Wry Martinis Read online

  Now, any Catholic who is not totally tone-deaf knows that the relevant ecclesiastical committees have been hard at work turning the beautiful sinewy prose of the Douai-Reims Bible into Formica-flat American. (The Douai and King James are for practical purposes identical.) Since 1965, we have become accustomed to this. But last Sunday’s rendition of the Passion, taken from the New American Bible, was so lifeless, so devoid of passion that one despairs over the harrowing of the language at the hands of the church’s liturgical bureaucrats.

  Consider:

  King James Version: “… the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

  New American Bible: “… The spirit is willing but nature is weak.”

  What—pray—is wrong with the classical metonymy, “flesh”? “Nature” here sounds like ersatz Emerson.

  In the King James Version, Jesus begs his Father, “If this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.”

  Last Sunday that was reduced to: “If this cannot pass me by without my drinking it, your will be done.”

  Bad enough to eliminate one of Christianity’s great metaphors, the cup of sorrow, but to leave the sentence as they have offends basic English usage. “Drinking” what? “This”?

  In King James, Peter “smote off the ear” of the high priest’s servant. In the New American Bible, he is “slashed,” making it sound as though he had been mugged.

  Jesus rebukes Peter with a phrase that has survived the ages: “All they that take the sword, shall perish with the sword.” That is now: “Those who use the sword are sooner or later destroyed by it.”

  “Art Thou the King of the Jews?” demanded Pontius Pilate. “And Jesus said unto him, ‘Thou sayest.’ ”

  “As you say.” Jesus’ artful answer to his executioner is thus reduced to a shrug: Yeah, whatever.

  King James’s scholars tell us that Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion, meant “the place of a skull.” The writers of the New American Bible make it sound like an Aaron Spelling TV show—“Skull Place.” Okay, okay. But why have they gone to such lengths as changing words that even the least sensitive parishioner could not possibly have mistaken in meaning? “Wine mixed with gall” becomes “wine flavored with gall,” as if the other choices were cherry and vanilla. It was the particular charity of a group of wealthy women of Jerusalem to see that the condemned were offered wine mixed with a grain of frankincense to dull the excruciating pain of crucifixion. When Jesus, in His death agony, cried out to his Father, a bystander soaked a sponge in “vinegar … and gave him to drink.” In the New American Bible, he is offered “cheap wine.” Chablis? Thunderbird?

  At the moment of death, “Behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose.”

  Whatever your religious belief, that is prose to raise the hairs on your arm. Does this do it for you?: “Suddenly the curtain of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked, boulders split, tombs opened. Many bodies of saints who had fallen asleep were raised.”

  The chief priest and pharisees tell Pilate that Jesus was “a deceiver” and beg him to make “the sepulcher sure, sealing the stone and setting a watch.” Here the New American Bible sounds like an FBI report. They ask Pilate to put the tomb “under surveillance.”

  All this is deplorable, but not contemptible. But what are we to make of the fact that the two thieves between whom Christ was nailed have suddenly been transformed into “insurgents”? Ronald Knox, the great translator of the New Testament, was satisfied with “thieves”; even the very contemporary Good News New Testament (Fourth Edition) only goes so far as to call them “bandits.” When the modern ear hears “insurgents,” the mind thinks of Vietcong, mujahedin, contras, Shining Path, Kurds, a half-dozen jumbled and bloody acronyms. What’s next? And they crucified Him between two freedom fighters.…

  The new edition of the New American Bible will be out soon. In this version, all references to gender will be expunged. The Son of God will shed all that sexist baggage and emerge as the Child of God. The Sermon on the Mount will no longer offend the National Organization for Women, Greenpeace or the Physicians for Social Responsibility. We will have arrived at the scriptural equivalent of “You can call me Ishmael, if you’re comfortable with that”; of solar panels at the cathedral of Chartres; of Bach’s “Saint Matthew Passion” performed by the Mantovani Strings. It will be accessible to all, and meaningful to no one. To use the old phrase, in the fullness of time they will have my Saviour sounding like a Valley Girl. I am wroth.

