Nonsecular Girl's "Sermon for Brokenness"

Oscar Wilde: "I drink to separate my body from my soul."

Casey Fleming's response:

Imagine our bodies, healthy or sick or momentarily struggling, as the light of God.

Imagine we might need affliction to illuminate our souls.  (know, in this imagining, the unfairness of such a reality on some, truly sick people)

Imagine we could not have a soul without a body.

Imagine the necessity of Jesus’ human body.

Then the body cannot be a shade of shame or a thing to denounce.  Then the body cannot be a cage, and drinking, dear Oscar Wilde, might be more for marrying our bodies to our souls than separating them.  Then the body has no use for a language of signs and signals and acronyms.

The flesh is the word, the word is the flesh.

Even, and especially, when the flesh is broken.

The whole thing is gorgeous. And it includes readings from Christian Wiman and Mark Doty, two poets with deep connections to Texas.

The Vatican on Graham Greene

One of the writers who got me started on this blog is Graham Greene, who called the protagonist of The Power and the Glory, one of the 20th Century's best English-language meditations on faith, a "Whisky Priest".

What the hell is a Whisky Priest? What does that mean?

On the one hand, the answer is obvious ("It's a priest who likes whiskey, duh!"); but on the other it seems like there's a lot more to explore there. Why isn't he just called a drunk? Or a sinner? Is he just a no-good priest, or is there some virtue in his whiskeyness? Questions like that are part of what I'm essaying to answer at Theology of the Bottle.

So I have to share this article from The Atlantic on Graham Greene's dossier at the Vatican, which I read in hard copy years and years ago but just remembered and dug up for y'all.


It's not surprising that Rome's censors worried about Greene's "'Immoral' or married priests; the ambiguity with which the central figure refers to God and the doctrines of the faith; the conviction or the virtue attributed to Protestants and atheists”. Nor is it surprising that, according to the article's author, some Vatican authorities were "Defensive about their authority (which they desired to assert even as they doubted its efficacy), and incapable of grasping the conceptual problems posed by Greene's writing,…”
But the most interesting nugget from this report is a quick glimpse of the man who would become Pope (now Pope Emeritus) Benedict XVI. The Atlantic reports: 

“The records of censorial investigations undertaken after the death of Leo XIII, in 1903, are in the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and are not available to be consulted by outside scholars. In February of last year I sought and obtained an audience with the Congregation's prefect, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. To my request that an exception be made to the rules, the reply was one word, uttered without hesitation: 'Ja'."

Paul Tillich on Grace

Since we've been talking grace around here, I'm stealing Andrew Sullivan's "Quote for the Day" for this past Sunday, which came from Paul Tillich's The Shaking of the Foundations:

“Do we know what it means to be struck by grace? It does not mean that we suddenly believe that God exists, or that Jesus is the Saviour, or that the Bible contains the truth. To believe that something is, is almost contrary to the meaning of grace. Furthermore, grace does not mean simply that we are making progress in our moral self-control, in our fight against special faults, and in our relationships to men and to society. Moral progress may be a fruit of grace; but it is not grace itself, and it can even prevent us from receiving grace. For there is too often a graceless acceptance of Christian doctrines and a graceless battle against the structures of evil in our personalities. Such a graceless relation to God may lead us by necessity either to arrogance or to despair. It would be better to refuse God and the Christ and the Bible than to accept them without grace. For if we accept without grace, we do so in the state of separation, and can only succeed in deepening the separation. We cannot transform our lives, unless we allow them to be transformed by that stroke of grace. It happens; or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves, just as it shall not happen so long as we think, in our self-complacency, that we have no need of it.

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!’ If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.”

Happy Hour in Havana

My latest at pterodactilo is a how-to on drinking in la Habana. A sample:

So here’s what you do: when you’re done researching and writing for the day, and the sun is starting to set and the heat is starting to fade, grab your colleagues or the friends that you’ve made on the island. Buy a bottle of Havana Club and some cans of TuKola. Go down to the malecón, where it will seem like the whole city is out sitting and talking and laughing. Claim some space. Face the city, not the sea. Open a can of Cuban coke, take a swallow, and pour the rum into the space you’ve just made. And there you go: a makeshift cuba libre.

