I had known about his unfortunate illness, but I didn't realize how serious it was.
For better or for worse, Reign in Blood--much of the music for which Hanneman wrote--changed my life. I still listen to it sometimes. One time a while back I found myself listening to it on my little old iPod (which I have thanks to a gracious Yonkers bride who gave me an iTunes gift card) as I walked the path around the Collegio Internazionale San Lorenzo da Brindisi here in Rome. I stopped as I recalled how, twenty-one years before, my decision to become a catechumen had come out of a brooding daily routine that often included a nocturnal walk around the outer path of Connecticut College while Reign in Blood played in my Walkman. Maybe I'm boring. Maybe I know a classic.
Though at times the devil has gotten into it to stir up a vainglory that made me forget other, more important graces, it's still true that the music epitomized by what Jeff Hanneman gave us was indeed a remote preparation for greater graces God has given me, by making me realize that the ordinary thing, in this case the music that everybody else was listening to, wasn't what I really wanted.
Requiescat in pace. May his family and friends have strength and comfort in these days.
Yesterday I finally got to confession. It had been too long. In fact, it had been since the day of my pilgrimage to the bleak Via Ostiense 131/L. I just didn't know whom to ask. It's so much easier to walk up to a confessional box. When you have to pick someone, knock on his door, and ask him if he has a moment to hear your confession, that's something different. But I had been praying that the Holy Spirit let me know to whom I should try to go, and, perhaps spurred on by the beginning of the second stage of Advent yesterday, I finally managed it.
In his counsel, the priest invited me to live these days of immediate preparation for Christmas con cuore stupito. It probably just stuck in my mind because it sounds funny to the ear of an English-speaker. 'With an amazed heart' or 'with an astonished heart,' I guess you could say. 'With a stupefied heart' doesn't really do it, but it's not an entirely useless thought; perhaps it captures something of being overwhelmed by contemplation of the mysteries at hand.
In one of the little synchronicities of grace, later on I happened to pray Night Prayer in Italian. (As I have mentioned, I don't really prefer it.) When I came to the Alma Redemptoris Mater in Italian, there was the substantive of the same word:
O santa Madre del Redentore, porta dei cieli, stella del mare, soccorri il tuo popolo che sta cadendo, che anela a risorgere. Tu che accogliendo quell'Ave di Gabriele, nello stupore di tutto il creato, hai generato il tuo Genitore, vergine prima e dopo il parto, pietà di noi peccatori.
That's the Latin natura mirante that translates in our American-English breviary as 'to the wonderment of nature' if I remember rightly.
A certain amazed, astonished, joyful wonder is the spiritual climate of Christmas. We are amazed to see that the birth of Jesus Christ reverses everything that our insecure and acquisitive minds think power and mightiness should mean. The Word of God, through whom all things are created, is born as one of us, born to plain parents, born away from home, born into a people and a place that were considered important by no known criterion of human civilization.
But Christmas is not only astonishing because it is an amazing and even scandalous revelation of God; Christmas is also invites us to wonder because it reveals who we really are, what creation really is. The creation, and we ourselves as created beings in it, as full of wonder and beauty as it all is even just on its own terms, finds in the newborn Jesus its true destiny, that we and all created being exists precisely so that God might be with us, incarnate among us. And our prayer is to sit in wonder, con cuore stupito, at the astonishing realization that we exist so that the overflowing Love we call the Blessed Trinity may love all the more by drawing us into the dynamic relations that are Himself. This is why it is the Holy Spirit--the Love the proceeds from the Father and the Son--who conceives Jesus Christ, that in the humanity of Christ we might be invited, drawn, and folded into the eternal, blessed and infinitely happy generation of the Beloved by the Lover.
