All right, one more interruption. I had really meant to go back to my dull and comfortable ramblings about The Magic Flute, but since everyone in the United States is required by Act of Congress to have an opinion on the Don Imus scandal, here’s mine.

What Mr. Imus said was disgusting, vicious, and inexcusable.

But that was what you hired him for, wasn’t it? Yes, you, over there at CBS, I’m talking to you. You paid Don Imus big money precisely because you knew he was going to say disgusting, vicious, and inexcusable things every day.

Now you’re firing him for one of them.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not lobbying to get Imus back on the air. (Nevertheless, he’ll be back, with legions of devoted followers, who don’t care how smart or well-informed he is as long as he continues to act like a seventh-grade class clown.) But don’t you think someone is being a little hypocritical? Yes, I’m looking straight at you, CBS, right in your big eyeball. Shouldn’t you be firing the executive who decided it would be a good idea to fill the air with juvenile offenses to good taste?

But that’s the way the business works, isn’t it? It’s the way it’s gone with every “shock jock” on the air. You pay them for the insults and the junior-high-school bullying, and they come through with it day after day, and you rake in the millions in advertising. Then finally one of the victims makes enough of a stink that the sponsors start to flinch. Then you fire the on-air personality, declaring that you have high standards, and—what do you know?—you’ve still got all those millions you made from all his previous offenses.

If you’re the “talent,” as I believe they call it in the business, it’s just playing Russian roulette with your career. You know you have to keep saying offensive things, and you know that eventually one of them is going to kill you. Anyone who agrees to a deal like that has probably already signed a contract with a more ruthless master than CBS.

So here’s my advice for Mr. Imus when he makes his big comeback on a different network: use bigger words—you know, words that take more than two letters to spell. Did you notice, for example, how I just called you Satan’s tool, but nobody even flinched? That’s because I used bigger words than “tool,” and I used a good number of them.

It’s the hot question all over the literary world. And not just the literary world, either. Everywhere you go—bookstores, supermarkets, coffeehouses, subway stations, restaurants—everyone is asking the same thing: What will Mike and I write about next?

But after that, if they have time, people sometimes wonder a bit about how the last Harry Potter book is going to turn out.

The seventh and last Harry Potter book is coming out in July, and the blogosphere (I love that word, don’t you? I always imagine it as a big purple bubble) is abuzz with speculation. (It’s a big buzzing purple bubble. Say that three times fast.)

Some people are saying that J. K. Rowling is going to drop a piano on Harry Potter. No, come to think of it, I’m the only one who said anything about a piano. But there are people who say that Harry Potter is going to die, because after all Ms. Rowling promised us that someone was going to die, and Harry Potter’s is the easiest name to remember, what with being on the cover and everything.

Other people are speculating that the climax of the whole saga will have something to do with the Holy Grail, and that’s where we come in. If you want to know about the Holy Grail, we’ve got just the book for you. (And it’s on sale!) You’d better read it now, just in case. You don’t want to be the only one left out when all your friends are having intelligent discussions about Grail lore, do you?

If you’re one of the many television or radio talk-show hosts who monitor this site, let me remind you that now is the best time for bookings, before the big rush begins. Remember that, with Mike Aquilina, you get a bestselling author and an internationally famous television and radio personality, and that, with me, you get the third-funniest Christian writer in America. And I’m much easier to work with than those other two with their big egos.

Of course, if it turns out that the last Harry Potter has nothing to do with the Holy Grail, we’ll have to find something else to talk about. But that’s all right. If you’ve read anything at all on this site, you know that there’s really nothing I can’t connect with the Holy Grail somehow.

Grail or no Grail, I can see why the last Harry Potter is so eagerly anticipated. J. K. Rowling gives me hope for the future of English as a literary language. You may like Harry Potter or not, and I have no quarrel with you either way. But I don’t think it’s possible to deny that Rowling has real skill as a writer. She tells a story effortlessly, and she constructs sentences that are straightforward and elegant at the same time. And the fact that she writes for young people is what gives me hope.

Years from now, those young people of today will be the book-buying adults who determine what goes on the bestseller lists. It doesn’t take much imagination to see where that could lead.

Imagine the year 2017. Dan Brown is trying to peddle his latest novel, a thriller in which a Yale professor of oenology stumbles across a 2500-year-old conspiracy to conceal the secret knowledge that the Buddha was really an appliance salesman from Des Moines. An affluent young adult—just the sort of person bookstores count on to pay $115.95 for the latest hardcover fiction—picks up Brown’s book and scans the first page.

