A new friend, an accomplished writer whom I met for the first time last weekend, gifted me a copy of The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom. I couldn’t put it down. While I’ve studied World War II as history, such an integral and personal story, comprehensive enough to include snippets of ordinary life yet short enough to be read more or less in toto, was truly elucidating.

Long have I been pondering the mystery of iniquity, first in the world, then in the Church… but more and more these days, I have been considering it in the context of the state. One point from the book that really struck me was the daily dysfunctionality that set in to Holland under German occupation. Beforehand, things had worked – not necessarily in an excellent or heroic way, perhaps, but nonetheless with their own coherent rhythm. Yet under occupation even the simplest things started to fail, without drama but inexorably, on a downward curve of wear, depletion and defect.

Here as everywhere, the first things to go lost are those which attend the feast, the reference point for sacramentality, for the symbolic, and therefore for heaven itself. Peace and safety devolve into wars and rumors of war, with Hitler’s broadcasts screaming over the radio; the nourishment of sleep and rest is broken by nighttime bombardment; food is reduced to scanty portions of rationed garbage consumed with tea steeped from stems and roots. Joy, civility in manners and discourse, a sense of the transcendent, generosity, study, culture, the preferential option for the weak – on a societal level, all seem to dissolve in something like this order. And details: People biking on scraps of shredded tire, presumably causing both a din and damage, metal rims over cobblestone. And especially color: Look at images of war, anywhere in the world, at any time: twisted heaps of destruction, barren expanses of gray.

In a small though all-too-real way, this evokes the New York City of my childhood. The city, the outer boroughs in particular, was at war. I recognized in it the marks of such enmity. I am grateful to have survived, and to have flourished (here, I do not refer principally to the survival of the body). But an ethos, familiar to me and palpable to all, is making its fearsome return.

There is a Marian homily for the Solemnity of the Assumption which I have read many, many times, silently in study and aloud for groups. It identifies what St. John of Patmos meant with the image of red beast of the Apocalypse:

We see this power, the force of the red dragon, brought into existence once again in the great dictatorships of the last century: the Nazi dictatorship and the dictatorship of Stalin monopolized all the power, penetrated every corner, the very last corner. It seemed impossible in the long term that faith could survive in the face of this dragon that was so powerful, that could not wait to devour God become a Child, as well as the woman, the Church.

And indeed, the churches in Brooklyn were all but shuttered. So too the libraries, museums and concert halls. I neither read books nor learned music. In the milieu of foundational rivalry, there can be neither worship nor leisure. One may still surfeit oneself, soul and body alike, on low-quality treats and diversions, but in the midst of this unnamed and aimless desolation the feast remains unattainable.

In a recent article, I wrote about the temptation to turn stones to bread, to sate the drive and appetite for life with that which is inert and inorganic, which resists assimilation to the authentically human. Stones that do not decay can offer no pushback to the hoarding impulse. They are supremely shelf-stable, and so completely under the disposal of systems of management and distribution. Over time though, they do crumble and erode.

Corrie and her sister, anchors of a family famed for their hospitality (which extended to concealing persecuted Jews in their home), were arrested, imprisoned, and eventually deported to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp in which nearly one hundred thousand women perished. The dormitory in their barracks, built for four hundred but housing fourteen hundred, consisted of tiered pallets jammed with women. The train ride to Ravensbrück saw the living bodies of the women stuffed and stacked like Jenga pieces, such that the air in the car was unbreathable and death by crushing would seem almost inevitable. I do not care to reproduce the accounts of the latrines, the sick wards, the morgues.

Yet do we not see something of the same spirit with factory farming, with its scale, its contamination, its necessary ripping away of the mechanics of animal reproduction from the course of nature and degradingly foisting them onto technicians? You take living beings and so deprive them of resources (space, air, water) as to reduce them to a squirming and vile infestation, a repulsive engine of needs, wastes, and not too much else. By altering the proportionality of life to sustenance, you utterly crush living things in humiliation, inculcate them with a self-hatred which fuels unnatural and aggressive self-harm in crated animals… or the gnawing-on of their own hands on the part of fatally starving infants, months on in age yet sunk virtually beneath their birth weight. This is happening now.

