From a Letter to a Friend
A Meditation on Sin, Death, and Love
“History is real,” Stanley Booth told us in conversation one evening. “You have to confront it, or else you will be in Hell.”
His own confrontation with history — including the events detailed in his classic work of reportage, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, which chronicles, with epic precision, the violence and sublimity of that band’s 1969 American tour — led Stanley, by slow degrees, into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church, in 1993, at a parish in his native Georgia.
The apparent irony of such a profane man embracing the sacred mysteries has not been lost on those who enjoy his work or his friendship. A decade after his conversion, Stanley fell into conversation with such a friend, a bookseller in Atlanta, an exchange leading to the ‘Catholice fidei defensionem’ - epistolary in form, Georgian in tone - offered below.
“If I’d known you were going to answer at such length,” the friend later replied, “I wouldn’t have asked.”
I had said to my friend in Atlanta, apropos of certain mundane frustrations, that I had been for too long in Limbo with the unbaptized infants, and he said, “you mean Purgatory.” I said, accurately if archaically, and with tongue hovering near cheek, “No, I mean Limbo. Unbaptized infants haven’t sinned, so they don’t go to Purgatory, but they have Original Sin, so they can’t go to Heaven.”
“What’s Original Sin?”
You asked what is Original Sin, and I said, “That proclivity for evil shared by the descendants of Adam.” Obviously this was inadequate because when I went on to observe that Catholic reality, odd as it might seem, really made a lot of sense, you said it made sense if you were the Tasmanian Devil, whoever that is. I have to say that (religious and non-religious) people’s attitudes toward religion at various times amuse, amaze and appall me. Of course there is nothing that cannot be belittled, but that isn’t to say that the belittlers are always right. I find for example my dear friend the artist William Eggleston’s moral opinions wonderfully confused. The last time I saw him, he had just concluded an unscheduled sermon of the free-style Presbyterian variety about how We-Are-Supposed-To-Do-The-Best-Work-We-Possibly-Can-While-We-Are-Alive-Here when God’s name came up and Bill related the story of how, as a preschool child, he was disturbed by talk of this so-called Deity and told his elders he didn’t believe in Him, and has continued to hold steadfast to this position. There’s not necessarily an inherent contradiction here, in spite of the apparent one.
A problem in discussing religious belief at all is the slipperiness of the terms. ‘God As You Understand Him’ is what they say at AA, and that’s a helpful phrase, but it perhaps doesn’t go far enough. God by definition is completely beyond human understanding. Baron von Hügel wrote that we can never in our lives understand God nearly as well as we are understood by our dogs. I found the God prayed and appealed to by my South Georgia elders hateful and frightening. Threatening, not loving. Critical, not creative. In the traditional Christian view such a God is heretical, not to say blasphemous, and people who worship such a God are heretics. Their God is not the God of Saint Augustine, who expressed the essence of traditional Christianity when he said Love, and do as you will. But he was speaking of agape, not eros - unselfish love, not unbridled lust. All our words, through loose usage, have grown dull, as I believe I once heard Jeeves remark. Something like that. Consequently, when we hear someone speak of God or of love, we tend at least to cover up our checkbooks. So we should. This is no proof that the concepts themselves, love and God, are without value.
I became a member of the Cathlik Church, as Flannery O’Connor — perhaps the most important patron saint of the house I share with my wife, the poet Diann Blakely — called it, because I love the Church and believe in what it teaches. Another problem for an aware person in or out of the Church is the tedious, tiresome and terrible literalism (“It is a wretched slavery which takes the figurative expressions of Scripture in a literal sense,” Saint Augustine says) that apparently will always plague religion in spite of the repeated gospel affirmation that the letter kills but the Spirit gives life, the strength of sin is the law, and so on. This is the part of the fundamental core-belief of the Church, the New Covenant, which freed the tribes from the historical chains of bond-behavior being linked to aggression and the resultant crimes of nationalism, patriotism, xenophobia. Or perhaps I should say the New Covenant potentially freed the tribes. If everybody accepted that we are all alike in our fundamental needs, if everybody treated everyone else according to what is known as the Golden Rule, we would have something rather different in the way of human society on this planet. But we don’t, and one way of explaining why we don’t is Original Sin. It may sound a quaint concept but who among us is so silly as to think human beings have attained spiritual perfection? The Church teaches that Man is like all creatures, all created beings, a good thing, but no man is perfectly good. The truth of the latter clause at least seems obvious, or does to me. Original Sin denotes lack of perfection — you don’t have to be a Tasmanian Devil to be imperfect. All you have to be is born.
(Limbo, by the way, is no longer a scheduled stop on the Catholic Transit System, Purgatory not necessarily so, and the former Pope said that while Hell exists in a sense no one can say that anybody is definitely in it. These are again expressions of spiritual rather than literal matters, though they are no less real, quite the contrary, for not being literal.)
