Not a syllogism but a poem

...I'm not sure if Greene has ever told it -he rrtay possibly still be freaked out...

...My father didn't want to force anything down my throat, yet it was very clear that the deck was stacked...

...We looked at three, although there was a hidden agenda all along...

...And I still think, if you could read only one book on what it means to be a Christian, that's the book...

...He said, "Well, what didn't you like about it...

...there were something like forty or fifty choices, which was a lot for eight years old...

...It was in France and Jerusalem that I had my reawakening, and when I went to Assisi it just all came to life...

...My dad wept as he hugged me goodby --my mother wasn't speaking to him, because how could he do this to her...

...Interesting...

...Now, I suppose this was convenient for the parents...

...The message is this: Be at peace...

...He was, incidentally, about the smartest kid there...

...Going to Italy also had a hand in making me rediscover Christianity and enjoy it more and find more pleasure in it...

...Did they really think that this was going to leave you with a love of God...

...But he knew what he was doing...

...It's actually happened that when, in the course of doing a magazine piece or whatever, I'm tempted to fudge a quote --if I think, Well, this quote doesn't do exactly what I want it to do, so I'll just fix it up -then I look at More and I unfudge it...

...Watching The Exorcist was for me a truly horrifying experience...

...In India and in Jerusalem and in Italy you feel a deep connection to the source...

...I cried myselfto sleep every night for three months...

...GROWING UP CATHOLIC & THE ADULT SEARCH FOR FAITH NOT A SYLLOGISM CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY BUT A POEM FROM ACID ON GOOD FRIDAY TO 'ORTHODOXY' y first memory, my first consciousness of God occurred in the semi-abandoned garage attached to my parents' house...

...Ritual should be pleasurable, it should be aesthetic...

...I mean, it's signed, sealed, and delivered...

...It was life's first ri(ual...

...God does not ask anything from us that we cannot give Him...

...All of a sudden it all began to fall into place, that it wasn't just a lawyer's brief on how to make it all the way, but an interpretation of how it had all come about...

...One thing the church should do is to revive the folklore and mythology...

...He sought to assure me that Jesus had not been surprised by this, that this wasn't a bad card they had suddenly dealt off the bottom of the deck, and that He had come to earth specifically to die...

...But it was told me by someone very close to him, who is also a Catholic...

...When you look at the parallel, it's something like the Passion --he was taunted and mocked...

...He's my closest spiritual adviser, but that gets rather ahead of the story...

...I was enrolled in altar boy training, the major part of which in those days was having those 138 lines drummed into you...

...I was about five, and we were driving in a car...

...And the ones who were with nuns...

...Now I really should have A. J. Liebling or E. B. White there, but I refer this to a higher authority perhaps than another journalistic buddy of mine might do...

...In every temple in India the priest will come up and tell you that it's the holiest place in all of India...

...One week after I had it all down pat, Vatican II changed everything, and I felt as though the whole thing had been done to annoy me...

...I looked up and saw tacked to the edge of a shelf a rendition of the Crucifixion which had been put there by our Cuban gardener...

...blood was streaming down his face...

...we looked at Taft, which I loved --it looked like a miniature Yale or Harvard, out in the country with no evidence of religion --and then we went to Portsmouth Priory, run by the Benedictine monastery...

...Whittaker Chambers writes in Witness that what brought him to belief in God was sitting in the kitchen one night feeding his three-year-old daughter...

...Thomas More, and I keep next to the screen of my word processor a postcard of the Holbein from the Frick Museum, the famous portrait of Thomas More...

...Everyone was packed into Mass, and he got into the back of the church...

...You go from the first confession, which occurs in this darkened sound chamber, the next day into a church that is brilliant with light, and you're wearing white...

...Much too early for impure thoughts...

...Now, on the pro side is the fact of Catholic education...

...My mother is Episcopalian, so she did not participate --it was just my dad, me, and the maids, all of whom were Cuban...

...He found himself observing her ear, this perfect, delicate little ear, and he decided this was not an accident, not a random accretion of molecules --it was designed...

...And so I learned at a very early age that "terrible" has more than one meaning...

