An Easter on Michaelmas
Confirmation, Catholic life, and my new EP "Goddddddd"
Just a few days ago, on Michaelmas 2023, I released my new EP “Goddddddd”, which I discuss in this essay. Consider listening on my Bandcamp. Alternatively, you can find it on another streaming platform here.
CONFIRMATION AND ITS CONTENTS“Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” - Matthew 28:20
On Easter Sunday 2023, I was confirmed into the Catholic Church. This was a long process, and I’m glad it was. I initially decided I wanted to be Catholic in late 2018. At that time, lots of things were changing quickly. I had finally dug my way out of a five-year long drug addiction, and after the initial withdrawals, I quickly ascended into a wild and manic pink cloud, which sent me deep into books, and the newly founded willpower to record an audio musical (about a boy who loses all his limbs), a hip-hop mixtape (rapped by yours truly), and an ambitious pop album all by New Years 2019. I got pretty close to my goal. All three projects exist on my computer in nearly-completed fragments, and no one shall ever hear them.
In January 2019, I crashed from the pink cloud. My mother’s cancer was becoming more and more bleak, and I was developing symptoms of OCD that made it difficult for my eyes to focus on objects, including words. Despite my difficulty reading, I still dived into books. That January, it seemed like the sun went down at 2pm. I was also discovering Twitter. Weird Catholic Twitter. And that led me down a path. Within a few months I went from not knowing anything about Christianity to reading Meditations on the Tarot.
September 2019, my mother dies. Around that time, I look into memento mori and the traditions of monks gazing at skulls on their desk. Everything is starting to click and make sense. Death, I’m sorry to say, is a great evangelist. Because you can’t understand Christianity without understanding death. This is why so many who experience death and grief either run towards God, or away from Him. Very few stay in the same place.
February 2020 comes, I’ve written most of my first album Wreath, and I’m so ready to become Catholic. Or at least, I thought. Suddenly, a deep wound comes back to bite me. I back away. I become Anglican instead. Then, COVID hits, with all its protracted complacency. I lived in an Anglican slumber until May 2022, when my dog killed a baby bunny in my backyard. I tried to stop her, but instead I just saw the tiny weightless creature whimper and die. I identified with the bunny, and started to understand what David sang of in the Psalms. We are weightless baby bunnies without God. I decided that night that my soul was in danger, and I needed to step up, and I wasn’t being given the help I needed in the Anglican church. I was in RCIA by September.
“I have run in the way of Thy commandments when Thou didst enlarge my heart.” (Psalm 118:32)
What is the point of sharing my testimony-in-brief? It is to show that God seems to work over either long periods, or in short spurts, but not much in between. Part of trusting God is going with the flow on which kind of ride you’re on, and not get too attached to it. There are long periods of seeds quietly sprouting underground, but then you can have an experience (like mine with the baby bunny) that can flip you instantly.
The process of achieving Confirmation took five years, but the gifts of Spirit that poured forth were immediate. The spiritual gifts of love synchronized with a few real-life experiences that happened around the time of Confirmation. The synthesis of these two, supernatural and natural, renewed my life’s purpose, and gave me a new vision of how I can fit in the world, and gave me a path towards sinlessness, one I didn’t know possible. In the same way in 2019 everything “clicked into place” through the experience of death, this time everything clicked into place through the experience of Life.
“GODDDDDDD” AND ITS INTENTSBut it also caused a severe restlessness, and a feeling of what I call “spiritual cabin fever.” During the early mornings and late nights of one particular insomniac week, the second week of Eastertide 2023, I wrote the five songs of my new EP “Goddddddd.” On Pentecost weekend 2023, I visited a friend out of town, and when I returned home the day after Pentecost, I suddenly noticed I felt normal again. The flying bird had descended to the ground. I scratched my head, trying to think how I could explain that feeling that lasted for fifty days. I guess you could read some of my unhinged tweets from that time.
Many of the physical changes were related to my heart — and I’m not being saccharine here, I mean my literal, physical heart. The thing that pumps blood throughout my body. I still haven’t figured out what exactly happened to my heart, but it seemed to be pumping bloody through my body with a sort of “openness,” as if my arteries were physically enlarged, and that I had an excess of blood. I started to understand what Hildegard von Bingen spoke of when she noted how medieval monasteries had bloodletting rooms. From all grew a fascination with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is the basis of the first song I wrote for the EP, “(sacred heart song)”. Especially as someone with French ancestry, I know the secret to French Catholicism deeply involves the Sacred Heart, because the French are people of the heart, and if the heart falls out of balance, they become too cerebral and/or too sexual. I identified deeply with Christ’s love for us. I felt a deep love that was marked by its absence, and realized that Christ feels this same love for us, times infinity. I understood what it meant to be overwhelmed with a beloved’s absence, and the great spiritual mysteries attached to this experience. It is the experience of what Christ calls being “poor in spirit.” I had a powerful desire to pour out my blood, as Christ did, and felt deeply guilty for living an entire life of self-indulgent isolation.
