Adventures in Adventing
Conversions, the rebirth of Notre Dame, book deadlines, the coming Golden Age, and miracles.
Here we are in the third week of advent already and friends, I have a confession to make: I have not been doing much official adventing.
Advent, the month before Christmas, is about preparing for the coming of Christ on Christmas Day. You’re supposed to be in a state of quiet waiting, praying, and reflecting. It’s like a mini Lent. Some families I know don’t put up a single decoration until Christmas. They decorate the tree on the Christmas Eve!
Instead, like most of you, I have been storming the internet, shopping for the kids, putting up lights, working, and sweating out these last few days of Democrat disco. Despite the stress, I am in a pretty steady state of ebullience since the election. Hard to believe, but we are finally on the other side of a election I was dreading and praying about and somehow we popped out on top with the big prize.
I’ll never get over it.
Oh, and I’m supposed to turn in my new book manuscript on, uh, January 1.
Send help.
Out of necessity, therefore, I am spending Advent mostly head down, sequested, praying for my word count to increase and awaiting the Coming of My Saviour (my book editor).
I even went to confession and confessed my failure to advent to the priest. He must have heard this before; he took pity on me and didn’t give me any penance. (I said three Hail Marys anyway just to be safe).
I am going to make up for it by taking five children to Midnight Mass on Christmas for the first time.
My character arc from Godless Heathen to City Trad Wife is sort of improbable. How did I get here?
“Of course there’s a God, you idiot!”
My favorite storyline in Woody Allen’s classic “Hannah and Her Sisters” is Woody’s character’s search for meaning in his life. Woody’s character has a brush with death and decides to become more religious. He starts questioning everything, meeting with priests. He decides to become a Catholic and he goes to his parent’s apartment to break the news and they start talking about God.
Woody: “Aren’t you afraid of dying?”
Father: Why should I be afraid?
Woody: Because you won’t exist!
Father: So?
Woody: That thought doesn’t terrify you?
Father: Who thinks about such nonsense? Now I’m alive. When I’m dead, I’ll be dead.
Woody: I don’t understand. Aren’t you frightened?
Father: Of what? I’ll be unconscious.
Woody: Yeah, I know. But never to exist again!
Father: How do you know?
Woody: Well, it certainly doesn’t look promising.
Father: Who knows what it will be? I’ll either be unconscious or I won’t. If not, I’ll deal with it then. I’m not gonna worry now about what’s gonna be when I’m unconscious.
Mother: Of course there’s a God, you idiot! You don’t believe in God?
Woody: But if there’s a God, then why is there so much evil in the world? Why were there Nazis?
Mother: Tell him, Max!
Father: How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don’t know how the can opener works.
As some of you know, I am a Catholic convert but I was a longtime atheist. How could I not have been? My mother, a secular yenta, kept a file in her desk of articles she would clip from the newspaper that “proved” to her there was no God. Stories with headlines like “50 Orphans Die in Church Fire in Lagos” and “Bus Carrying Pilgrims Plummets 1,000 Feet Off Cliff.” To her, this was definitive proof there could be no God.
Plus, she grew up hearing stories of her relatives who were murdered by Cossacks, shot by Ukrainian soldiers working for the Nazis, exterminated by Hitler. Like a lot of diaspora American Jews, to her, “religion” was something best left behind in the old country, since nothing much good can come of it.
Children dying of cancer. Newborns devoured by wild animals. “Why would God do this?” she would ask me after I converted.
To which, er, I still have no perfect answer. I mean, I don’t know? Sorry, ma! But when I was going through the RCIA process ten years ago to become an official Catholic, I had to actually decide, well, is there really a creator who did all this, made us, thought this all out, and we get eternal life in heaven if we believe it?
I spent a long time thinking about this. Everyone tells you what to read, the authors who explain it all, who can prove there’s a God, just read these theological arguments by the Doctors of the Church bro, it’s just two thousand pages bro, it’s in six-point font and only comes in the classical Greek version but just read it, bro. Just come to our bible study, it’s just 18 hours every weekend, bro, just memorize these 84 proofs and you’ll believe, bro.
Ain’t nobody got time for that! Anyway, I’ve officially been a Catholic for 11 years and going to mass regularly for almost 20 and I can honestly say I’ve done basically zero “research” on the question of is there a God outside of just reading the gospel.
