Napa Diary
From the Cluny Institute’s ZOË Conference
When I get to the chapel it’s already full. There’s a bench against the back wall, and a girl wearing a headscarf offers me the seat next to her. I sit down, but immediately the back doors open and more people start streaming in. She gets up to offer her seat to a mom with two young children. I stand up too. More are coming in from two different directions now. What was merely full is quickly becoming overfull to the point of hazard. I know I am with my people, and I feel blessed. Shortly, I am sardined in the space between the last pew and the back of the church. The kids are flopping around on the bench behind me. I’m breathing down the neck of a straight-brushed brunette (feathery and immaculate) and I have to lean backwards slightly off balance to avoid feeling like a creep. My calves are braced against the bench and I have to work out from first principles how to maintain this position without getting the shakes. Later on we will exchange the sign of the peace, and I will see her face, and I will regret not reaching for her hand.
I’m at the welcome reception, drinking wine up on the hill. A man is telling me how he converted to Catholicism while living in a “founder house” in SF. Then we are joined by another guy, who tells us how he grew up Catholic but left the church. He’s just too much of a skeptic, has too many questions. You can go to confession any time, I say. That’s all it takes to go back. “I know,” he says. His brother is a priest. They’ve talked about this stuff for years. We get into it about universalism, and pluralism, and his doubts about whether intercessory prayer does anything at all. I tell him that while I’m hopeful for an “empty hell,” I think the threat of hell is meaningful, and that confession doesn’t really make sense without it. What is mercy if there’s nothing to be merciful about? if we can just presume upon it? I tell him how I see intercession as the knitting together of our souls in love, that it’s the true business of life, and of heaven, to focus our attention on God, and on another person, and on our hopes for that person. He’s a big talker, and we go around and around. The sun warms our faces, and I am feeling my wine. I’m not going to remember half the things I say to him. Wouldn’t it be funny, I say, if we were the ones to finally convince you, all the while your brother is a priest! I am teasing him and we are all having fun.
I meet another engineer who is a Catholic convert. When I ask about it he makes a kind of dismissive gesture and says “yeah” out of the corner of his mouth. This makes me laugh. Ok, so we’ll talk about something else. He wants to talk about AI consciousness and he presses me on the hypotheticals—p-zombies and meat computers. When we’re leaving the poetry reading, there is a table where one of the conference girls is handing out books signed by the poet. He takes one and then after a couple of steps he doubles back and hands it back to her. This makes me laugh again. You are a specific kind of engineer that I am familiar with, I say, and it makes complete sense to me that you would return the poems. “You mean I’m an engineer from eastern Europe,” he says.
At lunch everyone wants to talk about Bryan Johnson. He was more charming, more convincing than many of us expected. He is the perfect provocation, I say, because he represents the opposite of zoë, and he does it so radically, so heroically. Why risk meeting God if you can go on living in the here and now? I tell them how Claude told me he might be the Antichrist, and everyone gets a kick out of that. A journalist is sitting next to me and she asks if I’d be willing to go on the record for the piece she’s working on. She needs a Catholic perspective on the rise of Aristotelianism in tech. I tell her about getting laid off on account of AI, and all the uncertainty now about software as a career path, and how our Hope is not captive to the things of this world.
A young woman at my table tells me she’s a Quaker. Oh, that’s interesting, I say. She grew up evangelical, she says, in Texas, but she didn’t like it. I ask why she came to the conference. She says she couldn’t find a Quaker gathering in SF, so she started visiting different kinds of churches. The thing she first appreciated about Star of the Sea was the silence. Then she found the Hamilton Society, and then she came here.
She tells me how her family members in Korea are Buddhist, and I start talking about how I visited Buddhist and Shinto shrines in Japan, and how it was interesting to see certain convergences—the ritual washings, the activities of the priests—and how I didn’t see this as a threat, but that I thought it pointed to how Christianity, as the true religion, was meant by God to fulfill man’s religious impulse. She gets excited by this and says, “Yes! I’m glad you said that. The smell of the incense…” And I talk about how Catholicism felt foreign to me, as a Protestant and an American, but then how I thought Christianity ought to be strange to me, since it came out of the Near East. (She likes this too.) And I start to explain about my trip to Rome, but we get cut off by the session. “I want to hear what you were going to say,” she says. I spend the next two hours aware of her presence right behind me, thinking about what I’m going to say to her. (Circumstances change—we don’t end up speaking again.)
The Hamilton boys are raucous and delightful. They quickly convince everyone to stamp feet in approval, to fistpound the table, to hiss approbation. In doing this we feel something stirring in our blood—something ancestral and vital and latent, something deeply American. During the billionaire Q&A that follows, a few aren’t ready to give up their new-found freedom. The room comes alive in ways it hadn’t before the debate, and this alone is a revelation.