Similarly, O’Connor said in response to someone who thought it odd that a serious modern artist could be a Catholic, “I find that the Catholic sacramental view of life upholds the artistic vision at every turn.” This is no platitude and no empty-headed complacency but rather a matter of the greatest practical importance, as a story like “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” amply illustrates. Granted, readers Cathlik and otherwise find this story horrible, offensive, unacceptable. O’Connor and I would say that this is at least in part because of the fatuous knee-jerk propensity for (false, shallow and easily changeable into its opposite) kind positivism, or positive kindness, that is rampant in our society. Some people think Denial is in Egypt, too.
I spoke to a group in Waycross recently about my novel-in-progress based on that town’s murder case known as the Pea Patch killings, using as reference points three things, one of which was “A Good Man…” The other two were the cases of Donald Raulerson and the Waycross boy who, along with two other American servicemen, raped a twelve-year-old Filipino girl. I don’t know if you heard about the Raulerson murders. He was tried in Savannah, after a change of venue, for killing I think three people in Waycross, the first two a young couple he saw kissing. Gang-raping a child carries its own distinction. We call the underlying cause of crimes like these alienation, but another word for it is evil. My message was that evil is real, it dwells among us, and no amount of legislation will alter that. Capital punishment will never deter people from killing — or raping or robbing — each other. (One of my messages to my Cathlik abortion-prohibitionist friends is that women will stop selling their bodies and having abortions when men stop killing each other and making wars.) Murder, rape, etc., are part of the human condition, as O’Connor knew all too well. Original Sin may, as I say, be a funny-sounding phrase but who can deny that men and women, though mostly good — if they weren’t, attempts at establishing and maintaining human societies would always break down altogether — contain within themselves evil impulses? The story of Art, Music, and Literature is this conflict between good and evil. And about the violence it often takes to shock us into recognition. No writer has ever known this better than Miss Mary Flannery O’Connor, who, doctrinal but wonderfully contrary, wrote that at the age of twelve she was made furious by discovering that she had a guardian angel.
When Sri Ramakrishna was asked why, God being good, there is evil in the world, he replied, “To thicken the plot.” If O’Connor was aware of his words, no doubt, upon hearing them today, she would have laughed herself into stitches, as we say in Georgia. One of the things we both love about the Church is that it recognizes the existence of mysteries. Do I agree at all times with the Pope, or with my parish priests? Hell, no. But Cathliks — even ones who are, to repeat myself, doctrinal as O’Connor could be — aren’t required to do so. Cathliks themselves, whom she famously described as being, on the average, “militant moron[s],” don’t understand their Church, so how can non-Catholics be expected to?
The Church’s reality is a spiritual reality, not a literal one, as Saint Augustine clearly states. I doubt if many Catholics believe that consecrated wine examined under a microscope will reveal the presence of red and white corpuscles. Certainly the Church teaches that the appearance of the consecrated Host remains that of bread and wine. The literal aspects are beside the point. The Sacraments, of which Communion, the Eucharist, is the center and heart of the Church, are meant to bring us closer to God. We can only get closer to or farther away from this spiritual concept we call God. No less an authority than Charles Baudelaire has said that the Devil’s greatest wile is to convince us that he does not exist. R.H. Blyth, the great Orientalist, whom I deeply suspect O’Connor never read (though she was very fond of the Anglo-Catholic C.S. Lewis), wrote that “sensitive people, that is morally sensitive people, know that they have no rights, not even the right to life itself.” That’s called, I believe, reality. People see the sins committed by those in the Church and condemn the Church for these sins, but the Church did not commit them. When three soldiers in the Philippines rape a child, the Army is not accountable; the ones who committed the outrage bear the guilt. It’s true the Church, through some of its popes, bishops, priests and religious, has officially sponsored horrible wars and inflicted unspeakable tortures, but those misdeeds, mistakes and misdirections are not the Church, and they are not part of what the Church teaches. As anything can be belittled, so can it be perverted, sometimes by extremely well-meaning Tasmanian Devils. Anyone who doubts that something like Original Sin exists and can’t remember his own childhood has but to become a parent to be reminded that we come into this world laden with anger, selfishness, concupiscence, along with a host of other faults. And even as adults, which of us is so wise as truly to recognize his own unimportance? Here we have pride, another of our old friends (almost as old as Original) the cardinal sins. (The others are gluttony, lust, anger, greed, envy and sloth - in my life I’ve neglected none of them.) These are called the cardinal sins from the Latin cardo, or hinge, because they open the door to all other sins. But sin itself is not the same to Catholics as it is to Protestants. Sin is for Protestants simply a no-no; they have no mechanism for forgiveness — save direct appeal to God, which can be awfully lonely and shall we say unredeeming — but because they’re human they go on sinning, so their lives are filled with disappointment and that Egyptian river alluded to earlier. Sin to Catholics, as O’Connor wrote over and over in her work, is anything that separates us from God. That stuff happens all day long, that’s the world we live in. But we have the sacraments to redeem us. They also refocus us. “Our whole business in this life,” Saint Augustine said, “is to restore to health the eye of the heart through which God may be seen.”