...the crown of thorns had been jammed tight into his skull...

...She must have learned this at Buchenwald --she would sprinkle rice on the floor, and you had to roll up your pants and kneel on it for two hours...

...He located the village on a Sunday...

...Churchill said, "Six hours.., plus seventy years...

...This was done privately in a kind of car pool approach...

...Italy is like India with its spiritual topography, because you have the place where a miracle occurred and then the home of a saint...

...There were about five or six of us and she sort of walked us through the Baltimore Catechism which, on the whole, seemed very much less interesting than that card which I had seen in the gardener's shed...

...And what do you know, he was killed in a car crash a year after graduation...

...The priest ran right up to him and said, "I have a message from Padre Pio...

...I'm writing a play on the life of Edmund Campion, the Jesuit martyr under Elizabeth I, whose life was illuminated to me by Evelyn Waugh's book on Campion...

...I said, "Everything...

...There's a Chinese proverbthat says, "Beat your child at least once a day --if you don't know why, the child does...

...And then one weekend my dad and I went to look at prep schools...

...He said, "Well, what did you think...

...But it was a gray, cheerless, miserable September 13, 1966...

...A little over a year ago, that same monk married my wife and me...

...Then, before I knew what was happening, I began to be instructed in catechism...

...Padre Pio, who died not long ago, was an Italian priest who received the stigmata early on, and he became as such almost an embarrassment to the church...

...So I went from an idyllic white schoolhouse with a trampoline out front to the wonderful world of Roman Catholicism ~/la Mafia Montessori --oh, yoiks...

...At school, we had one teacher who would beat you with a ruler with your pants down, and one who did a sort of caning...

...You take an eight-year-old kid and you tell him to go into a dark booth with a man dressed in black and tell the priest what was it...

...God, after all, was an Englishman, and this was merely an unfortunate by-product of having married a Catholic...

...Thompson, who was Scottish and smoked a pipe...

...What is it that is so rational, obvious, logical about a dandelion or a butterfly...

...I remember distinctly being handed a mimeographed sheet by a nun...

...One night they got him out of bed, smeared chocolate all over his face, and paraded him about with a crown as King Hershey...

...You know, "What on earth had gotten into them...

...After watching Brideshead Revisited, he had the idea to do a saga of the recusants, a term from the sixteenth century used to describe one who refused to attend the Anglican services...

...I suppose the idea was to inculcate in you a degree of formalistic respect for the institution, They were not a grim bunch, but it was the first time I was introduced, outside of church, to organized prayer...

...That was not a happy period...

...This made absolutely no sense, so I leaned over to my dad --I had the sense that I was on to something, that I had just caught a major typo...

...My memory is fuzzy, but I had gone from the pretty girl who taught me catechism past a brief gauntlet of nuns, who were not the sadistic concentration-camp matrons that they are popularly made out to be...

...I suppose I have a fairly Manichean imagination, and I tend to divide things into good and evil...

...So somewhere there are thirty kids who 14 August 1987:455 very important had been illumined...

...It has some of the genuine strengths of director Stanley Kubrick, but all of his weaknesses as well...

...F inally, by grade four, I was sent to a Catholic school --a Montessori school, no less...

...It's sobering...

...I don't know...

...The story went that some student from a previous generation had left photographs of Hiroshima taped to the front of his prayer carrel...

...On one side you put pros and on the other side you put cons...

...He discerns in this, with typical Chestertonian majestic reasoning, a continuity of theme that he later found in Christianity...

...So I continued for a while to mumble under my breath, "Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam...

...And I'm doing it with James MacGuire, a friend of mine from Portsmouth...

...I remember, for instance, poring through one of those old missals with the onionskin paper and red and black ink and all that --the Mass was still in Latin then, with the English translation...

...Anyway, Graham Greene, who is a rather complicated Catholic --I have no window to look into another man's soul, but he's a pretty skeptical dude --heard about Padre Pio, and he went to visit...

...So they sent him to a very remote parish in Italy that was hard to get to --precisely because they didn't want headlines saying, you know, THE AMAZING BLEEDING PRIEST...

