Last Sunday in the early afternoon, no one at St. Patrick’s had taken off their coat, even indoors, as it hadn’t been above freezing in Manhattan in a week.
The atmosphere was tainted somewhat by the tourists and non-believers milling about, some even attending mass for entertainment, and the family directly behind me couldn’t control their bellowing voices as they chatted before the service. A few pews ahead was a stable of women who seemed to be private school friends, now grown, one of them wearing a monstrous diamond ring, a beret and silk trousers. The others were excellently groomed but not quite as dripping with money, and later they all kneeled during the presentation of the Eucharist with the innocence of little children.
It was the fourth day in a row that I’d come to mass at the Cathedral, the fourth day I’d spend an hour in the Marian shrine afterward, the fourth day I’d cry through some or all of it. But there is something about that place that made it very easy and sensible to weep there. After all, it is a symbolic representation of awe before the divine, and I had brought my troubles and petitions with me.
Everyone suffers, but it’s different in a gilded nave, where beauty offers its coherence as a form of condolence, and places individual affliction into a greater narrative, in which life on earth, however sorrowful, is also filled with awe and wonder. Suffering in a dismal place doesn’t easily carry with it the expectation of a miracle or hope for good to come; it only wants relief from itself. In a dim apartment in a gray and dirty part of town, anyone could feel forsaken by God, because all around, there is only the evidence of what has been created in disavowal of Him. Even in the towns and suburbs across America, where it might be less dim and dirty than the city, there still hangs in the air the heaviness of our separation from the anima mundi, the soul of the world.
Everyone suffers, but it’s different in a gilded nave, where beauty offers its coherence as a form of condolence, and places individual affliction into a greater narrative.
America on the whole is not terribly aware of this separation, only rife with the symptoms of it, what we are calling a crisis of meaning.
The emergence of a young and healthy conservatism since the election has revived images of a life that is again ensouled, represented by the feminine at the heart of the home, taking care of the sensual and aesthetic aspects of existence. In turn, the masculine is again allowed to provide structure and strength, to maintain the ethics of the independent homestead and the customs of religion. It is an image of a return to the values that were dominant at a time when this country was more self-assured in its purpose.
I remain hopeful that these are not just images but portents of better days ahead. However, even if an older America were to be fiscally and culturally restored in some form, I am not confident that our crisis would be resolved.
The emergence of a young and healthy conservatism since the election has revived images of a life that is again ensouled.
Before the mass began, I had no choice but to eavesdrop on the thundering family behind me. The daughter was telling her father how much money she had spent on a bathrobe for someone’s birthday, a price that had me wondering what it was made of and what she did for a living; but the father then countered with “Why? So she can hang herself with it?”. He chuckled, the daughter said nothing, and they went on to recite the congregation’s portion of the mass by heart, every prayer and response enunciated clearly.
What a fine and inadvertent metaphor for the American condition, that we seem to be trapped, as a people, between a misplaced hope in material abundance and the callous reminder that it won’t save anyone who is in despair.
Buried throughout our political discourse is the inalienable truth that few Americans inhabit built environments that have arisen out of spontaneous human endeavor. Our cities are largely outgrowths of industries that needed to supply themselves with workers, who in turn have had to leave behind all indicators of their unique humanity, which are of no value to industry.
The country was built for and by machines, a Faustian bargain that there’s no going back on, and even with all the political will in the world to restore some other American way of life, we will inevitably be forced to look upon the sheer ugliness of our infrastructure in the light of day. So we will have to ask ourselves whether it is really possible to uphold and maintain high ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, and social standards in such surroundings.
The right is correct in going after the moral decay of society and calling degeneracy by its true name, but it is not able to put the genie back in the bottle, because it is all around us, in concrete and asphalt, trash-littered highways, abandoned malls, disconnected suburbs, obsolete corporate-industrial parks, eye-watering sameness, expressionless towers, and the ways of life, and ideas about life, that develop in the populace of these settings.
The right is correct in going after the moral decay of society and calling degeneracy by its true name, but it is not able to put the genie back in the bottle.
Life’s true animating spirit is unwanted, wandering, and misdirected, because it has nowhere to really lay its head at night. This spirit resides in all of us, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we choose to live by it or not. But it’s no coincidence that the truest tangible form it takes in America is the backwoodsman, the man that will suffer anything for self-reliance, because he feels that integration into our wider society would be a poison to his soul.
There I was, inside this monument to the idea of there being a vast magnificence beyond our comprehension—not out of Christian obligation, or because my problems were so grievous that I had to lay them daily before God. Rather, I had come to be reminded that there are places in this country where a person can go to see and feel evidence of the life force that animates the world, to feel it within oneself and not have to wander further, to be reminded that this spirit has a value and a meaning unto itself.
Colloquially, we call this beauty.
Once outside of St. Patrick’s and on the street again, and for thousands of miles radiating north, south and west, it is not so clear if spirit and beauty will have to wander forever across this land, looking for a place to be received. More often than not, it seems that such wandering is their fate. But that question will be the truest test of the changing winds blowing across America.
