we did…
The article’s author says in her younger years she had identified with Marxism as a social justice philosophy–another well-noted dichotomy (contradiction, hypocrisy?). Only if one considers capitalism (which Harold Bloom likened to the American Religion) in the same breath as a) ny kind of earnest socialism.
Marx (not Groucho) appropriated the concept of equality from church teachings in Europe. Could be why we hate socialism–too close a reminder of our dearest contradictions. Hate the religion, not the religious?
Socialism has been a good boogeyman for big ‘C’ capitalists. We’ve hung a lot of politicians on that canard. God bless those fuzzy headed socialists.
Though one more shot at art’s debt to religious experience: Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem is a choral piece that moves me. To be sure, it is spiritually inflected, being after all a Catholic mass. Was it inspired by an intelligence outside of the composer?
There’s an old saw about how creatives don’t themselves create works of art so much as they are the medium through which art enters the world. I like the metaphor, and I’ve even gotten phrases and images dropped on me occasionally, but most of it’s been work and persistence.
An oblique mention of Fauré’s work is found in National Cathedral, a poem included in Love in Winter. After Ryan’s death, my sister lent me a CD including the Requiem, as she said, because it might help. True confession: I haven’t returned her CD yet.
The rich layers of art, the paintings, sculpture, the music and literature that has been built on Christianity, the religion I know best, have influenced my life well beyond the catechism. So perhaps Ms. Burton’s pursuit of old fashioned church service isn’t that foreign. And Fauré’s compositions are said to point the way to later developments in classical music.
So we build on what has come before, always needing to recognize our own time isn’t so distant from when Buddhist bells and prayer flags on a mountain were the means humans of a different time used to express their deeper feelings.
I wonder if Princess Hanuttawy ever thought about it.