Pardon the relative silence and particularly the silence on substantive matters. I will blame it on two things: First, our in-between status around here. Getting Ready for Things. Secondly, the fact that there’s a lot to comment on. A lot. Which then paralyzes me. So. Randomly, in no particular order:
(In case you are wondering, when I find a candidate for “Random,” I email it to myself with the subject “Random.” And then just harvest, when it comes time.)
Another note: I’m going to come back to a few of these and look at them in more depth.
No, of course there’s no division or competition between Eucharistic devotion and the works of mercy. It’s the opposite. A good piece from NCR(egister):
The Sisters Poor of Jesus Christ spend much of their day ministering to the homeless of Los Angeles. They bring food and hygiene items and even offer haircuts and beard trimmings to those they encounter on the streets. Much of the sisters’ work focuses on ministering to those living on Skid Row, a neighborhood in Los Angeles that has one of the largest populations of homeless people in the country.
But on the evening of July 15, the sisters brought something else — Someone else — to the streets of Skid Row: Jesus Christ.
Alongside friars and volunteers, the sisters hosted a candlelight Eucharistic procession that brought Jesus to the impoverished Los Angeles neighborhood.
Sister Mariana Disciple of the Divine Master, is a member of the community, originally founded in Brazil. The Brazilian native said that the reason for the Eucharistic procession was the realization that, as important as the food and material objects the sisters provide to the people of Skid Row are, they were not enough; what the community needs even more is Jesus.
For Sister Mariana, these two aspects — Eucharistic devotion and service to the poor — go hand in hand.
“The Eucharist is Jesus being the most poor of all,” she said.
The Sisters and Friars Poor of Jesus Christ also have a presence in Birmingham. Their FB is here.
Mother Elvira Petrozzi, who founded Comunità Cenacolo, passed away.
Our Bishop emeritus and friend Bishop Robert Baker had a special relationship with the Cenacolo community, and brought them to the United States, first to the Diocese of St. Augustine and then to the Diocese of Birmingham. Their community here is in Hanceville, near Mother Angelica’s Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament. We attended their living Way of the Cross several years ago, and it was quite moving.
Her death, following a long illness, came just weeks after thousands of people gathered in Saluzzo, a hilltop town in Italy’s northwest Piedmont region about an hour’s drive south of Turin, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Cenacolo Community’s founding there in an abandoned home on July 16, 1983.
In the decades since, the community has grown to encompass 72 Cenacolo houses in 20 countries, including four in the United States.
Mother Elvira called the Cenacolo a “School of Life” because it took people off the streets and gave them a “rebirth” that was “based on a simple, family-oriented, orderly life” with the foundation of prayer, physical labor, discipline, and fraternal sharing…
….
The daily schedule at these houses includes Mass, eucharistic adoration, Marian devotion with three rosaries minimum a day, and devotion to St. Joseph. Every day members pray simply: “St. Joseph, provide for us.”
“The heart of it is, of course, the Eucharist,” Baker explained.
“Part of Elvira’s training is to divest to get rid of the stuff you don’t need,” he said. “So, the divesting, the trust in divine providence, and then … the Eucharist, praying before the Lord. That’s where her greatest strength was — the Eucharist, where she had all these insights. [You] have to have the sense of God’s immense love, which she had from praying before the Eucharist. And then because you know God loves you immensely, he will provide for you.”
When Baker visited Mother Elvira shortly before her death, he noted upon entering the house a mosaic on the floor that spells out the words “Dio Provvede” (God Provides).
From the Atlantic: “The Ones We Sent Away”
My grandmother told my mother that she instantly knew something was different when Adele was born. Her cry wasn’t like other babies’. She was inconsolable, had to be carried everywhere. Her family doctor said nonsense, Adele was fine. For an entire year, he maintained that she was fine, even though, at the age of 1, she couldn’t hold a bottle and didn’t respond to the stimuli that other toddlers do. I can’t imagine what this casual brush-off must have done to my grandmother, who knew, in some back cavern of her heart, that her daughter was not the same as other children. But it was 1952, the summer that Adele turned 1. What male doctor took a working-class woman without a college education seriously in 1952?