“Easter Is Finally Here!!!” was the next song I wrote. I was obviously giddy when I wrote the song, perhaps too giddy. Thankfully, it came quite organically. Once it came time to record it I figured I should lean into its sugary sincerity, so I did an 80’s/90’s style production with a strong plate reverb on the vocals, booming drums and childlike choir layers on the chorus to give it the sound of a charity song from that era. It helped that it comes after “john the baptist defeats the leviathan for the last time before Christ begins his ministry,” perhaps the most unhinged of the tracks. In my album works, no song can exist purely by itself, but only in context with other songs on the album, especially the ones that precede and succeed it. Contrast is everything. “John the Baptist” connects with the second track, “Lord Have Mercy On Me, I’m Just A Dude,” in that both contain fight sequences. And hallelujah, in both fights, the Lord wins.
The song that ties the EP together is “Loneliness Prayer”. Every album demands a moment of repose, a moment of “tell us how you really feel.” I’m really happy with this song because out of all the songs I’ve ever written and recorded, this is the one I wrote the fastest. I pulled up the MIDI strings setting that you hear on the final recording, set up a microphone and headphones, and immediately played the first three chords you hear at the beginning and started singing. I told myself, after two years of recording Apiary and overthinking every part of the process, I would proceed with a “first-thought-best-thought” mentality. The song was written within ten minutes. For the end of the song, I weaved in the theme from the chorus of my Carmelittles song “I Dunno What To Do With My Hands,” which I call my “lament theme”:
It is true that I was incorrect in the my 2022 song “Hope Is Not A Cope.” Hope is indeed a cope, but that doesn’t mean the cope is healing something nonexistent. It’s like saying a Band-Aid is a “cope” for slicing your arm open.
CATHOLIC LIFE AND ITS LAMENTS“I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” - John 16:33
Christ never claimed the Christian life would be easy. Many folks in the Catholic Church, when congratulating you on your Confirmation, will say something like “Welcome home!” — an endearing sentiment, but also one that brings a sense of unease, especially when you feel cursed to not be at home anywhere besides your own solitude. The truth is that, as long as the Catholic Church is a niche community instead of the centerpiece of the whole world, it can’t truly feel like home. It can only be an escape. They don’t call the pews of a church its “sanctuary” for nothing. It is true that for many, conceptions of “home” are tied to childhood comforts, such as the maternal bosom of domestic life which protects and nurtures the child from the outside world. So, the Church would fit this description of “home.” But I have a different vision of what “home” is: it is the place where freedom is so great that the desire to compare home with “other places” becomes irrelevant, because in order to compare the home with other places, one must either doubt the supreme goodness of the home or rigidify the home (that is, set boundaries to it in order to distinguish it from what surrounds it) to an extent that its full freedom required for it to be deemed “home” becomes thwarted and restricted. The behaviors just mentioned are clearly a facet of Catholic discourse, and an exhausting one at that, with constant dialogue on the “dangers of modernity” and so forth. Therefore, by my own definition of the true home, the Church wouldn’t be home even to those who claim it is.
Let’s look at the first behavior, which is comparing the Church to the world-at-large. The danger here is arriving at the value of something through its comparison with something clearly worse or better. It is in this way that the goodness of the Church loses its transcendence, because it becomes a matter of relative comparison. My parish, St. John Cantius in Chicago, is famous for its traditionalism. Many drive from the distant suburbs to attend Sunday mass. Many are even paranoid about tithing to the wider Archdiocese of Chicago, with what they perceive is an encroaching liberalism within the Church-at-large. The idea that the Catholic Church, which is supposed to be “home,” is encroaching on the safety of itself, shows that the Traditionalists have an insecurity about their “home,” and an altogether muddled idea of what the Church really is. Because we must ask the question “What is the Church? Where is it?” as daily as we are born again. I was frustrated at the recently red-pilled co-catechumens in my RCIA class who seemed almost entirely occupied with how reactionary they should be, with questions about, for instance, whether or not they should attend SSPX masses or not. Are these really the essential questions of life?