Every year on the feast of St. Luke, Gregory the Great pierces me a little bit in the Office of Readings: As he preaches on the Lord's advice that we pray for workers to be sent into his harvest, he delivers this biting comment on the priesthood:
Ecce mundus sacerdotibus plenus est, sed tamen in messe Dei rarus valde inventur operator, quia officium quidem sacerdotale suscepimus, sed opus officii non implemus.
"Behold, the world is full of priests, but a real worker in God's harvest is rarely found, for we have taken up the priestly office, but the works of the office we do not fulfill."
St. Francis:
"And I worked with my hands, and I still desire to work; and I earnestly desire all brothers to give themselves to honest work. Let those who do not know how to work learn, not from desire to receive wages, but for example and to avoid idleness." (Testament, trans. FA:ED. By the way, this quote is affixed to the top of the pages of the General Curia's intranet site. That gives some idea of the culture of the place.)
Abba Abraham:
A brother questioned Abba Abraham, saying, 'If I find myself eating often, what will come of it?' The old man replied in this way, 'What are you saying, brother? Do you eat so much? Or perhaps you think that you have come to the threshing floor to thresh grain?' (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedicta Ward, SLG)
Partly because they're sweet in their excitement for me in my coming transfer to Rome, and partly because they like to make fun of my long history of rocky relationships with spiritual directors, the brothers have been suggesting to me whom I might ask to be my spiritual director once I get to my new assignment. Two candidates have emerged:
First, Raymond Cardinal Burke:
No doubt the brothers thought of His Eminence because I share some of his opinions, but also because I am currently under the care of one of his seminary classmates.
Second, our Capuchin brother Cesare Bonizzi, sometime frontman of Fratello Metallo:
The real compliment in all this is the recognition of the sublime synthesis that is my particular vocation, and I'm sure that's what the brothers mean to say by their suggestions.
It's a commonplace in religious life to say that why you came isn't exactly the same as why you stay.
This is largely because religious life wasn't quite what you thought it would be. But perhaps more importantly, you also find out that you weren't exactly who you thought you were. Some of this is can be a painful purification. When the honeymoons are over and first fervor is gone, afflictive emotions that arise in community life reveal to us that our attraction to religious life wasn't entirely pious and pure. We realize our mixed motivations, that our hearts are mysterious and messy fields of weeds and wheat. We can let this teach us patience with each other and humility for ourselves, or we can refuse growth and just flail around in a doomed project of trying to get our disorderly emotional needs met. But no matter which we choose, we find ourselves a different person than we were when we started.
And so, because religious life doesn't turn out to be what we had imagined, and because we become different people within it, why we came usually isn't why we stay.
I was just thinking about this stuff because someone challenged me the other day with the question, "Why do you stay?" It's a good challenge, and the response ought to be dynamic and growing, parallel to the work of grace in a vocation. So here's where I am right now:
I'm a religious because it gives me peace to know that I have disposed of my life on earth. One of my confreres in the Order likes to say that my primary desire in life is to feel 'all set.' By my perpetual profession and my vow 'to give myself to this fraternity' I feel all set. I may be living it less than adequately, but I have dealt with and disposed of my earthly life. How much time have I wasted in life already, and how poor a steward of my life have I been! Who knows how much time is left? The time to begin preparing for my death is now.
I'm a Franciscan because I am convinced that the Franciscan way is my antidote to the world. I have always been looking for an alternative to the bleak and pointless tastes and attitudes that are the given in this world. When I was eleven I thought the answer was to escape into fantasy. When I was fourteen I thought it was the alternative taste and uniform of Heavy Metal. When I was seventeen I thought it was in the uncompromising cultural critique of Punk. When I was nineteen I began to become convinced that the only coherent answer was Christianity. Soon after that I met St. Francis in a history class, and ever since then it has seemed to me that the Franciscan way has been the best way for me to be a Christian.
I'm a priest because in living my priesthood I have become convinced that the vocation to priesthood has been God's way of redeeming my particular humanity, and making me useful for his work in the world.