“This is written for imbeciles,” she declares, flinging the book down contemptuously. “I was reading more sophisticated prose when I was ten years old.”

And you’ll have Harry Potter to thank for it when it happens.

Meanwhile, I more or less promised you one last article about The Magic Flute before I finally let the subject drop, didn’t I? I’d better get to work.

I’ve spent far more time than is healthy for me mulling over my response to The Magic Flute and its Masonic Manichaeanism. I’ve mulled so long I’m nearly mulled all through, like a cup of hot cider.

And why was I worrying about it so much? I think it’s because I saw the opera in the afternoon on the same day I heard the Passion story in the morning, and for the first time I was struck by the superficial similarities and the fundamental differences between the two stories.

There are obvious superficial similarities, you must admit. Each hero has to go through terrible trials on his journey toward the light, and each hero successfully endures those trials and reaches his goal.

But there are big differences as soon as you go any deeper than that.

First, let’s just look at the plots as literary constructions.

In The Magic Flute, the trials themselves seem pointless. They exist only to try; they do not arise from any otherwise necessary circumstance in the plot.

Contrast that with the masterful plotting of the Passion story. There the trials exist because the hero must suffer to redeem the world; but they also rise naturally from the tawdry human motives of the villains of the piece. The two opposing chains of motivation converge naturally and inevitably, God using the evil of human nature to bring about his ultimate plan for good.

We can make a similar comparison of the characters of Tamino and Jesus, and once again I think the comparison works in favor of the Gospels.

Tamino has only one motive for enduring the trials in The Magic Flute: Sarastro is holding Princess Pamina out as bait. Before that, the Queen of the Night had been holding the princess out as bait. Tamino switches sides from darkness to light according to who seems most likely to come through with the princess at the end.

Nor can we even say much about the power of true love, because of course Tamino didn’t fall in love with Pamina; he fell in love with a picture of her, which is not at all the same thing. I know any number of young men Tamino’s age who are deeply in love with Scarlett Johansson in exactly the same way, but theirs is not the spiritual sort of love that leads them toward the light.

The portrait of Christ in the Bible, on the other hand, is both rich and heroic. He is not simply a deity in disguise, incapable of really suffering pain, but he isn’t a man whose baser instincts have to be appealed to if you want any action out of him either. He is completely human, and he knows exactly what he’s getting into. He prays that he might not have to suffer it; he sweats blood and sheds countless tears; yet in the end he willingly offers himself, not because he lusts after a pretty soprano, but because it is meet and right that he should do his Father’s will.

Tamino, too, is good at doing what he’s told, but he’s not particularly good at distinguishing whom he should allow to do the telling. He starts out doing what the Queen of the Night tells him to do and ends up doing what the priests in funny hats tell him to do. One gets the impression that he ends up on the side of virtue mostly because virtue talked to him last.

In plot and characterization, then, I have to give the Gospels the victory over the musical Masons. While I’m at it, I might as well add that I have absolutely no idea what goes on with real Masons, even though one of my grandfathers was a Mason. (The other one collected every book on the Masonic conspiracy, so you see we had balance in our family.) I have nothing to say against real Masons or their secret rituals, which by definition I know nothing about. I can only tell you what I think of the opera, which people who do research into Masonic ritual and drying paint and other exciting subjects all agree is riddled with Freemasonry.

Merely from an artistic point of view, then, I give the palm to the Passion story over The Magic Flute. As for the theology and philosophy, I leave that to Augustine, who has dealt with the subject more thoroughly than I ever could.

But all this is reckoning without the music, which is a bit unfair to the opera—something like judging Hamlet without the words. It’s the music that makes The Magic Flute for the Masons what Birth of a Nation is for the Ku Klux Klan: an emotionally overwhelming appeal for the cult. (No, I am not comparing the Masons to the Ku Klux Klan, but it has suddenly occurred to me that I could write a whole book comparing The Magic Flute to Birth of a Nation and Mozart’s style to Griffith’s. I couldn’t sell it, but I could write it.) The music is what turns a lackluster play into a masterpiece that changes lives; it’s what persuades us that the light really is beautiful and the darkness terrible, that Tamino really is a virtuous hero rather than a pliable airhead, that Sarastro really is wise rather than just verbose and sententious, and that we really might want to be part of Sarastro’s order of wise and good men.

