Matt Watson

Our grandmother, whom we have always affectionately called Mimi, taught us a lot throughout our lives.

When we were kids, she might have spoiled us a little bit, but she also taught us how to find joy in small moments and how to love unconditionally. We would always play a “love you more” game with her, each trying to get the last word in. In an attempt to have the final say, we would blurt out “Love you more than whatever you say.” The phrase became something of a farewell ritual.

Once we were adults, she taught us how to be thankful for our blessings and for friends and family.

Most recently, she taught us how to persevere when things get tough. She fought her illnesses to the very end with unbelievable grace and calm, and always with a lucid sense of humor.

She sets an example for us we hope we can begin to live up to one day.

— Matt and Blake Watson

See obituary.

Today officially marks 10 years for me as a Catholic. Several months before Easter of that year, I began the standard classes called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults at St. Joseph in Starkville, MS. Two years before that, around spring and summer of 2007, I first began to be drawn to the Catholic faith, even though I knew almost no Catholics with whom religion was a topic of conversation.

I was introduced to the Catholic Church largely through sources antithetical to her: the Baptist A Beka Book history textbooks in grade school, and preaching and religious tracts in the Church of Christ. In 2007, I started reading Catholic literature on websites and Internet forums, and one evening in 2009, without calling in advance or getting in touch with anyone, I made my way awkwardly to a room full of strangers in a classroom behind St. Joseph Church at the RCIA time posted on the church’s online bulletin. The only other time I had ever visited a Catholic church was when I attended a St. Joseph weekday mass once the year before, just to see what a Catholic church was like.

There were two reasons I initially wanted to become Catholic: I began to believe she was the one true Church founded by Jesus, which beforehand I had been taught and believed was the Church of Christ, the church I grew up in. Secondly, I had always believed the Bible was the only source of authority in religion, but I began to believe that the Catholic Tradition and Magisterium were necessary to believe in the Bible, since it was those things that gave us the Bible in the first place.

Back then, like many young Christians going through college, I suffered doubts about the origin and veracity of the Bible. The Bible also felt somewhat distant and imperceptible. It was through the Catholic Church and her sacraments that I felt most connected to the Bible and to the person of Jesus.

I still consider myself blessed to have been brought up in the Bible Belt, where faith in Jesus and biblical morality, although Protestant, was instilled in me in a permanent way. The older I get, the more I realize how rare of a gift that is. Modern life is so far removed from Christianity, that we are falling headlong into a hell on earth. Being reared in the Church of Christ was somewhat like being formed in a shielded time capsule, where one could assume some semblance of basic Christian principles.

I never imagined that on my tenth anniversary as a Catholic, public masses would be virtually shut down throughout much of the world. The coronavirus pandemic feels rather apocalyptic. I’m thinking over the last ten years, where I’ve succeeded and failed in practicing my religion. Constant controversy in the Catholic news and blogosphere the last few years has also caused me to look in the mirror and think more about how I live the Catholic faith in my personal life from day to day.

I couldn’t imagine not being Catholic, so I’m glad that as it happens, I wasn’t turned away from the Church early on by some hot-button issue or other. I’m not sure if I ever would have discerned a calling for marriage if not for the Catholic Church. I can’t imagine not praying the Rosary, or receiving communion, or going to confession, or believing in the Real Presence or in guardian angels, or in visiting an old cathedral in San Antonio or New Orleans and feeling more than just a tourist’s connection.

Well, I can partially imagine it, now that the coronavirus has shown all of us what life would be like without our normal ebb and flow. And it is not very pleasant. Sunday church gatherings are illegal in Mississippi, imagine that! Mass is not available to most Catholics in many parts of the world, although we are blessed to have priests and parish staff, such as those at St. Thomas Aquinas here in Hattiesburg, who have enabled confession and Eucharistic adoration to take place when possible.

Ten years. You often hear people say, “It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long.” But to me, it actually does seem like a very long time ago. I feel like a different person in many ways, hopefully a better one, but that is not my call to make. I hope in the next ten years, I will have given a little more effort at living for Jesus and helping others. Wish me luck.

Confirmation pictures

A friend of mine from the Starkville Church of Christ, Wil, was sitting in the pews during my confirmation and got the friend of another RCIA candidate to snap a few shots, proof that it happened!

