In frozen silence

By Franz Klein


In frozen silence a chord strikes
Gong-like twelve, and sound
Echoing reechoes in undulating
Waves in silence
Silent no more.

Waves whelm the sand
With pendual regularity,
By stricken cord retracted
With sucking hiss,
A sound in silence.

In time marches on the Master
Of an army of Hosts arrayed
In glittering-gold monstration,
God-with-us-on-the-shore,
Emmanuel.

O come, Divine Messiah
Into time immemorialized
By the striking of a gong
Transmitted with a hiss,
The static of souls lost

In shifting sand, descendants
numerous upon the shore
Amassed silent, at frozen midnight,
For wave-strike tsunamic, awaiting
Gloria in excelsis Deo.

Who shall be born for whom? A Closer Look at the Refrain of 'O Come, O Come, Emmanuel'

The hymn "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" is ubiquitous with the season of Advent. Everybody can sing along, if not for all the verses, then at least for the refrain:

"Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel / To thee shall come, O Israel."

"Veni Veni Emmanuel" as it appears on p. 336 of the Hermann Adalbert Daniel's Thesaurus Hymnologicus (1844)

Or is it, "Rejoice, rejoice, O Israel, / to thee shall come Emmanuel," as printed in Shorter Christian Prayer and various hymnals? Surely I'm not the only one who has stumbled in an attempt to sing one version from memory only to realize that everybody else is looking at the other version.

Why switch Israel and Emmanuel, as the various hymnals do? There's a history to it, with "Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel" being the more famous 19th-century translation by Thomas Helmore. Both versions are considered faithful translations of the Latin original, Veni, veni, Emmanuel, / nascetur pro te, Israel, because both take Emmanuel as the subject of the verb nascetur, "shall come" (literally, "shall be born"), and Israel as the one being addressed ("O Israel"). How could it be otherwise? After all, Jesus, God-with-us, Emmanuel, shall be born for Israel on Christmas morning.

Count me the heretic, I guess, as I propose a third way to translate the refrain. For as much as Jesus comes into the world on Christmas morning, and as much as Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead, there is a third way, a "middle coming," as proposed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. "Because this coming lies between the other two," St. Bernard writes in a famous sermon that appears in the Divine Office, "it is like a road on which we travel from the first coming to the last."

Bernard is saying that while Jesus is born for us on Christmas day, we are being born for Him every day as we travel the journey of our lives as Christians. Israel could just as easily be the subject of "shall be born" because Israel stands for us, and the rejoicing that occurs at Christmas, at least if we've prepared ourselves properly, is both on our part and on the part of Our Savior, Who welcomes His prodigal sons with open arms. We could be telling Emmanuel to rejoice, for we, Israel, are being born for Him, in Him, and through Him in the intentional readying of our souls for His coming during the liturgical season of Advent.

There certainly is nothing in the Latin phrase, in any case, that prevents translating Israel as the subject and Emmanuel as the addressee. While ordinarily a noun in Latin inflects differently depending how it is used in the sentence (think who versus whom, one of our rare English language inflections), Hebraic words like Emmanuel and Israel don't generally adopt the regular endings. Emmanuel looks like Emmanuel, and Israel like Israel, regardless of how they function grammatically in the sentence.

One could point out, however, that Emmanuel is before the verb, the normal placement for the subject. Indeed, the extreme flexibility of word order in Latin poetry that would permit a subject to be elsewhere is predicated upon inflections. But clarity is maintained nonetheless if the phrase is broken into its respective lines. The first phrase would be, "Rejoice, rejoice, O Emmanuel." Only then would the next phrase follow: "Shall come to thee Israel," with Israel easily being understood as the subject because we've already invoked Emmanuel in the prior line. If that last phrase sounds a little awkward with the subject after the verb, remember that the subject also follows the verb to fit the meter in the other common English translation: "To thee shall come Emmanuel."

Punctuation is the one thing that gets in the way of my heresy. Ordinarily there are commas or exclamation points after the commands to rejoice. There is a comma between "for you" and "Israel." All of which, I guess, argues against me, since Israel being set off at the end by a comma indicates that it is the addressee, not the subject. While there is always a line break between "Emmanuel" and "shall come to thee," there is only a comma in a few hymnals that I looked at.

