We don't know much about Julian of Norwich, who during an illness in 1373 experienced religious visions that prompted her to write an enduring book that includes the line, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." For years, I mistook it for something from the Book of Psalms.
We know much more about Cheap Trick, a hard-working Illinois rock band who in 1978 found themselves playing to an ecstatic crowd in Tokyo's Budokan arena. At the end of their generation-bridging and quite funny song "Surrender" — in which the narrator discovers his supposedly square parents making out while listening to his Kiss records — the band reaches a sort of pop apotheosis: "Mommy's all right, Daddy's all right/We're all all right! We're all all right!"
If you can't find any sort of connection between those two quotes, the rest of this column might not be of much use to you.
The occasion for this admittedly weird juxtaposition was my reading of "Evangelii Gaudium," the first apostolic exhortation to be written entirely by Pope Francis since his papacy began almost nine months ago.
Now, I am not the sort of Catholic who rushes to the Vatican's website every time a new papal statement goes up. I am, in fact, the sort of Catholic who doesn't go to Mass very often.
But to borrow the debased language of popular culture, the advance word on this one was strong, and my head was snapped around by the line that ended up on top of most of the initial stories about the exhortation.
It arrives near the end of the document's first chapter, "The Church's Missionary Transformation": "I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security."
This is — and here I beg the Pontiff's forgiveness — a very punk rock thing to say. Indeed, "Bruised, Hurting and Dirty" would have been a suitable title for the sort of records I began to listen to right around the time I stopped going to church.
Lest you think I'm calling the Pope a punk, it might be best to define terms. At its most powerful, punk was a reaction against the decadence and emptiness of much of the pop music of the 1970s, a blunt-force aesthetic for hard truths. (At its worst, it was the aesthetic devoid of meaning, a loogie hocked into the crowd.)
In this mission statement for his papacy, Francis makes an analogous choice to use language that is direct, stripped-down, even colloquial. It is, for example, probably the first papal exhortation to use the word "sourpusses" in describing the risks of spiritual defeatism.
There is even more of this sort of rhetoric in the second chapter, "Amid the Crisis of Communal Commitment," which casts a baleful eye on unfettered capitalism.
"Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality," Francis writes. "Such an economy kills."
If you're recuperating from spending the weekend at the mall battling your brothers and sisters for doorbuster values, here's a line that might feel like an open-handed slap: "The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us."
I'm not sure how this sounds in the other languages that "Evangelii Gaudium" was translated into, but in English it is exceptionally fine writing.
For a long time, I puzzled over the admonition against reading the Bible merely "for its prose" — as if literary beauty and power aren't sacred in and of themselves. This pseudo-commandment, I later discovered, comes not from the Gospels but from a poem by W.H. Auden. (It follows the proscription: "Thou shalt not be on friendly terms/With guys in advertising firms.")
Francis' work is worth reading for its prose as well as its message, and not merely for its warnings.
This is, after all, an exhortation intended to convey the sort of leaping joy that electrifies the works of Julian of Norwich and Cheap Trick of Rockford.
"God does not hide himself from those who seek him with a sincere heart," Francis writes, "even though they do so tentatively, in a vague and haphazard manner."
Or: All will be well, even if we're not yet all all right.
cseiler@timesunion.com • 518-454-5619