Early in the book we encounter a “tall, good-looking” young watchmaker named Otto, a Berliner, who is fond of declaring, “The world will see what Germans can do.” Indeed. Over time, the buffoonish incompetence, the characteristic dysfunction, the desperate scarcity, the reeking putrefaction, pervade the very bones of society.

This is the inverted correlate of the temptation to turn stones into bread. It is turning life into stone. Among the indignities described in the book that were inflicted on Corrie and her sister (like millions upon millions of others) was the assignment of numbers in place of names. The unreal construct – the ancient pyramid, the military parade, the glory of the state – supersedes the heaving, open-mouthed biomass of the nests with their manifold pains and exigencies. Ideology whitens the sepulchers until the sanitized, domesticated, polished headstones glisten clean and godlike, proclaiming superiority as they mute the sufferings of the living. With these places is the surest salvation, and so must their architects and overseers be rewarded with exceptional privilege and fattening; it is to the interest of the many. There is a power in transforming oneself, in transposing society, to Death – the new criterion according to which every natural human inclination to mercy must be ruthlessly exorcised, to the glory of Baal, Mammon, Ozymandias.

Corrie sees death for the first time as a child: it has come to a newborn, not through war but from illness. She is very much affected. The awe in the presence of its staunch finality is not learned; it brings us to our knees. The wrong turn occurs when men seize upon death, enter into pact with it, seek to parlay its terrors and its sadness, to systematize them into boring and bland bureaucracy, into procedure. After all, as Stalin is alleged to have said: “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.” Indeed, the numbering protocol of the concentration camp renders its victims as statistics in advance.

Brought down into the quotidian life of mortals, death and its forever are rendered too stupid and too small. The oppressed must be mocked as a dissociative tactic. Where the call to justice is mere naivete and mercy is weakness, callous aversion is an endemic psychology. To live so is to have made decay the sole arbiter of existence, to have succumbed in advance to dissolution. It is to have no hope. It is sheer nihilism. Nietzsche the atheist knew better; he intuited that “joy wills deep eternity.”

All of this is an antipathy to God, for God is Life. Where there is life, there is autonomy more than control, development more than articulated planning; there is the terrible, inescapable, utterly salutary suffering which attends personal growth and interpersonal sacrifice, which testifies to their accomplishment. God is Love. Where there is love, there is woundedness – that is, openness, passibility, vulnerability. These realities are, all of them, ecstatic and erotic, drawing self into the Beloved and upwards into Truth, Goodness and Beauty.

In contrast, the cult – the institutionalized spirit of death – galvanizes externally, by transference. Absent the bond of unity forged of attraction, only coercion and its technologies remain. Nationalisms, like fraudulent religious movements, are cults – hence the larger-than-life personae of their figureheads.

At one point in the book, the otherwise meticulous guards are diverted to a celebration of Hitler’s birthday. I have seen the same with corrupt religious – and this is no innocent or life-affirming party, with cake, candles and ice cream. It is the proclamation of the singular worth of the leader; time and date are made sacred, are made as though feast, in him alone. He is become their sole criterion, thus having established an alternate calendar of liturgy… and liturgies must have their processions. In the face of the putative greatness of regime and leader, in deference to all the aggrieved exceptionalism of alleged persecution, the unmistakable, in-your-face rot and squalor, the utter misery, must recede imperceptible.

