"If I would help the weak, I must be fed . . ."

Fellow-former-New-Yorker Fallen Sparrow's moving reminiscences of his life in the days following September 11, 2001.

Falling Back

A quick post to let my readers know that one of my favorite bloggers, Fallen Sparrow, is writing again after a long hiatus. 

If you haven't read him before, I urge you to check him out.  Fallen writes with elegance, wry wit, and searing honesty about sin, penitence, loss, recovery, and other matters both spiritual and mundane.  I have missed him and am glad to have him back.

"There surely is need of youth and innocence"

Today is the birthday of journalist and poet Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), most famous for his poem "Trees." Kilmer, who was killed in France in World War I, was a convert to the Catholic Church; his journey to Rome was driven by the illness of his little daughter Rose, who died of polio at the age of five.

While discerning the path of his conversion, Kilmer would stop every day at the Church of the Holy Innocents, above, in what was once the red-light district of New York City (it's now the Garment District), on his way to his office at the New York Times. This church has had an almost mystical importance in my life, and I know it's also a place of great spiritual significance to my friend and "antiphonal blogger" Fallen Sparrow. Kilmer wrote about the church to his spiritual advisor, Father James J. Daly:

Just off Broadway, on the way from the Hudson Tube Station to the Times Building, there is a Church, called the Church of the Holy Innocents. Since it is in the heart of the Tenderloin, this name is strangely appropriate - for there surely is need of youth and innocence. Well, every morning for months I stopped on my way to the office and prayed in this Church for faith. When faith did come, it came, I think, by way of my little paralyzed daughter. Her lifeless hands led me; I think her tiny feet know beautiful paths. You understand this and it gives me a selfish pleasure to write it down.

It's appropriate, then, that the Church of the Holy Innocents has a shrine dedicated to unborn children. Anyone who's lost an unborn child, for whatever reason, can enroll the child online in the Shrine's Book of Life. Indeed, the name of one of my four unborn little ones is inscribed there.

Turning Everything to the Purpose

As my readers know, I love Brahms. Like many of the great composers, however, it must be acknowledged that he was not much of a mensch. His well-known apology for not having offended each person present at a dinner-party was a bit of a self-effacing joke on his part; he was notorious for his barbed, even cruel, wit and his heedless egotism, and, according to a friend of his youth, Brahms was "sehr herbe in Wesen": very bitter in his essence. This bitterness was tempered later, when, as one of the only composers in history to be acclaimed and handsomely remunerated in his own lifetime, he was able and eager to show extraordinarily generosity to those in need.

It has often been speculated that Brahms's personal problems were the result of childhood trauma. Although his home life seems to have been happy, his family struggled in poverty, and the young Brahms was forced to quit school and bring in an income to help out. So, from the age of twelve, Johannes played piano in the dockside brothels of his native Hamburg, the Animierlokale ("stimulation pubs"), providing music for the dancing of the St. Pauli Girls and their sailor clients.

Brahms was a virtuoso pianist and musician, and he was able to play the waltzes, polkas, and mazurkas that his employers demanded from rote memory, while at the same time reading from a novel or a book of poetry that he had propped up on the music rack of the whorehouse piano. But, as his biographer Jan Swafford writes,

the effects of the Lokale on him were deep and indelible. For the rest of his life, with friends or in his cups, Brahms would recall those nights as dark and shameful . . . . He told one beloved that "he saw things and recieved impressions which left a deep shadow on his mind" . . . . Between dances the women would sit the prepubescent teenager on their laps and pour beer into him, and pull down his pants and hand him around to be played with, to general hilarity.

And Swafford continues, in an aside which drew mocking derision from Charles Rosen when he reviewed the Brahms biography in The New York Review of Books in 1998:

There may have been worse from the sailors. Johannes was as fair and pretty as a girl [see the sketch of him, at twenty, above].

As Swafford notes philosophically:

Everything that happens plays a part in an artist's life. What elevates one and not another to the level of genius is not only talent and ambition and luck, but a gift for turning everything to the purpose. Many first-rank creators have had traumas in their lives -- Beethoven's drunken father and his chronic illness and deafness, Robert Schumann's mental illness . . . With Brahms, it was first of all the lowlife of Hamburg. The [St. Pauli] Girls shaped him along with the training in music, the novels and poetry. The . . . squalor of his home and the Lokale . . . and . . . the idealistic intensity of his studies and his reading -- all that is one with the story of his music.

