Thoughts at Thanksgiving

scattered like leaves, falling somewhere near the tree

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Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

Nothing is more right, nothing more just, than to give thanks to the One who made us and who sustains us, and to be thankful also to one another for kindnesses bestowed. Nothing is more humanizing in these dehumanizing times. Families united, rejoicing at table. And all those glorious leaves, in colours divine! For me, even the occasional ride, less frequent than I could wish.

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I have been quiet here at Desiring a Better Country for some seven weeks, mainly because I have been getting a new course under way, called Theology through Fiction. We're reading François Mauriac, C. S. Lewis, Walker Percy, Marilynne Robinson, and (more briefly) a few others, beginning with Tolkien. I wish you could join us. There is certainly a balm in Gilead, which exudes thanksgiving. That’s the book we have just finished.

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The Thanatos Syndrome, on the other hand, which rings truer today than when it was written, is darkly prescient. NIH, FDA—“the fellows at Fedville know what they are doing.” The book is a fitful commentary, like Fr. Smith’s sermon, on portentous signs and haunting dreams; on “the smell of winter apples and the stranger coming.”

The leaves, when they turn brown, require to be raked. Raked they shall be. Yet we can and may give thanks for those apples, for those colours, for every other generosity of God. We may even learn to sing gratefully “the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb,” if we are willing to be led by those who have suffered and, just so, conquered:

Great and wonderful are thy deeds,
O Lord God the Almighty!
Just and true are thy ways,
O King of the ages!
Who shall not fear and glorify thy name, O Lord?
For thou alone art holy.
All nations shall come and worship thee,
for thy judgments have been revealed.

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McGill, for its part—I mean the bureaucracy, which like most bureaucracies consumes the fat of the land, and not only at Thanksgiving—thinks all theology fiction. Given the fictions in which the university is so heavily invested these days, you might think this would increase theology's stock. 'Tis otherwise. Theology is too "confessional" for the university. It must be rooted out.

What is really meant, of course, is that the university is too busy confessing something else. It resents the competition, particularly any clear-thinking competition, with which it cannot compete. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion über Alles, even over reason itself, in which the university is no longer invested.  

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I’m tempted, by way of response, to propose another new course: Theology and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Enrolment would be limited, no doubt, but we could take it out on the road, out of the university’s hair, perhaps retracing Pirsig’s tracks. That would absorb a term quite profitably, with “quality” added. Think of it as remote education. The more remote, the better.

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Here are two timely works of non-fiction that ring true. I’ve been meaning to mention them:

The latest ECT statement, Fear God; honor the Emperor: Notes on Christian Citizenship has just appeared in the November issue of First Things. I am among the signatories, having been party to the process that produced it, though it is written by a more experienced hand.

Another such document, The Frankfurt Declaration of Christian and Civil Liberties, appeared a couple of months ago. I was not party to its drafting, but (uncommonly for me) I have endorsed the results after the fact. Among its initial signatories are some I have mentioned in these pages or at The Catholic World Report.

I encourage readers to peruse both documents. The first is more sophisticated, and rhetorically powerful. The second is more straightforward in addressing the great failure of the last three years: the failure to fear God during a time when it was customary to fear death instead, to sacrifice to "Covid" rather than to God.

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The universities were very eager to make the sacrifice, even if what was sacrificed was their own students. I haven't forgotten my promise to write further about that. But so, more alarmingly, were the churches. It is my hope that the combined effects of these two documents will help draw Christians back to their senses and churches back to their obligations. As the Frankfurt Declaration says:

It appears that the world may well be entering a time of testing, not only for the Church, but for everyone who believes in freedom and who opposes tyranny. Let us stand with those who are hard-pressed, arrested, or forcefully isolated because they have chosen to do what is right. Let us stand in solidarity with those whose churches are forcefully closed or who are exiled from their congregations. 

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If you suppose this isn't happening, or isn’t happening still, perhaps you haven't heard of Cardinal Zen. Even the pope, it seems, has not heard of Cardinal Zen.