  —The Washington Post, 1987

  My Own

  Private Sunday School

  “Dad?” My daughter, Caitlin, six, asked me one day when she was about five, “What’s God?” I broke out in a sweat. This was the Big One, existentially speaking: Where do we come from? Where are we going? Will we have to change planes in Atlanta?

  I suppose in this day and age I should be grateful she didn’t ask, “Dad, what’s a condom?” Still, her question made me feel I had failed, big time, as a father. I’d already filled in about twenty nursery school applications. I’d already started to put money away for her college education. I’d already bought her her first computer so she’d be able to get a job in 2000-something. Clearly, it was time to get cracking on the spiritual side of things.

  And yet, how to proceed? A practicing Roman Catholic for almost forty years, I’d recently crossed over into the agnostic camp—which I think of as the “just-the-facts-ma’am” school of philosophy—so I wasn’t quite sure how to answer “What’s God?” I did want Caitlin to grow up open to God and spirituality. Which isn’t to say that I hope she’ll run off with the first Jehovah’s Witness who bangs on the door. Quite the contrary: I want her to be able to look that Jehovah’s Witness right in the eye and say, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  What she needed, in other words, was a firm grounding in the Judeo-Christian heritage. Besides, I’d rather she knew something of Abraham and Moses and Jesus than of Barney and Lambchop and Thomas the Tank Engine. She already knows about them.

  I went out and bought a beginner’s Bible. The stories are nicely told, and the illustrations are friendly. Everyone looks clean and presentable; no one looks too scruffy, even Goliath, though you probably wouldn’t invite him to dinner. It’s not called a whale in the text. The chapter is titled “Inside a Fish,” which to me doesn’t have the same oomph as “Jonah and the Whale.” The chapter about the Roman discovering Jesus’ empty tomb is titled “Surprise!”—which is sort of cute, even if it does make a pretty crucial New Testament event sound a bit like a panel from Where’s Waldo? And Cain and Abel are left out, which is probably for the best, because Caitlin often expresses the desire to murder her two-year-old brother, Conor. No good could come of her learning how common fratricide always has been.

  “OK,” I said to Caitlin one Sunday morning. “Today we are going to read the Bible.”

  “Actually,” she said, “I’m busy.” That is, watching The Rescuers Down Under for the eight hundredth time. I did what any other loving-but-firm father would have done. I asked her if we could read the Bible after her video was finished.

  Boy, if she only knew what her dad’s new-found agnosticism was sparing her. Sunday Mass, confession, Communion, confirmation, holy days of obligation, Lent, four years of boarding school with Benedictine monks, trudging up to Mass at 6:15 A.M. in winter, in the dark … I’ll say this for a Catholic upbringing: great memories.

  In fact, the Bible was an easy sell on Caitlin. She gobbled it up. One morning she insisted on reading the entire New Testament. We were halfway through Jesus’ ministry when I asked, “How about a video?” Anyway, she got a firm grounding in her Judeo-Christian heritage. For example, she now knows that God is present in everything. And I do mean everything.

  CAITLIN (pointing to her foot): Is God in my toe?
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  DAD: Well, basically. The point is, he’s in you. And in Mommy, and in Conor …

  CAITLIN (suddenly alarmed): God is in Conor?

  A few hours later: “Is God in Conor even when he does something really bad, like putting the firewood log in the toilet?”

  (Confidential to agnostic parents: Expect a barrage of questions intended to provoke you, such as “Is God in bubble gum?” The good news is that eventually your kids will tire of provoking you—by which time you are on Prozac.)

  She now was ready to explore even more complicated moral and philosophical questions.

  CAITLIN (sweetly): Dad?

  DAD: Yeah, honey?

  CAITLIN: Does everyone die?

  DAD: Say, how ’bout a Flintstones pop-up ice cream bar?

  CAITLIN: But Dad, am I going to die?

  DAD: Well, uh, I guess everyone dies. I mean, it’s part of … what’s your favorite part in The Rescuers Down Under?

  CAITLIN: But what happens after you die?

