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Published: June 29, 2008

Hymn to Leviathan

The irony of neo-paganism

Notes from a Cultural Madhouse

By Christopher Zehnder

Nearly two years ago, I wandered into St. Philip’s church in Bakersfield for the 7 a.m. Sunday Mass. My wife was in a hospital in the city after giving birth to our youngest son, and I, after having spent a none-too-comfortable night in the hospital, exhausted and feeling grousey and intolerant, sought a Mass that, I figured, would probably be tame. A 7 a.m. Mass, I thought, would be a simple, “low Mass” – straightforward, no theatrics, no music ministry. How wrong I was.

St. Philip’s that morning did not feature much in the way of theatrics, but the music ministry was there in force. It was a band with, I recall, a flute, guitar, some percussion, and vocals – really not a bad performance, I thought -- for a folk festival. But it was trying, nonetheless, to my less than liturgically tolerant soul. I am not a thorough music snob, but my tastes are quite narrow as regards liturgical music. I love a good, gnarly Appalachian fiddle, for instance, but I don’t want to hear it during the offertory.

The performance at St. Philip’s that morning featured a song I found trying indeed, but also ironic. I can’t recall all the words, but the refrain was, “deep peace flowing over you,” and the verses spoke of the peace vouchsafed by various natural spirits, one verse being the ”peace of the river spirit.” I found this song ironic because my wife had just undergone childbirth – the seventh I had experienced with her – and childbirth, though natural, is hardly a peaceful affair. But it was the bitter irony of the phrase, the “peace of the river spirit,” that really struck me. I had learned just the day before that a former student of mine, a young man of character and promise, had drowned in the Ohio River.

It was October when this young man died in the cold, swirling waters of the Ohio. On a lark, he and a friend had decided to jump from a bridge spanning the river, not far from Steubenville, Ohio. From what I learned, it was not an uncommon thing to do; but my former student forgot or didn’t know to tuck his chin against his breast, and as he hit the water, his head jerked backward, and he broke his neck. He had made a fatal mistake; but nature is not tolerant of mistakes. His companion survived his fall, though injured. For both, the spirit of gravity (if there be one) and the river spirit were none too peaceful that day.

The fate of these young men underlines the sentimental foolishness of songs like the one I heard that Sunday morning at St. Philip’s. Nature is sometimes peaceful, gentle, even maternal. She can be alluring, like a beautiful woman; she can be intoxicatingly so. Who has not perceived her deep, ravishing music, as heard in the crash of the waves on the seashore? Who has not felt her gentle caresses, as when a zephyr breeze in spring brushes his cheek or stirs the vagrant tresses of his beloved’s hair? “Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown, lilac and brown hair,” wrote T.S. Eliot. Who has not known the contentment and longing such words convey?

But like a woman (forgive me, dear feminists), nature is changeable. She can be gentle, but she can be violent. She nurtures the crops that feed us, but she can destroy them through drought or flood, by hailstorm and by pestilence. My family and I do a bit of gardening and keep livestock, so we have known the bounty of nature. (I drink the sweet, creamy milk from my goats as I write this); but we have known nature’s indifference and, sometimes, seeming vindictiveness, as well. Nature is a generous mother, but very often, she is a dreadful, cruel goddess.

If those who live closest to nature have worshiped her, they have done so to appease her. They have known that nature does not love us sons and daughters of Adam – but, maybe, she can be coaxed to fawn on us for a time. Pagans wrote beautiful hymns to their gods, told of Zeus, the protector of guests, and of Hera, aid to women in childbirth. But history tells of how our pagan ancestors cast infants into rivers swelling in flood to placate the “river spirit,” how men have “passed human victims through the fire,” to appease Moloch, how the Aztecs offered blood victims to the sun god to assure his rising. Ancient pagans knew nature for what she is, and while they often could love her, they more often feared her.

This was why the Gospel of Christ was such good news to the pagan world of Greece and Rome. It revealed to them a God who transcends nature and who, even when He punishes, does so, not out of indifference or petty vindictiveness, but out of love. God transcends nature – but more wondrous yet – He entered into nature, becoming a poor man who cast his lot with the poor, healed diseases, cast out spirits, and trod the Leviathan, that ancient serpent of the untamed waters. “Peace, be still,” He said, when He calmed the rage of sea, and, “Do not fear, I Am,” when He comforted his disciples, struck with terror by the lord and master of unredeemed nature -- Death.

In too many circles today, Catholics seem to flee the Prince of Peace for the Lord of the World. They would make our religion into a new kind of paganism that regards the world as divine. Why is this? It may be, in part, because we modern men, living in hermetically sealed suburbs, going from temperature-controlled houses to temperature-controlled cars, cut off from the sources of our physical life in the soil, the air, and streams, do not understand nature. We have become sentimental about nature because we know nothing about her. We have become unnatural and so cannot really grasp the radical liberation of the supernatural.

We may have the head knowledge, but we have not the conviction, of what the Incarnation means. It is not the rejection of nature, its abject subjugation, or the denial of its inherent goodness. The Incarnation is the interpenetration of nature by Him who stands outside nature – a union like that of man and woman, productive of new life. God became man, as St. Basil said, so that man might become God. God became man so that, through man, nature might be redeemed. All creation yearns for the redemption of the sons of God.

Christians live in hope of the new heavens and the new earth. This truth came home to me poignantly at the funeral of my former student. During the wake in our local church, we viewed his body, displayed without the mortician’s art, ravaged by death and the fury of nature. We prayed during the Mass for the repose of his soul, expressing our hope for his and our future peace. During the reception, we ate and drank and celebrated his memory and, again, our hope. And then we commended him to Mother Earth, from which his natural life had sprung.

On All Souls day each year, my family and I visit his tomb and those of others of our town who have died. Some we know; many others, we don’t. There are children buried in that ground, men and women who have died in ripe old age, others who were cut off in the prime of life. On all we invoke the name of Christ, the Prince of Peace. And though we feel sorrow and a sober sense of our own mortality (one day I may lay in that cemetery), we leave thence with a sense of the peace that neither river, mountain, nor aerial spirit -- nor all the world -- can give. We leave in the Peace of Christ.

Kind readers, who have endured to read this piece to the end, when I sat down to write it, I intended to address the question of Church music, drawing on recent and rather recent documents from the Holy See. Obviously, my intention changed mid-essay. The muse who inspires blog writers, it seems, directed me otherwise. I hope to return to my intended subject next week.

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