Vegas for the Catholic
My son lives in the monastery. It’s a house near the Ann Arbor campus that is known for housing devout Catholic UM students. Saint wannabes but not total nerds. God first, studies second, drinking third.
At semester’s end, they’re bound for that neon-lit Gomorrah, Las Vegas . . . flying into McCarran (“Reid” be damned), a mere quarter-hour from the Strip’s pulsating debauchery. But instead of lingering, they’re immediately snagging a rental jalopy and peeling out for Utah’s state parks, the moral and geological antithesis of that desert Sodom.
That’s unfortunate.
Here’s my open letter to him.
Son:
You better appreciate beautiful women after you see a few ugly ones. You’ll better appreciate the grandeur of Utah’s state parks if you first see Vegas.
Besides, Vegas isn’t ugly. In fact, it’s beautiful, but its beauty is the opposite of Utah’s beauty. Utah’s beauty is God-made, in its raw awesomeness. Vegas’ is man-made, in its rawness.
Vegas is the closest mankind will come to creating like God: ex nihilo. Something from nothing.
Its founding ghosts snatched the sorriest patch of North American nowhere—just a spit from Death Valley’s furnace, a piddling four inches of rain a year—and spun it from a dusty 1890s jerkwater into a two-million-soul metropolis boasting major pro sports squads.
When gambling went nationwide in the 1990s and Vegas lost its wicked edge, the doomsayers crowed it’d flop. Wrong. Population’s doubled since tribal outposts started sprouting casinos like crabgrass.
Vegas keeps morphing. Tech, green energy, new lures beyond the slots. They bulldoze and rebuild, those hulking pleasure palaces thrown up cheap, meant to crumble ’cause it’s easier to raze those smoke-semen-stained sin cylinders than to replace the carpeting. Payback’s a blink: six months for some resorts, not the usual five-to-ten-year grind of the normal successful real estate development.
If we’re cast in God’s likeness and God’s a creator, Vegas is us mimicking His craft on a huge scale.
Sure, it ain’t traipsing Utah’s peaks. But that doesn’t make it trash. Scorning Vegas for being “artificial”—man-made—is like spitting on your own hands’ work. We’re all muddling through this fleeting gig called life; it’s churlish to sneer at mortal endeavors.
Let’s address that horny elephant in the room.
Vegas is Sin City, where what happens stays, except the clap. But that shouldn’t spook a lad with a shred of Catholic spine. If you’re fretting you’ll end up bedding some skank hooker (the only prostitute your wallet could afford), your soul’s got deeper problems than Vegas. Vegas’ temptations are so over-the-top, they barely tempt the average Joe. That’s my take, anyhow.
Edmund Burke had it right: you can’t cherish the good without loathing the vile. Sin’s the only thing we’re bid to despise. Roll into Vegas and gape at the gaudy human ruin. Those shattered souls will make hating sin a breeze.
Here’s Vegas’ real trap, though: judgment. Vegas is a magnet for the broken: folks who washed up there after torching their lives, or who stumble in for a breather from the daily grind, too wrecked for wholesome relief. Vegas is prime people-watching turf. Trouble is, watching slips into judging faster than a drunk slides off a barstool.
Don’t do that. Sure, you’ll label the parade of freaks—can’t help it—but resist your inner-gavel. Vegas is the perfect place to implement that meat-and-potatoes lesson of the Catholic spiritual life: hate the sin, love the sinner.
So, kid, haul your pious backside to Vegas! Stroll Fremont Street, tip a nod to a tranny, chat up a weirdo while slurping a vodka slushie. If it’s a hike you want, hoof the five Strip miles from Glitter Gulch to Mandalay Bay. Cross those skybridges, traverse the miles of nasty carpet at Caesars to see the attractions, spy the Sphere, that new billion-dollar monument to nothing.
Soak it all in, then hit Utah for the real spectacle. You’ll savor it deeper.