I am saying the whole project can be understood, from a certain point of view, as an apostolic work, as a project of evangelization. I am saying that it is also a legitimate act of intellectual dialogue in good faith. Faith must be informed by science, including technology, while remaining faithful to revealed truth. I am saying it is Ratzingerian, in the sense that the late pope was not afraid to engage with the modernists. We are not afraid to engage the transhumanists, the computationalists, even the deniers of death. There’s a different vitality to apologetics when you’re actually in the conversation that is happening. There are different things at stake when the world is changing rapidly and you’re not just rehashing hashed-out arguments from 500 years ago.
I introduce myself to @growing_daniel, shitposter extraordinaire. He goes to clink my glass, but stops halfway. “Wait, are you Catholic,” he asks. Yes, I say. “Okay,” he says. “Cheers.”
I make a fast friend just by overhearing him in the hallway. “I just got divorced, I’m not ready to date! I told the matchmaker… I mean a fling is one thing, maybe even at this conference I sorta thought…” I tell him I just finalized my divorce, and he shakes my hand. Probably he is the most unmistakably Jewish man I’ve ever met, an AI academic in his 60s, loquacious and entertaining as Woody Allen character. He solves a mystery for me when he says he was the guy at Mass wearing a kippah, and then opens a much deeper mystery when he tells me he’s a convert—not ethnically Jewish at all. He grew up Catholic, actually. He loved the ritual practices but he didn’t believe any of it, and he wanted a religion he could practice without believing. Why not just be a skeptical Catholic, I ask, we have plenty of those. “Okay well the thing is I love Ashkenazi women.” Aha. “They would date me but they wouldn’t marry me but then I found a loophole.” I am laughing but also I get it.
At dinner he doesn’t order anything. He's on the ‘pic, he explains. He’s a big believer in the ‘pic. He pays $400/month out of pocket and he’s convinced he saves more money in food costs. He apologizes to the waitress for not ordering anything, but he says he will tip anyway. (He doesn’t.) His religion seems to consist mainly of not mixing meat and milk. No cheeseburgers, he says, is the deal. But really you just do the best you can. Is it not just the goats? I ask, and he looks at me in amazement. “So you know the Scripture?” (As if I were some kind of cradle Catholic!) After the Catholics say grace he insists on giving his own blessing over our food in Hebrew. I am delighted by all of it. For some reason I find it impossible to really believe that he doesn’t believe in God.
After dinner the resort is basically abandoned. A little group of us are trouncing around in the dark, trying to find people. We pass a maintenance worker and ask where we can find the bonfire (from the schedule) and he looks at us like we’re crazy. We hike up above the cave to where the breeze is rustling the grapeleaves. The moon is full, and there are string lights running hither and thither. One of the guys says something about how many stars we can see. It’s true that the sky is big, but the light pollution is pretty average. We come upon two men sitting in chairs, and one of them is a priest. I think the other might be a penitent, and we move along discreetly.
We are four motley uncs and one plucky, lifesaving blonde, fresh-faced and charming—her pixar-mischievous grin, her guileless Alabama twang. She complimented my shoes. As we hike up the hill I wonder if she knows how important she is—this lone girl who’s willing to pal along with the guy-group, the sense of meaning she’s bestowing on our existence right now. For a moment it feels like I’m in high school again. But I’m too old to be harboring such illusions. In the dark she tries to make a little joke that comes off half baked and confusing. She tries to explain, and then she berates herself too many times. “That was lame,” she says, finally. None of us think she is lame.
We come upon two more men, and one of them asks if we’re on our way to look at the statue. Where is the statue? I ask. The hotel has been pretty Catholic so far, so I assume there must be like a Lourdes grotto or something. “Turn down that way,” he says, “then go through the gap in the fence, and then up a ways and jump the other fence and you’ll find it.” We are delighted by this plan. We find the gap and start making our way up the slope, treading unseen hillocks and brambles. The second fence is just low enough to swing a leg over. I glance back to watch how she fares with her maxi skirt.
At the top we come face-to-face with the great round larger-than-life denim-clad ass of an old-fashioned vintner putting his back into the down-screwing of the press. Reflected uplight shines down on us to rival the moon, and we have a good laugh. “That guy must have known what he was doing,” someone says. Pranking us with the statue.
The night is delicious and intoxicating. As we pick our way back down the slope, someone brings up the story of St. Augustine and the pears. “What’s that,” she asks, and we all scramble to be the one who gets to Explain. “Oh, yeah, I think I remember.” So, we decide we’re each going to pluck a grape. “Mine’s sour,” she says, and I show her where to find the ripe ones. Wine grapes are small, so it’s not a grave matter, I say. One of the junior uncs keeps bringing up the hot tub. She admits that she brought her swimsuit, and this clearly encourages him. One of the guys didn’t. “Anything can be a swimsuit, once,” someone offers, helpfully. I brought mine, but I think I’ll leave them to it. In the end they go bowling, anyway.