Only when my mother and her family went to the Catskills that same summer did a doctor finally offer a very different diagnosis. My grandmother had gone to see this local fellow not because Adele was sick, but because she was; Adele had merely come along. But whatever ailed my grandmother didn’t capture this man’s attention. Her daughter did. He took one look at her and demanded to know whether my aunt was getting the care she required.
What did he mean?
“That child is a microcephalic idiot.”
My grandmother told this story to my mother, word for word, more than four decades later.
In March of 1953, my grandparents took Adele, all of 21 months, to Willowbrook State School. It would be many years before I learned exactly what that name meant, years before I learned what kind of gothic mansion of horrors it was. And my mother, who didn’t know how to explain what on earth had happened, began telling people that she was an only child.
A transcript of a convo between Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn on Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Don’t forget the Cultural Tutor
It should be underlined here that the movie version of The Natural departs wildly from the novel’s ending. Malamud had envisioned Hobbs as a fallen hero, whose career ends in disgrace. There is no pennant-clinching home run, much less any personal redemption. Hobbs’ past misfortunes, along with his subsequent poor choices, secure his demise. The film, obviously, casts the story in a more cheerful light. The question is: which version is better, more true to life? Many critics have given the edge to Malamud’s novel, preferring its hard-bitten cynicism to the movie’s ostensible deification of Redford’s Hobbs and his salvific swing of the bat. But this critique is not quite accurate. The actual ending of the movie is not Hobbs’ home run; it’s the catch he is having with his young son, back on his farm in Nebraska, with Iris looking on. All three are smiling. In the end, The Natural is not about attaining godlike status; it’s about accepting one’s historical “thrownness” and the incalculable outcomes that emerge (in Kierkegaardian parlance) at the nexus of necessity and freedom.
….the nexus of necessity and freedom.
A look at The Exorcist in the wake of director William Friedkin’s death
In New York, I yielded to temptation and took Edith Wharton’s classic society novel The Age of Innocence off for a walk around Grace Church and Gilded Age Manhattan. The American essayist Anne Fadiman called this “You Are There” reading — such a frisson of delight, to read a book in its rightful setting. I remember the thrill of reading Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma at Lake Como, where his fictional family had a castle, while back home in Delhi, reading Anita Desai’s In Custody or the late Hindi novelist Krishna Sobti’s Chandni Chowk books gave me a deeper sense of place, and lost time.
The best thing is, you don’t even need to travel. If you’re in search of companionable solitude while reading, no matter the location, it might be time to discover the pleasures of Silent Book Club It has a simple but bold premise: readers gather at a pre-arranged time and place to read together, but they don’t utter a word. They can agree to read the same book, or different ones altogether. Afterwards, they may engage in conversation, but they can also simply leave. It is the introvert’s answer to the usual chatty, note-taking book club.
This helped me understand my own thoughts about the difference between what is art and what is artisanal. If art brings us closer to something true about the human experience in a beautiful way, artisanal combines beauty with function and elevates the necessary tools of everyday life to a level of artistic beauty. Personally, being bereft of practical skill — the kind required to make beautiful objects — I place a very high value on people who possess them. But are the things they make art? Not to me. Though perhaps they are something better, or just as good: they are the things that smooth over the rough edges of life, bring comfort in the small moments, like making tea in a perfect tea pot, or sitting with a beautiful handmade quilt over your knees, or biting into the crunchy crust of a piece of sourdough bread. The artisan makes the day-to-day a happy sensory experience, while the artist lifts our eyes to the universal. It’s genuinely hard for me to say which is more important.
Speaking of….our Cathedral has published a coloring book:
re. The Exorcist. I don’t know what demonic possession really looks like but I have always sensed that the gross “horror business” trivialized what possession/exorcism are. I realize that films usually offer things to viewers who are on different levels of appreciation, but I fear the takeaway is lowest common denominator schlock. I do love Max von Sydow and Mercedes McCambridge, however.
My goodness. Breathtaking essay in The Atlantic. Thank you for that, Amy.