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Wedding

Although we got married in New Orleans, all of the marriage prep was at St. Therese in my hometown of Jackson. My wife and I made good friends there. Here is a photo of us with the priest who did our marriage prep, Monsignor Elvin Sunds.

Traditional Latin mass

Ever since I converted, I’ve always wanted to go to a traditional Latin mass. It took almost 10 years, but I finally fulfilled this dream with my wife and a caregiver last year, when we drove to St. Patrick minor basilica in New Orleans. I have no photo or video evidence of this, but here is a YouTube video of the same church and the same priest that said the mass while we were there. Beautiful, no?

Catholic apps

As a web developer for the past 3.5 years, I feel it appropriate to share some miscellaneous apps and web resources pertaining to the Catholic faith I have found handy:

• Of course, first on my list is HolyRosaryOnline.com, maintained by yours truly. Sure, it is not the same as real rosary beads, but not a bad alternative if you are disabled like me, cannot finger beads, and are at your computer all the time anyway.
• Divinum Officium – Traditional online missal and breviary in Latin and English. Good English, as in the King James and Shakespeare kind.
• Universalis – Modern breviary, but not the official one which is bound up in copyrights.
• iBreviary – Missal and breviary, modern official translations, somehow they got past copyright issues and kept it free.
• Best online version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and as it happens, based out of a church in Mississippi!
• A better looking CCC, but doesn’t always work right.
• Easiest-to-navigate Douay Rheims Bible with commentary, the Catholic equivalent to the King James, basically. Because if I’m gonna read the Bible, it better be in Early Modern English!
• News, ugh. I have to tune out every few months though.

https://youtu.be/AuBrdohkORc

Just imagine. You could observe from your place, say, in the sitting room, the jungles of Africa, what the wild beasts are doing there. And more, you could see and listen to the jungles of our human society. Every man, then, would be forced to be honest, and there would be no secret plotting anymore of all the wickedness. Wonderful, no?

Indeed! TV will save us from wickedness!

I could watch these videos all day. All old footage, some with real sound, others with fake sound added. All joking aside, some of them are truly majestic.

I recently re-watched one of my favorite Coen brothers films, “No Country for Old Men” and liked it so much on this second viewing that I started reading the original novel by Cormac McCarthy. In the film, as the astute movie critic Father Robert Barron pointed out years ago, the bad guy, Anton Chigurh, represents evil and death, which follows all the characters who pursue a briefcase of money left in the desert after a drug deal gone bad. Certainly the movie and the original book are full of biblical metaphors, and the Coen brothers often deal in them. The one that stuck out to me most of all was that Anton Chigurh seems to represent not just evil, but a very biblical variation of the devil himself.

The devil believes in a kind of free market, a certain kind of justice, in which everyone gets what they deserve and may sell their soul if they so choose. That is why in the book of Job and in the temptation of Christ, Satan takes the form of a tempter who will take advantage of his prey’s rightly ordered sense of fairness. Job only fears God because he’s wealthy enough to afford to, Satan argues. He appeals to Jesus’s rightful status as Lord, saying “[i]f thou be the Son of God,” you could make stones turn to bread or take possession of “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them” (Matt 4:3, 8).

Chigurh, who always carries a coin like an amulet, uses money (and other principles of exchange) throughout the film to lure others into cooperating with evil. In truth, he rarely ever barters to benefit himself directly. He doesn’t really care about money. He uses it only as bait to pull unwitting people into the game, because he knows people put more value on money than it’s really worth.

I think a good argument could be made that Chigurh was the one responsible for the drug deal gone wrong, a mystery never actually solved in the film. Who else would have busted up a perfectly good deal? The dead bodies strewn on the scene from the beginning look a lot like his work, and when two American dealers higher up in the mob come with him to the scene to search for clues, he kills them too. But he keeps the device that tracks the location of the satchel of money. He knows it will take him to his next victim, whom he must kill out of some twisted sense of fairness, as if the man who has the money deserves it, because he has bought in to the devil’s game.

A conversation between Llewelyn Moss, the poor hunter who now possesses the money after happening upon it, and Carson Wells, Chigurh’s rival assassin, spell out Chigurh’s devilish priorities clearly:

Llewelyn Moss: If I was cuttin’ deals, why wouldn’t I go deal with this guy Chigurh?