On the way back down, someone spots a king snake in the path. We all stoop down to watch it slither its way back into the vineyard.
In the square I find an amorphous cluster forming close by the gasfire. There is a dapper, white-haired older gentleman (foppishly curly) whom I know I haven't seen before. He tells me he isn’t an attendee at the conference at all, but his wife is. “She makes me stay in the room,” he says. “She only lets me come out at night.” (Are we doing elder abuse jokes right now?) He asks her if she’s planning to get up for the Latin Mass at 7:00. He seems to defer to her in everything. She glances at me with a bit of embarrassment and mutters something about how she only goes to Mass on Sundays. She is pleasant enough, but doesn’t really want to talk to me. They strike me as an odd couple. She can’t be much older than me, I think, handsomely middle-aged… And then I realize I know who they are.
He asks me about my home life. I tell him how I grew up in North Carolina. “You don’t have a southern accent,” he probes, in his pretty English lilt. Well, I can do it, but my family moved to Raleigh and it got kind of neutralized, I explain. I think about doing it for him, but I don’t. His wife grew up in the South and she doesn’t like northerners, he tells me. “There is real animosity between different regional subcultures of whites.” He tells me how his wife couldn’t make friends with anyone in Connecticut, so they had to move back down to the South. A generous donor bought a castle for them—really it’s a folly, he says—because it was no longer possible hold their events in rented venues, because of Antifa. (He’s a notorious white supremacist and the two of them are currently being sued by the Attorney General of New York.) He looks at me with great compassion in his steely blue eyes the whole time I’m explaining about my divorce.
A black woman joins the larger circle. The man wonders aloud (a little too quickly) if it might not be time to turn in. But, he has taken a liking to me. And at any rate he needs to check in with his wife. She isn’t quite ready, so he insists that I sit down with her. There is a pair of Adirondack chairs and she is in one of them. He wants to have a little huddle by having me sit next to her while he perches himself on her arm rest, sandwiching her in between, but she doesn’t really look at either of us. He seems eager for me to talk to her. Perhaps it should be of interest to her that I’m a Catholic and a born-and-bred southerner. He tells me how her whole family converted, in Arkansas, in the 1960s. Very unusual! By this time her own speech has become “transatlantic.” He asks if I’m a Latin Mass person, and I say no.
We are still talking about regional accents, and he tells me how his first wife (she died of cancer) was from Newfoundland and how when she was angry she would break out with Welsh vocabulary no one could understand. It is irreducibly strange to be hearing about a first wife at the same moment you are meeting a second wife, no matter how at ease they may be about it. I can’t tell how she feels, because she’s still looking away. I don’t know how much I’m projecting here. I do know that he married her when her life was just beginning, at the age of 22, and that he, at 59, was already pushing retirement. I know this because I was stalking the attendee directory earlier, at home, and I found the whole SPLC dossier about them.
When they get up to go, he turns back for a moment and puts a grandfatherly hand on my shoulder. “Best of luck with… your situation,” he says. I’m in some strange atmosphere of the soul.
Our circle shrinks and consolidates. The girl from Mass is here, talking about books. She’s enjoying The End of the Affair, and she regrets leaving it at home. Another guy brings up Cormac McCarthy and we have a nice little chat. I tell him my theory that The Passenger / Stella Maris is his magnum opus, but that people won’t accept this for some number of decades. He’s understandably skeptical, but he lights up when I say The Road is the best book I’ve ever read about being a dad, about the way you want nothing more than to protect your children, and how you know you won’t really be able to. For her part, she respects McCarthy but she doesn’t really like him. I am about to say, well he’s for the boys, but for some reason I falter. It’s been too many hours since I’ve had something to drink and I am starting to leave things on the table. She finishes her wine and says she’s ready for bed. Her final act is to tell me her name, so I tell her mine, and then she’s gone.
It’s midnight, and we’re down to four: three Catholics and the one Dutch Reformed. We kind of gang up on him a little. He brings up such doctrines as purgatory and the Immaculate Conception, and we’re all just explaining how we think about it, but it isn’t exactly fair. He says he’s a magazine editor who’s here scouting for writers, and I am thinking I would rather talk to him about that, but the night seems to be pushing an agenda of its own. At least he seems to be a good sport about it. The rowdy spirit of Debate is at work within us, and with it the power of Night.
On the morrow I bring my suitcase down for the final session. There are just a few minutes to mingle and say goodbye. I’m washing my hands in the bathroom when I run into my skeptical friend, the one from the welcome reception.
“Hey, I just wanted to tell you, I think you’re probably right.”
What do you mean?
“All that stuff we were talking about.”
Oh, really? Do you mean you’re going to go to confession?
“Yeah, I think so…” he says. “Probably… Yeah.”