I’m just going with it. It’s called “faith,” not “proof.” I am trusting the plan. I am letting 2,000 years of scholars, philosophers, and thinkers do the proving for me. Tolkein believed; so did C.S. Lewis. Shakespeare was a Christian. Michelangelo spent four years painting the Sistine Ceiling while lying on his back, 66 feet in the air, wet paint dripping on his face, nowhere to pee, no where to get a snack.
That’s good enough for me.
But when I am plagued by doubts, or question my faith, I always revert back to the basics. How could the insensate firing of neurons make me feel the way I do about my baby, or when you see stars on a dark night? Why would pure evolution explain the features of garlic, or wine, or chocolate? Why does a baby’s laugh fill us with ineffable ecstasy? How is it that a song can make you cry, or make you suddenly stop short as long buried memories decades old come flooding back?
Those are probably all terrible proofs of God! “Science can explain it all, you retard.”
Fine, I accept that. If I wrote a book called “Believing in God for Retards,” this would be the intro:
How can wheat barley be turned into beer, and grapes into wine, and potatoes into spirits, and all those things have brought unquantifiable solace and utility and pleasure to us? What wonderful serendipity! There are these beans that grow in the rain forest, and you can grind them and put hot water on them and you can finally wake up in the morning—imagine! There is a flower that grows in Asia than can be used—you’re not going to believe this—to make surgery pain free!
How can tiny insects produce some sort of thread that can be woven into king’s robes? How do hairy ungulates grow fur that can be spun into the warmest wool, the softest cashmere, their skins polished into the smoothest, strongest textiles? Why do nuggets of the softest gold and sparkling precious minerals in all colors lay buried deep in the Earth, and why do our eyes delight at these substances?
How is it that our planet is filled with million-year-old oily sludge that somehow can send rockets into space? How can the brain do complex math without a calculator? Why do we love rhyme and meter? How is it that you can listen to a piece of piano music you’ve never heard before, and not know how to play or even how to read music, but if the player strikes the wrong note, you will know instantly it was an error?
What makes the hottentot so hot? Who put the ape in apricot?
You get the idea. Anyway, ten years ago I chose to believe. And now I do. Fake it til you make it, Catholic edition.
Reader: it worked.
Notre Dame is So Back
Notre Dame, the building, makes me cry sometimes. It was designed to do this, of course. They knew what they were doing when they built that thing. When I lived in Paris in my twenties, sometimes I would skip the Metro and walk all the way home from my job at an expat magazine in the Marais. I would always head south across the Ile de la Cité. Sometimes I would stop and peek inside the Cathedral; the equivalent of kissing the hem of its garment.
I was a pagan back then, so I never went to mass there, tragically. I didn’t worship in the church, but I did worship that church.
How amazing it was to watch the reopening a couple weeks ago, and the surprisingly reverent ceremony, and see the building itself magnificent in its newly restored splendor. My favorite living American made a cameo, right there in my favorite building! Into my veins!
All of this is to say that this Advent feels portentous. It’s thrilling—exciting, a little scary. Sort of like Christmas eve! The air positively crackles with excitement—or is that just the drones?
It really does feel like this Christmas is happening against a truly historic backdrop where Western Christendom appreciators are finally getting their mojo back.
I feel like I’m a little kid waiting for Santa, only my Santa wears red baseball hats and lives at the Palm Beach pole. Next week, Santa and Baby Jesus return. Three weeks after that, we will witness the incredible, indeed, miraculous, return of President Trump and a new Golden Age.
If you are someone who struggles through the holidays, have hope! Better times God willing, are on the way. Hang on!
Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
Seriously, it’s a miracle this is all happening. How could anyone think there’s no God?
Thanks for reading!
XO
Peachy
For me the actions of the disciples post crucifixion was determinative. They went from confused, scared, men hiding in rooms to courageous, brave tribunes of the risen Christ. They were glad to be persecuted, tortured and killed. Quite a change.
I have been “all kinds of enthusiastic” too, Peachy. About the coming Golden Age and about the fact that enough of our countrymen, at long last, had the scales fall from their eyes to allow for it. And especially about my growing faith in God and our Savior. But, once more, your humor, common sense, grateful nature and tenaciousness have sent my spirits even higher. Merry Christmas! God Bless America!