  You can postpone this moment, but you can’t avoid it. Ultimately, the important thing is to remain true to your convictions. If you lie, they’ll pick up on it and never trust you again. Which is why, as an agnostic dad—difficult as it was—I looked her right in the eye and said, “You go straight to heaven.”

  —USA Weekend, 1994

  Mr. Robertson’s

  Millennium

  As annus mirabilis 2000 approaches, we’d best start to deal with it: there will be Elijahs on every street corner, cable channel and Web site urging us to repent, repent, for the end is at hand. There’s just something about an impending millennium that brings out the gloom and doom.

  The year 999 was a boom year for monasteries. Penitents flocked in, hysterically bearing jewels, coins and earthly possessions by the oxcartful, hoping to cadge a little last-minute grace before Judgment Day. The year 1999 may turn out to be a similarly good one for the coffers of fundamentalist Christian churches—especially if Pat Robertson’s apocalyptic novel, The End of the Age, is any indication of what the faithful think is going to happen when the ball atop the Times Square tower plunges into triple zeros.

  Mr. Robertson is, of course, no ordinary street-corner Elijah. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and chairman of both the Christian Broadcasting Network and International Family Entertainment (the Family Channel). He has his own daily television show, The 700 Club, and is the author of nine previous books. In 1988, he ran for president in the Republican primaries, giving the distinctly non-fire-breathing Episcopalian George Bush a briefcase of the heebie-jeebies during the Iowa caucuses and establishing the Christian right as an electoral force to be reckoned with. So when he ventures forth into pop-fictional eschatology, attention must be paid—if only for the pleasure of hearing a president of the United States tell the nation in a televised address, “We are the world,” and to watch as an advertising executive is transformed into an angel.

  It’s hard to define The End of the Age exactly. It’s sort of a cross between Seven Days in May and The Omen, as written by someone with the prose style of a Hallmark Cards copywriter. The good guys—a born-again advertising executive and his wife, a black pro basketball player and a Hispanic television technician, all led by one Pastor Jack, a descendant of the eighteenth-century American preacher Jonathan Edwards—tend to sound like a bunch of Stepford wives who have wandered onto the set of The 700 Club, eerily polite and constantly telling one another to please turn to the Book of Revelation:

  “ ‘That’s right, Manuel. Every bit of it is in the Bible. As a matter of fact, whole books have been written about a diabolical world dictator called the Antichrist. He got that name because he will try to perform for Satan what Christ performed for God.’

  “ ‘Wow, I hope he fails,’ Cathy said.”

  The bad guys tend to sound like the villains in a Charlie Chan movie. In fact, they sound as if they were being simultaneously translated from some sinister Indo-Iranian tongue:

  “Panchal, sorry to wake you. Get your people ready. Tonight the gods have given America into our hands.”

  That “sorry to wake you” is one of the many unintentionally hilarious moments that relieve the general tedium. For all the apocalyptic pyrotechnics, the book leaves the eyeballs as glazed as a Christmas ham. But just when you start wondering what’s on C-SPAN, there will be a reason to go on:

  “The Antichrist raged within his palace.… The final battle was coming. He would march on Jerusalem at the head of his armies. ‘Then,’ he said to Joyce Cumberland Wong, ‘I will win! At last I will have my revenge!’ ”

  The book begins with a bang in the form of a 300-billion-pound meteor that lands in the Pacific Ocean with the force of five thousand nuclear bombs, setting off a three-thousand-foot tsunami, earthquakes, fires, nuclear plant meltdowns, volcano eruptions, ash in the atmosphere, floods and food shortages. All in all, a rather bad hair day for old Mother Earth, sending the Antichrist ouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Meanwhile, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, things are a bit sticky:

  “Well, here’s the story,” the secretary of defense explains to his top general over lime-and-sodas while the world burns. “As you know, we had one President commit suicide. The next was killed by a snakebite, and then the man who left the cobra on the President’s desk was murdered. They say he committed suicide, but don’t you believe it.”

  At this point, if I were the general, I’d have asked for some Scotch to go with my soda, but in evangelical literature the good guys don’t drink.

