Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep - After 'The Horror...The Horror' A Bedtime Prayer

Emily Sparing grew up in a solidly Catholic family, one which observed Holy Days, went to Mass on Sunday, fasted on Friday, and tried to remain in a state of grace.  The Church was not exactly the center of their lives, but it was far more than the peripheral affair it was for most residents of New Brighton.  They took Jesus seriously. 

Father Brophy was an impressive priest, and when he began his sermon, the rustling and squirming stopped, and all eyes were front and center. Everyone knew that they were in for fire and brimstone, and if they had heard it all before, they still welcomed the opportunity to hear it again. 

'Sinners', began Father Brophy, pausing to adjust his chasuble, centering the Bible on the pulpit, and looking out over the congregation - his congregation, the one he had nurtured, instructed, directed, and brought closer to the Lord.  

His many years at The Church of the Redeemer had been good ones.  The building fund, so generously endowed, permitted the renovation of the school which had stood unattended since the day it was built.  He had been considered for promotion to bishop, but chose to remain a priest and complete the work of his calling. 

'Sinners', he repeated, and the communicants in the front row looked up expectantly, waiting for the full bore of his intent.  Brophy was an old-style priest who although faithful to Vatican II and the church reforms that came with it - structural, liturgical, and canonical changes aimed at creating a more inclusive church - he champed at the bit, waiting for the pause in the sacramental offering of the mass and to begin what was really on his mind, sin. 

For a good half hour at times, he, feeling the divine retribution of God, his anger at the perpetual ignorance of those still residing in darkness, and the need to wake them from their impious slumber, he harangued, hectored, and caviled, invoking the celestial beauty of a place at the right hand of the Father and the perpetual fires of hell.

As a young girl Emily had no idea what all the fuss was about.  She was too young to understand the priest's invocation of sodomy, prurience, sexual deviance, and infidelity, and so leafed through her missal and looked at the pictures of Jesus ministering to the poor instead.  She wished she didn't have to be there, in church with this beery lot of parishioners on hot summer days; but she knew it was part of the family routine, necessary somehow to complete some kind of obligation.

As she got older, she began to see Father Brophy as the old windbag he had become, banging on about the same sins that had preoccupied him for decades but which were apparently as still common, perverse, and insidious as ever. 

Finally, when she went away to boarding school, she stopped going to church, felt relieved that her Sunday mornings were not the penitential miseries they had been back home, stretched her legs on the deep, carpeted lawn in front of Hadley Hall, and had not a care in the world. 

She couldn't have gone to Mass even if she had wanted. Fielding Academy was located in the foothills of the Green Mountains, deliberately remote and isolated, a place of hermetic learning said Isaiah Smith, founder and first principal in 1888.  Her parents, worried about her growing indifference to her religion but pleased that she had been accepted into an elite preparatory school, the equal of Andover, Exeter, or St. Paul's, demurred.  She would have to find her own way. 

Religion is many things to many people.  Perhaps the most important of which is that of spiritual home.  No matter what happens in the outside world, no matter how depraved or threating, the church would always be there as a refuge.  God loves you if no one else does. 

After Fielding Emily entered Harvard and there was fully sensitized to the plight of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized.  The university prided itself on having moved from the restrictive, disciplined redoubt of the white privileged students of wealth to an open place of social justice and racial communalism, and the indoctrination of its students was as telling, intimidating, and complete as Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge Year Zero. 

 

That this new ethos had such a hold on the young Emily was not surprising to Prof. Lombard Freeman, Dean of the Duke University medical school and leading scholar on 'transnational idolatry', the willing suspension of disbelief in social reformers. Prof. Freeman was particularly struck by the elision from traditional religious faith to secular faith. 

The human individual cannot do without religion, whether Biblical or down-to-earth.  It is no surprise nor no coincidence that the true believer whether in God, Jesus, and the hereafter or in social reform share the same faith and fidelity.  They both have canon, liturgy, litany, evangelism, and a profound belief in the coming of another, better world.  Without either faith - celestial or earthly - the individual is adrift in a miasma of uncertainty

In Emily's interregnum - the period after leaving the church and before full adoption of progressivism - she felt as adrift as speculated by Lombard Freeman.  She missed that clerical certainty, that absolutism that the Catholic Church afforded. Harvard had begun the process of transition from religious to secular faith, but the old ways were so deeply embedded, four university years were not enough to complete the elision. 