Of course, like any good scholar, my first instinct was to try to look at the original. Most hymnals cite the 1710 Jesuit Psalteriolum Cantionum Catholicarum as the place where "Veni, Veni, Emmanuel," based on the ancient O Antiphons, first appeared. According to WorldCat,  the only copy of the Psalteriolum in the United States is at the University of Washington, and even that is a later, 1780 edition.  The best that I could do was Hermann Adalbert Daniel's 1844 Thesaurus Hymnologicus. A screenshot from this early hymnal therefore appears above. Although the commas in Daniel's do not back my creative translation, like any good heretic I remain stubborn. I'd be willing to bet ten dollars, in fact, that the Psalteriolum version is in notation and doesn't have any punctuation at all, and that Daniel's punctuation is as much an interpretation of the hymn as the famous English translation of Helmore is an interpretation of Daniel. Of course, that would also leave room for my interpretation.

The hymn is more beautiful that way, as poetry generally is with its manifold nuances and multiple meanings. So, don't mind me if I stumble while we are singing. No, we're not looking at different versions this time. It's just me overthinking things again when I was supposed to have been paying attention.

A blessed last few days of Advent to y'all!

Aleppo and the coarsening of the conscience

Amidst all of the Facebook newsfeed pictures yesterday of new-fallen snow and Christmas preparation was a British news video with this freeze-frame image:

A screenshot from the homepage of British Channel 4 News, with their report on the ongoing tragedy in Aleppo.

From the subtitles, his name is apparently Ayah. He was wounded in a bombing, trapped in the last open hospital in Aleppo as tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, attempt to flee in the latest imperfect ceasefire to have been declared by the Assad regime. I posted the video to my wall because the sight of his haunted eyes, his dusty, bloodstained face, rends my heart and makes me wish desperately that I could do something, really anything.

It's not that you and I can do nothing at all in response to the climaxing Syrian crisis. There is Catholic Relief Services, for example, if one is able to contribute financially. There's certainly the power of intercessory prayer.

But you most likely know what I mean: There's something about the haunted eyes of a vulnerable child that demands an immediate, physical response. The child needs to be picked up, held close, protected, and loved.

Which is not possible in the case of little Ayah.

Which has me thinking about the hyper-connectivity of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, with their endless images of war, tragedy, suffering, and natural disaster. I'm ashamed to admit that for every image of a suffering person that I've seen in the newspaper and stopped to say a prayer for, I've mindlessly flipped through dozens of pages with similar images; for every email that I've received asking for GoFundMe funds for a person or a family in need that I've actually given money to, for every request for prayers in my newsfeed that I've actually, seriously committed to intercessory prayer, there are scores and scores more requests that I've hurried past.

As recently as a few decades ago, people's experience of current events consisted of print newspaper articles or the 5:30 p.m. newscast. I would imagine that people were affected by what they read in the newspaper or saw in grainy definition on the TV, but there simply wasn't anything like the sad, blinking eyes of little Ayah in a high definition video clip that one could play again and again. Knowing about the world's tragedies in real-time is a very new phenomenon, the affect of which, I think, is a coarsening of the conscience.

We human beings care about each other by nature. It is ingrained from the moment of birth, when we are placed upon our mother's chests and the beautiful bond between mother and child is forged. We grow up in families, where we learn to work together and to help each other, lessons which extend out into the wider community of church, of school, and of any other organizations to which we belong. This network encompasses those who are close to us in terms of geography, and as people move away, the connection fades, and we tend to move on.

Social media, however, keeps people from former places we've lived, studied, etc., close to us even as our real connection to them fades. The 24-hour news cycle makes present to us tragedies and disasters in places to which we have no real connection. Whereas previously the appeals to our care and concern were more limited, now the entire world's suffering is at our fingertips. It's not just Syria, by the way. If your reading ranges as widely as mine, you would also know that a 7.9 earthquake just struck off the coast of Papua New Guinea, that the Yemeni civil war presently has half a million children at risk of starvation, that Boko Haram continues to massacre villagers and kidnap schoolgirls in Nigeria. The list goes on and on.

Again, we human beings care about each other by nature. That's exactly why it is so emotionally draining to have the world's concerns brought into our line of sight every time we turn on the TV or open the computer. Which is why we develop coping mechanisms: We look for the lighter fare from our more distant friends--the cat videos, the baby photos, the funny memes--but sometimes skip over the tougher things that they share. We hurriedly scroll past news stories about ongoing tragedies and disasters rather than actually reading them. I do it more often than I'd like to admit, and I'll bet that you do, too.

What is troubling me, I guess, is that I can't imagine how scrolling past little Ayah, or, if not him, then scores of other similar stories about the years-old war in Syria, has not contributed to a coarsening of my conscience. As much as it's necessary to filter things in our over-connected, information-saturated existence because we simply can't respond to every request, every tragedy, that we become aware of, the very act of filtering is itself a tragedy, a casualty of our surrender to the new, inescapable reality of the digital age.