  “Now,” the secretary continues, “we’ve got this ex–campus radical in the White House, and if you heard the speech tonight, you know he’s got some mighty big plans.”

  That would be the aforementioned “We are the world” speech, and yes, President Mark Beaulieu (read “mark of the beast”) does indeed have some big plans: a one-world government with its own currency and a police force in United Nations—ish uniforms, a grand new $25 billion world headquarters palace in Babylon with some positively kinky special effects, computer-tattoo ID markings for everyone, drugs and orgies for schoolchildren, vintage wines for the grown-ups.

  Your basic liberal agenda, right down to the Chardonnay. President Mark of the Beast’s cabinet would certainly provide for some memorable nomination hearings:

  “For Secretary of Education, the President had selected a Buddhist monk who shaved his head and dressed in a saffron robe and sandals. For Secretary of Agriculture, he asked for a shepherd from Nevada who lived alone in the hills and spoke broken English. The man’s only known ‘credential’ was that he had once played jai alai in Las Vegas. For Secretary of Energy, he named a Lebanese Shiite Muslim who was a member of the terrorist group, Hezbollah, and ran a filling station in Dearborn, Mich.

  “For drug czar, he picked a man who had spent his life crusading for the legalization of all narcotics. For Secretary of State, a professor of Eastern religions from Harvard University”—a Yale man just can’t help himself—“who had close ties to Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Japanese cult of Shiva worshipers known as Aum Shinri Kyo, or Supreme Truth. They had been linked with a poisonous gas attack in a Tokyo subway in 1995. And he chose for Attorney General a militant black feminist attorney who advocated abolishing the death penalty and closing all prisons.”

  I’ll bet not one of them paid Social Security tax on the nanny.

  The End of the Age is to Dante what Sterno is to The Inferno. When you have a hard time keeping a straight face while reading a novel about the death of a billion human beings, something is probably amiss.

  But lest we be too smug, bear in mind two recent events. In March 1989, a large asteroid passed within 450,000 miles of Earth. Had it landed in an ocean, according to scientists quite genuinely rattled by 1989FC’s sudden appearance, it would have created three-hundred-foot tidal waves. If you think 450,000 miles is a country mile, consider that Earth had been in the asteroid’s path just six hours earlier.

  Then there was Hurrica
ne Gloria. In September 1985, this violent storm was working its way up the Atlantic, headed for Virginia Beach, Virginia, headquarters of the Christian Broadcasting Network, with murderous force. Mr. Robertson went on the air and prayed, commanding the storm to stay at sea. It did—and came ashore at Fire Island, demolishing the summer house of Calvin Klein.

  —The New York Times, 1996

  Remembrance of

  Mansions Past

  I was lucky, in an age in which houses seem to be getting smaller and smaller, to have grown up around some of the big ones. I think it’s because I had the run of such places when I was very young that I still tend to look on stately manses with affection but something less than awe. Thus I found myself in an immense, nineteenth-century former Rothschild hôtel in Paris a few years ago, tossing a Frisbee in the state dining room—a modest Louis XV affair full of boiserie and crystal, slightly less large than a basketball court. To me such houses have purposes their builders might not have foreseen: outside ledges to crawl along while horrified nannies threatened from fifty feet below; marble floors for bicycle riding and roller skating; laundry chutes for physics experiments with medicine balls.

  When I finally read Brideshead Revisited I found myself on familiar ground: the ache for a vanished house in which one’s happiest days were spent. I wonder if psychologists have got around to classifying a Brideshead Syndrome, or does that fall too squarely into the problems-of-the-idle-rich category?

  But like many relics of grander days, great houses are subject to peculiar ravishings. The Georgian-style house my mother grew up in, on a beautiful estate in Vancouver, British Columbia, was sold after my grandfather’s death in 1965. Some years later, I found myself in a movie theater watching Ann-Margret and Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge rutting away in the same gardens where I used to play with my Teddy Bear. Not long afterward the new owner sold Shannon, as it was called, to developers. The house was carved up into apartments, and where there had been lavender beds, roses, riots of sunflowers and cypress stands you will now find one hundred and ninety condominium units.