One of the little spiritual boundaries I try to keep for myself is not looking at any social or news media before I've said my prayers and done my spiritual exercises in the morning. One of the funny side effects of this is that sometimes on days when I go to offer morning Mass at the Poor Clares, I first hear about big news stories from them. Today it was Whitey Bulger. Some weeks ago it was Osama bin Laden. It gives a friar a shot of goofy vanity in the morning, to think that he is so unworldly as to get his news of current events from cloistered nuns.
It reminds me of the great graces of my life, and one of the periods when God was working very hard on me. Not that I knew it at the time; in fact, I was almost totally ignorant. I was like an anesthetized patient; grace was operating on me and I was unaware of it.
At some point in early 1987 I had a dramatic conversion that was to have far-reaching effects in my life. Around the time I turned fifteen, I became a metalhead. I grew my hair long, I took up the uniform, I turned the radio dial all the way to left, from the popular music stations down to WNHU from the University of New Haven, which had an all-day Heavy Metal show every Saturday. Distracted by the noise and macabre mood of it all, I was distracted from the grace God was working in me: the experience had firmly rooted me in a critical turn with regard to tastes and values; I had discovered that the things everybody did, liked, and believed were not necessarily the right or best things.
From this my ongoing conversion proceeded in stages: to thrash, crossover, second wave hardcore, punk, Oi!, anarcho-punk, spirituality, Christianity, Catholicism, Franciscanism.
I rehearse all of this personal mythology just to make another point. When I first fell into the metal subculture, I became separated from popular culture. From early 1987 or so, I became almost totally unaware of popular songs, television, and movies. In fact, I didn't come to be aware of these things again until I entered religious life the first time in the fall of 1994. This was one of the things that made my adjustment to religious life so hard the first time I tried it; I was surprised to find televisions in friaries, and even more shocked to see things like People magazine. For years, it hadn't even occurred to me to watch television or pay any attention to the vapid popular culture of the world. At the time I thought of my entrance into religious life as a kind of culmination of a conversion process; how was it that I found therein a culture that seemed more entwined with the world's inanities?
All of that is another story and another complaint. I only bring it all up because I want to thank God for inspiring the flight from the world that was my 'cloistered' period. That awareness helps me to remember to keep good boundaries with this world's media.
The other day I got into a conversation with someone on one of the standard conflicts of the parish ministry: music for funerals and weddings.
The conflict goes like this: the engaged who are preparing for their wedding or the bereaved preparing for the funeral Mass of their family member decide that they want a certain song in the liturgy. The pastor, priest, or music director objects, saying that such-and-such a song is not appropriate for divine worship because it is secular, sappy, vulgar, etc. Then the counter objection is made: on the contrary, this song 'mentions God' or is 'very spiritual.'
The first objection is easily dismissed. Just because a song 'mentions God' doesn't make it appropriate for the liturgy. Black Sabbath's "After Forever" (written by bassist Geezer Butler, a Catholic) mentions both God and Christ, and contains senses of eschatological urgency and counter-cultural belief in God that one rarely hears with such sharpness even in church, but this doesn't mean I want Ozzy to sing it at my funeral. For the blog, however, it's a fine inclusion. My funeral music is planned anyway, in a way.
The second objection, that an inappropriate song is 'very spiritual,' is a little harder. Here we are up against a flattening abuse of the term 'spiritual' which goes largely unchecked by preachers and pastors of souls. To the world, something is spiritual when it refers to the non-material life of the person, or the relation of the person to God or the divine in a very general way. For us Christians, however, the term is more specific. The 'spiritual life' and 'spirituality' refer specifically to the activity of the Spirit, the formal principle of the Church Who prays in her and as her both corporately and in her individual members.
But here's my challenge to pastors of souls and music directors on this issue. Who gets to decide which songs are suitable for the liturgy? Is it OCP or GIA? Who gave them this tremendous authority over the theological and catechetical formation of the praying assembly? If they, who are neither God nor the magisterium, can decide that a song is appropriate for liturgy, why not the couple preparing their wedding or the folks trying to mourn the loss of a loved one?
