…if Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being.I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake.
Despite this caveat, Vonnegut confesses that he’s given up on the human race. He had, he wrote, no hope for them anymore. I used to feel that way, or thought I did. (That attitude amused my wife when we were dating, through high school and college. She knew me better than that. She has always been the wiser of the two of us.) I now see, confronting Vonnegut in my ‘70’s rather than the 1970’s (when I read just about everything he wrote), that I don’t agree with him at all. And it’s fundamentally because I consider myself a Christian, rather than a humanist (although I’m more a Christian existentialist, and I know Sartre said existentialism is a humanism. So I’m not so much at odds with Vonnegut, as simply mildly disagreeing with him.)
I don’t mean I profess the charlatan Xianity of the preachers who praise Trump. I mean the Christianity of Julian of Norwich:
With this bare word 'sin" our Lord brought to my mind the whole extent of all that is not good, and the shameful scorn and the utter humiliation that he bore for us in this life, and his dying, and all the pains and sufferings of his creatures, both in body and spirit--for we are all to some extent brought to nothing and shall be brought to nothing as our master Jesus was, until we are fully purged: that is to say until our mortal flesh is brought completely to nothing, and all those of our inward feelings which are not truly good. Have me insight into these things, along with all pains that ever were and ever shall be; and compared with these I realize that Christ's Passion was the greatest pain and went beyond them all. And all this was shown in a flash, an quickly changed into comfort; for our good Lord did not want the soul to be afraid at this ugly sight.and the martyrs of El Salvador and of Saint Oscar Romero, of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and St. Francis of Assisi, of the Beatitudes of Luke (Vonnegut champions the Beatitudes of Matthew, and in the RSV, but I stand on the even more radical Lukan version, in the Scholar’s Version translation). These Beatitudes:
....And because of the tender love which our Lord feels for all who shall be saved, he supports us willingly and sweetly, meaning this: 'It is true that sin is the cause of all this suffering, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'
"Congratulations, you poor! God's domain belongs to you!Luke 6:20-26, SV (Interestingly, when I googled to get the scripture numbers, the first item for “Luke beatitudes” that came up directed me to only verses 20-23; the blessings, but not the curses. Jesus continues to make us uncomfortable, I guess.)
“Congratulations, you hungry! You will have a feast.
“Congratulations, you who weep now! You will laugh.”
“Damn you rich! You already have your consolation!
“Damn you who are well-fed now! You will know hunger.
“Damn you who laugh now! You will learn to weep and grieve.”
I don’t mean to condemn humanism, but Vonnegut’s is a paltry and selfish vision, especially up against the vision of Julian; or even the Beatitudes he professes to find so important. Vonnegut aligns himself with Einstein and Mark Twain, both of whom, he claims, gave up on humanity at the end of their lives, too . Neither were notably religious men (Einstein was Jewish; I don’t know if Twain claimed to be Xian, or how he felt about it). It’s not that being religious or Xian is a “Get Out Of Despair Jail Free” card. Nor is it a false, or fantasy, consolation. But while I read Vonnegut when I was young and impressionable, and while I saw the absolute worst in people directed at me just because of the role I assumed (and I don’t mean being a lawyer. Judges, clients, other lawyers, were saints and Sunday School teachers compared to the people who turned against me in the churches, the ones I pastored and the one I attended after losing my second church). While, as I say, I saw that vitriol directed at me for the entire (short, but too long) period I was daily among professing Christians who knew me solely because of that confession, I still came out the other side (years later, granted) convinced that Julian’s vision was right. And that there is a moral arc of the universe, and it does bend toward justice. I am as secure in it as I am in my love for my wife and my daughter (and that they love me, which I can only understand as love being a kind of divine madness.
