When I pick up a book, fiction or non-fiction, I’m looking for signs of spiritual interest, direction, and such. Some of it is gratifying; much of it is not; all is intriguing. Here’s a sampling:

Miles: The Autobiography, by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe: The blurbs tout this book as “brutally honest” (Cash Box), “unmuted” (Atlanta Constitution), “told in Davis’s voice” (East St. Louis Monitor), and a work in which this “brilliant bad man of jazz unburdens himself of his hate and anger as well as his good feelings about life, friendship, sex, drugs, women and cars” (Publishers Weekly). Well, finishing the first chapter, one wishes Miles (who died in 1991) were less brutally honest, more muted, less inclined to speak in his natural voice, and reluctant to unburden himself so thoroughly. He was a nasty piece of work, as is this book. Yes, he had something of a religious upbringing, but he couldn’t talk about it appreciatively without resorting to his trademark obscenity. In remembering fondly his grandfather’s taking him to Saturday night church down in Arkansas when he was six or seven, he recalls the stirring music: “Man, that [S-bomb] was a [MF].” Nice. And he often sounds the “I gotta be me” theme (e.g., regarding anger; the prima facie contempt he feels for most white people; simply not liking some people (“a vibe thing, a spiritual thing”). Well yes, all this is “a spiritual thing,” not a Holy Spiritual thing. It came from somewhere else and abided as a welcome guest in his soul.

Near the end of the book, he waxes theological:

I don’t like throwing God up into anybody’s face and I don’t like it thrown in mine. But if I have a religious preference, I think it would be Islam, and that I would be a Muslim. But I don’t know about that, or any organized religion. I’ve never been into that, using religion as a crutch. Because I personally don’t like a lot of things that are happening in organized religion. It don’t seem too spiritual to me, but more about money and power, and I can’t go for that. But I do believe in being spiritual and do believe in spirits. I always have. I believe my mother and father come to visit me . . . .

Yes, he was remarkable jazz musician, a trumpet player who worked with a lot of notables, including John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and Charlie “Bird” Parker. But what a sad tale he tells, and what a toxic prescription for life he offers.

The NYT Book of the Dead, edited by William McDonald: The subtitle reads, 320 Print and 10,000 Digital Obituaries of Extraordinary People. The title plays off The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which Buddhists have used to enter and negotiate the afterlife, as they suppose it to be. But here, we read what the New York Times had to say about just-deceased luminaries. As Marvin Olasky chronicles in Prodigal Press, the New York Times was strongly against abortion in the 19th century, but times (and The Times) have changed, and so have the obituaries. These days, they’re disinclined to bring up the spiritual angle at all. For instance, regarding Jim Henson (d. 1990), the Times said only, “Hospital spokesmen said he had died of streptococcus pneumonia.” One of his Muppeteers, Camille Kampouris (Bonora back then) painted a fuller picture, suggesting that vestiges of Henson’s  Christian Science upbringing likely influenced his delay in seeking the medical help which might have saved him. (I recount this this in my book, For Such a Time as This: Kampouris and Kairos.) 

Here’s a sampling: 

Sojourner Truth (d. 1883): “Her real name—or that which had been given to her by her first master—was Isabella Hardenburg, but becoming dissatisfied with it, it is said that she went out into a wilderness and prayed to the Lord to give her an appropriate name. After praying for some time she heard, she said, the name ‘Sojourner’ whispered to her, as she was to travel ‘up and down,’ and afterward ‘Truth’ was added to it to signify that she should preach nothing but truth to all men.”

Leonard Bernstein (d. 1990): “In many aspects of his life and career, Mr. Bernstein was an embracer of diversity. The son of Jewish immigrants, he retained a lifelong respect for Hebrew and Jewish culture. His ‘Jeremiah’ and ‘Kaddish’ symphonies and several other works were founded on the Old Testament. But he also acquired a deep respect for Roman Catholicism, which was reflected in his ‘Mass,’ the 1971 work he wrote for the opening of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (d. 1969): “His ancestors belong to evangelical groups from which evolved the Mennonite sect.”

Margaret Thatcher (d. 2013): “Her family lived in a cold-water flat above a grocery store owned  by her father, Alfred, who was also a Methodist preacher and local politician. She was reared by her parents to follow the tenets of Methodism: personal responsibility, hard work and traditional moral values.”

The [NYT] Obits: Annual 2012, edited by William McDonald: While the Times’s Book of the Dead, also edited by McDonald, covered over 160 years of death notices, this volume covers only a single year (August 1, 2010 – July 27, 2011). In it, we read of:

Don Meredith (d. Dec 10): While sitting on the bench as a backup quarterback for the first three years of his time under Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry, “he grimly regretted not becoming a lawyer or preacher.”

Jack Kevorkian (d. June 3): Bored with medicine, the man who later became known as “Dr. Death” for assisting in over a hundred suicides, “moved to Long Beach, Calif., where he spent 12 years painting and writing, producing an unsuccessful film about Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ and supporting himself with part-time pathology positions at two hospitals.”

John Stott (d. July 27): “Michael Cromartie once said that if evangelicals could elect a pope, they would likely to choose Mr. Stott”; Mark Noll said Stott became “a patron, mentor, friend and encourager of thousands of pastors, students and laypeople from the newer Christian parts of the world”; “He was appointed a chaplain to the queen in 1959 and served in that post until he reached retirement age in 1991.”  So enthusiastic was the Times’s account of Stott that they devoted two pieces to him, one by Nicholas Kristoff, who said, “I’m not particularly religious myself, “ but praised him: “Mr. Stott didn’t preach fire and brimstone on a Christian television network. He was a humble scholar whose 50-odd books counseled Christians to emulate the life of Jesus—especially his concern for the poor and oppressed—and confront social ills like racial oppression and environmental pollution.”