...We had a Latin teacher called Mr...

...He says he has absolutely nothing against skeptics except --and here's the very Chestertonian trademark --they're not skeptical enough...

...Still, stepping into that confessional for the first time is an experience that every Catholic writer has explored with an understandably surreal appreciation of the sudden darkness that has been imposed on an otherwise gay period of life...

...His hands would bleed at the moment of the elevation of the host...

...There was a sense of something important going on...

...I asked my father about CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY, thirty-five, has been an editor for Esquire, a speechwriter for George Bush, and has written several books, including The White House Mess (Viking) and a new play based onthe life of Edmund Campion...

...You ended up with bloody knees, and you ended up having to sort of surgically extract the grains of rice with a tweezer...

...I find nothing contradictory in the theory of evolution and Christianity...

...Anyway, in a chapter which he calls "The Ethics of Elfland," where he describes being brought up in an utterly agnostic household in which God did not figure, he tells how he learned Christianity without even knowing it at his nurse's knee when she read him the fairy tales...

...the things that you haven't even told your mother," I think was how they put it...

...ure, Full Metal Jacket has some good moments, but it is too abstract, uneven, and fractured to work as compelling drama...

...Portsmouth itselfI did not enjoy at the time I was there...

...You know, the church is very wary of miracles...

...He said, "I tell you what makes sense whenever you're trying to make a tough decision --you make a list...

...A writer's capital is his life...

...his fingers were clawed around the hub of the nail...

...They wanted to secrete him...

...And when he came to God many years later and he looked back on what he had learned in the nursery, he realized that it was all the same...

...I discussed it with my buddy from catechism class and we pored over it, and here life's first lesson in Catholic evasion was learned, which was: Go the path of least resistance...

...David's...

...And you find yourself speaking to this darkened screen, trying to remember things...

...They take it out every twenty-five or thirty years, but that's about it...

...Judaism is fascinating --the language and music --and to think that Christianity is part of that makes Christianity seem a richer and more varied tradition than it sometimes appears...

...I don't recall his answer...

...The one thing that is extraordinary about any contained Catholic institution, by which I suppose I simply mean boarding school, is the level of sadism...

...It's a very clear, visual memory, as clear as yesterday, burned like a daguerreotype into my brain, and I have no way of accounting for it...

...I believe in genuine evil...

...I believe in Darwin and Genesis...

...But here they had a guy with the stigmata, and the crowds were starting to come...

...My next memory is of my father telling me about Jesus being put to death --and I was very concerned about that, as they say in Washington...

...Taft, great place...

...One told me of a Sister Immaculata --it's always Sister Immaculata --who kept a box of uncooked rice by her desk...

...So we settled on "disobeying our parents...

...It's pretty grim stuff...

...I said, "Sure...

...The headmaster was a man called Father Leo Van Winkle, who had worked with Edward Teller on the atom bomb as a young genius just out of Yale graduate school...

...I think that the first confession is essential to the whole thing...

...I said, "What's so pro about that...

...For my part, I remember being astounded when I found out, at about age ten, that Episcopalians had only three sacraments...

...I think there should be more of an effort on the part of Catholic and Jewish leaders to emphasize what is common to both traditions and to create a greater' unity...

...There was one Jewish kid at that school --what he was doing there I don't know --but he was the butt of every anti-Semitic joke, taunt, and raw cruelty, oven jokes, the works...

...Nothing was spared: Christ's knees were bloody...

...Here's a true story told to me by a very good friend of Graham Greene, concerning Greene and Padre Pio...

...otherwise, he wore,gloves...

...It's really rather an abstract concept, isn't it...

...It was ridiculous...

...The bell would go at six fifteen, and in the winter it was dark and cold, and you would find yourself marching through snowdrifts up a hill with freezing toes to attend Mass...

...I remember thinking quite a lot about this rather inconvenient step which had to be gone through in order to get that first wafer...

...And I was very grateful to such a sturdy and robust atheist as Mencken for having come up with the sentence: "The Latin church, which I find myself admiring more and more despite its frequent, astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism but a poem...

