Origins and Ends
The golf lovers around here spent much of the weekend, when they weren’t out on one of the courses that just opened for the season, watching The Masters. Since they no longer have to put up with CBS Sports and Jim Nantz and can get just ball striking and birdsong, I did not hear the phrase “Amen Corner.”
I must have missed the sound of it, because when I caught a glimpse of the two words together in The Browser’s Dictionary by John Ciardi (a book I recently picked up again), I eagerly read on, thinking he’d tell me about the 13th hole at Augusta National Golf Club and how it got the moniker. It turns out that I was wrong. The man made no mention of Georgia or that venerable institution of Scottish origin. Instead, he told me about religion and politics: intimate bedfellows never to be separated.
According to poet, translator (with Dante’s Divine Comedy to his credit), and etymologist John Ciardi, “Amen Corner” denotes both:
1. A section of pews, usu. near the pulpit, reserved for church elders who lead the responses, esp. the amens. Variantly, such a section of pews regularly taken over by the vocally fervent. 2. NYC machine politics. In the XIX and early XX [centuries], a suite in a New York City hotel, permanently reserved as a meeting place for politicians.
Ciardi goes on to question why the NYC machine politicians might have been said to be sitting in Amen Corner: “For putting their heads together as if in prayer? For allowing the ward heelers to say ‘Amen” to whatever the bosses said?”
Really? He couldn’t come up with a better explanation than that? A man who translated The Divine Comedy, in which more than one circle of hell is home to members of the clergy, some of whom are popes? In explanation 1, Amen Corner is filled with church elders who lead the responses. In other words, they tell the congregation what to do and say. Mob bosses and minions? Same. If you lived in Boss Tweed’s ward, you weren’t going to cast a vote for anyone else —and live to tell about it.
The other day, I paged over to the R section and looked up “religion,” but on the way there, my fingers found “Pontifex”: “A high priest of ancient Rome.” Interesting: a pagan origin for one of the terms by which the pope is known. I think I like “pope’s nose” better, though: “In a chicken or other fowl about to be carved, the fatty rectal bump.” I don’t know if God has a sense of humor, but someone does.
Back to “religion”:
Belief in the existence of God. (A once simple definition now troubled by the theological announcement that God is dead.)* … 1. At root: According to the prescribed rules of religion. … 2. But more commonly in the extended sense. By undeviating habit. He is at his desk religiously by 7:00 A.M. [<L. re-, intensive and frequentive prefix; with ligare, to bind. Hence to bind oneself to a rule. …]
“To bind oneself to a rule”: that makes sense, but I have to wonder how many people understand what, exactly, they have bound themselves to when they affix a label to their breast—and, yes, it does apply to politics, as well as religion: Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran.
How many conversations, over the years, have I had with Catholics who thought that papal infallibility applied to only two instances of dogma (it doesn’t); that the Eucharist just symbolized Jesus’ Body and Blood (nope, that’s not what the institutional Church believes); that the prohibition against contraception was “just a guideline” (sorry, folks, it’s defined as a mortal sin, which means eternal damnation for anyone who contracepts and dies unrepentant**); or even that you can get a gluten-free host at most of your local parishes. (Okay, not even your average-Joe priest understands that the Code of Canon Law prohibits that from ever happening; the Eucharistic host must be made with wheat and water only; so you can get a low-gluten host, but not a gluten-free one, and if you’re allergic to wheat, as I am? Forget about it.).
At least with religion, though, the rules are there to be found, if you bother to look. Things get trickier with politics. Without Wikileaks and independent journalists, how do you find out what’s really going on: how the game is played and who really writes the rules? Besides, it’s not like corruption (in any institution) is something new. Socrates was sentenced to death not because he had done anything wrong, but because he had pissed off the wrong political faction, and unfortunately, they “won.”
While it’s tempting to believe that “what I don’t know won’t hurt me,” it’s not true, and I can’t live in deliberate ignorance, telling myself that “there’s nothing I can do anyway” or “it doesn’t affect me.” I may not be able to dodge the bullet, but I want to know if there’s something I can do to keep the gun from getting fired in the first place.
In And Then There was Light, blind French Resistance organizer and concentration camp survivor Jacques Lusseyran wrote:
Some of my companions declared themselves patriots. Not I. I had no desire to be like them, for they were all braggarts, and not one made the slightest effort to understand what was going on. Besides, inside their anti-German families, it was amazing how indulgent they were toward Hitler and his crimes.
*Talk about a can of worms. One of these days I may organize and write up what I’ve discovered about Nietzsche and his obituary for the Creator, René Girard’s Single Victim Mechanism theory and the way it pertains to the Crucifixion, and who citizens of ancient civilizations were really trying to kill when they sacrificed one particular human or another.
**Oh, and this is interesting: Catholics are morally culpable if they don’t let other Catholics know they are sinning by contracepting. Talk about a moral dilemma: if your sister contracepts because she doesn’t understand the teaching of the Church, she has a good chance of sailing on up to heaven, but if you know she contracepts and don’t say anything, you may wind up in hell. What happens, though, if you tell her and she refuses to change her ways? Have you just damned her for eternity?