Mapplethorpe, by Patricia Morrisroe: The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe died in 1989, at age 42, of HIV/AIDS. Though he had Catholic upbringing (at Our Lady of the Snows), he slid, indeed marched, into stunning degeneracy. His work was so outrageous that it faced cancellation at Washington DC’s Corcoran Gallery of Art , brought fire down on the National Endowment for the Arts (which had extended funding for the Corcoran exhibit), and prompted an obscenity lawsuit against the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. His work was homoerotic and sadomasochistic, with typical but notable offense from an image of urophagia. And it wasn’t just his art; along the way, he “developed a worldwide network of coprophiliacs,” and he “spoke of excrement as the ‘ultimate sacrament.” (Some dictionary work may be required to sort out this paragraph.)

As a teenager, and as an effeminate, artistic boy, he struggled to demonstrate his masculinity to himself and to his skeptical father. He joined a “macho,” Catholic fraternity (Columbian Squires), asked people to start calling him “Bob.” He humiliated himself as a member of a youth baseball team and joined the Pershing Rifles through ROTC. It just didn’t fit him, so he found his home in the arts (which, of course, is not to say that most who do this are “gender fluid”). Raised Catholic, his early paintings were often Madonnas (not surprising for a Catholic boy) though her image soon became fragmented as he developed a taste for Picasso. And so he began his artistic departure from the religion of his youth.

Though I find him to be not only a disaster of a person, but also a self-indulgent and socially impactful enemy of truth and goodness, I was stung by a heartbreaking story from his early days. (I use the words ‘heartbroken’ and ‘heartbreaking’ very sparingly, for it’s deployed far too frequently and superficially to parade one’s sensitivity, and embarrassingly so.) So here it is, an effort to show his dad that he was really a “jock.” 

There was one athletic activity, however, at which Robert excelled, and that was jumping on a pogo stick. He had already won the title, “Pogo Stick Champion of 259th Street,” so one Saturday afternoon he set out to break the Guinness world record in pogo stick jumping. He positioned himself in full view of the living room bay window, surely hoping his father would see him, and began jumping up and down while calling out the numbers . . . 404 . . . 405 . . . 406. He knew his father was inside so he kept jumping and shouting until finally he felt dizzy and collapsed on the lawn. He didn’t break the world record, but it amounted to his personal best. He understood that it wasn’t like hitting a home run, but he couldn’t wait for his father’s reaction. When Robert went inside, however, he found Harry sound asleep on the living room couch.  

And there’s another quote I’ll pass along. At Mapplethorpe’s funeral, the tender hearted but theologically vacuous priest, Father Stack, said,

We need to believe in a God who is good and gracious and merciful, especially in the dark moments of life. “No one who comes to me will I ever reject.” Because of that promise we trust that when Robert went through the gates of death and stood before the judgment seat of God, Jesus opened His arms and welcomed Robert home.

I once heard it said that funeral directors are cynical because they hear so many lost people preached into heaven. Unless Robert had a late conversion (which, of course, is possible and would have been effectual), he is a case in point. And the priest was doing nobody a favor in misconstruing the way of salvation. Worse than that, he was encouraging his listeners stay on whatever broad roads to destruction they might be taking. What a waste of clerical status. 

The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton, by Bay Buchanan: Pat Buchanan’s sister, Bay, was a prominent conservative, at work in campaigns and in broadcasting. She even served as Treasurer of the United States under President Reagan, and her name can still be found on some one dollar bills. She was born into a Catholic family in 1948 and converted to Mormonism in 1976. (Her interest in the religion stemmed from contact with a missionary in Australia, where she was working and studying for a time.) 

In this book she traces the changes the former first lady has undertaken through the years, from being a Goldwater Republican to what we see now. Buchanan surveys a number of personalities who did much to shape Hillary’s values and perspectives, such as leftists Saul Alinsky and Michael Lerner and psychic counselor Jean Houston. But, as I’ve read elsewhere, her path away from religious orthodoxy began under the tutelage of Don Jones, a youth minister at her church, First Methodist of Park Ridge, Illinois. (BTW, in our eleven years with Evanston Baptist Church, we frequently took Dempster Street straight west out through Park Ridge on the way to I-294 and O’Hare.) 

Buchanan says that Jones introduced her “to the civil rights movement, the plight of the migrant workers, and a new kind of Christianity. Hillary’s heart bleeds, she moves left, and throws away a solid Christian foundation for one with a Marxist spin.” CNN tells the story sympathetically in a piece entitled, “From Park Ridge to Washington: The youth minister who mentored Hillary Clinton.” It’s a reminder of how “the twig is bent” in church youth programs, for good or ill. It’s a shame that at this critical juncture in her life, Don Jones did much of the bending. This isn’t to say it wouldn’t have happened otherwise, for she seems thoroughly susceptible to the blandishments of the left, but there’s no denying that her church hired an agent of unfortunate change. Of course, Christians should care about justice, but it makes a world of difference who’s defining and implementing it, and the “social justice” movement Jones was peddling missed the mark big time. (For what it’s worth, I’ve written a book on the matter, noted under Books on this site.)