It might be worth pointing out, then, that there’s some pretty good music on the orthodox Christian side, too. The whole Passion was set to music by J. S. Bach, and not once but possibly as many as four times—one for each Gospel. Mozart himself wrote Masses that equal his opera in artistry if not in popular appeal, and his Requiem even challenges The Magic Flute on the popular-appeal front.

Now that we’ve looked at The Magic Flute for so long, you may be asking, “What does all this have to do with the Holy Grail?”

I’m very glad you asked that question. You, on the other hand, may be regretting it already.

Easter is the most joyous season in the calendar for good and obvious reasons, but this year we have yet another reason to celebrate. Not only can you have eternal life, sharing in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but you can also have The Grail Code for 30% off, which gives you something to read while you wait. How’s that for a deal?

All you have to do is follow the easy instructions on this page. Enter our “friends and family” number when you order from Loyola directly, and almost a third of the cover price disappears from the invoice.

But you’ll have to hurry. This offer ends at the end of the Easter season. After that, the offer of eternal life still stands, but you’ll have to pay full price for the book.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I didn’t wear a tie to the opera this time, and I suppose I could write a whole essay about the decline of civilization and how I personally accelerated it. But I won’t, because I happen to know that Monteverdi never wore a tie to the opera either. Besides, it was a Sunday matinee, where the standards have never been as strict. And I caught a strong whiff of mothballs in the lobby, so I know civilization isn’t completely dead.

The opera was Mozart’s Magic Flute, and it would be hard to imagine a more delightful way to spend an afternoon. Never mind that the costumes and sets seemed a bit odd to me (I’m sure they were brilliant, but how can you dress Papagena without a single visible feather?): it’s the music and the singing you come for, and those were very good.

Now, I love Mozart’s operas in general, and I have a soft spot for this one in particular. So don’t take it the wrong way when I tell you that I think the plot is rather silly.

For those of you who don’t know the opera, let me summarize the story. Tamino, the prince of Whatchamacallitania, meets the Queen of the Night (night—forces of darkness—get it?), who introduces him to a portrait of her daughter Pamina. Tamino falls in love at once, as I understand usually happens in these cases. But there’s just one catch, the queen tells him: the evil tyrant Sarastro has kidnapped the princess and is holding her prisoner in his evil Moose lodge. I mean Masonic temple. Someone needs to rescue her. But where oh where will we find a brave hero who will take on the job?

Tamino, being a tenor, realizes that he’s just right for the hero part. The Queen gives him a magic flute, which will spend most of the rest of the opera dangling silently from his shoulder. The flute has surprisingly little to do in the opera, considering that it bought the naming rights. The Queen also sends the birdcatcher Papageno along with Tamino, because she knows that a hero is useless without a comic relief, and because she foresees that Papageno will get all the best songs.

Well, now it’s time to cut to the lair of Sarastro, where sure enough we find Pamina being menaced by one of Sarastro’s evil minions. But when Sarastro himself shows up, he doesn’t seem nearly as evil as we expected him to be. By the end of the first act, Tamino has figured out that Sarastro is really the good guy, and our hero is well on his way to becoming a Freemason.

But first he must endure the terrible trials, for which purpose the good and wise Sarastro has installed a Terrible-Trial-Enduring Room in his temple. (I wanted to put one of those in my house, but it’s amazing how stuffy and outdated the zoning laws are in Pittsburgh.)

There are romantic complications I won’t go into here—enough to fill up most of the second act—but in the end, Tamino and Pamina endure the trials of fire and water together. (In the Pittsburgh Opera’s production, they both looked more like the trial of revolving doors.) Now they can be married and begin a life of wisdom, virtue, and secret handshakes among the Freemasons. Oh, and Papageno proves himself a worthy comic relief, and therefore deserves to marry Papagena, a pretty young woman who is his equal in singing comic arias.

Well, there’s the plot. It’s all a thin veneer for some fairly heavyhanded Masonic ritual and philosophy. At least the story and the philosophy are heavyhanded; the music, of course, is as close to perfect as mortal music gets, and it’s the perfect music that gives this opera its reputation. But the story itself has no life outside the opera, even assuming anyone could completely understand it. And why that story has never caught on—as opposed to some other allegorical stories you might be thinking of—will be the subject of the next installment, which will come after your patience, which I’ve worn out with this installment, has had a chance to revive.