Hobbit-Sense at OneFreeGarden.com

Courtesy the fellows at Creative Minority Report, I’ve watched an audition tape for a 16 year old girl called Maddie Curtis. I liked Maddie so much that I thought I might try to follow this season, so I googled and got to the official website to look at start dates and what have you, and couldn’t help but click to watch Maddie’s audition again.  And from one video follows another, and now I’ve watched all the featured auditions currently available, and a couple of other auditions stood out.

All three (including Maddie) have great voices.  They also had great stories and great personalities.  They were complimented on their honest, authentic performances, which were not carbon copies of the original artists but expressed themselves.

I think a lot of that has to do with the lives these three have lived.  Many people are close to their grandmothers;  not many 16 year olds spend their free time hanging out with grandma, or are, like Katie Stevens, prepared to talk about singing for her and winning for her before she can’t remember who they are anymore.  Seventeen year olds can’t vote or smoke or drink;  and yet at that age, Jermain Sellers began taking care of his sick mother.  And while, despite the huge efforts of parents of kids with Down’s in the last 40 years to mainstream them, many struggle with the idea of having a person with Down’s in their family, Maddie Curtis is proud of her four brothers with the condition.

American Idol and shows like it are great at introducing us to people with great talent and interesting stories.  But I imagine that many other people also found these three stories particularly touching, and these three talented people endearing.  And I think it’s because these three people have close relationships with people whose lives are very different from the norm– people who, either from their very nature or from their current condition, have their “quality of life” questioned.  There are people and places who would allow or even encourage the snuffing out of these lives simply because they involve pain, or won’t be able to take care of themselves, or can’t live up to “normal” standards.  We already know that rates of Down’s in the US has fallen where statistically it should be more likely (given older motherhood)– I don’t think it’s a stretch to infer that has something to do with babies with Down’s being aborted.

And yet these three most likeable contestants all come from families where the “abnormal” was their normal.  And that’s why all three were complimented not only on their voices, which, with training, are essentially received or not received, but also on the honesty of their performances.  They’ve experienced, at a young age, life’s breadth, with includes difficult illnesses and disabilities and all the rest.

And all of this is a long-winded way of pointing out that without Jermain’s mom’s suffering, Katie’s grandmother’s slow deterioration, and Maddie’s brothers’ “abnormality” we don’t get the wonderful Jermains, Katies and Maddies whose compassion, honesty, and lack of self-absorption not only make for compelling television, but enrich our communities.  Jermain’s mother, Katie’s grandmother, and Maddie’s brothers have been good, strong influences on these people, and they have been loved:  that sounds like an excellent quality of life to me.

I don’t doubt that, while sinister influences are at work in some, many people who support abortion, euthanasia, and the rest of these “solutions,” do so out of a misguided compassion that thinks they’re keeping people from suffering.  But death isn’t an answer to suffering or difficulty;  it’s only an end to our interaction with those people.  There are places where these individuals, in pain, deteriorating, or with a perceived low quality of life can be excised from the picture– and those places are poorer for it.

It’s not compassion or love or self-sacrifice that drives “mercy” killings which are anything but.  And it won’t make us a more compassionate society.  What it will do is leave us with a future made up entirely of people who met some imaginary, ridiculous, and completely arbitrary idea of what constitutes a life worth living;  we will be a population of the most well-intentioned but least able to actually be compassionate executioners and survivors.  That’s a quality of life we can do without.  There’s a lot of talk about the value of diversity, but the diversity that’s truly dying out isn’t cultural or ethnic– it’s a diversity of experience which requires people to suborn their own interests for someone else.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to follow Idol from across the seas, but I can tell you I’ll be rooting for these three– they haven’t just got talent;  they’ve got heart.

Watch videos of Maddie Curtis, Jermain Sellers, and Katie Stevens at the American Idol Featured Auditions page.

I can’t recall if I mentioned but I am a native Bay Stater.  In fact, Ted Kennedy has been my senator for my whole life– in fact, he has been a senator almost as long as my parents have been alive.  I have had severe philosophical differences with the senator both on issues of governance (I’m a liberal in the classical sense, not in the big government sense) and moral ones (yes, red flag to a bull, the abortion issue).  I also have hated the mystical near-worship of the Kennedy clan in this area– I don’t believe fantasy of that kind is good for anyone, especially not the person (or group) being lionised.

The Catholic blogosphere, which generally crosses the political spectrum, has been ablaze with the subject of Ted Kennedy’s death.  What I have encountered has been just- neither sugarcoating his sins nor claiming to know the status of his soul.  I’ve had a lot of disparate thoughts about this subject, but I wanted to add my two cents in my own little corner of the internet.

From a Catholic perspective, there are a few things to be said about the senator.  There are rumors (many substantiated) of infidelity and alcoholism.  There is the sad story of Mary Jo Kopechne whose life was imperiled by Kennedy and whose death was caused by his failure to procure help.  And the clincher for most devout Catholics- the one thing that they really can’t get past- is his support for abortion.

And by all rights, abortion is something we should never “get past.”  There is no getting over so grave an evil.

But stories have started to trickle out that have made me look Ted Kennedy in a different light.  I don’t do well at personal malice (atleast of people I don’t know, excluding Andrew Jackson whom I despise– no room for explanation), so I never disliked Teddy K– in fact, he’s someone I imagine I would really like on a personal level.  He and his family also have my sympathy for having suffered so many tragedies.  It cannot have been easy to have been the last brother out of four when the other three all died young and tragically.

The stories have to do with prayer.  I heard someone say that the Eucharist was the center of his life.  I don’t know if that was true.  But I do know of two different people, both of whom disagreed with him politically, that they saw him praying.