...And he explained in a very gentle, fabulistic, Aesopian way that it had to be...

...o that was St...

...It was the gardener's shed and it was full of must, dust, and broken-down things...

...So I took the sheet home...

...She was asserting her right to have a say in where I went, not as a religious matter but as a sort of turf battle...

...He said, "Okay, let's take Portsmouth...

...What is it we're missing in America...

...God knows, it can often seem stodgy and boring...

...By this time I was going to Mass with my dad and, always, the servants...

...Everything is lambent, coruscating...

...He calls it the "doctrine of negative prohibition," which is to say that the happiness depends always on not doing something...

...He is the son of Patricia and William F. Buckley, Jr., the author and conservative commentator...

...Aloud...

...I noticed one particular passage which attributed the adjective "terrible" to God, as in "for He is terrible...

...It shaped my values a great deal...

...I say that because Portsmouth is responsible for my having faith...

...off I went...

...The prince will return to his homeland if he doesn't kiss the warthog...

...There would be many rituals to follow, but that inflected all rituals with, I suppose, a subconscious religious content...

...Giving a child a mimeographed sheet --and it was crammed, it looked like a crib sheet...

...Just in passing I should add that I became immensely resentful of Pope John XXIII not long after this...

...And for some odd reason, part of the deal was that he had to attend Mass...

...The teachers there at Whitby all wore, in the Oxford or Cambridge manner, black robes...

...Really, I'll keep this to myself, thank you very much...

...I'd never seen a monk before, and it was a cold sort of cheerless place looking out on a bay that froze over in the winter, and I thought, my God, get me out of here...

...We became friends, somehow --he somehow had the extraordinary grace to forgive...

...We made that our buzzsin...

...It was, I think, a pen and ink drawing, and it was one of those wonderfully gory Latino renditions...

...The disobeying of parents, certainly, and not saying your prayers --I was very guilty on that count...

...And there are a number of miracles associated with his life, which are the subject of a fairly fascinating book, recently written...

...Right now I'm embarked upon a very distinctly Catholic project...

...He went to the edge of town and had a drink...

...the church gets it in writing...

...Maybe it's because we're a nation of immigrants and .we don't have roots that go down too far --we're.transplanted...

...But there were some characters among the monks...

...I got belted a couple of times in the face with the back of the hand, but it was all pretty tame in comparison to what most other Catholic friends of mine were going through...

...Again, as in a Hindu temple, it's the spiritualization of the physical, which you see in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions and which often seems to be lacking in contemporary Catholicism and Christianity...

...But I remember a nasty argument because she knew clearly that I wanted nothing to do with Portsmouth, and I just wished they would stop, it was traumatic...

...I thought, Well, poor things, how do they manage...

...But I was curious about some of the vocabulary...

...And he left...

...And then there was a kid who had a ghastly case of acne -how he was made to suffer for that...

...However, before one got to First Communion, there was The First Confession...

...the girl will not turn into a newt if she gets home by a certain time...

...SCREEN I I SATIRED OLJT 'FULL METAL,' 'TAMPOPO,' ET AL...

...He does that rather well...

...It's really the most sobering thing I can imagine happening to an eightyear-old, in a ritualistic sense --you know, short of losing your mother or father...

...As someone else might put it, I believe in that shit...

...Those who went off to the Christian Brothers were routinely beaten with leather straps...

...This particular school had concrete floors...

...I said, "God, I hate it...

...I'm not sure if I was yet fully verbal, so I may have been younger than four years old...

...For example, Kubrick has a fetish for abstract dramatic structure...

...And then iconographically there is a marked difference...

...What do they want, anyway...

...It was very strict: thirty-six hours for Thanksgiving, no weekends, prayer every morning at seven, midday prayer, grace before meals --if you opened your mouth to put a Baby Ruth in, someone whapped a grace on you --vespers, evening prayer, Mass three times a week, and one of them was at six forty-five A.,M...

...You know, someone once complimented Winston Churchill on a speech he had just made and said, "Winnie, how long /I did it take you to write that...

...The monk who showed us around was a wonderfully gentle man Who did much to set me at ease...