I also feel strongly that it would be equally tragic to hide my head in the sand, pretending, for example, that Syria isn't happening right now. Which leaves me, I suppose, between a rock and a hard place.

So for now, I'll be praying for Ayah. I can't solve all of Syria's problems, or the world's, but Jesus said, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move," and so I'll start with Ayah, and at the same time I will hug my own children all the closer.

Antibiotic-free chicken and floppy-armed gimmicks

Every morning that I have had the radio on and tuned to the local country station on the way to school--which certainly isn't every day--an advertisement from the major chicken producer Sanderson Farms has aired. It's one of those silly, annoying ads, even apart from its message. Two men are talking in a car sales parking lot, with an inflatable tube "salesman" audibly flapping in the background. Naturally they're discussing chicken, more specifically the fact that more and more producers besides, of course, Sanderson Farms, the nation's third-largest producer, are going antibiotic-free.

"That's just a trick to get you to pay more money," one of the gentlemen says.

"Fact is," the other adds, "by Federal law all chickens must be clear of antibiotics before they leave the farm."

"It's a marketing gimmick," the first concludes, "like Mr. Floppy Arms here."

Our own Kleinshire chicken has always been organically fed, free range, and wholly antibiotic free.

Is antibiotic-free meat just a marketing gimmick as Sanderson Farms would like to have us believe? Is there really no threat to human health that comes from pumping animals full of antibiotics to promote growth and prevent the spread of disease, a nearly ubiquitous agricultural practice since antibiotics first hit the market in the 1940s? Of course not. I suppose that Sanderson Farms didn't have time in their silly ad to explain that while the chicken sold in stores is free from antibiotics, it isn't necessarily free from bacteria, including potential superbugs that have developed due to the overuse of antibiotics. That's why a lot of meat is sprayed with aluminium sulfate before hitting the grocery store shelves. Remember "pink slime," anybody?

I won't hold it against the country station for running Sanderson Farms' ad because they have to pay their bills. But it's is getting awfully annoying. Maybe it's time to return to something more productive during the morning commute, like pray the rosary?

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About chicken, in any case, every few months for the last three years we have ordered a few dozen chicks from Hoover's Hatchery in rural Iowa. They come overnight in the mail, and the boys take great delight in helping to dip their beaks in the water and get them accustomed to their surroundings. When they're old enough to withstand the elements, we move them out of the garage and into a chicken run attached to the barn. There they feast upon Reedy Fork organic feed for another month and a half until they reach 5-6 pounds, at which time we process them. A small number of colleagues and friends get a chicken, or two, or five, at every processing. We sell just enough to break even, basically getting to eat organic free-range chicken year-round free of charge.

Obviously we will be scaling up dramatically next year at our new farm in Wisconsin. I'm not sure what the market will be like for farm-fresh chicken. La Crosse isn't exactly ritzy big-city Raleigh, where people are eager to pay $4.25/lb. Organic feed in Wisconsin costs half what it does in North Carolina, though. We'll have to start slowly and cautiously with the chicken nonetheless. Right now our tentative business plan does include raising 100 or more Thanksgiving turkeys and trying our best to market them. I'm pretty confident that there's potential with the turkeys.

So, we're not Sanderson Farms here at Kleinshire, but we are in the bird business, albeit in a small-but-growing fashion. Whether people want antibiotic-free chicken, and why, is something that certainly interests us.

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Along those lines, I have been reflecting on a recent NPR interview mainly about Perdue Farms, a producer which is now nearly entirely antibiotic free. Perdue Farms, according to this interview, has eliminated not only the antibiotics that are used to treat humans, but ionophores as well, a class of antibiotics that are actually toxic to humans. Why ionophores, if they'd help to keep chickens healthy without any potential harm to humans? Apparently it's for marketing reasons. "Our customers have already told us that they want chicken raised without any antibiotics," the CEO said in a statement to NPR.

As I understand it, the implication of the CEO's statement is that many Americans eagerly buy into the hype of labels like "antibiotic-free" simply because they're the newest health fad. These labels are legion, some more closely policed by the USDA, some still emblematic of a foodie Wild West: "organic," for example, or "all-natural," "free-range," "farm fresh," or "farm-to-table." These labels give food the allure of freshness, health, and nutrition. Surely organic produce is healthier and more nutritious, despite the fact that farmers can spray highly toxic copper sulfate on their produce; surely free-range chicken is more nutritious, despite the USDA requiring only two square feet per bird.