Carson Wells: No no. No. You don’t understand. You can’t make a deal with him. Even if you gave him the money he’d still kill you. He’s a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that. He’s not like you. He’s not even like me. (IMDb)

Chigurh eventually does try to cut a deal with Moss, who has heroically escaped from his grasp time and again. On a phone call with Moss, Chigurh says he will not hunt down and kill Moss’s wife, Carla Jean, if Moss will give up the satchel of money and, most importantly, his life. “That’s the best you’re going to get,” Chigurh says.

Perhaps Chigurh just wants the money for himself, but then again, probably not. What he seems to care about in trying to make this deal is satisfying a blood-sacrifice sense of justice, for lack of a better term. If Chigurh can’t get to Moss, Carla Jean will do. Moss doesn’t accept the offer and stubbornly believes he can take down Chigurh, who has become “a special project” of his. If we view Chigurh as the devil, then Chigurh doesn’t need to pursue Moss anymore. For one thing, Chigurh now only needs to kill Carla Jean to satisfy his justice, and for another thing, he has already won Moss over to his world of vengeance and power by becoming his “special project.” Moss has essentially signed his own death warrant, for no one can escape the world into which he has plunged himself.

Chigurh eventually finds Carla Jean, just as she arrives home dressed in black, returning from her mother’s funeral. After she serenely protests the notion that justice demands she be killed, Chigurh hesitantly makes her the only offer he can, his most signature offer throughout the movie. She must call a coin toss and let fate decide.

To his surprise, the first time he is surprised in the movie, she tells him, “I ain’t gonna call it.” Finally, someone has stood up to the devil, and she has done so not by trying to avoid death and grasp on to a worldly hope, like her husband, but by not agreeing to play the game in the first place.

This throws off the devil’s sense of justice. In the devil’s view, justice is absolute, leaving no room for mercy or forgiveness. Neither is their hope in the future or the procuring of wealth, because death comes no matter what, the devil, in the form of Chigurh, being its minister. It doesn’t make sense for Carla Jean to refuse the game. Doesn’t she realize she will surely die otherwise? The dignity she seeks to maintain will not serve her then, or so Chigurh would have his victims believe.

We don’t see Chigurh kill Carla Jean on screen, but as he walks off of her front porch, he checks his boots for blood, which he often does after murdering someone. Even so, he has been defeated by Carla Jean’s meek resistance. When Chigurh’s car is randomly sidelined at an intersection after he leaves her house, badly injuring him and possibly killing the other driver, it serves as a metaphor for the fact that his world has been rocked.

But he gets back up and keeps playing the game. When two kids standing by come to his aid, he asks for one of their shirts in which to hang his broken arm. As sirens ring in the distance, Chigurh hands the kid some money. The kid refuses at first, saying he doesn’t mind helping someone, but Chigurh insists he keep it and tell the first responders he was long gone when the kid got there. The kid accepts the money, and as Chigurh walks off, the two kids immediately start arguing over it. The kid who accepted it very reasonably points out that he is the one without a shirt, and therefore the money is his. It paints a very clear picture of how the devil in the form of Chigurh draws others into his own corruption simply by dropping down some cash.

In the final scene, Sheriff Bell, with an air about him similar to Carla Jean before she is killed, has chosen to retire, realizing he will never catch the perpetrators now nor the perpetrators to come. The very person who should buy in to the game – the sheriff, representing true justice – has chosen instead to put away his sword. You can’t win this game, not on this earth. He recounts a dream to his wife in which his father, also a sheriff, has ridden a horse deep into the darkness ahead and is preparing a warm fire in the midst of the cold wilderness.

This recalls Scripture in John 14, in which Jesus promises to go to his Father’s house to prepare a place for his disciples, who must in the meantime endure “the prince of this world” by holding fast to “the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him.”

Similarly, Bell and Carla Jean hold onto this hope for a true and peaceful justice they know can only be possible in the world to come. Until then, the only way out is brave resignation and martyrdom in the face of pervasive injustice.

We live in a time of a heightened sense of justice that can be disordered. I think it’s safe to say that polarized political views in our country testify to that, whether liberal or conservative. The Coen brothers, as well as Cormac McCarthy, remind us that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12). It is a wickedness that seeks to turn us against each other with reasonable-sounding appeals to power, power that, in reality, is as fleeting as Llewelyn Moss’s satchel full of hundred dollar bills.

Correction: I originally wrote that Chigurh never gets the money, but there is an insinuation that he does find it. I also wrote Carla Jean is returning from her husband’s funeral at the end, but it is her mother’s.