The feast of the name of Mary. Instituted when Sobieski's news about lifting the second siege of Vienna (more coffee for us) arrived in Rome, paraphrasing Caesar: We came, We saw, God conquered. After wandering the Balkans for a bit, these sentiments are a bit more comprehensible. There are three great historical winds here -- the wind from the West, and Rome; the East, and Orthodoxy; and the South, anciently the Sublime Porte, but Ataturk's republic is still a living force in these southern countries. Possibly, there's another wind from the north, anciently the Saxons and the protestants contra the Habsburgs (when they arrived to lift the siege, treated none too kindly by the local Catholics), and now the industrial developments with loud German shepherds, and late-night classes at the Goethe Institute -- if you look in the window, you can sometimes see the bleary-eyed locals (no doubt after working two jobs that day) scrutinizing the whiteboards.
At present, I'm in the lands the government of which Demosthenes excoriated in the Philippics. It's a peculiar place. They left the old socialist southern republic before things degenerated into war -- from the chatter I've read, apparently they realized they had little interest in the fight, and would simply be used as soldiers by one of the larger ethnic groups. But avoiding the general war of the 1990s didn't make for an idyllic republic. The capital appears to be a placid but divided city, much like some others in the region, with one religion on one side of the river and the other on the other. Just a punter's guess, but perhaps the more recent conflict in the city is from the fact that the population growth after the recent nearby war didn't follow that pattern. The capital is marked with baroque architecture and statues, many from a development push a decade ago, and from a decade before that, there's an enormous lit cross on the mountain above the city. The folks across the river undoubtedly have very firm notions on statuary. (Latin churches in this part of the world seem to make a point of having a statue or two out front, and sounding the bells at the canonical hours, even if the doors are locked at the time. Cf. Ivo Andric's novel, in which the arrival of the French diplomat causes the Christians to wonder if flags might be allowed.) And adjacent to the large cross on the mountain, there is an even larger tower, apparently a telecom tower, which closely resembles the central tower in the Muslim-majority capital city to the northwest. The rocks and stones themselves.
Travelling through these places does bring some very strong dreams, and it does force you to define where you stand in relation to these questions. Someone could live their entire life in North Dakota and never encounter these forces, and there's many who would say that it's not a bad thing, and perhaps even the point of the New World. But it's been my experience, as someone from the New World on a bit of a peregrination hereabouts, that the dreams in which you have some sense of the angels will come even if you are a fast-food and television-reared child of nature amid the suburban comforts. (Kant's only statuary was a bust of Rousseau. It's a beginning.) When they occur in the context of world-historical forces, though, these dreams and intimations have a context within living experience. And perhaps the recent political experience of my country shows the dangers of these intimations of higher things when they arise without any context in the social life. The message can get a bit garbled, and a soi-disant modern Sobieski can launch a crusade against a DC pizza joint, and then make a last-second detour to the Capitol. History is an attempt to synthesize the higher truths of experience within the social fabric. And this can bring the wars in heaven down to earth, either with actual armies and actual pain and death, or in the form of a bridge laden with statuary, almost like primitive charms against the other tribe, lining the paths between the villages.
Rousseau didn't imagine that the children of nature would be dispassionate blank slates, or mild animals content to sleep and feed and work in the factories. This simplicity of primeval (or perhaps primordial) nature was a notion of greatness. The point was that this greatness came about through simplicity, and (long before Weber), disenchanting the people of a few old social charms. And Kant took this notion as a beginning. We of the New World can't pretend, in our innocence and prosperity, that there aren't ancient spiritual conflicts, and occasionally the wars in heaven are being fought out on earth. And perhaps the real danger is that we, with our own personal sense of the numinous, and of faith, might leap into these conflicts precipitously. Where wars of religion are being fought, they often have as much to do with the earthly elements of the two societies as they do with religious doctrines. The reine tor from the New World doesn't intuitively understand that these higher personal truths he senses so clearly have been translated into social experience over long centuries of conversation and daily life. Jumping into a battle because you recognize a device on the flag is a bit foolhardy. Instead, the traveller, knowing their own spiritual sympathies, is best off carefully observing the way these inner sensibilities have been translated into the social fabric, and making peace where it is possible to make peace.
I say this sort of thing with trepidation, as it's a bit contrary to the present television-oriented foreign policy of my country. But I have lived in these small towns and cities, in the north and in the south, in North Dakota and in midtown Manhattan. There are hundreds of millions staring at the televisions and imagining that they understand. Life, though, is (if I can make a sectarian point of my own) much closer to the care and encounter of sacrament than the sudden insights and identifications of textual analysis. America wields a rather big stick these days, and the policy decisions often play to the television narratives. But the ancient truths of the world are inscribed on the wanderer's staff. Every encounter is transactional sacrament, not a merely a vindication of simple and intuitive truths you always already knew.
Hold to your faith, and look carefully.
