#RevThread # 78
My Father’s House
1/ Packing, I realized that both on the plane and in Paris, I’d have leisure to read. I also decided to banish the boor from my brain for the week. I grabbed, sort of at random, Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education.” ...
My Father’s House
1/ Packing, I realized that both on the plane and in Paris, I’d have leisure to read. I also decided to banish the boor from my brain for the week. I grabbed, sort of at random, Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education.” ...
2/...The Holy Spirit is a rascal....
3/ Turns out the novel is a study in what happens to intelligent people who come into adulthood just as a boorish autocrat, Louis Philippe, rises to power, annuls freedoms, & betrays the nation’s revolution. We watch as young men degenerate into paralyzed cynicism. Lots of fun.
4/ Around Paris, I saw only one reference to Trump--a book entitled, “The First 100 Tweets”--with a drawing of him sitting on a toilet. I also read his tweet about the terrifying caravan of-gasp!-brown people coming through Mexico to get us...
5/....His tweets are indeed the stinky offerings he excretes into our souls.
6/ And then three magical moments unfolded for my wife and me. Here’s the first:
Just up a hill from our little hotel there’s an ancient stone church where gifted young musicians offer concerts...
Just up a hill from our little hotel there’s an ancient stone church where gifted young musicians offer concerts...
7/...We walked in and heard a man named Elio Di Tanna play Chopin in that place of acoustic perfection. Chopin makes music that sings of heroic and tender love and of freedom. Get this: Chopin wrote much of his greatest stuff during the period of that novel.
8/ I heard and saw that anyone can stay free even while those around them are surrendering.
9/ Listen to the Heroic Polonaise or the Revolutionary Etude. They were written while his royal lowness sat on his temporary throne. Who today reads the speeches of Louis Philippe? But almost 200 years later, even now, concerts of Chopin attract crowds all over the world.
10/ Here’s the second: Paris at the moment is jammed with tourists from every province and country and continent. And why not? Paris is filled with splendid art, great food, and kind people.
11/ So there are long lines for the churches and the museums. And in every line we stood behind young couples all in love.
12/ 51 years ago, Barbara & I were one such couple in Paris: newly married, full of hope, drawn to beauty. Watching these kids in front of us, you could see how they just couldn’t get enough of each other--they were looking into each others’ eyes, grinning, laughing, touching.
13/ That novel was all about thwarted desire in an age of social constriction. But Paris is free now and getting freer. Love flourishes in freedom. And freedom can be threatened and then recovered.
14/ Yes, let us struggle, passionately, in the #resistance, to sustain and to reassert our freedom. But that is a social task beyond our personal ability to accomplish alone. What is not beyond us is this: to guard, to deepen, to intensify the love in our life...
15/.. Freedom will emerge the stronger, for freedom ultimately springs from love.
16/ Here’s the third moment: Like dutiful tourists, we returned to Notre Dame and to Sainte-Chapelle. After 51 years the biggest change was the crowds. OMG. Back in ‘67, we just walked in...
17/... Not today. Thousands upon thousands line the plaza and the streets and bridges, all day, every day. Standing among them, I felt like I was in one of the accounts of a medieval pilgrimage, only bigger.
18/ There were as many Africans and Asians as Americans & Europeans. Simultaneously, without ad campaigns, they are coming to see, to breathe in, to feel these gloriously sacred spaces. Atheists and Muslims & Jews & Christians & young & old--they stream in, day after day...
19/... It is as Jesus foresaw: “My Father’s house shall be a house of prayer for all peoples.”
20/ And it’s the same--maybe even more so--at the great museums, especially the D’Orsay, where the great impressionists’ works reign. We want to see beauty created through human beings...
21/... not old stale crappola, but ground-breaking work that is still fresh. We want to see and to value something that cannot be bought and sold.
22/ Stupid, stupid Donald: “I’ve always been greedy. Greedy, greedy, greedy. I always grab for more money.” That’s his most honest statement in his public life.
23/ What does a Van Gogh have in common with the windows of Sainte-Chapelle? Neither one was done by greed or for greed. They were offered from some fount of generosity. They were generated from something sublime and free in the human spirit.
24/ American Evangelicalism is now terminally ill. The brand is forever tarnished by the foolishness of Trump followers. They have surrendered the sacred and imperishable gospel and chosen Mammon over God.
25/ The rest of us who follow Jesus? Like the stone cutters and architects of Medieval Europe, like Van Gogh who started life as an evangelist and became enthralled by the phrase, “I am the light of the world,”...
26/..let us simultaneously wage war against the greed within us and express our faith in ways that honor humanity’s passionate longing for life that is not for sale.
