Why Predators Must Pray

by Joe Bissonnette (October 2016)

Though we don’t graze in herds and seldom run from bears, there are similarities. The Lottery is the most commented upon short story ever written. It begins with easy banter and more or less good humour, but also a sub-current of anxiety. Every year the town gathers and each person draws a piece of paper from a box. In turn, each unfolds his paper, holds it up and breathes a sigh of relief. Until one unfolds her paper and it reveals a black dot. She panics, claims it must be a mistake, desperately says that it must belong to her husband or one of her children. But the die is cast. With cold eyes her neighbours, friends and her own family pick up rocks and stone her to death.

Beyond pro forma inquiries about well-being and banalities about the weather, scapegoating is the most recurrent motif in our interactions. It is usually clothed in levity but the apparent lightness masks serious business. The first effect of Original Sin was Adam and Eve becoming aware that they were naked and then being ashamed. They made clothing for themselves, to mask their nakedness. They were no longer at ease with each other, and they hid from God. All of us live with this baseline anxiety, but we are predators as well as prey and we know that the best defense is a strong offense. Like the herd which offers safety through the failure of the weakest, we overcome the anxiety produced by our shame by enlisting others to join us in the persecution of some third party. The persecution of the scapegoat is the basis for alliances between us. If together we are attacking the victim, we need not fear being attacked by each other. 

Schools of fish are in some ways the aquatic equivalent of herds, but in mysterious ways they are something more. They swim in the same direction in a coordinated manner. They are tightly organized, synchronized and precisely spaced. Schools undertake complicated manoeuvers as though they were a single fish. The main theory to explain schooling is similar to the logic of herding, it’s called the “encounter dilution effect.” A predator will only eat so much. Proportionally it will eat a smaller amount of a large grouping than of a small grouping, therefore the likelihood of a given fish surviving an attack is greater if part of a larger group. But of course this doesn’t explain the fascinating synchronized movements of a school of fish which seem to represent a willful subsuming of individuality into the whole. Fish as part of a school are much more than scaled versions of Dawkin’s selfish genes, only coincidentally aligned in their private pursuits of self-interest. There is something sublime and even transcendent in the aesthetic of schooling fish or spiraling formations of birds.

And this mysteriousness appropriated by the early church which used the fish as the symbol for Christianity and the dove as the symbol for the Holy Spirit seems like a good place to reconnect Animalia with us. Schools of fish are of the same species, the same age and the same size, and this important fact, though felicitous among fish, is the single greatest problem with our schools of children, gathered, ostensibly, for education. There is no sublime aesthetic achieved through creating a monolith of children all the same age. In fact, quite the opposite. It is the perfect storm for mass psychopathology.

A recent study measured viewer responses to a picture of a human face. Almost all of the child and adult respondents identified the facial expression in the picture and either neutral or positive. But more than 70% of the teenage respondents identified the facial expression in the very same picture as negative and hostile. Teens are often neurotic. They should not be segregated from the rest of society among large groups of other teens beset by the same disorientations. 

Our world is coming apart. The most obvious truths of maleness and femaleness are being criminalized. We are increasingly atomized, as the U.S. Census reports that for the first time in history, “single adult living alone” is the most common household type. Perpetual entertainment has left us uninspired, perpetual stimulation has left us flat, bored and boring. It was wittily said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, but we are no longer hypocrites because we no longer aspire to any virtues or feel shame for any vices. That we are not a bloodthirsty mob at this minute is due to nothing more than the timing of a trigger event, something many people anticipate on the near horizon. Behind the door is the predator. And it is precisely for this reason, that we are two steps away from a religious renaissance.

Predators need to pray. Though we conservatives often quote The Second Coming (Factiva reports that lines from the poem have been quoted more often in the first seven months of 2016 than in the preceding 30 years) it is not the final word. The widening gyre awakens spiritual hunger. In the Easter Octave the Church prays felix culpa, or happy fault that led to our downfall, but subsequently brought redemption through Christ. The Fall occasioned greater love, greater grace from God, because we were all the more in need. And this anticipation of a coming apart, this heightened awareness of the darker undercurrents of our souls is already awakening a mustard seed renaissance. Every parish I know of has experienced a significant decrease in Sunday Mass attendance, but is also experiencing a significant increase in daily Mass attendance. There is a winnowing of witnesses as we awaken from spiritual slumber.

The Mass sanctifies brutal corporality as it revolves around a sacred meal. To eat is the most natural thing, but it is fundamentally shocking. To eat is also to destroy the essence of the thing eaten, animal or vegetable, to break it down to its elemental parts and appropriate it into our being. It depends upon the cycle of aggression and terror. But as Josef Ratzinger points out in Behold the Pierced One, through the Eucharist the creative destruction of eating, where we appropriate food into ourselves, is reversed. When we consume the Eucharist we do not destroy and appropriate, we are drawn up into Christ. All things are transformed. We become Tabernacles of The Lord and the beatitudes supplant survival of the fittest. Christianity utterly transforms everything, especially the tragic. And the Mass is not just an idea, it is the most sublime enactment, the most thoroughgoing existential engagement possible.

We are deeply conflicted. In Genesis 2 we are made from soil, the lowest thing – waste, rot, decay- and the breath of God, which as the medium of The Word is the very stuff of God. There is no part of us that is without corruption, but neither is there any corruption which does not point to redemption. We are predators who must pray.

 

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Joe Bissonnette teachers Religion and Philosophy at Assumption College School in Brantford Ontario. Joe and France have 7 children.

 

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