In a new book Calm in Chaos, Father George William Rutler of the Manhattan parish of St. Michael the Archangel quietly and beautifully offers the best of Catholic wisdom for this anxious age. He is not afraid to go against the murky rapids of Manhattanite fears.
“An advantage of living in the center of the universe,” he writes, “is that one need not travel, since one is already there. Here on Thirty-Fourth Street in Manhattan, the Jacob Javits Convention Center, where the Democratic Party met on election night [in 2016], is a five-minute walk west of my rectory, and The New Yorker Hotel, where Hillary Clinton gave her delayed concession speech is five minutes to the east. On the pavement outside of my door, party workers had stenciled images of Clinton. The paint must have been thin, for one rain shower washed most of them away. When John Podesta finally appeared in the convention hall to disperse the crowds, he seemed browbeaten, as well he might, for witnesses said that upon being told that she had lost, Clinton had to be restrained at the sight of Podesta’s face.
Some who trusted pundits were shocked that their perception of the American populace was an illusion. Their rampant rage would have been tamer if they had not been assured, to the very day of voting, that the losers were winners. The reaction confirmed T.S. Eliot in The Four Quartets: ‘human kind/Cannot bear very much reality.’”
Rutler introduces his essays on this angry age with a little bit of historical perspective and divine unction:
“In the precipitous anxiety of 1939, the British Ministry of Information printed nearly 2.5 million posters with the message ‘Keep Calm and Carry On.’ The words were printed in bold modernistic typeface similar to the Gill Sans font designed by Eric Gill, the tormented friend of G.K. Chesterton. But back then, the stalwart population with stiff upper lips had not degenerated into the neurotic culture with quivering lips that would, for instance, succumb to group hysteria at the death of celebrities symbolic of their illusory world. In 1939 the British working class who knew tough days also surmised that the well-intentioned government propagandists fresh from Eton and Oxford had underestimated their mettle. Very few of those posters actually were posted. The people did not need them, and they carried on in their finest hour. … In the present cultural climate, domestically distraught by spiritual doubt and threatened by cynics disdainful of the Gospel, it is reasonable to trust that there will be those who stay calm and carry the day. …
Christ is not asleep. “‘You of little faith, why are you so afraid?’ Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and was completely calm. The men were amazed and asked, ‘What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!’”
George William Rutler. 2018. Calm in Chaos. Essays for Anxious Times. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
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