I am very much against the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, but my reasons are mostly philosophical, not scientific, and certainly not practical. As I see it, animals need to be treated decently because they are living beings, part of God's creation. The conditions that necessitate the overuse of antibiotics are not exemplary in that respect. If you don't believe me, then search Youtube for any term along the lines of "chicken mass production." Or read Matthew Schmitz's description, in the January 2017 issue of First Things, of his college-years experience helping to rewire a hog confinement facility. Take-away line from Schmitz: "We intuitively feel that it is unnatural to keep pigs packed together on hard concrete--but we do not see that there is something equally unhealthy about human lives that have no contact with husbandry and hunting. Pigs, kept in close confinement, bite off each other's tails. Humans, freed from all contact with regulated violence of farm life, become squeamish savages."

To be clear, I am not against the use of antibiotics altogether, but I am wholly against raising animals in conditions that require their medication from hatched egg, from birth, to the butchering block. I think that it's bad for the animals, who are not treated in accord with their nature. I think it's bad for us, because, as Schmitz argues, we become insensible to the violence that is a necessary, essential part of the natural order, the violence that in the end bears each one of us away.

It's a very, very small step, I suppose, but props to Perdue and the other major producers who've changed their practices in order to reduce their dependence on antibiotics. Props to Chick-fil-A, and, of all fast food joints, most recently McDonalds, for moving to the slightly more expensive chicken. For our own part, if we apply for the "organic" label at our Wisconsin farm next year, which we plan to do, and which prohibits the use of antibiotics altogether, it's not because we believe in the label per se, but because it opens up the market to customers who want what we produce, whether they want it for the right reasons or not. Maybe over time we can tame their squeamish savagery just a tad.

If not, I will yield to any label that doesn't violate my conscience, because ultimately the customer is always right.

Reflections on Our Modern Anti-Septic Lifestyle

Medicine was changed forever with Alexander Fleming's 1928 discovery of the antibacterial properties of the mold penicillium. Within a decade and a half, a strain found growing on a single cantaloupe from a Peoria, Il., farmer's market had been manufactured into millions doses. Many soldiers wounded during World War II owed their survival to penicillin. In the years after the war, infections that had been deadly for all human history became treatable and survivable. Without a doubt, antibiotics are one of medicine's greatest achievements.

    

There's little that is controversial, however, in pointing out that antibiotics have been overused to the extent that they've become less and less effective. Everybody knows that doctors are being advised to stop automatically prescribing broad-spectrum antibiotics at the first sign of illness. Many people are also aware that it's a general practice in agriculture--one that contributes to the rise of so-called "super bugs"-- to pump animals full of antibiotics to promote rapid growth and to prevent diseases that could easily and rapidly spread in overcrowded feed lot conditions. So I applaud the decisions of major fast food chains like Chick-fil-A, for example, that have recently committed to purchasing only chicken raised without antibiotics. Recently even the government has gotten on board, restricting the sale of feed containing antibiotics without the say-so of a veterinarian. I find it a little ironic, however, that while I can no longer purchase medicated goat feed at the local hardware store, mega-farms with veterinarians on staff can continue to pump their animals full of antibiotics just as they always have. That's the meat most people end up buying in the grocery store. Yummy.

But I digress. This post is not so much about the dangerous overuse of antibiotics as it is about a by-product our modern miracle cure-all: the idea that bacteria are an an enemy to fight against; the notion, more broadly, that anti-septic cleanliness is synonymous with health.

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The temperature has been dipping down into the mid-twenties at night, signaling that it's time to start harvesting the dozens of heads of cabbage that we've carefully weeded and watered in the garden all through the fall months. Sauerkraut is just about the easiest thing in the world to make. It's simply a matter of slicing up the heads of cabbage and working in some salt. Then the salted cabbage is packed into gallon glass jars, pressed down layer by layer with a potato masher to ensure that each jar is as full as possible. This afternoon I added a few splashes of white wine as I pressed the cabbage down in order to add a touch of sweetness. But really, it's as simple a process as food preservation can possibly be.

Then the cabbage sits; and over time it gradually ferments. More specifically, it sits on the kitchen counter for a month or more as bacteria work overtime to multiply themselves, feasting upon the sugars of the cabbage, with the byproduct of that delicious tanginess that is characteristic of fermented food. By the middle of January, with the everything in the fall garden having succumbed to the frost, except perhaps the carrots deeply composted as they are in fallen leaves, this fermented kraut will become our main vegetable. It will be an accompaniment to pork and sweet potatoes, to curried chicken and goat, to pretty much anything else that Rosemary can dream up to keep us fed during those long, cold, dark winter months.