A regular columnist at a respected and fairly liberal publication recently contended that, unless the state were to wield the means of death and destruction to the fullest extent of its capacities, one cannot speak of genocide. In reading the comments posted under the news stories of famine this morning, it is easy to feel oneself confused, especially when there’s no dearth of ill will on all sides. “Why is our nation always blamed?” “The enemy distorts the truth.” “It is we who are persecuted.” And this particularly horrific contribution: “The images of starving children are AI generated.” There is a particular cowardice which would deem every suffering “a hoax.” Are hunger, violence, disease, or for that matter the hatred which fuels them, so remarkable as all that? Are we to be mocked for believing in them, as if we were claiming to see fairies and little green men? But by all means, take the human impulse to empathy, and arouse in its bearers the shame of having been taken for fools.

Oh my gosh, the scale at which ordinary folks are experiencing reality is so far out of whack. These days, one apparently no longer needs to be a practitioner of statecraft to see only global dynamics, rather than persons, to be blind to the tortured innocents. When I first heard of “depersonalization,” or of “othering” the enemy, I would have thought that simply meant seeing individuals as carrying the stigma of inferiority ascribed to their people. No; a deeper depersonalization is entailed in seeing movements and numbers and an abstract and cartographic dominance, while seeing persons not at all. Perhaps the jaundiced eyes of the scholars to whom our Lord preached never even saw a Samaritan, but something more akin to “an exponent of the monolith of the syncretism of the Northern Kingdom,” a mass-produced artifact, as it were, slickly identical to all others of its kind, like the playing pieces on a chess board. Thus everything must be done en masse – deportations, conscriptions, rationings, punishments. When one in the camp was deemed to have fallen out of line, all were made to pay, lest any vestige of feeling be stirred by the uniqueness of an individual story.

Tenderness alone would topple this system, break this spell, through an implicit shift of proportionality and Gestalt. To be hard of heart is perhaps something like cherishing the static, lapidary-though-subject-to-dust idolatry of mere human process – vacuous and entropic as outer space; absolute, detached and hollow as the god of the philosophers; morally decadent as the pantheon in the persons of its temporal avatars.

And so against the dragon stands the Woman, icon of tenderness par excellence:

Without any doubt, a first meaning is that it is Our Lady, Mary, clothed with the sun, that is, with God, totally; Mary who lives totally in God, surrounded and penetrated by God’s light. Surrounded by the twelve stars, that is, by the twelve tribes of Israel, by the whole People of God, by the whole Communion of Saints; and at her feet, the moon, the image of death and mortality.
Mary has left death behind her; she is totally clothed in life, she is taken up body and soul into God’s glory and thus, placed in glory after overcoming death, she says to us: Take heart, it is love that wins in the end!

We do well, as Christians, to avoid the wiles of the tempter. How we would discern stones, bread, and hunger is a matter of no little urgency, these days. With God alone is the feast, however costly and unruly it may prove:

[I]n all ages, the Church, the People of God, also lives by the light of God and as the Gospel says is nourished by God, nourishing herself with the Bread of the Holy Eucharist. Thus, in all the trials in the various situations of the Church through the ages in different parts of the world, she wins through suffering. And she is the presence, the guarantee of God’s love against all the ideologies of hatred and selfishness.

I cannot bear the images I see in my newsfeed; as ten Boom’s book says rightly, “There is no more wretched sight than the human body unloved and uncared for” – and babies, at that! Nor can I bear the systemic irrationality, institutionalized double standards, and lawless chaos that everywhere hover in the air like darkening particulate filth blowing in after a wildfire. I have no idea how to bridge the disparate realities which span this one earth, although this does not dispense me from trying, however ineffectual my poor attempts, soft and appetitive bum that I am. I do, however, have life and voice, and this is remarkable. And as long as I do, I will use them in preferential service to the poor, the vulnerable and the innocent. In this virtually connected world, we must not dare turn away abashed from our brothers and sisters in humankind when the knowledge of their sufferings inconveniences or embarrasses our prosperity.

Image: The “Ozymandias Colossus:” Ramesseum, Luxor, Egypt: Creative Commons, CC-BY-2.0, photo: Charlie Phillips