I've been thinking about Brahms lately in light of my friend Fallen Sparrow's recent brutally honest posts about his struggles with intimacy. Fallen and I had a discussion about his use of the word "monstrous" to describe some of the women he'd been involved with before he found sobriety. His violation as a teenager by an older woman is monstrous indeed, and I hope and pray that, as Brahms was able to do, Fallen will be able to temper the poison that was given him into medicine that he might use to heal the sick. There are people around him who need that medicine, and who need to receive it from him in particular.

His Eye is on the Sparrow

Dear readers, please pray for my friend Fallen Sparrow, who is mining the depths of his soul as he discerns his true vocation. (If you haven't been over to his blog yet, take a look around there. He writes with disarming honesty, in a voice that is almost painfully beautiful.)

Get Out My Vote

I have tried to keep politics out of this blog, and I have little stomach for it in most cases anyway, but Fallen Sparrow has written another of his typcially breathtaking posts, this one about the current presidential political conflict in the context of eschatology, and it has gotten me thinking.

I will start off by saying that, unless I'm able to discern that I should do otherwise, I don't expect to vote in the upcoming election. This is not a glib choice, and is actually quite a personally painful one. As some of my readers know, I grew up in an idealistic and committed left-wing family, and the natural choice of my heart, and even of my blood -- my family has had an intergenerational commitment to the civil rights movement going back about seventy-five years, and, coincidentally, that branch of the family is based in Chicago -- would seem to be Obama. And in fact, though I'm not exactly sure what he stands for, Obama is a powerful and moving symbol to me of change, and of the hope that there might be a real chance of healing the festering racial misunderstandings and injustices that still divide our country.

I am, however, repelled by Obama's understanding of abortion rights, so I most likely won't be casting that vote. Still, I hasten to say that I think the furor raised over his stance on FOCA and the "Born-Alive" bill misses the point entirely. I am convinced that Obama, like many if not most pro-choicers, truly believes that, while abortion is a personal tragedy and even a moral scandal, the compassionate stance is to ensure that it's legal. I know, because I was on that side myself, and I can't tell you how many women I've met who say, "While I would never have an abortion myself, I think other women who need to should be able to" (I used to find that complacent opinion particularly devastating after I had my own abortion, and the question of need is perhaps the most troubling aspect of this attitude, but these are issues beyond the scope of this blog post). To call Obama (or any other pro-choicer) a baby-killer or a willing accomplice in evil is wrong and misguided, and only serves to further balkanize the debate. I'll say it again: pro-choicers believe that keeping abortion legal represents compassion towards women in need, and even towards children. If you disagree, as I do, then go out and change hearts. It's better to light one candle, etc.

Nor can I in good conscience vote for McCain, whom I used to respect but whose recent campaign has rather sickened me. To vote for the Republican ticket because of life issues would be, to quote Samuel Johnson out of context, the triumph of hope over experience. The president of the United States has virtually no say over the legality of abortion in those states, as we've clearly seen with the Bush 43 presidency. Regardless of who a President McCain would appoint to the Supreme Court, I don't believe Roe v. Wade will be overturned in our lifetimes. To do so would cause political upheaval; if the current Court overturned Roe tomorrow, there would be carnage in Congress on November 4. Does anyone seriously believe that your congressman wants to go back to his constituents and take a stand when he's finally in a position to vote on a piece of real legislation? High moral dudgeon is easy, but with a real, not sham, bill in Congress or a referendum on a state ballot, careers would be made and lost in an instant, and no one in power now wants to see that happen. And, even if Roe were overturned, abortion would undoubtedly remain legal (with some restrictions) just about everywhere.

I also think there are other criteria on which to choose the leader of the free world, and McCain fails my litmus test on most of them. Any symbolic pro-life aura reflected upon his presidency by his running mate would be seriously mitigated by his own stated support for preemptive war and the torture of prisoners.

In short, I am unable to determine who here is the lesser of two evils. I feel stymied, and, frankly, upset about sitting out this crucially important election, but at present I feel (to make another oblique Doctor Atomic reference) like Arjuna on the battlefield, who has lain down his arms and declared that he will not fight.