A Little Scripture
Dante describes one poor wretch among those who make up that babble of benign mediocrity chasing banners for all eternity. He calls him “the coward who had made the great refusal.” We meet him in the Gospels.
Matthew tells us that after Jesus was betrayed, the Sanhedrin arraigned him before Pilate, the Roman procurator. They wanted him dead, and only a conviction by the Roman authorities could accomplish that. He was charged with plotting to become the “King of the Jews,” which meant his business was insurrection. Roman justice would be swift and merciless if he was convicted.
Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?” (Mt 27:11). We can imagine him sounding almost bored. In the Gospel of John, Jesus answers, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice” (18:37).
“What is truth?” Pilate answers for two thousand years of a cynical humanity (Jn 18:38).
The rest of the story is straightforward. Pilate has Jesus scourged and claims he finds no guilt in the man — at least, not enough to have him crucified. But the crowd wants blood and even refuses Pilate’s offer to free Jesus, calling instead for the freedom of the troublemaker Barabbas. Pilate’s wife warns him, “Have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered much over him today in a dream” (Mt 27:19).
Pilate turns from Truth. The innocent man will die, he decides, if only to keep the peace. Seems like a small price to pay.
Pilate makes one last dramatic gesture, perhaps to clear his conscience but more likely as an act of near-perfect cynicism. Calling for a bowl of water, he washes his hands in front of the crowd and declares, “I am innocent of this righteous man’s blood; see to it yourselves” (Mt 27:24). And forevermore he will be “the coward who had made the great refusal.” Because he couldn’t recognize Truth standing right in front of him.
Speaking of Truth
After four decades of driving, I received my first traffic ticket, courtesy of a Pennsylvania state trooper. Sure, I had gotten a few parking tickets, but they were back in my salad days in New York, for violating the “alternate side of the street” parking restrictions. You needed a Harvard law degree to understand those rules, so those tickets don’t count. And anyway, they weren’t moving violations.
My crime was exceeding an alleged fifty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit on a minuscule stretch of a road that was sixty-five miles per hour before and after. You know where this is going. When the cop wrote out the ticket, it was rationalization time.
Like every guy in the joint, I was convinced I was an innocent man, a victim of circumstances. The next day I checked the road signs, checked where the lower speed limit began and where it ended. And I was guilty as sin. No doubt singing along with an old Beatles’ tune on the radio at the time, I had breezed through the restricted zone well over the speed limit. I could claim I never saw the signs, wrapped up in the moment of “Hey Jude.” But the truth was plain to see, no matter whether I saw it or not. And that’s pretty much a fact of life for all of us.
When Frank Conroy, jazz pianist and author of the award-winning “Stop-Time,” died in 2005, there was a long profile of him by James Salter in the Sunday New York Times book review section. Conroy was a legend among American writers, head of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa for eighteen years. He died at the age of sixty-nine — cancer.
Salter told this story about Conroy:
Objectivity came up more than once and the existence of truth, or God’s truth, as Frank called it. No one could know that, the complete truth. It was too vast and complex. “All we know is what we think we know,” he said; there was really no such thing as truth or fact. He told me he had written that his mother and stepfather had gone to Cuba to buy a piano or something — actually it was for her to have an abortion. But what he wrote was what he thought was true. “For me it was true,” he said.11
If Salter’s recollection is correct, in one sense old Frank Conroy was right. There’s a difference between God’s truth and what can pass for our phony ideas of truth. But Salter seems to imply Conroy’s great insight is that truth is simply what we think, no matter what the reality might be. Because the truth itself — God’s truth — can’t be known. Which is downright silly.
Conroy lost an innocent sibling, no matter what he believed, no matter what he wrote. Truth exists, and it can be known. God’s truth exists, and it can be known. For if God’s truth can’t be known or understood, then there is no truth at all. And God becomes pointless in our lives. It is that kind of thinking that is at the root of contemporary humanity’s despair.
Nothing new here, of course. Thomas Aquinas described the evident source of truth: “What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do; Truth Himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.”12
A Stranger in a Strange Land
There are times in life when we are hit with change, fundamental change. There are the obvious moments, of course: the principal shaking your hand for the first time because he knows he will never see you again as you accept your high school diploma; the priest pronouncing you married; the doctor saying, “It’s a girl!” But there are the less obvious moments, or at least those moments obvious to you if not to everyone around you. Yet they still mean things have changed fundamentally and won’t ever be the same. Maybe it’s the first time your knee hurts when you try to run full speed, or when The Three Stooges just don’t seem as funny as they did before.
My day of reckoning was a softball game in my early thirties. I was playing right field when a fly ball was hit my way, curving toward the foul line. I started to run for it.
There’s a feeling that anyone who has ever played the outfield knows. It’s an actual physical sensation that you are going to catch the ball, as if the brain has done the geometry of the angles and the physics of your speed and is letting you know everything is fine. It had never failed me in decades of playing. I stretched out my glove, and I knew the ball would be there. And it wasn’t. I was a half-step short. I stood there, staring at my glove as if it had done something wrong.
And then I knew. I knew it in my soul before my brain realized it. I had started to get old.
I was sitting at a high school graduation a number of years ago next to an older couple. The valedictorian was giving a speech laced with references to Forrest Gump, at the time a hugely popular movie with Tom Hanks playing a dim-witted savant. It became obvious that the older couple was without a clue. Not having been aware of the phenomenon of Forrest Gump, they found all the allusions to the movie — like life being a box of chocolates — incomprehensible. The valedictorian’s speech might as well have been in Portuguese.
My time will come, if it is not already here. I have no idea what the top songs are today, have no desire to see the movies that are consistently grabbing the coveted eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old market, and wear essentially the same style of clothes that I wore twenty years ago. Every joke I know I heard no later than my senior year of college.
The final indignity is realizing that there is an entire nostalgia industry based on cultural detritus accumulated twenty-five years after I was born. Adults are fondly recalling things from their childhood that are meaningless to me because I was grown up when they were kids.
I’m a stranger in a strange land.
There is a lesson in all this. Perhaps it is a reminder that the ephemeral is really ephemeral. After all, the older couple clueless about Forrest Gump seemed none the worse for that, and what possible difference could it make today? We invest a great deal in the passing parade, the bread and circuses of our lives.