Fire & Meerkats

Back home, we have a brilliant turn of phrase: 'You can't polish a turd'. From time to time I take delight in sharing this eloquent expression with American colleagues and students to emphasize a point, namely, that something that is inherently bad cannot be made good or masked effectively by something superficial, no matter how hard one tries. Nevertheless, the inverse of the idiom is equally true, and a warning for post-modern tendencies: You can smear s**t on a diamond. Today's Bing headline (don't ask me why as still use 'Bing'... at least I'm not asking "Jeeves") displayed an example of such. Le Mans Cathedral, an iconic display of Gothic architecture, was inhabited in 2015 (yes, those many moons ago... again, 'Bing') by a series of multi-colored meerkats. In this single display of apparently comedic and boundary-testing art, this instance that has re-emerged portrays what Western Europe has systematically accomplished in the destruction of it's half-remembered, often resented Christian past and origin. This is a reality that has ironically come to the fore through recent discussions in the wake of the devastating Norte Dame fire, which will celebrate it's first Holy Mass this weekend since the disaster.

The exhibition was initiated by the "Cracking Art" collective, which uses recycled plastics to construct large figurines of various animals, displayed in "unexpected locations." In the case of Le Mans, the meerkats were placed upon the wall surrounding the apse of the Cathedral, with snails and others critters placed in the surrounding plaza. And though the outside may well be populated, the pews within, as with many of the Catholic Churches in Western Europe, are likely empty.

Joel Saget, AFP | Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral on May 12, 2019.

On the day the Notre Dame caught fire, I wrote to a well-educated, non-Catholic, friend abroad how I felt like what manifesting materially in the tragic and internationally-televised moment was merely that which secular Europe has been systematically achieving intellectually and socially through gradual and increasingly aggressive methods over the past 50 years and beyond. The 2015 exhibition at Le Mans is an example of this. When Notre Dame caught fire, and the damage was reported to be significant, many around the globe felt as if some cornerstone of Western civilization was in its final hours. Everyone recognizes the iconic rose window and the façade of that impressive Church (which I myself lament never making the opportunity to see prior to this event.) The eyes of the world were on its ramparts in those brief few hours, while its stone walls were engulfed in flames, and then (to borrow an artist's line) "everybody got up and stretched and yawned, and their lives went on." That which the magnificent building stood for, and stood upon, is hardly understood, or worse, misunderstood, by the average Western mind. The medieval era, whose achievement brought rise to these great bastions of the institutional Church, is looked back upon with suspicion and shame--as a time when a foreign and corrupt super-power under a religious guise dominated the Western European states and imposed its mythical beliefs upon a naïve, uneducated, and poorly-treated population. This time is labeled the 'dark ages', the debunking of which I defer to the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. Dawson's observations, however, are perhaps more poignant now than ever. Social democracy and certain political agendas even with the Church Herself set about to erase our collective cultural and ancestral memory of that which moved and animated Western culture for nearly two millennia.

We do not know what do with our Churches and Cathedrals now, except to display plastic meerkats on their ramparts. My university town was dotted with medieval Churches like stars in the night's sky, from corner to corner, and yet half were vacant, with the other half converted into bookstores, cafés, and venues for music or karate classes. And yet we weep and wail when a freak-fire takes down an international icon of the same, without knowing why. The darkness that we attribute to medieval Christianity is merely the feces with which we have smeared upon it, as was done at Le Mans. And it is a flammable fuel. We do not know how to read the awe-inspiring stained glass windows that were assembled for the evangelizing of the illiterate. We have forgotten how to sit in a Church and pray to the God of all Creation, and instead construct multi-colored idols of social and political values to divert our attention.

The pearl of great price has been cast to the pigs and emerged from the process of digestion. We opt for eastern-meditation and psychological 'mindfulness' practices in place of the contemplation of Teresa of Avila. We read Jordan Peterson for spiritual consolation and not John of the Cross.