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Bacteria, of course, is not bad per se. Again, there's little that is controversial in pointing out that bacteria play an indispensable role in fostering human health. Scientists talk about the trillions of microorganisms that inhabit each human body as its microbiome, and no place in a person's microbiome is more important than his stomach, his gut flora which break down food and help to extract nutrients and important vitamins and minerals. It's also not controversial to point out that exposure to the diverse bacteria present in fermented foods like sauerkraut, and in the process of our everyday encounters with other people and creatures with their own microbiomes, help us to build up important antibodies and resistances to the more dangerous bacteria that we are also likely to encounter, the likes of which antibiotics like penicillin were developed in order to combat.

Not controversial, perhaps, but overlooked and severely under-appreciated, to be sure. Although there is a fringe Whole Foods-type craze about all things probiotic, it is certainly not main-stream at present. That's to the loss of most people, because all the research shows that we need a great deal of exposure to bacteria in order to foster good health. Besides the continued over-prescription of antibiotics, which kill good bacteria as well as bad, there is the omnipresence of anti-bacterial soap, which, while perhaps a very necessary thing in the hospital operating room, is not such a great thing with which to wash one's hands on a regular basis. The store versions of traditional "live" foods like sauerkraut usually don't contain any live bacteria cultures at all due to high-heat canning processes that kill bacteria indiscriminately, resulting in an absolutely sterile food product.

Which leads back to my point about the lamentable by-product of antibiotics, our modern-day miracle cure-all, namely, the idea that the modern world ought to be clean, spotless, and wholly anti-septic.

It's simply not the case.

Yet it is a worldview that goes beyond food and the fighting of illness to touch every aspect of our lives, especially the sterile, anti-septic, "safe" way that we raise our children. A thoroughly interesting article by two MD's in the Wall Street Journal a few months back attempted to buck the trend, suggesting that it is necessary to let children get dirty in order to foster the growth of a strong microbiome. I was particularly amused by the anecdote the two MD's shared about the friend who once discovered her son "knee-deep in a cesspool of pig waste." Yep, we can identify with that sort of thing here at Kleinshire. But even this anecdote shows the true difficulty of overcoming our modern worldview, for it's not just our own personal revulsion at uncleanliness and lack of safety, but society's as well. And society, in turn, can wield heavy normative influence in matters such as these.

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Society's normative influence is what I was thinking about earlier this week after viewing a Facebook post on a local community page. A distraught mother had posted a picture of the puncture wound of her daughter after an attack by somebody's loose pit bull. The mother said that her daughter had been to the doctor for stitches and was going to be okay. Then she described the pit bull and the approximate location and asked for help in tracking down the stray dog. A terrible situation, to be sure, and one that is all too common out here in rural Franklin County where many people let their dogs run loose. But as I glanced through the thread I was taken aback by the comments. Although there were plenty of sympathetic responses, someone had the temerity to suggest that it was the mother's fault for letting her daughter play outside without proper supervision. Another person took issue with the fact that somebody would probably lose their beloved pet as the result of this mother's "vendetta." 

Seriously?

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Our modern society, I think, expects us to raise our children anti-septically, safely. It is normative not to expose children to dangers, be they in terms of the food that they eat or the places that they play. To be sure, in highfalutin' circles there are people like the MD's whose article was published in the WSJ, who can openly speak about how letting children play in unsanitary conditions and eat food off the ground of the chicken run without attracting the attention of Child Protective Services. There are people like Silicon Valley's Mike Lanza, who can brag about letting his children, and the children of the entire neighborhood, climb onto a roof high above a stone patio in order to develop a sense of bravery, confidence, and entrepreneurial independence. But like with the Whole-Foods probiotic craze, it's a fringe movement for those wealthy and well-connected enough to pull it off. For the rest of us a few rungs down the economic ladder, who may also be convinced that we need more danger, more sepsis, in our lives, there are fewer options that society considers acceptable.  

Free-range parenting deserves a post of its own in the near future. But regarding "live" foods in particular, most people simply cannot afford to shop at Whole Foods or their local farmer's market. Rather, they are relegated to the affordability of whatever is available at their local grocery store, where governmental regulation militates against any but the blandest, safest, most sanitary of foods. Milk sold in stores, to give an example that drives me crazy, needs to be pasteurized, a process that involves heating it in order to kill all the bacteria present in it, potential harmful bacteria to be sure, but helpful probiotics as well. Even when regulations would allow for "live" foods like saurkraut, for example, it is vastly costlier to process and get to market than the heat-treated, bacteria-free version. 

