The Crazy Uncle

I note this week everyone I know has at least one crazy uncle in the family. After my sister's wedding, we were lined up, per usual, outside the chapel, ready to throw rice, and here comes Uncle J, drunk as a lord, who stumbles a few feet and falls flat on his face.

This startling event happens all the time when I read the First Things magazine. There are brilliant letters and articles on history, theology and culture throughout, before the end-piece, The Public Square, where Father Neuhaus comments on the news of the day. It's like watching Uncle J plow through those doors and drop, over and over again.

Such was my experience in reaching the end of Norman Podhoretz' The Prophets which I studied in preparation to teach an upcoming class in our Adult Sunday School. All's well from page 1 through 344; during the final 14 (only .038% of the book), Podhoretz not only falls, but he flies, over the barriers, right off the road, like an out-of-control DUI.

Uncle Pod, consistently, before the accident, coherently synthesizes much serious scholarship. Like how the Prophets running commentaries on society, politics and history drew the attention of their audience to what they could and couldn't control in their lives and Who ultimately was in charge. How manners count if not elevated to self-righteousness, and how all those who nominate for sainthood should be closely watched. How there are Barthian-style limits, as we've been discussing in the past few week, to applying Biblical principles, in the creation of a perfect society on earth, and how secular prophets always fail when they establish a new regime devoid of any religious principles.

That last point is a tricky, if not downright ironic, where Uncle Pod is concerned for he's a founding neo-con if not theo-con. In one sense, he denounces appeasement with nations he can clearly identify as evil, even if others disagree, just as the ancient rulers of Israel unsuccessfully concluded alliances that thwarted God's plans. In another sense, though, isn't his advoacy of the idea that one country can import and impose its way of life upon another, an example of the idealism to which he contends is very limited in application?

It's a debate that could be, and is presently, conducted by people of good will, albeit an area where opinions and subsequent government policies have deadly consequences. At this point, though, Uncle Pod and I are still driving down the road civilly discussing these points. It's at the next intersection that the car starts to shake like we might have hit someone lying in the road.

U.P. contends, and I fully agree, that the Prophets never advocated not fulfilling the law when it came to Temple ritual. He writes convincingly that God's greatest desire was that the ritual not be rote, but sincere and meaningful, since if it wasn't, then the hypocrites offering the sacrifice revered other idol's than God.

Uncle Pod insists this is the primary Law that must be fulfilled above all others, and not to perform and conform in this way, labels one 'antinomian,' or anti-law. I'll digress a bit here and note this week it's the 60th anniversary of Levittown. I didn't live there but did reside for three years in its sister city on Long Island, Hicksville (famed mostly as the hometown of Billy Joel). Those affordable starter homes for the Greatest Generation were subsequently mocked and derided as ticky-tacky "Little Boxes," the very symbol of suburban conformity. Gosh, my memories are anything but - those summer days, in the backyard, lying literally under the apple tree, reading Superman and Sports Illustrated, are the fondest times in my memory of overwhelming warmth and peace.

Anyhow, back to the story of my harrowing drive with crazy Uncle Pod for this is the point where he veers suddenly and violently to the right. He blurts out, screaming at the top of his lungs, that the entire counter-culture generation is antinomian since "it attempted to invert the moral order of the middle class which had itself grown out of the biblical tradition." Say, what? The Bible foretold of the establishment of the Kingdom of God and a Davidic dynasty on a city on the hill named Levittown?

My crazy uncle is frothing at the lips, hollerng about Black Masses, and that most awful of awfulest compendium, the very essence of the liberal agenda of sin: tolerance, multi-culturalism, diversity, conservation, gay rights, featuring, of course, Adam and Steve, and horror of all horrors, working mothers, who in their neglect of children, are no better than the pagans of ancient days that sacrified their children in the fires of Molech.

By this time, I'm clawing at the door locks, leaping from the car. Guess I'll have to hitchhike home. Yet, try this on, Uncle Pod: what the counter-culture was saying, just like the Prophets you revere, is that the emptiness of living a life of habitual ritual while the world offered so much potential for sincere joy, love and meaningful existence, is a waste of time.

All those labels you pin upon us as sin, we carry proudly: wise stewardship of the environment; liberating women to be good mothers, if that is there choice, and anything else they want to be if they choose another path; freeing our glbt brothers and sisters from a life of prejudice and violence so they can live in peace on equal terms with everyone else; celebrating a natural world wide diversity and multi-culturalism where there is no need for agressive adventures by any one nation over another.

We believe in the strength of a nuclear family, and the spiritual extended family of humanity, even if our family may look a little different than those in your day. Even you are still a part of our family, dear Uncle Pod, and we love you; we just wish you'd get some help.