...And it was arresting because I was still at the Mother Goose stage and not yet even into Grimm's fairy tales in which you have the odd scary old woman and, perhaps, the slavering wolf, but nothing like this...

...At the moment of the elevation, sure enough, Padre Pio began bleeding...

...The movie cameras were out, the girls in their white dresses, the gold medallion with your name engraved on it...

...Go to a Hasidic synagogue in Brooklyn and, my God...

...It prefigures --doesn't it...

...But I'll tell you something very concrete...

...At a deeper level, there is a certain rationale to all that -although I didn't come to realize it until years later, when I read G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy...

...There's a line in Orthodoxy, which I shall now render clumsily, and it's Chesterton's answer to the scientific denunciation of the existence of God...

...But she signed away those rights when she married my dad --all women who marry Catholics do...

...But, you see, I was really raised by Protestant women who had no interest in any of this and' thought of it as rather vulgar, certainly unseemly...

...the transition from innocence to experience...

...There was not much white space on it...

...We looked at Canterbury, which I kind of liked...

...And then, of course, there were Christian doctrine courses --mandatory, nothing elective about them: One found oneself reading the Monarch Notes to the Old Testament: "All right now, which one was Amos...

...t's very hard to say what goes into writing, whether it be religion or anything else, for that matter...

...Getting back to the confessional, I was already a confirmed criminal at that age --I stole regularly from the local five and dime...

...I was thirteen years old, and it was the most miserable time of my life...

...What business is it of theirs that I've been stealing erasers from the local five and dime...

...You know the minds that devised all this weren't dumb, they were good showmen...

...I had a healthy resentment about this intrusion on my Sunday mornings and took no interest in it...

...What I remember mostly about First Holy Communion was the whiteness of the costumes and my special satisfaction in finally being allowed to wear long pants, for it would be many years before I was again allowed to wear long pants...

...They're like all the Greco-Roman gods...

...I'm a big fan of St...

...Greene was horrified by it and he fled, he had to get out of there...

...There was no clearly explained narrative link between the appearance among apemen of a mysterious monolith in the first part, the exploration of the moon by contemporary astronauts in the second part, a space voyage to 14 August 1987:457...

...In 2001 (1968), this meant an abrupt four-part division of the action...

...But that really was about it...

...but how is it that you can believe in a dandelion...

...I remember distinctly he and my mother having a real argument over dinner --it was just the three of us and my dad had basically informed her that I was going to Portsmouth...

...That's a true story...

...452: Commonweal it, but I didn't even have the vocabulary to describe what I'd seen...

...There should be more joy in the Catholic service...

...At that point I think he gave up for the moment...

...He was sitting there with a bottle, getting ready to leave, when he saw a young priest running in the street...

...We began the 14 August 1987:453 Now that was at home...

...Shall we do that...

...It was the closest thing to a British public school experience that I think you could get on this side of the Atlantic --minus the Catholicism, of course...

...Now, there was a touch of Little Lord Fauntleroy about my childhood --I was the only child of devoted parents --and I found myself rather affronted by this sheet...

...They found a nice, unblemished, suburban Catholic girl who also had the advantage of being very pretty...

...He .would whack you over the head with this pipe, and let me tell you, three ounces of briar, judiciously applied to the cranial weak spot, produced stars...

...He says, "It seems to me fine to say that you cannot believe in God because you can't see him with your senses...

...And I'm ashamed to say that I used to engage in that...

...The Catholic church in Italy, God knows, is spectacular --the color and the light...

...And I keep it there for a reason: He keeps me straight...

...Yet it was these nuns who caused a mimeographed sheet of sins to fall into my possession, given me for the examination of conscience prior to confession...

...I guess any loving parent would prefer not to beat their child and have someone else do it...

...involvement with Jewish culture in my family, and I feel very privileged to have had that when I was growing up...

...Also, I never learned much about the saints and always wanted to...

...The Catholic church has taken pains to keep the Shroud of Turin quiet...

...He was not expected to take Communion or anything, but maybe they saw no sense in exempting him from what everyone else had to go through...

...I don't believe in ghosts, but I do believe in miracles...