To bring about a true change would necessitate a total societal transformation. In terms of food, it would involve being closer to our food sources, and in most cases being willing to pay significantly more for what we eat. Which is hard to do when health insurance costs four or five times more than it did in the simpler time when people spent twice as much as we currently do for food. In terms of raising our children, it would involve living around people who actually formed a like-minded community. Which sounds great, until one tries to buy a house near other like-minded people in a tight housing market.  

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Even though the anti-septic nature of modern society is harmful to us and especially to our children, in terms of the antibiotics we overuse, in terms of the blandly safe food we eat, and in even in terms of the uncertain company we keep, the mass-production and disconnectedness that fuels globalized modern life necessitates that very anti-septic, unhealthful lifestyle. When one doesn't know where one's food comes from, or how long it has sat on the store's shelf, or whether the person who harvested it or processed it cared enough to do so carefully, then one has to depend on the government and its onerous regulations to make sure it is safe to consume. When we don't know our neighbors, where they come from or what their values might be, then we need to be ever vigilant with our children. 

Would that it were otherwise. In the meantime, my wife and I will form our own hippie commune of two. We will let our children play in the dirt and mud of our own fenced yard, and every evening during this long, dark, cold winter of our discontent we will feast on fermented cabbage from our own garden and drink deeply from the delicious raw milk of our own goats. 

Mary's Immaculate Conception as a Curb on Intellectual Pride

The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, which the Church celebrates tomorrow, has been my favorite Marian feast-day for as long I've known enough about Marian feast-days to have a favorite. Why, indeed, the Immaculate Conception, a theological abstraction shrouded in obscurity and misunderstanding, and even, through the centuries, in doubt, debate, and theological contention?

When I was an undergraduate seminarian at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., one of my philosophy professors entered the Church through the RCIA process. It was a rather dramatic occasion, especially for students like myself who were college-level seminarians and paying close attention to that sort of thing. In class, he explained that for a long time he had sensed there was a God, and that he was intellectually convinced that of all the options Christianity best accounted for the paradox of a loving, all-powerful God and the tragedy of human suffering. Although he was certain that the Catholic Church had the best claim to being founded by Christ, he had delayed becoming Catholic because he couldn't wrap his mind around Catholicism's peculiarities: the all-male priesthood, for example, and papal infallibility and, of course, the specific dogma, defined infallibly by Bl. Pope Pius IX on Dec. 8, 1854, of Mary's preservation from the stain of original sin from the first instant of her conception.

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This professor of mine has certainly not been alone in the history of the Church. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercians, for example, who writes mellifluously about the Blessed Virgin, nonetheless wrote a scathing letter to the priests of the Diocese of Lyon after they added the Immaculate Conception to their liturgical calendar in 1274. Even the Church's greatest theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, argued in his Summa Theologiae that Mary was sanctified "after her ensoulment," not at the first instant of her conception.

Although I am probably disagreeing with Bl. John Duns Scotus in saying so, I would argue that there is nothing of theological necessity in Mary's immaculate conception. Granted, it was compelling for Aquinas that Mary's flesh had to be sanctified, that is, be made free from sin or immaculate, if Our Savior was to take it for His own, but there is nothing of necessity in her flesh being immaculate from the first instant of her conception, especially in light of St. Paul's statement that "all men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).

Indeed, another professor of mine, a few years afterward when I was studying abroad at the Angelicum University, shared with my class that the Dominican friars in Rome, influenced by their reading of Aquinas, held a vigil at the Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva the night of Dec. 7, 1854, praying fervently that the Holy Father come to his senses and refrain from the proclamation of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

As history would have it, their prayers went unheeded, and the next morning Bl. Pius IX spoke ex cathedra, beginning with Declaramus, pronuntiamus, and definimus, and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was thereby elevated from a pious belief to a teaching to be held "firmly and constantly" by all the faithful. "Let him know and understand," the pope said, "that he is condemned by his own judgement; that he has suffered shipwreck in the faith; that he has separated from the unity of the Church; and that, furthermore, by his own action he incurs the penalties established by law if he should dare to express in words or writing or by any other outward means the errors he thinks in his heart."

And the Dominican friars rose from their knees, my professor from the Angelicum related, and the bells of the Church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva joined the joyous peal of the bells of all the churches throughout the Eternal City.

Roma locuta, causa finita est. Rome has spoken, the case is settled.