You see, I am begging the question. There is any easy way out of this problem, which is to begin to give up on the option of replacing the actual proper chants of the Mass with songs in the first place. Unfortunately, the option of replacing them has become so normalized that many priests no longer even recall that it is, in fact, a substitution.
Therefore, if pastors are unwilling to even investigate or begin to let go of this option become norm, and are also unwilling to try to preach a corrective against the flattening of the generic uses of 'spiritual' and 'spirituality,' then it's not fair to deny ordinary folks the option of substituting the music they think they want.
Things have been very metal for me lately, especially with the thrill of being interviewed on the subject yesterday by Ben Ratliff of the New York Times Arts section. I can only fear what will become of the tape of my outrageous utterances on the topics of the catholic imagination of metal and Christianity as the logical answer to the cosmic dread it celebrates, among many other things.
While out on errands today, I learned from WSOU of the death of the one of the great metal singers of our time, Peter Steele of Type O Negative. Last I heard he had rejected atheism and begun to identify himself as a Catholic. This is from an interview he gave to Decibel, as reproduced in his Wikipedia article:
There are no atheists in foxholes, they say, and I was a foxhole atheist for a long time. But after going through a midlife crisis and having many things change very quickly, it made me realize my mortality. And when you start to think about death, you start to think about what’s after it. And then you start hoping there is a God. For me, it’s a frightening thought to go nowhere. I also can’t believe that people like Stalin and Hitler are gonna go to the same place as Mother Teresa.
I think I also remember reading somewhere about how he went to confession after being away from the sacrament for thirty years. I can say that from the priest's perspective, those kind of encounters are precious and honored.
I pray that you had the grace of the sacraments at your passing, brother, and that you were sped by the Lord's mercy to the rest you weren't able to find in this life.
Apparently, a religious priest who grew up as a Heavy Metal kid is considered an oddity. So much so, in fact, that someone who writes about Metal music professionally is coming to meet and interview me tomorrow. He's thinking about writing a book about the Metal ethos, or something.
In my curiosity about this situation, I have been reflecting on what connections there might be between my conversion to Heavy Metal around age fourteen and my conversion to Catholic Christianity six years later. Perhaps they are more and deeper than I had previously imagined.
For whatever reason, I was reflecting on the lyrics to "The Small Hours" by Holocaust, a song famously covered by Metallica.
Look hard at the darkness, And you will see, Just call my name and I'll be there. You cannot touch me, You would not dare, I am the chill that's in the air.
And I try to get through to you, In my own special way, As the barriers crumble, At the end of the day
This is such a vivid description of my experience of prayer. Peering into the obscurity of being, of one's own existence and that of the world, Something is found, Something that is more a Who than a what. But this finding is itself an illusion, and as "barriers crumble" you realize that is you who are being found and Sought all along. Nevertheless, the One Who finds us will not be possessed or grasped: "You cannot touch me." Noli me tangere. But this retreat draws us further in to the Mystery, and ultimately to the goal, the eschaton, the resurrection destiny of the New Jerusalem, the "end of the Day."
Since today is the day of Lent in which we arrive at this point in the Office of Readings, I couldn't resist posting its most metal treatment.
The more time goes by, the more I realize the importance of my discovery of this sort of music in early adolescence. Having realized that there was something better than what most other kids seemed to like, at once it began to dawn on me that the prevailing tastes and ideas around me were not to be trusted automatically as the best thing. I was already set on the path of wanting to renounce the world.
Let us never forget John Chrysostom's insight that the lamb's blood on the doorposts of the Hebrews is the Precious Blood of Christ on the lips of Christians.