Read the rest at blog.pterodactilo.com .

One more for the Hymnal: Muddy Waters "Champagne & Reefer"

International Drinking with Gary Shteyngart

This sprawling, entertaining interview with Gary Shteyngart at Modern Drunkard Magazine is a real gem. Here's the author on drinking in Russia:

GS: Right. All Russian rites are suffused with the idea that you will get drunk after you’re finished. I think there is vodka at the end of everything that happens in Russia. My favorite ceremony to do is to go to gravesites of famous artists in Russia. You bring a bottle of vodka andzakuski.

MDM: Zakuski?

GS: If you go to a Russian restaurant, the first thing you see on every menu is zakuski. Which literally means “the thing you follow it with.” “It” being vodka. Appetizers are built around vodka. The mystery of Russia centers on what will happen at the end of the day, or the middle of the day. That being the drinking of the 150 grams (5.29 ounces) of vodka. When I go back there, and I go back every year, I have to acclimate like you would in Denver. Everyone, especially the men, brings their own bottle of vodka. Each finishes their bottle and they enter that land of no return. I’m not a religious person by any means, but you feel this kind of strange communion. With people who, if you had met them on the street, you’d think, “My goodness, look at this strange specimen.”

And here he is on writers drinking: 

GS: True. There are so few people to drink with. The literary community is not backing me up here. I’m all alone. There’s a couple of guys who are strong, but that’s it. It’s so pathetic when I think about my ancestors. Give them a bottle of shampoo and they have a party. And here I am with the best booze available.

On how Georgians drink:

MDM: My Russian brother-in-law tells me some Russians like to spike their vodka with a good jolt of hair spray. Is this true?
GS: Ah, yes, the old hairspray maneuver. You know who drinks like crazy? My favorite people, the Georgians. They drink from these big ram horns and each person has to toast every other person at the table. There’s the tamada, the toastmaker, he’s like the air traffic controller. A toast comes in, and he stops it and makes sure everyone is okay with it, then another comes in — it’s a fascinating job. A good tamada is like an MC, he gets hired to work parties and weddings. Their wine is like Thunderbird, really strong. It’s not for a connoisseur, it wouldn’t pass muster. When I was in the nation of Georgia, I met some guys in the government. Some mid-level ministers. We went to their dacha, this gigantic compound. They wanted me to get involved in a scheme to steal $600 million dollars from American charities.

And Italians:

GS: Italy is a dramatic country. I was living in this square, where all these orgies were going on.
MDM: Actual orgies?
GS: Yeah. It was the rich children of the Italian intelligentsia, famous Marxists, people like that. And they all had these huge apartments. It was just these wild parties. And all based on wine. People would bring their own wine, from whatever region they were from. There were a lot of arrivistes from southern Italy, so there was a lot wines from Abruzzo, Campana, and Calabria, the really violent province. The only time I got semi-violent in a bar, someone came up and said, “You must be Calabrian.”
MDM: It’s considered an insult?
GS: It is, but I thought it was quite a compliment. The whole scene was wild youth, women, wine and a dearth of clothing. There was this one Italian. An incredible Russophile. 

 Brazilians:

GS: It’s not the bars, it’s hanging on the beach. The people are so beautiful. They drink, then the dancing starts. I don’t have an ass. I don’t own one. But they do. It’s so sad to leave it. You think, where the hell am I going? It’s not an intellectualized drinking culture. No one gives a damn about that stuff. You can’t bring up Schopenhauer after a couple drinks. I had the most expensive sake I ever had in Rio. A hundred dollars for a little flask.

He even has something to say about Austin:

GS: I was just in Austin. I could live there. It seemed pretty cheap.

One more for the Hymnal: Lived in Bars

Cat Power, "Lived in Bars," The Greatest (2006).