To understand my attitude toward the Church it would be necessary to read at least Flannery’s The Habit of Being, her collected letters, and Mystery and Manners, her collected essays. Her gut-busting humor makes both of them a joy to read, but they’re packed with wisdom secular and otherwise.
Love is what the whole Catholic thing is about, a healing redemptive love that soothes and relieves the pain of this world. Isn’t it love, or something like it, that lies behind all civilized or nonaggressive human behavior? I admire Native American religious thought, I love Zen Buddhism, and we know that the idea of the Golden Rule had been expressed in at least China hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. There is perhaps something admirable in many if not most religions. But I know of no higher wisdom than that embodied in traditional Catholic Christianity, through which I am joined to an enormous company of crazy guys & gals, including my beloved breeder of peafowl — Joseph of Cupertino hovering in the treetops much as O’Connor herself described Christ, though she saw his figure as “ragged” and almost imperceptible, moving through those trees of the mind; John of the Cross and Teresa rising into the air in the middle of one August afternoon in 1567, after which Teresa said, “One may not speak of God to my father John of the Cross because he goes into ecstasies and causes others to do so.” She reveals at most a mild alarm at whatever altitude, but ecstasies are profoundly alarming to a certain kind of mind which demands that the world maintain a simplistic tidiness that it will never possess. It was this same Teresa who was told by God, when she complained of her afflictions, that this was the way he treated his friends, and who replied, “No wonder you have so few.” No wonder, indeed. So far as I can see, nothing whatever has changed in the last two thousand years. The Church is still a pilgrim, wandering on a hostile planet. Christians are considered hateful now as Tacitus tells us they were in Nero’s day. And indeed many of them are hateful, filled with hate. This will always be so. There are evil people in the Church, evil people in the Vatican. But the Church is good. For every child-molesting priest there are thousands upon thousands of quietly self-sacrificing agents of mercy, grace and love. Who get no credit and no respect because, as I say, nothing changes.
The Devil can quote Scripture for his own purpose, and the world is filled with false prophets; but it is true that by our own fruits we are and shall be known.
Here we come back to Bill’s saying what he did about the Work-We’re-Supposed-To-Do-Here. He is right. (Not only that, he gets extra psychological points for bringing forth fruit without expecting anything for it from anybody or Anybody.) There is after all only one wisdom in this world. Science, Buddhism, Christianity and Eggleston are in fact perfectly congruent and disagree with each other not one iota. It is only when man’s vision is distorted (Bill wears glasses, but then, of course, so did O’Connor) that this appears not to be the case. “I love going to church,” Andy Warhol said. “It’s so pretty.” Some people do love it, while others are completely indifferent to it, and others hate and despise it. I have friends in all three camps. We tolerate each other. Someday perhaps we will all see that each of us was right from his point of view.
You spoke years ago of my seeing life in this way, as an attempt to do the Lord’s work, or at least to have some part in it. Being a Catholic makes it — not easier — but somehow more nearly possible to do God’s work. This is what I feel and believe. What is this work? The same as it’s always been — to avoid participating in the general discouragement. To be countercultural. (If the thoroughly countercultural, comic and tragic is not the Lord’s work then I’m a hopeless fool who understands nothing.) This will ever be the true role and mission of the Church and her poor — “to the serious writer, all people are poor people,” she wrote — pilgrims; it is my desire to be found with these bearers of that counterculture, to be a grain of sand on that vast beach. I joined the Church because I thought it was the right thing to do, not because I expected it to make me feel better, but I have found the Church a source of a kind of joy I had not previously encountered. I had met saints before but now I understand better who they are. You are one, and so is Bill, and so of course is Furry “Holy Spirit, don’t you leave me” Lewis. As I say, it’s all about love. What Flannery calls the Catholic sacramental view of life is a very happy thing, indeed the happiest thing possible given the inevitability of death. At the same time, as a Franciscan priest I know said, I wouldn’t expect too much. We could go through life with worse guides than this, loving our lives but not expecting too much. Another Franciscan priest told me - this was in Reconciliation, which used to be called Confession, but if I am in any way a typical Catholic should be called Complaining; I’d just told the priest that I had belief but no, or very little, faith - “There are levels of faith that haven’t been required of us.” He smiled when he said it. As Saint John of the Cross asked, “When were men ever brought to God by harshness?” If harshness abounds in O’Connor’s work, so does humor. Our world can indeed be a harsh place, and for those who insist on softening its edges, well, they’re the ones of whom she spoke when she said that for some people, you had to draw big pictures. And in the most primary — or primal — of colors.
Stanley Booth is the author of The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, as well as Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South. His work has appeared in Esquire, Playboy, Newsweek, Granta, The Saturday Evening Post, and Rolling Stone. His latest collection, Red Hot and Blue: Fifty Years of Writing About Music, Memphis, and Motherf**kers was published by Chicago Review Press in May 2019.
He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.