I don’t despair, in other words. I cannot despair. I’ve seen too much and learned too much to believe it’s all going to smash now because I’m here to see it. I read the accounts of settlers in the 19th century on horseback in the dark in wilderness where I now ride on well lit roads to stores, or use this phone in my hands to have the world’s goods delivered to my door, and I think what they faced, and they didn’t despair. I think of what the Native Americans and African Americans and any non-white people in this country went through, still go through, and I don’t see a bitter end, I see a struggle that has to be championed, a fight that will succeed if we don’t yield. And so few of us want to yield. As Auden wrote in World War II, “Maps can point to places/where life is evil now.” These places were in America in the ‘60’s, and they are here again now. Auden meant evil being done by governments, intentionally. So yes, here, now. Those maps are also places where more people are resisting, fighting back; more of us, many, many more of us, are repulsed by the evil; and that why I don’t despair. Vonnegut worried, almost 25 years ago, that we were making the planet unlivable. I grew up on that fear. It started as the environmental movement in the ‘70’s, a full 50 years before Vonnegut wrote his conviction that there was no hope. The movement that in short order convinced Congress to create the EPA, and passed the Clean Water Act. Trump wants to abolish all that, but he can’t erase it, and the pushback to stop polluting the planet and make it more livable will go on. Hell, I remember when we set a river on fire. “The Lord can make you tumble/The Lord can make you turn./The Lord can make overflow./The Lord can’t make you burn.” 🔥—Randy Newman
In the ‘70’s the message was despair: there was no hope, and we were done for. Do you remember the simplest things? The scene in “Mad Men” where the Drapers go on a picnic, and finished shake off their blanket and leave their trash to blow across the grass? That was normal in the early ‘60’s. It isn’t normal now. A great deal that was normal, still isn’t normal now. And what seems abnormally normal, is not going to last, is already fading even as it arouses opposition to eradicate it, to not allow it to be the norm again.
Little things are important, especially in the view that all the big things are lost and falling to ruin. In Matthew’s parable of the sheep and the goats, he tells the sheep how they fed him when he was hungry, clothed him when he was naked, visited when he was sick or in jail. “Lord,” they very reasonably ask, “when did we see you?” Whenever you did that for anyone, Jesus replies, you did it for me. Whenever. For anyone. What does the Lord require of you? Only that much. When Jesus later tells his disciples, also in Matthew, to make disciples of all people, it’s in the context of Isaiah’s holy mountain. Teaching people to be like the sheep will create the holy mountain where everyone wants to live, because life is so good there, and the reason why so simple, so easy to follow.
So: do we despair because the world has not figured it all out yet? This nation was born in racism. When Jefferson said “All men are created equal,” he clearly meant some men (humans) and not others. We finally stopped portraying the Natives as “savages” (Jefferson’s term, in the Declaration) in our entertainment late in the 20th century. It took longer to stop portraying black males that way (consider the example of our current president only 30 years ago). We’re moving far too slowly for justice; but we’re moving that way nonetheless. Do we despair because we aren’t there yet?
Well, you can, but I’m not going to.
I can’t give up, and I can’t explain why in any other terms except that I believe. Not in fairies at the bottom of the garden, or in the better angels of our nature. I believe in the strength and endurance of human love and goodness; and I believe there is a moral arc to the universe. And after 70 years, I find those beliefs unshakable, because I also believe in the confession of the first chapter of Genesis: that creation is good, and that that means “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
I can’t make you believe that. I can’t talk you into my belief. I can only stand by it and offer it as my contribution to the conversation. In Candide, Voltaire concludes that we must all tend to our own garden. He means we can’t live the life of others, and we can’t make them live life as we see fit. Dorothy Day, by the way, would agree. And I think Walker Percy and Thomas Merton would agree, too. As well as the Desert Fathers. You can find my references to them in the search function of this blog. Of course, just by writing that novel, Voltaire was trying to interfere in our lives; or at least just give us some advice. Much as Jonathan Swift did in Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest Proposal.” Advice is not really interference, though; it’s not telling you what to do like so many “THOU SHALT NOTS!” It’s more about pointing out the ultimate reality of the situation, because the destitute will have their condition alleviated; and the rich have already had their reward. Too bad they didn’t do more for the destitute when they could have, because the moral arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice.
Of that I am as sure as I am sure I am virtually at your elbow, as you read.
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