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It's not that the dogma is irrational. Pius IX mainly speaks about the "fittingness" of the dogma in his declaration, and there certainly is a fittingness to the parallelism of the purity of Eve, who chooses what she wants for herself, and the purity of Mary, who chooses what God wants of her. But I don't think that there is a rational argument for the necessity of the dogma. Rather than solving difficulties, it creates the need to say that Mary, "by a singular grace and privilege," shared in the merits of Christ's redemptive sacrifice on the cross in advance of the actual sacrifice. Obviously God exists outside of time and can grant any singular grace and privilege that He wishes, but it certainly shakes the devotion of any philosopher worth his salt to Ockham's razor, that is, the principle that the simpler explanation is usually the better one.

That's why I see the Immaculate Conception as the Marian feast-day for thinkers and intellectuals. The more that one studies, the more that one is liable to see the horizon of what one understands as the horizon of knowledge itself. In other words, just because it's simpler from a human perspective to predicate of Mary all the foibles of fallen human nature doesn't mean that it's the case. God has a way of confounding men and their ways, and Mary's Immaculate Conception certainly has the potential to be a confounding stumbling block to anybody who puts his "trust in princes, in children of Adam powerless to save" (Psalm 146:3).

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At least, this was the testimony that my philosophy professor back at St. Thomas gave, as he explained why he was baptized, confirmed, and received his First Holy Eucharist despite the fact that he didn't yet understand the why or wherefore of the Immaculate Conception. What had at first been a stumbling block for this highly intelligent man became instead an opportunity to make a leap of faith, that is, to give his own fiat based on an assurance of what was not yet fully visible to his limited human intellect (cf. Hebrews 11:1).

The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, in other words, is a curb on the intellectual pride of those who have studied too darned much, myself included. It is the triumph of a pleasing fittingness, a poetic parallelism, that, from the human perspective of a theology that actually fits together, that lets one dot one's i's and cross one's t's, causes more difficulties than it solves.

Speaking of fittingness, then, I suppose that it is only fitting that the most effective propagators of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception were not so much the prelates gathered in Rome in 1854 as 14-year-old St. Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, France,, to whom Mary appeared in 1858, telling her, "I am the Immaculate Conception" and asking her to spread devotion to this title. Indeed, I recall that Jesus praises His Heavenly Father for hiding things from the wise and learned only to reveal them  to little children (cf. Matthew 11:25).

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I suppose, then, that the Immaculate Conception is my favorite Marian feast-day primarily because of a philosophy professor to whom I owe a great debt. Eventually I was able to take three courses with him--intensely intellectual courses in modern philosophy, in metaphysics, and in epistemology--but what I remember most of all was his personal testimony of faith, his witness as regards his own leap of faith beyond what his human intellect could perceive, his own conquering of his intellectual pride.

Semi-ambulatory pet chickens, and the linked realities of life and death

Not long ago, our newest batch of broiler chicks arrived in the mail. Yes, people's newly hatched chicks are sent through the USPS post together with your junk mail, cable bills and Christmas cards. We order ours from Hoover's Hatchery, all the way in rural Iowa. We get a call from the post office in Zebulon, N.C., generally around 6 a.m. when their first delivery of the day arrives.

This last time the frigid mid-20s temperature proved awfully cold for the baby chicks, who had nothing but their own body heat to protect them as they huddled together in their little shipping carton. It wasn't surprising that there were already three dead chicks, who had been trampled underfoot during transit. We did our best to warm up the others, immediately dipping their beaks into warmed water fortified with electrolytes and then carefully placing them under a heat lamp one by one. Even so, we lost another five or six by the end of the day.

On a farm, you cannot escape from the fact that living things at some point cease to be alive. In fact, I've been studying different small-scale budgets put together by the N.C. State Extension, and I've found that mortality is written right into the project cost together with labor, fuel, electricity, etc., all things that one needs to anticipate subtracting from the net profit. The rule of thumb for broilers happens to be 10-percent mortality, which means we're doing pretty poorly with our loss of eight or nine of the original three dozen. Or perhaps we're still doing okay, as Hoover's reimburses for chicks that die in transit or soon after arrival. Even so, we've got at least 150 pounds of grower ration more than what we need. Anybody in the market for Reedy Fork organic broiler grower? It's pretty tasty, I'm told, at least if you're a meat chicken.

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On a farm, in any case, you cannot escape the reality that life ends in death, sometimes quickly and unexpectedly, sometimes slowly and excruciatingly; that our hold on life, however seemingly secure in the flush of youth, is in fact startlingly tenuous. We've lost a lot of chickens to the summer heat and to neighborhood dogs in these past few years. We even lost one of our expensive new meat goats to bottle-jaw a few months back. Although farm animals aren't people, death is an experience that we share in common with all living creatures, and the death of any creature is a reminder that death is real and life is short.

