By DONALD DeMARCO
Mark Strand, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, passed away recently (November 29, 2014). He was a staunch atheist, declaring that he had never met God and had never been to Heaven. He said: “Although there are a lot of people claiming that God is telling them what to do, I have no idea how God talks to them. Maybe they are getting secret emails.” In one of his poems he imagined how it felt “to open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.” His daughter Jessica spoke for the family in saying that “we weren’t a religious people, but we worshipped at the foot of culture.”
Jessica’s comment about worshipping at the foot of culture is most intriguing. Secular culture offers little to satisfy the deepest needs of the human soul and is surely not a fit subject for worship. What characterizes moral life in secular culture is not the Ten Commandments, but ten complacent maxims that are aimed at making life easier.
The irony, of course, is that in trying to make life easier, life is made immeasurably more difficult. Not exercising is much easier than exercising, but it leads to atrophy and a host of other undesirable consequences. Not studying is less taxing than studying, but ignorance is a liability.
I began to think about these ten complacent maxims that are set in opposition to God’s sterner and more rewarding commands. I came up with the following:
1. All religions are equal.
2. Religion is the cause of all wars.
3. Marriage is purely a social convention.
4. Masculine and feminine are arbitrary constructions.
5. Mutual consent is all that is needed to legitimate sexual acts.
6. We must always keep an open mind.
7. Everyone has a right to his opinion.
8. Always be inclusive.
9. Do not judge.
10. Every woman has the right to choose.
Although each of these maxims may initially appear to be distinctive, they all have one thing in common. They all avoid reality, whether that reality is God, marriage, love, sexuality, truth, or objective morality. They represent a falling back, a retreat from what lies beyond their realm of presumed convenience. If God does not exist, the floor opens and everything drops into a bottomless chasm.
What does it mean to be a poet in an atmosphere of meaninglessness? Matthew Arnold, another nonbeliever, describes this bleak image in his poem, Dover Beach: “the world…hath really neither joy nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”
A poet may eloquently express his own despair, his “unhope,” to borrow from Thomas Hardy, in a way that wins him honors and fame. It does not require faith to be miserable and famous. Art is not a source of faith. It is God who dispenses this gift. Faith enlarges our world by including God and all the gifts that bear His signature.
Christ, as Simeon foretold at the Purification, will be a Sign of Contradiction. Those of the world will prefer to have their lives governed by complacent maxims, rather than by illuminating truths. The sword that Christ brings into the world divides those who are for Him from those who are against Him. He represents the narrow path. But this narrow path, this path of grace, is the road to salvation. It is a road that does not appear on the secular map of the world.
Mark Strand has entered the “beyond.” We believe that he will find therein a dictionary whose vocabulary is not confined to nothing, but is far more extensive than all the words contained in the New Oxford Dictionary.
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(Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth & Charity Forum.)
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