I do confess that I have a lot of difficulty assimilating Catholic doctrine and theology with everything I’ve known for the twenty-five years before inquiring into the faith. I grew up in an entirely secular household, town, and school system. The Church is much better in assimilating St. Pauls — those who have had dramatic and sudden conversion experiences — than it is in assimilating C.S. Lewises like myself, who came into the Church gradually and calmly through an almost mundane and indecipherable blend of reason, imagination, and happenstance, things difficult to communicate in a testimony-of-faith. I do pray that my disenchantment isn’t permanent, and regardless of what happens I wish to pass on an enchanted worldview to those around me. But my greatest sense of peace, of purity and beauty, just isn’t about going to Mass, praying the Rosary, intercessing with the saints, and so on, even though I have faith in the goodness of these things. It is instead with the formative experiences of my youth, the first music I fell in love with and the first people I felt an affinity towards that I feel my greatest sense of divinity and “home.” If I had been raised in a non-lukewarm Catholic environment, it is likely that aspects of the faith would’ve bled into the formation of my personality, affinities, hopes and desires, all of which — I’m sorry to say — are more or less fully formed by twenty-five, the age I first learned anything about Christ and the Church. Of course miracles can happen, and I’ve noticed many little miracles within myself as a result of receiving the Sacraments. But in these miracles I can only describe being saved, not exactly being changed. The house has been cleaned and scrubbed of some of its muck and spiderwebs, but the agèd decor remains.
Perhaps my experience is more normal than I think, and I find myself as an outsider because I go to such an eccentric parish. All I know is that the work that still needs to be done to assimilate the world with the Church, while maintaining the flame of Tradition, is insurmountable. What do I do with the fact that most of the music and films that I love — that I’ve always loved — are made not only by non-Catholics but by non-Christians? This contradiction between the Church and the World puts into mind an ugly tension that sows seeds of doubt in both the Church and the World. But this is also where my greatest faith lies: as a Catholic, I believe that, if the world can be united in a single place, a single home, it would have to be the Catholic Church. But until that happens, or (more pessimistically) if that happens, the Catholic Church cannot be home, and neither can the World. This is the lament.
The struggle to reconcile the gifts of the World with the gifts of the Church — which often seem totally at odds — was even a source of conflict for medieval Benedictines. In The Love of Learning and the Desire For God: A Study of Monastic Culture, Jean Leclercq notes that medieval monks, who all grew up virtually memorizing the pagan Latin classics, struggled with a simultaneous “certain distrust” and a “sincere admiration” for them. He goes on to write,
“The temptation — and here asceticism was directly concerned — was that Virgil might outshine Holy Scripture in the monks’ esteem because of the perfection of the style. There was the danger that the beauty of the imagery, ideas, human sentiments, and the words in which they were expressed might appear more brilliant than the wholly interior, supernatural, and spiritual charm of the Gospel.” (pg. 124)
Here, the author is basically admitting that, from the perspective of artistry (that is, the “perfection of style”) the pagan classics are in that way superior to the subtle, interior simplicity of the Gospels. For the monks, it seems as if these pagan texts are also a source of nostalgia for their youth, having read and even memorized them as young pupils. Leclercq later goes on to reconcile this conflict by quoting the Apostle:
But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honour, and some to dishonour. (2 Timothy 2:20)
One must not misinterpret the distinction between “honour” and “dishonour.” In this context, both are in a “great house,” which means nothing within it is useless or wholly bad. “Dishonour” just means “everyday.” The clay bowls are used for lesser meals, and wood cups are used for water rather than expensive wine. In all greatness there is hierarchy of this sort.
Perhaps this speaks to the lament. When one converts to Catholicism, there is a temptation to use the gold and the silver of the great house every day, for every meal. The wooden and earthenware become neglected, unloved, and consequently fall into the distant gaze of contempt. But it is precisely the wood and the clay of the house — the lowest amongst us — that deserves our attention as Christians. Restoring the divine hierarchy of things doesn’t just mean worshipping the Most High, but baptizing the Most Low.
This mindset can be applied to the important things, such as helping the poor and desolate, but also to more petty things, such as the pursuit of Art. There was a moment where I thought I wanted to switch entirely into making sacred music, music about God and for God, committed to the Transcendentals and nothing else. But such music exists for when the gold plates and silver cuttery is brought out — which is to say, not very often. And also, such music is designed to appeal to the severe king and few else. In simpler words, it is not for the people, but for God. I hope that with my new EP, as well as the other music I’ve made in the past and will continue to make, I can inspire believers, those who love the king, acknowledge the hierarchy he established, to instead of stiffly remaining at his table, to explore, like a curious child, the many rooms in his mansion and the gardens of his courtyard, always with the promise, never forgotten for an instant, to return when he calls you back to the table for dessert.