Memento mori is the ancient counsel in this regard: Remember death. The phrase originates in the great military parades--the "triumphs"--that the Roman senate would sometimes grant to its generals. The victorious military leader would enter the city of Rome in procession with his troops and all the spoils of victory, to the adulation of a cheering citizenry that would often be showered with coins, or perhaps with bread. But behind the triumphant general riding in his chariot would stand a slave whose sole task was to whisper again and again in the great man's ear, Memento mori; remember, o mighty conqueror, that in the end you too will be conquered.

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In last week's batch of baby chicks, there was one tough little fellow who survived the transit and the cold, but from the beginning he has been weaker than his peers. He has a gimpy leg, and he more or less flops himself from the food dish to the water, and then back to the warmth under the heat lamp. I would come in from evening chores and remark about how I should dispatch that poor chick with a quick hit of the shovel, making a merciful end to his suffering. But then the boys would protest; they were indignant that their father would even consider such a thing. So I relented, and I have continued to relent, figuring that nature will ultimately take her course.

Two days ago, however, I came home from school to find that the poor little chick now occupies a box in the living room by the fireplace. My seven year-old has taken the lamp from my desk and found an warm incandescent bulb to replace the fluorescent bulb that I had in it. He took the thermometer off the wall in the garage and began carefully monitoring the temperature in the box, ensuring that it wouldn't rise any higher than the mid-80s. There was a veritable gleam of triumph in his eyes that evening, like the gleam that surely marked the eyes of Roman generals during their triumphal processions, as he paraded before my own eyes his careful set-up. He had thwarted my murderous intent by his preemptive strike; against all odds, he had stayed the hand of death itself.

Any reasonable adult knows that this chick would be better off dead. Sure, it's no longer being trampled underfoot by the other chicks, and sure, it's cheeping happily and seeming to enjoy the attention being showered on it. But it's a meat chick. And it can't walk. And, well, I'm not sure quite what to do with a paralyzed pet meat chicken. I'd put money on it surviving another week or two.

I was probably heartless enough to articulate this truth to him. Okay, I admit it: I've heartlessly articulated my thoughts on the matter repeatedly. We are trying to farm, after all, and it's rather hard to farm when one's children protest the imminent demise of animals specifically raised for meat. A big part of the reason that my wife and I have chosen to farm is so that our children know where their food comes from; so that they are aware of, and comfortable with, the intertwined realities of life and death. I don't intend to have any child of mine grow up thinking that meat, and eggs, and milk, and vegetables, all magically appear on store shelves. It is one of our age's great tragedies, I think, that people have separated the food they eat from any real notion of where it comes from.

Yet I relented, and even now I am doing my best to bite my tongue about the semi-ambulatory meat chicken residing in our living room, because I know that the alternate tragedy lurking in the wings occurs when death becomes so commonplace, so ordinary, that we become inured to it and coarsened by its presence.

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Yesterday morning, sadly, I had to butcher one of our laying hens. In each of our two pastures we have a Great Pyrenees living with the goats. They are still young, however, and in training as livestock guardian dogs, and while generally they are good with the animals, one of them--her name is Leche--recently entered the final throes of puppyhood. So it's likely Leche who took a playful swat at this unfortunate hen. We're happy that she didn't actually kill the chicken and drag it around or eat it, mostly for her sake because doing so would have set her training back. But it is unfortunate nonetheless that she did enough damage to dislocate a wing and put the poor hen into shock.

So, I did what needed to be done: I heated a pot of water and then carried the hen to the butchering block. My youngest son, who is going on two years old, was outside at the time, and he watched with wide eyes.

And I let him watch.

I explained to him, as I butchered the chicken, that I was sad that she had to go; I explained that she was food, and that we would eat her. I'm sure he didn't get much philosophical nuance out of what I said, but I am also certain that he understood the solemn tone of my voice. It doesn't have to be dramatic or drawn-out; it obviously didn't involve prayers to Mother Earth or anything like that. Yet there is a certain decorum to be observed, I think, even in a confrontation with death so so commonplace as the processing of a chicken.

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How is one to live balanced precariously between being so distant from the reality of death that he forgets how it is linked with life, how it gives life, how it sustains life, and, on the other hand, being so inured to death's presence that he no longer views it with the reverence that is owed to something that in the end will come even for him?

 That, I suppose, is the question that I'm pondering.