Sometimes on a day off I stop by a local spot that I like to call 'Classic Rock Pizza.' The walls are decorated with various photos and autographs of rock stars, including Ozzy Osbourne and Ace Frehley. I nurse a grudge against Mr. Frehley deriving from the evening of November 18, 1987, when he failed to appear for a concert at a delicate, early moment in my headbanging career.
It's also very close to the neighboring parish church, which I can always count on to be a quiet spot for solitude, quiet, and prayer.
Pictured: chicken parm slice, can of seltzer (I'm so NY), and Breviarium Romano-Seraphicum.
I just wanted to post a couple of pieces of Christmas music I have been enjoying during the Octave.
First, the introit of the Mass at midnight from Westminster Cathedral, which I first saw on NLM. I have been listening to this over and over; it's just so hauntingly beautiful to me, and illustrates what reverence and beauty could be accomplished if we just let go of this practice of substituting the actual antiphons and texts of the Mass with hymns and songs.
Second, from a Facebook post of a very old friend, Ronnie James Dio singing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. I think that's the great Tony Iommi on guitar.
Today one of the brothers informs me that my favorite confrere I've never met, Br. Cesare Bonizzi, has given up his ministry as a heavy metal singer. He seems to think that his ministry is too divisive among the brothers; that his superior doesn't really approve (despite giving permission) and that the brothers don't like the noise. I can relate to that part. When I arrived in my current assignment, I was made to understand, in strong terms, that my neighbor didn't appreciate my listening to Black Sabbath's Master of Reality as a way to psych myself up for the 6:45 am Mass.
Well, good for him. We say that fraternity is our primary ministry and witness, so he's trying to be true to that.
But now the question arises...is this Providence inviting me to take up this ministry and become the rock and roller I've always dreamed of being? Shall I try to become the next Fratello Metallo?
Once in a while I have one of those experiences that reminds me of how odd a life I lead. Tonight, after working with my RCIC group, I went to the friary TV room to hang out with the brethren. I usually bring a book in case the choice of program doesn't do it for me.
Well tonight was one of those nights. Since I can't even imagine being interested in Dancing with the Stars, I had brought the Meno to read for fun. I can still participate in banter and conversation, but I don't have to be bored to tears. Then, all of a sudden, I am rudely torn from my enjoyment of Plato's conceits when I hear a watered-down version of one of the great riffs of Randy Rhoads, and look up to see two ghoulish characters spinning around to it. What are you trying to do to my rock and roll memory?
I've had an iPod for about a year. I never really meant to have one, and I certainly don't need one. What happened was that one of the last summer's brides gave me a sizable iTunes gift card. The guardian said I could keep it, so there I was an iTunes user all of a sudden. So then I wanted an iPod. Saving up my "day off money" for a couple months, I was able to get a nano. I'm sure the bride in question was just trying to say thank you with a fun and hip gift, but if you look at my library as a whole, my poor iPod has been sacrificed to nerdy purposes.
In a year my libary has only grown to a few hundred songs, gleaned mostly from old CDs and free downloads. A couple of times I traded my loose change for iTunes credit through one of those change machines in the grocery store, but I really haven't spent much money on the whole thing, and for this I am grateful.
What's funny is that my iTunes library is dominated not by music, but by sung Mass parts in the Extraordinary Form, different gospel and prayer tone examples for practice, and imported language learning CDs.
So I'm really an intense rock and roller, walking down the street with my iPod, trying to get 1962 Missale Romanum prefaces in my ear, or trying to learn German or Italian. Oh well, I guess it's about growing up.
As an adult convert, the telling of the conversion story becomes a regular part of religious practice. You are called upon to tell your story to brothers and sisters who also marvel at God's grace, but also to people who are just curious. You also have an awareness of the conversion story as an internal narrative that forms a kind of self-apology in the consciousness of yourself as a praying person.
Since the day of my Baptism almost seventeen years ago, I have told my "conversion story" more times than I know, both to myself and to others. What is fascinating to me is how the story has changed.
