THOMAS LARSON

Eulogy for John Christianson April 2018

John and I were good friends, close friends. I knew him through the best and worst times of his life. For a time, when I was churning out article after article for the San Diego Reader, where I’ve written cover stories the past twenty years, he seemed to read every-thing I wrote, often commenting, “Great piece, Tom,” after which he’d want to discuss some quote or idea from the work. Writing is a lonely profession; when what you write is examined, even critically, you feel a great inner satisfaction, having been heard.

John enjoyed going toe-to-toe on religion and hypocrisy. Unlike most people who look askance when I say, “I have never had a religious thought or feeling in my life,” John laughed that big, barrel-chested laugh of his, somewhere between lusty adolescence and existential darkness. However, I had no idea that he grew up a Christian. The doctrine tortured him with guilt about his sins. I said why don’t you just let that neurosis go. He said he’d always wanted to but he never could. It was just too deeply ingrained.

(San Diego Troubadour February 1, 2018)

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Say the name, and the action is clear: Xerox, to copy; Google, to search; Maverick, to go it alone. The latter (the refined term is eponym) comes by way of Samuel Maverick, an early twentieth-century Texas drover who refused to brand his calves. Without a burnt-flesh insignia, cowboys couldn’t tell one cow from another. But, since Sam so hated impaling animals and upset the cattle business because of it, we honor him with an Americanly distinct word.

(Sustenance: Writers from British Columbia and Beyond on the Subject of Food December, 2017)

You don’t wet the bread board. You flour it, generously, as the Tassajara Bread Book says. Next, you splat-set the antsy dough onto the wood where it fate-flattens with a shrug. Already, you’re speaking up for the lump—to wit, its voice, yours for the taking, such generosity, indeed.

You knead the pile. The pile needs you, so much so that your push meets its fetal mass, serpent-bodied. Its bouldered build yeasts a gathering force, an orneriness that matches your provocation, hail batch, well met.You put your hands’ heels into it and the mass rolls its shoulders and spine back and the water leeches out, and with it the gluten, which sticks to your fingers, gums them up, and gloms onto your intent, hosts this transference, what the psyche of food plots in you, its host-maker.

(Berfrois UK October 17, 2017)

When I was growing up, I was uninspired by Christian dogma. Perhaps it was because my cradle-Catholic father became an atheist or my Sundays, by my choice, were spent singing (not worshipping) in a church choir. Later, after reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I knew that if I fell headlong toward any faith, I need only revisit that novel to keep me honest. The most frighteningly apostate fiction ever penned should disabuse anyone of holy orders. Joyce begins his semi-autobiographical work (made all the more powerful because it was semi) portraying the familial heaviness of his Irish Catholic family. He is further assailed at school where, via monumental sermons, he is enthralled by the Church’s vision of Hell. Post-grad, he begins to escape his indoctrination and adopt the life of an agnostic via literature. There, he cherishes those theological conundrums and literary questions Catholicism sometimes raises and sometimes won’t touch.

The rest of the essay is here: https://www.berfrois.com/2017/10/thomas-larson-thomas-merton/

(Pacifica Literary Review Summer, 2017)

In Langston Hughes’ story, “Salvation,” from his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), he tells us that “going on thirteen” he was saved from sin—saved, “but not really.” At a special children’s meeting in the church, charged with the expectation that he would “see and hear and feel Jesus in your soul,” Langston waits while the minister asks the “little lambs” to come forward. Many do. A few hesitate. Most go to the altar. And there, by their voluntary presence, they are saved. But not Hughes and another boy, Westley. Neither budges; Langston, especially, is not feeling it. But it’s hot, and the hymns keep insinuating, and the preacher keeps intoning, and the flock keeps expecting, until Westley finally capitulates: “God damn! I’m tired o’ sitting here. Let’s get up and be saved,” he says to Langston, and so Westly goes to the front of the church. And he’s saved.

(Written for WQXR, NYC's Classical Radio Station May 24, 2017)

If we include in an overview of JFK’s classical musical legacy, those compositional masterpieces that honored him after his death, two pieces jump out of the field for me: Leonard Bernstein’s Mass and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

Mass was commissioned by his wife, Jackie, to open the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1971. Bernstein used the venue’s function—performance—literally: he stitched together a transmedial work that combined the best of Brahms’ German Requiem, The Who’s Tommy, and his own Candide.

(Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies April 1, 2017) (Revised version)

The first person in Western literature to write his spiritual journey is Augustine (354-430 CE), author of Confessions (399). In it, he testifies to what he knows and to what he’s been instructed by God he should know. Writing in Latin, Augustine tells the struggle between his self (bad) and his soul (good), which, he believes, mirrors the physical wounds Christ’s endured. When I read Augustine, I see that his selfish choices have been so immoral and his soul so scarred that remaining on his path he will lose God’s grace, he will forgo Heaven. His sins are not abstract. They are real, and they take place in the individual’s daily life, and he tells us just how much they hurt, over and over and over

The book bridles with analysis, with philosophical argument about the compulsion of humans to sin, Augustine one of its great exemplars. As one of the first Christian writers who will develop the literature of Christianity, he does not confess the tale of his conversion until later in the book, only after explaining the entirety of his weaknesses in a kind of Aristotelian testimony.