Teach me to be Gentle with All

In response to the Zelenskyy meeting at the Oval Office

I try to limit the amount of autobiographical material I post. For one thing, I have no way of keeping up with the universal and enduring truths which need to be explored. At any given time, there are anywhere from a dozen to fifty things with which I am puttering – aesthetic theory, approaches to technological advances, philosophy of consciousness, et al. There are so many brilliant theologians whose work I would like to understand better and share more broadly. Questions pertaining to the metaphysics of substance have been consuming me for months; I am presenting these ideas to a group of philosophers this coming Sunday.

All this goes neglected now, as a fragment of my own story flashed across my screen as it was broadcast on the world stage. I watch nearly zero video content, but the New York Times was insistently sending notifications to every email account on my phone. In the clip of the Oval Office press conference forwarded to me, U.S. Vice President Vance’s demeanor, timbre, cadence – even the literal transcript – were a nearly exact reenactment of an exchange my father visited on me:

I think it’s disrespectful… [with barely concealed rage on the word “disrespectful,” particularly on the negative prefix]

You should be thanking the President…

Do you think it’s respectful for you...?

Have you said thank you once?

No, in this entire meeting?

Offer some words of appreciation…

Just say thank you…

Substitute “your father” for “the President,” remove any talk of meetings, salt through hair-raising expletives and obscenities, and it’s all basically faithful to memory. I must have been between four and six, and the proximate occasion of this particular episode was a baby-sized vanilla soft-serve with rainbow sprinkles purchased at the now shuttered Mr. Cone in Orange County, New York.

My egregious failure as to the expected etiquette likely owed to how repulsed my small self was by ice cream, as by just about anything comestible (I’ve since recovered from this, I assure you). I had chronic stomach pain, which I attribute to the omnipresent stress of that life era. While I have since grown into an exceptionally happy, healthy, dairy-loving adult, I used to find anything too sweet or too rich deeply off-putting. Stoical resignation to the fact of the ice cream and my subsequent attempt to consume it with feigned enthusiasm, lest I appear ungracious, led me into the very sort of lapse I would have hoped to have avoided. In the case, my father left me abandoned on the shoulder of Route 32, just as it was rapidly getting dark. For once, my mother advocated on my behalf with him; it wasn’t so long until the car returned and I was hastily shoved into the backseat.

The point of this is not to divulge childhood trauma. I would be recounting far worse incidents if that were my aim. I am writing here with the intellectual seriousness of a theology post, not the sensationalism of a family exposé. I cite this here, actually rather dispassionately as regards my own situation, because the monological template in the two cases is nearly identical in every way. Imagining a frail (and sticky) five-year-old with sandy blonde hair pulled up in wispy pigtails, clad in a sundress, in place of a world leader in military fatigues trying to broker international diplomacy in a foreign language, offers a rare clarity. This is abuse.

My father was preoccupied with “respect” and “gratitude,” as much as he was with the films depicting brutal sadism to which I was dragged, theoretically restricted audiences or no (Tarantinos and hyper-violent cinema, a match made in... well, someplace). His was (and perhaps is; he fell out of contact in my adolescence) a psychology and a cosmos utterly dominated by raw power versus obeisance, a structure in which the highest virtue in the subordinate was to “toe the line,” and to do so in abject servile deference. You knew who held the cards and you carried on in submissive accord. I was trained early: “Cry, and I’ll give you something to cry about.” My precocious mind and strong will disciplined my young person to ice and to steel.

“The history of religions knows the figure of the mock king,” writes Pope Benedict XVI. Scandal at the warping of power is internalized and then acted out on someone as disempowered as the aggressor experiences himself as being. Or, put another way, the measure of a certain backwards “righteousness” is acceptance of one’s place in an architecture of malicious dominances.

The soldiers are playing cruel games with Jesus. They know that he claims to be king. But now he is in their hands; now it pleases them to humiliate him, to display their power over him, and perhaps to offload vicariously onto him their anger against their rulers.

This is part of Pope Benedict’s meditation on the Passion. It continues:

Him whose whole body is torn and wounded, they vest, as a caricature, with the tokens of imperial majesty: the purple, the robe, the crown plaited with thorns, and the reed scepter. They pay homage to him: “Hail, King of the Jews”; their homage consists of blows to his head, through which they once more express their utter contempt for him.

After all of this, the figure of the government makes a showing of the handiwork of its military men: Ecce homo; behold man as we have cast him in the image of our Machine; thus do we burn down this effigy. Anger is so much less the improper calibration of the irascible appetite with its dysregulated and misfiring amygdala than it is a set of maddening presuppositions about reality and, consequently, about worship.

French-American sociologist René Girard, a wisdom figure to Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel, had a deep insight into these principalities and powers and how their dominion is dissolved through the triumph of the Cross:

In the triumph of a victorious general the humiliating display of those who are conquered is only a consequence of the victory achieved, whereas in the [triumph] of the Cross this display is the victory itself; it is the unveiling of the violent origin of culture. The powers are not put on display because they are defeated, but they are defeated because they are put on display.

There is an irony, therefore, in the metaphor of military triumph, and what gives it its edge is the fact that Satan and his cohorts respect nothing but power. They think only in terms of military triumph. They are beaten by a weapon whose effectiveness they could not conceive, that contradicts all their beliefs, all their values. It is the most radical weakness that defeats the power of satanic self-expulsion.

Sadly, the selfsame norm of dominance and subjection carried on through Christendom and beyond; it is one of the tragedies of our time to see, in the face of “the irresistibly increasing sense of the solidarity of all people” observed in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, this norm more Roman than Catholic (a wonderful turn of phrase I owe to Paul) and more pagan than Christian reasserted by believers in tones of righteous anger.

Vice President Vance, much to his credit, has not been shy about discussing the details of his own abusive upbringing and his ongoing issues with anger. He has also expressed his willingness to grow in the Faith. I cannot evaluate the details of his political policy; some of them may very well have merit. But whatever their associations with historical Christendom, the framework and ethos within which he is working here, which he is invoking and seeking to enforce, is one of a primitive honor culture, of dominance, abrasiveness, aggrandizement and crassness. This departs in its substance from Christianity, just as an analogous vision of “respect” departs from the holy wonder and awe of latria, and of “gratitude” from eucharistia.

Our sins – the sum total of those committed against us and the ones we ourselves have committed – bear a tremendous power. It is ours to claim as pure destruction, or as the crucible of a conversion profound and abiding, with an orientation toward a caliber of sensitivity which simply could not have been achieved any other way. May Mr. Vance, and all of us, come daily to a deepening and authentically reverential esteem – holy love – for the meek heart of the Redeemer, from whom all graces, and all genuine order, flow. He alone is the path to peace.

From the prayer of St. Francis de Sales against anger:

Teach me to be gentle with all, even with those who offend me or are opposed to me, and even with myself, not burdening myself because of my faults.

When I fall, in spite of my efforts, I will gently pick myself up and say: “Come on, my poor heart, let’s get up and leave this pit forever. Let’s have recourse to the Mercy of God, and He will help us.” Amen.