Emily remembered her Catechism class.  'Who made the world? God made the world. Where is God? God is everywhere? Who loves you? God loves you', a childish litany evocative of the Agnus Dei. 

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

miserere nobis.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

miserere nobis.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,

dona nobis pacem.

These words, both those enunciated in clear, unequivocal tone by Sister Mary Joseph and those recited by Father Brophy on the altar were especially resonant and meaningful in this interregnum.  What had she done, abandoning the church as she had? And as much as she now embraced the heady world vision of progressivism, was membership in such a temporal movement only secondary to real belief?

Nevertheless, she persisted and became one of The Movement's most ardent advocates. Taking a page from Father Brophy's prayerbook and his incendiary, accusatory, and threatening sermons, she became well-known for her clarity, singularity and absolute mastery of the progressive faith. 

In a similar vein and one also noted by Professor Freeman, she became a missionary.  The podium/pulpit was too removed from the real world of the oppressed, and she was bound and obliged to evangelize amongst the poor and disassociated. 

'Whatchoo doin' up in here, bitch?' were the first words she heard as she stepped out of her car in front of the Lincoln Douglass Homes, one of Anacostia's biggest, most crime-ridden, drug addled projects where she was to meet LaShonda Adams, a community organizer and political activist. 

When Emily paid no attention to the do-ragged, grilled, blinged, shirtless black man who shouted at her and started to walk up the steps of Bloc B, the man blocked her way and was joined by three others who surrounded her.

'I said, Whatchoo doin' up in here, bitch?'

'Yeah', chorused the ring around her. 'That's right. We gonna run a train on yo' ass.'

LaShonda came running out the door, down the steps, shouting, 'She's with me...She's with me' and got in the face of Pharoah Jones who started the whole affair. 'Don't you be messing with my white girl, fool'. 

And so it went, call and response, another litany, this time street liturgy until face had been saved, bitches all went home, and Emily walked with her to an area where men were playing chess on cement chessboards. Soon, and one by one, the men got up from their game and walked over to Emily and LaShonda, grinning, jacking their pants down a notch, fingering the Glock-9s in their waistbands, and chiming in with the same bullying swagger of Pharoah Jones and his crewe. 

OK, Emily said to herself on the way home.  I shouldn't have gone first into...Here she stopped herself, pursued by a very racist, unkind metaphor...The Heart of Darkness. 

Yet there was no way to avoid the comparison.  Kurtz, Josef Conrad's hero in The Heart of Darkness, lives and works deep in the African forest.  Tribalism, primitive barbarism, and human sacrifice form the culture which he was supposed to address, a European colonial reformer out to mine ivory but to bring civilization to the natives. 

Instead he is taken by the raw power and beauty of the tribe's primal savagery, and desires it.  If he can become as primitive and unattached to any developed moral code, he can become king. 

Of course the story ends badly, and on his deathbed, Kurtz can only manage these last words, 'The horror...the horror' a final understanding that the primitive savagery he sees in the natives around him, the complete lack of any moral code, the lack of any evolutionary promise, is universal.  The horror is everyone's. 

Of course she stopped the thought before it proceeded into nastier territory.  The excursion was her fault, that of a naively optimistic woman who simply wanted to bring the word of progress and social reform to a deserving community.  She had misjudged, misread, and completely misunderstood the ethos of the inner city.  It was little different from Conrad's Congo. 

Seminal events, minor epiphanies, 'Aha' experiences, eye-openers are common in those who are prepared to have them, and despite her secular commitment, her deep avowal of progressivism, and a profound faith in something, she woke up.  The horror...the horror...was not for her. 

That night, she knelt before bedtime, and repeated the familiar childhood prayer - 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.  If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take'. 

Nothing could have been more comforting. 

Sometimes it takes a one-off event to reverse one's fortunes.  If it hadn't been her evangelical desire to leave the academic posturing of official Washington and to descend into the real world, she might never have returned to true faith. If Kurtz had not participated in unholy tribal rituals, he might never have seen the truth. 

'Once a Catholic, always a Catholic', say those who can never understand the nature of faith and assume patent indoctrination, nothing more.  

Father Brophy might have been an old windbag, but behind him was the cross, the altar, the tabernacle and the miraculous presence of Jesus Christ.  She was back.