JocuSecuHiLarity

March 2, 2015

Dateline: Pangloss, California

When I came in last night, Roz was on the landline: “Uh-huh,” she was saying, “Uh-huh. Yes. Uh-huh,” voice slurry, rolling eyeballs caught in her throat. “Yeah. I’ll try to do that.”

          “Meaning what?” I asked when she’d hung up. “Polly,” she said.

          “An article? book?” Polly, the epitome of kindness, always trying to improve her friends, to make them over in the image of their best selves. Eternal optimist. (Their best selves, as she understands them.)

          “Have you got this?” – Roz, because I usually “got this”: I read the article in question or skim the book and give her “talking points.” It’s like she’s Meryl Streep and I’m her personal assistant. Unpaid.

Polly has been, in her fifty-plus years, a Roman Catholic, an evangelical of the warm and fuzzy variety, a Buddhist, the follower of a guru from Brooklyn – well, he looked Indian and he did a good accent; and finally, now she’s a “secular humanist.” And suddenly, now she knows why; she found it in a book, Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions by a California “professor of sociology and secular studies” named Phil Zuckerman (no relation to Nathan).

          So I go looking for reviews – and I find Zuckerman has also been interviewed by Tom Ashcroft on the radio series, On Point.

And now for something completely different.

          I’m still and always trying to latch onto the nature of whimsy – what cast of mind and heart, what nurture and education, what circumstances of life make one, or allow one to be, whimsical?

Maybe not completely different; at least, not beside the point.

          Listening to Zuckerman – and the always perceptive Ashcroft – on the web this morning, I’m almost certain that religion must be some part of the whimsical-mix: one must have a heart for both faith and doubt, a religious upbringing, and at least an occasional need to squeak out a prayer whether it will be heard or ignored; one must have at least these

Tom Hulce playing Mozart. Listen!

things to have whimsy. One must have a sense of a transcendence that’s bigger than looking at a sunset, weeping after a life victory or defeat, listening to Mozart, or eating a peach. These are the kinds of things, besides playing on the beach at dawn, sledding in the dark, 

and dancing with your grandmother that provoke in Zuckerman what he calls “aweism.”

          Whimsy requires the additional sense that this isn’t just about you looking at something; there could also be something looking at you, peering over your shoulder when you’re trying – unsuccessfully, and you know it – to shake that last yellow drop from the end of your member before you fold it back into your pants.

Speaking of which.

          Here’s an almost perfect example of Divine whimsy – Genesis 17. Abram is ninety-nine years old. The Transcendent One becomes immanent and says, “I’m going to make a covenant between me and you.” Abram falls down – on purpose: this is more than a sunset or a bunch of grapes or the music of the movies of 1200 bc sifting through the background. Abram falls to his knees; and he gets up with a new name, Abraham, and not only a covenant between God and him but between God and all his descendants – and Sarai’s. She also has a new name, Sarah.

          God is going to do this, and that, and the other thing – there’s a land deal, among other things, many other things: the scope of the contract is amazing. God will be Abraham’s God. But what can Abraham and all his house, present and future, do in return? – because God has everything; there’s nothing God needs from him.

          “What? Please?” Abraham prays. And God replies, after just the right hesitation – God has impeccable timing: “How about your foreskins?”

God is impeccable. But we are not.

          We are, in both Abraham’s world and mine, fallen. And that means not only that we sin, but, more important, that we are limited. Without help we don’t see past the ends of our noses. (With help we see a two inches past.) Sociologists are, in my limited experience but not-so-humble opinion, help-less. It’s not that they leave out transcendence – they have to do that, because they’re social scientists, for God’s sake. It’s that they leave out science; they don’t proceed by proven method or reason.

What that means here.

          That Zuckerman has discovered in his study of secularists in America precisely what he’d hoped to – that they are in general a mirror of his best self, his best self.

          So, they have not fallen farther than a few skinned knees. Here is where “secular humanists” go awry, if Zuckerman’s supporters that phoned into On Point and Roz’s friend Polly are an indication. They lack any notion that we are truly fallen – our brains are as banged up as our knees – our hearts, too, and our souls if we have them. They have arrived at the optimism of the nineteenth-century liberal theologians, and they’ve remained there, as if neither the Great War nor the Holocaust has happened. They are like Pangloss, unfazed by the Lisbon earthquake.

          They have the moral resources to do good – they have helped any number of little old ladies across any number of busy streets – but do they have the moral vision to recognize – and so combat – evil?

          I am doubtful.

Though I could be wrong. I often am. (And those not so far fallen could be right.)

          Still, Roz, these are your notes. Tell Polly you’re happy if she’s happy, but you prefer to be sad, because the world’s still a mess however happy she is. And if – by chance - she asks what good God is if “he” doesn’t pull us out of the mess, tell her God makes it possible for us to recognize the mess we’re in.