For Today

So, a little over a year ago, I was in Rome with my family, and as part of our sight-seeing, we were visiting a church*. It was a church mostly famous for the large, first-or-second century drain along the wall of the entranceway, carved into a slightly Celtic-influenced, stylized representation of a man's face. Imagine an image of the Green Man, but without the leaves. The opened mouth was the actual drain part of the face, and there was an old folk tale that if you stuck your hand in the drain, and you were being untruthful in your life, the mouth would bite it off. The drain's notoriety is due mostly to its appearance in Roman Holiday, though Only You did a riff on it.

After waiting in line and getting our pictures taken with our hands in the drain, suffering no injuries, we went inside the church, just to have a look around. It was a very pretty church, by American standards, although it paled beside some of the other churches; it didn't have the mind-boggling frescoes, or luminescent stained glass windows, or detailed statues, or magnificent architectural craftsmanship of other churches we had seen. It was mostly just small and dim. As my family stopped to looked at something I had no interest in, I wandered off the the left (as I am prone to do) and came upon a glassed-off alcove, with a velvet rope in front of it. Behind the glass, an ancient skull was sitting atop a large velvet cushion. Beside it was a sign noting that this was a sign in Italian, noting that this was a reliquary for "Santo Valentino."

"Hmm, Santo Valentino!" I thought. "I wonder who he was!" I walked over to my younger sister, who had recently spent a semester in Rome studying abroad, and had before that "converted" to Catholicism, and thus knew quite a bit about saints. "Hey, Anne," I said. "Have you ever heard of a Saint Valentino?"

Anne looked at me funny. "You mean Saint Valentine? As in Valentine's Day?"

"Ohhhh!" I said, and felt very silly. Then, recovering, I said with relish, "You want to see his skull?"

And we all went over and looked at St. Valentine's skull. There might have been a finger bone was well. Mom and Mary took pictures.

I just thought it interesting to note, on this February 14, on St. Valentine's Day, that the skull of the man whose feast day this is lies, at this very moment, upon a velvet cushion, in a church in Rome that owes it's fame to an entirely different and unrelated reason. A part of me is tickled pink, but another part of me finds it kind of sad.

*It was one among many.

Rhetorical Iconography

I just watched the Obama Father's Day speech. I thought the Jesus bits at the end felt tacked on, mostly there because he was in a church. So, in that sense, a little discordant as literature.

I have decided to refer to such invocations of Jesus as "rhetorical iconography." It seems like there is this tendency among the religious, or those in the habit of making arguments that they try to evoke as religious, to just stick a reference to having faith in Jesus Christ as making everything all better, and why this is so is left unsaid. The speaker/writer is not really trying to explain the importance of Jesus, or how mechanism by which faith and Jesus beings about positive developments, they are simply throwing in the reference. It's a representative rhetorical flourish meant to be considered and meditated on by the audience, in much the way an icon was meant to be studied on, as if through it's consideration some truth of the depicted would dawn upon the viewer.

Now, there is probably a good reason the reference can just be tacked in there, which is that the audience as already heard all of the reasons for why they should trust in Jesus, so why said it again? But that's actually what icons are for. You look at them, and meditate on your relation to the which is pictured; it requires some understanding of the images meaning in order for the truth to emerge from it. Since I haven't internalized these reasons, these evocations always leave me cold. They don't tell me why faith in Jesus will (supposedly) help me, and as a result I just think "whatever, man."

I wonder if I should be feeling alienated that Obama seems to think that faith, and faith in Jesus, is so important, such an edifying way of living and succeeding in life, but I figure, that's just his bag. All people have some shit that they think is the the way to be, the way to do things, whether that's Veganism, Christianity, being a swinger, hippy, "traditional" family member, gay clubber, raver, anarchist, objectivist.... People all have this tendency to form some silly tribe that bolsters their particular view of How One Should Live. Obama's is no different, and his thing happens to involve Jesus. Not really something to get bent out of shape about.

Still, I hope he keeps that kind of talk in the Church. If he starts talking like that at those huge rallies, I might have to reconsider my position.