The first is from Kathryn Lopez, who writes for the National Review, saw him at daily Masses in DC when she dropped in from an internship at the Heritage Foundation (a conservative thinktank).  And not just once or twice.  As she said, “[H]e probably led some people astray by his example. But our faith also teaches that we are all sinners and that there is redemption.”

The second is from a man, I don’t remember his name, who lives in the area of the basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, covered in the Boston Herald.  He described himself as a ’small goverment guy,’ and also as someone who dropped into the basilica having been taught by nuns to visit our Mother daily.  He too saw Senator Kennedy there, in the pew, deep in prayer.  This gentleman, who serves as an acolyte at noon dailies, had hoped he’d be allowed to serve, political differences aside.  Most important to me, however, is that these stories were not told while the senator lived– his prayers were not for show.

There is no escaping the fact that Kennedy’s flaws and particularly his public political support for abortion have given scandal and also have harmed the Church through tacit encouragement of the view that one can be a Catholic in good standing and support morally objectionable causes that have been expressly prohibited by the Vatican.  But there is also no escaping God, whose standard shows all of us that our “good standing” leaves quite a lot to be desired.

I will make no excuses for Senator Kennedy’s actions;  they are grave ones indeed.  But reading all these little tidbits, listening to the eulogies at the wake and the funeral (Teddy Jr.’s was especially good), I felt little tugs on my memory.  Wisps of the story wafted around my brain until I could finally grasp just whom this Ted Kennedy I was just starting to know reminded me of:  the tax collector in the temple.

Remember that parable?  Two men go to the temple to pray.  The first is a pharisee who thanks God that he follows all the laws and is better than lots of other people, including the second man.

The second man, a public sinner by virtue of being a tax collector, doesn’t even approach the front, doesn’t even look heavenward.  Instead, so conscious is he of his sin that he only stands, pleading with God, “Have mercy on me, a sinner!”

I don’t have any special knowledge of anything, let alone Ted Kennedy’s soul.  But, for all his faults, though they were grave and in some cases persistent, I just have this inkling that he clung to prayer like that second man.  The good father at the Byzantine Rite church we go to occasionally said today, in that Tradition, we say that we are the first of sinners in the Liturgy– a Liturgy which is suffused with petitions for God to be merciful.  Perhaps that is the lesson of Senator Kennedy’s life to those of us who remain- a reminder that we are all wholly dependent on the mercy of God.

And just because it’s a beautiful prayer that bears repeating, here is the prayer Byzantine Rite Catholics (in various Churchs- e.g. Ukrainian Catholic Church), say before receiving the Eucharist:

I believe, O Lord, and confess that You are indeed the Christ, the Son of the living God, Who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first.

Of Your mystical supper, make me a partaker this day, O Son of God, for I will not speak of Your mysteries to Your enemies, nor like Judas will I give You a kiss, but like the good thief will I confess to You.

Remember me, O Lord, when You shall come into Your kingdom.

Remember me, O Master, when You shall come into Your kingdom.

Remember me, O Holy One, when You shall come into Your kingdom.

Not for judgment, nor for condemnation be for me the partaking of these Your Holy Mysteries O Lord, but for the healing of my body and soul.

O God be merciful to me a sinner. God, cleanse my sins and have mercy on me. Innumerably have I sinned, forgive me, O Lord.

(A brief note that this is in no way a criticism of actual vegetarians.)

I’ve been mulling over this idea for a while but it was only in a conversation with Plush Appendix over the weekend that I put a name to it. I call it vegetarianism of faith not because of an abstenance borne of good will. Rather, this is the choice to avoid the “meatier” elements of faith, because they are disagreeable to the person.

That is, rather than go for the real core of faith, we stay at a comfortable surface level, where differences are matters of opinion rather than truth and honest discernment. This mentality leads to a tricky kind of idolatry, one which tends to replace God with a shifting notion of “social good” and, as Chesterton put it, “not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”

The common good is certainly a Christian idea, but the mistake is in mistaking that for the whole of faith. These are the sort of people who point to Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day as examples of their kind of Catholocism or Christianity, and then proceed to make all sorts of unjustified assumptions that will aid in their avoidance of the center of their faith. They are very results focused- Mother Teresa is a hero because of all the help she gave the poor. But easily overlooked is why she did those things.

Mother Teresa didn’t do these things because she believed in a social good- she did those things because she loves Jesus. It wasn’t an ideology of common good, or a high ideal, even though those can be parts of it. But mistaking the effects of a deep love for Jesus as the equal of that love is an easy way out of the more difficult parts of faith. The moral requirements, the challenges to the ego, the reliance on God, and perhaps most importantly the awareness of one’s flaws– all these are easily set aside when faith is reduced to “being a good person,” which is an effect, not the source.

And yet practicioners of this meatless faith will claim that those who go beyond the broth are polemical because, having had the better portion, they will not surrender it or compromise its potency.

At the risk of adding even more to my various food metaphors, I will offer one last though, which is a challenge to everyone, myself included. As much as I wish it were otherwise, I’m often a vegetarian when it comes to faith. But I have found a useful reminder in the wedding feast at Cana: a lot of times we settle for the cheap wine. But if we will wait, and plead for help, and follow Mary’s injunction to “do whatever he tells you,” we will get the better wine. Our task then is to discern what are the hearty things we leave in the bowl, what is the cheap wine we’re settling for.

Thanks for bearing with my long absence and any lack of cohesion due to writing this on the small screen of an iTouch.

Best,
-Rosy