Since this is Thanksgiving, I will offer thanks here for all courageous people like that praiseworthy cleric. And for all who have been standing up to the CCP, locally or internationally, or to their own madly authoritarian regimes—for Freedom Convoy Canucks, and Dutch farmers, and everyone else God has graced with a remnant of courage and common sense. And for Substack, too, which provides them something of a refuge.

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As for the pope, let us be frank. This pope is an instrument of testing. And his Synod on Synodality is the kind of thing—infinite regress, the cross turning back into the swastika, to employ a Chestertonian insight—that happens when the Church itself prefers bureaucracy to mission.

Diversity, Equity, Iniquity.

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Of course it isn’t really the Church, is it? The Church is eucharistic to the core. It does not, however, give thanks carelessly or indiscriminately. It gives thanks for all that has from God being and goodness, for all that is being redeemed. It gives thanks for the judgments of God, which are being revealed. It remains grounded in Christ, through whom, with whom, and in whom it gives thanks.

Jorge Bergoglio is no Francis. He is the spearhead of a movement that is seeking to lay another and different foundation. Which cannot be done.

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Sukkot has begun. I like to think of it as thankful watching, untrammeled watching, watching in the readiness of faith and hope.

That was not, for the most part, what was being done in the Sinai desert. Quite the reverse. Had it been done, the harvest celebration in the Land of Promise would have come much sooner. The giants of Canaan would have been despised and the God of Abraham praised. Which, in the patience of God, can still be done.  

Moadim l'simcha, then: not in optimism, but in hope; sober, messianic hope and joyful, anticipatory thanksgiving.  

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"The song of Moses and the song of the Lamb"—of this, too, I want to write. How Marcionite the churches seem to have become! Neither song can they decipher, neither tune can they carry.

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The publisher of my Thessalonians commentary sent me, the other day, a brief review in which the author (a cathedral dean) said how much he enjoyed it, as far as 1 Thessalonians 4. After that, he thought, it became irredeemable. Too much talk about corruption in the Church, dark times, and judgment.

Just there, of course, Paul turns to eschatology, which he pursues in 2 Thessalonians. And Paul’s eschatology, like that of Jesus, is very Danielic. The dean, who seemed rather distressed, didn’t remark on the fact that Daniel’s visions distressed even Daniel. No doubt they distressed Paul, too. But Paul (to speak anachronistically) was no Marcionite. He was steeped in the law and the prophets. He knew the Song of Moses by heart. He had wrestled with Daniel. He had no doubt that corruption would enter the Church and threaten to overwhelm it, until the song of the Lamb was clearly heard.

Or that God and his Christ would get the raking done.

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Marcion, who in his resentment eschewed redemption, may have been a bit like Hubert in The Knot of Vipers. He would have made a good study for Mauriac, whom we are reading now. Mauriac wasn’t Marcionite either.

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We’ve read Jonah, too, by the way, whose central character appears in today’s Gospel. What an absolutely wonderful tale!

In the end, Jonah couldn’t muster the spirit of thanksgiving. Parked on a hill above Nineveh, where no such judgment as Nineveh deserved could be seen happening, he felt a bit put out. Indeed, he had felt put out when sent to Nineveh in the first place. He found it too easy, as we do, to overlook or to misconstrue the compassion of God. Or he found it too difficult to carry his share of the divine burden of compassion.

Jonah was a sign of contradiction, just as he was supposed to be, but a self-contradictory one.

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We may be like that as well, particularly where Jews are concerned. We may even provide a reverse image of Jonah. We may try to blame Jonah’s faults on his Jewishness, as some interpreters have done. But who is the “one greater than Jonah” to which today’s Gospel refers? Another Jew, for God’s sake!

That, after all, is what Jews are for—they are precisely for God’s sake, and for our sake, too. Do we reckon with that? Are we grateful for that? Do we care for the Jew? Do we see in Jesus the Jew who redeems Jews? Do we reckon with Paul that the gospel “is for the Jew first, then for the Greek”?

Only when we do reckon with that, will we see the salvation of God.

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Lest I scatter my thoughts still further, however, I’ll betake myself out among the leaves, while they’re still in colour and the sun is still shining.

Again, Happy Thanksgiving.

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