My sense of my conversion story has changed in two basic ways: it's starting point has been steadily retreating to an earlier point in my earthly life, and the agency of the story has been shifting away from me and onto God.
When someone asked me to tell my story around the time of my Baptism, I started the story a couple of years before, when I became interested in this or that, concerned about what it meant to be a human being in this or that way, how I picked up the gospel of St. Matthew on a hot summer night and read the Sermon on the Mount, and how my inability to know any criteria by which I might "choose" a church was my first school of the surrender of prayer.
But as time went on, the starting point of the story retreated into the past. After a couple of years I realized the importance of choices and influences that came upon me several years before. My discovery of punk rock and hardcore rock and roll, for instance, was helping me to make the "critical turn," to know that the values and given wisdom about the world were not always the best or what the heart really wanted. An interest in mathematics combined with the awakening of reading Plato for the first time had both helped me to understand what it is meant by a spiritual reality.
Even later I began to remember certain experiences of the Infinite Mystery that I had when I was real little. Returning to such experiences from time to time in prayer, I have begun to see how God was drawing me into the grace of prayer--unaware as I was--even from early childhood. This helped me to understand certain spotty attractions to Christ crucified and to the life of faith that I also experienced as a kid.
All this is to say that it has been an amazing experience to see my conversion story unfold backwards. When I was baptized I thought that this was a process I had begun a year or two before, but now I can see it as something that was going on as far back as I can remember.
All of this makes for the second shift in my consciousness of my conversion story, which is the question of the main character. When I was baptized, I admit that it was mostly me. I had decided to do this bold thing because of what I had to come to believe and to desire. More and more I know that this is a story about God and not about me; about how God--in his tremendous mercy--has given me the opportunity to be relieved of the tyranny of my life being about me. In other words, it's not my conversion story anymore. It's a story about grace in which I play a supporting role, and not even very well. But that doesn't matter, honestly. God is so good, who cares about me?
When the New York Times reviewed a Slayer concert a couple of years ago, I knew that my adolescence was long gone. Far away were the days when hearing a then obscure 1986 record called Reign in Blood was to change my life forever. To his credit, reviewer Ben Ratliff did describe the music as "unreasonable." I love that.
Today, upon reading A. O. Scott's review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I notice that he uses the term adamantium without seeing the need to explain what it is, and now I realize that my childhood is long gone too.
Oh well. I guess I'll just look forward to the guilty pleasure of the macabre Catholic kitsch that could be X-Men Origins: Nightcrawler.
Sharing some Chinese food in between the Masses of Christmas Eve, I had fun with our organist by telling him how I'm always very amused to sing "O Come All Ye Faithful" because my original reference point for the tune is not the hymn, but Twisted Sister's 1984 hit "We're Not Gonna Take It," which is just about the same song. After being mocked unmercifully about it these many years, they finally just recorded the real thing, complete with an interpolation of "We're Not Gonna Take It" as part of the bridge at about 2:30:
I was listening to metal internet radio the other day and I was reminded that even Slayer, widely regarded (and rightly so) as pretty occult and Satanic, can deliver the stark and obvious anti-abortion message. Here's some of the lyrics to their 1988 song, "Silent Scream."
Nightmare, the persecution, A child's dream of death. Torment, ill forgotten A soul that will never rest*
Guidance, it means nothing In a world of brutal time Electric, circus wild Deep in the infants mind
Silent scream Bury the unwanted child Beaten and torn Sacrifice the unborn
Shattered, adolescent Bearer of no name Restrained, insane games Suffer the children condemned
Scattered, remnants of life Murder a time to die Pain, suffrage toyed Life's little fragments destroyed
Silent scream Crucify the bastard son Beaten and torn Sanctify lives of scorn
*Of course we know that the Lord is close to the broken and wants always to save the victim of society's injustices. So we trust that God does give rest to the souls of those who are robbed of their lives on earth through abortion.
