Jesus Livingston Seagull

Hi there, and welcome to the first, for real, comment-ready post at Trust Walk.

Refresh your memory as to what this is all about here.

And here are some ground rules for commenting. There will be a few more in a second.

Yes, for readers of my regular blog, this is a reprint. But it’s also the post that got me thinking that this kind of space might be a good idea - I had a few interesting responses in the comments over there and on the Bird App that got me pondering.

It got me thinking, once more, about narratives. About how there’s something - I don’t know what - about modern life and our modes of communication - that privileges The Narrative above reality and actual human experience.

So when we hear an historical event mentioned, our minds - taught, formed, brainwashed - click into Narrative Mode: The Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Great Depression, the 60’s…the “causes,” the consequences, the framework - we think we know it all.

But of course, we don’t. And that’s one of the reasons I, for one, am addicted to the (admittedly casual now) study of history. You think you know…but you don’t. There are always surprises, not only about newly-discovered facts, but also regarding our awareness of how our own particular position in time and space impacts our perception.

Are you new here? Please know that I can go only so long without Breaking Bad or Mad Men references.

So here we are, talking about the Second Vatican Council, trapped in narratives.

And it still matters, it’s still a reference point, it’s still the reference point, for some reason.

I’m not going to bang on any more about my theories and opinions. More about that as time goes on. For now, I’m going to share this story, and then invite you to share yours. The Catholic world desperately needs conversation about how real people experienced the fallout from this Council. It needs to hear the stories from real people who were there before we all croak. Your stories.

Some of my posts will be more thematically-oriented - music, catechesis, crazy weird crap, Great Moments in Gaslighting - but feel free to offer any story you have to share.

Hopes, dreams and rules:

• All of your stories are welcomed. Did you love what happened? Hate it? Doesn’t matter here. Share it.

• This is not a discussion space. It’s a story-sharing space. If you would like to comment on someone’s story, try to contact them directly.

• I have never commented on a Substack post, so I don’t know how it works. I would suggest that you write your comment on a word processing program before posting here, to lessen the risk of losing your hard work to a glitch of some sort.

• I don’t know what’s going to happen here. It may be a sad exercise in futility. Who knows! But even if a few of you comment, I know it will be worth it.

Let’s go.

Original, with some extra blathering, here.

So, my anecdote. This is mostly to remind you of how quickly things changed. You can read other accounts elsewhere, especially from folks who were older and suffered a great deal from the decisions of mostly priests and religious with the mission of forming them in adult faith by treating them like children who need to be taught a lesson and, like good children, accept what they’ve been told. I was younger, born in 1960, never experienced a Traditional Latin Mass (because I wasn’t taken to Mass until I was five years old), went to public schools and sporadic CCD until 1974, when I started at a diocesan Catholic high school in the South.

The freshman religion teacher was very good. We read Dei Verbum – I think I still have the mass-market copy of the Vatican II documents that we all had in those days – and spent the rest of the year on the Old Testament. Miss Olson was young, but fairly old-school in her approach – even as she was earnestly sharing the vision of the Council with us. She did a good job, and the material was solid.

Then sophomore year? 1975? The main text of the fall semester?

Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Some of you might remember or know of JLS. It was a massive best seller, originally published in 1970 to little notice, but then exploding, so that in 1972 it sold a million copies, and has now sold about forty million.

The book tells the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a seagull who is bored with daily squabbles over food. Seized by a passion for flight, he pushes himself and learns everything he can about flying. His increasing unwillingness to conform finally results in his expulsion from the flock. Now an outcast, he continues to learn, becoming increasingly pleased with his abilities while leading a peaceful and happy life.

One day Jonathan meets two gulls who take him to a “higher plane of existence” in which there is no heaven, but a better world found through perfection of knowledge. There he meets another seagull who loves to fly. He discovers that his sheer tenacity and desire to learn have made him “pretty well a one-in-a-million bird.” In this new place, Jonathan befriends the wisest gull, Chiang, who takes him beyond his previous self-education, and teaches him how to move instantaneously to anywhere else in the Universe. The secret, Chiang says, is to “begin by knowing that you have already arrived.”

But unsatisfied with his new life, Jonathan returns to Earth to find others like himself to teach them what he has learned and to spread his love for flight. His mission is successful, and Jonathan gathers around himself a flock of other gulls who have been declared outcasts themselves for not conforming. The first of his students, Fletcher Lynd Seagull, ultimately becomes a teacher in his own right, and Jonathan leaves to teach other flocks.

I spent some time last night re-reading the thing at archive.org – it took maybe fifteen minutes.

My memory of it and the way it was dealt with was very faint, but mostly centered around Jonathan as some sort of Christ figure since he, what, descended from his new place of wisdom to share this wisdom with the gulls back home? I guess.

“I don’t understand how you manage to love a mob of birds that has just tried to kill you. ”

“Oh, Fletch, you don’t love that! You don’t love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practise and see the real gull, the good in everyone of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That’s what I mean by love. It’s fun, when you get the knack of it.”

In reading it last night, I was surprised – although I probably shouldn’t have been – by how vaguely Eastern or simply new-agey it is, and how tenuous any connection between the bird and Christ is – and how trying to make the connection produces a warped, to say the least, understanding of Jesus, Christianity, faith and mission – and even the role of nature and grace.

But mostly, Jesus.

“Each of us is in truth an idea of the Great Gull, and unlimited idea of freedom, ” Jonathan would say in the evenings on the beach, “and precision flying is a step toward expressing our real nature. Everything that limits us where we have to put aside. That’s why all this high-speed practice, and low- speed and aerobatics… ”

…and his students would be asleep, exhausted from the day’s flying. They liked the practice, because it was fast and exciting and it fed a hunger for learning that grew with every lesson. But not one of them, not even Fletcher Lynd Gull, had come to believe that the flight of ideas could possibly be as real as this flight of wind and feather.

“Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, ” Jonathan would say, other times, “is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too …”

For decades I have thought, “Wow, I can’t believe that was my sophomore religion text in a Catholic high school, crazy times, right?” but last night I transitioned fully to: I CANNOT BELIEVE THEY USED THIS AS A TEXT IN A CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL. WHAT THE HELL WAS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE.

Who were, I don’t hesitate to say, very nice, well-meaning people. Most of them.

So let’s circle back. This was 1975. Ten years after the end of the Council. In just ten years, high school kids had gone from having substantive, challenging religious education in a Catholic high school, to spending weeks comparing a stupid anthropomorphized self-actualizing bird who just wants to fly, man, to Jesus of Nazareth.

(One of our big Senior projects was to compile a folder with reflections and artwork comparing the Beatitudes to the lyrics of The Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha.)

Don’t tell me that didn’t have an impact, both in terms of most obviously, the collapse of religious knowledge, but also our generation’s sense of how serious this whole business is. Narrator: not very serious at all.

I do remember what the teacher wrote in my progress report that year: Amy makes good grades although she sits in the back of my class reading novels all period.

Oh come on…just breaking those chains and learning to fly, okay?