Dorothy Day on Advent

Nativity scenes from the three most well-known Catholic Worker artists. More at this link.

Here are passages from some of Dorothy Day’s writings on Advent:

Advent is a time of waiting – from On Pilgrimage, 1948

ADVENT IS a time of waiting, of expectation, of silence. Waiting for our Lord to be born. A pregnant woman is so happy, so content. She lives in such a garment of silence, and it is as though she were listening to hear the stir of life within her. One always hears that stirring compared to the rustling of a bird in the hand. But the intentness with which one awaits such stirring is like nothing so much as a blanket of silence.

Be still. Did I hear something?

……

Many people think an examination of conscience is a morbid affair. Péguy has some verses which Donald Gallagher read to me once in the St. Louis House of Hospitality. (He and Cy Echele opened the house there.) They were about examination of conscience. There is a place for it, he said, at the beginning of the Mass. “I have sinned in thought, word, and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.” But after you get done with it, don’t go on brooding about it; don’t keep thinking of it. You wipe your feet at the door of the church as you go in, and you do not keep contemplating your dirty feet.

Here is my examination at the beginning of Advent, at the beginning of a new year. Lack of charity, criticism of superiors, of neighbors, of friends and enemies. Idle talk, impatience, lack of self-control and mortification towards self, and of love towards others. Pride and presumption. (It is good to have visitors – one’s faults stand out in the company of others.) Self-will, desire not to be corrected, to have one’s own way. The desire in turn to correct others, impatience in thought and speech.

The remedy is recollection and silence. Meanness about giving time to others and wasting it myself. Constant desire for comfort. First impulse is always to make myself comfortable. If cold, to put on warmth; if hot, to become cool; if hungry, to eat; and what one likes – always the first thought is of one’s own comfort. It is hard for a woman to be indifferent about little material things. She is a homemaker, a cook; she likes to do material things. So let her do them for others, always. Woman’s job is to love. Enlarge Thou my heart, Lord, that Thou mayest enter in.

The first column in an Advent series from 1966, which focuses on Mary:

And now even the prayer, the Hail Mary, has been left out of the listing of Catholic prayers from the new Dutch catechism, so we are told in our diocesan paper.

After reading this I changed my mind about writing about the counsels for this first of an Advent series and decided to write about the Blessed Mother instead. She is, of course, a controversial figure, the last thing in the world she would want to be.

It is fitting to write about her in Advent, and I would like to tell in simple fashion about Mary in my life.

WHEN I was a very little child, perhaps not more than six, I used to have recurrent nightmares of a great God, King of heaven and earth which encompassed all, stretched out over all of us in a most impersonal way, and

with this nightmare came also a great noise like that made by a galloping horseman which increased in volume until the sound filled all the earth. It was a terrifying dream and when I called out, my mother used to come and sit by the bedside and hold my hand and talk to me until I fell asleep. That passed, and then a few years later I met a little girl by the name of Mary Harrington who told me about the Blessed Mother and a heaven peopled with saints, and this also was a great comfort to me.

Years passed and I attended high school and college and then went to work for the Socialist and Communist movements in the early 20’s. Nevertheless, I often dropped into churches. One winter when I was working in New Orleans and living across the street from the cathedral there I found great joy in attending Benediction. That Christmas a Communist friend gave me a rosary. “You were always dropping into the cathedral,” she explained.

I did not know how to say the prayers but I kept it by me. I did not know any Catholics and would have been afraid to approach a priest or nun, for fear of their reading into such an approach some expectation which was not there.

More.

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Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Today’s her feastday. 

Pope Francis’ homily at her canonization:

Following Jesus is a serious task, and, at the same time, one filled with joy; it takes a certain daring and courage to recognize the divine Master in the poorest of the poor and to give oneself in their service.  In order to do so, volunteers, who out of love of Jesus serve the poor and the needy, do not expect any thanks or recompense; rather they renounce all this because they have discovered true love.  Just as the Lord has come to meet me and has stooped down to my level in my hour of need, so too do I go to meet him, bending low before those who have lost faith or who live as though God did not exist, before young people without values or ideals, before families in crisis, before the ill and the imprisoned, before refugees and immigrants, before the weak and defenceless in body and spirit, before abandoned children, before the elderly who are on their own.  Wherever someone is reaching out, asking for a helping hand in order to get up, this is where our presence – and the presence of the Church which sustains and offers hope – must be.

Mother Teresa, in all aspects of her life, was a generous dispenser of divine mercy, making herself available for everyone through her welcome and defence of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded.  She was committed to defending life, ceaselessly proclaiming that “the unborn are the weakest, the smallest, the most vulnerable”.   She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity; she made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crime of poverty they created.  For Mother Teresa, mercy was the “salt” which gave flavour to her work, it was the “light” which shone in the darkness of the many who no longer had tears to shed for their poverty and suffering.

St. Teresa is in The Loyola Kids Book of Heroes. You can read most of the entry here, at the Loyola site – they have a great section on saints’ stories arranged according to the calendar year. Some of the stories they have posted are from my books, some from other Loyola Press saints’ books.

When we think about the difference that love can make, many people very often think of one person: Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. A tiny woman, just under five feet tall, with no tools except prayer, love, and the unique qualities God had given her, Mother Teresa is probably the most powerful symbol of the virtue of charity for people today.

Mother Teresa wasn’t, of course, born with that name. Her parents named her Agnes—or Gonxha in her own language—when she was born to them in Albania, a country north of Greece.

Agnes was one of four children. Her childhood was a busy, ordinary one. Although Agnes was very interested in missionary work around the world, as a child she didn’t really think about becoming a nun; but when she turned 18, she felt that God was beginning to tug at her heart, to call her, asking her to follow him.

Now Agnes, like all of us, had a choice. She could have ignored the tug on her heart. She could have filled her life up with other things so maybe she wouldn’t hear God’s call. But of course, she didn’t do that. She listened and followed, joining a religious order called the Sisters of Loreto, who were based in Dublin, Ireland.

Years ago,  when the excerpts from Mother Teresa’s journal detailing her “dark night” were published, I wrote several posts. All have links to other commentary.

The first is here.  One of the articles I linked there was this 2003 First Things piece.

A second post, in which I wrote:

My first post on the story of Mother Teresa’s decades-long struggle with spiritual darkness struck some as “dismissive,” and for that I apologize. That particular reaction was against the press coverage – not the Time article, but the subsequent filtering that I just knew would be picked up as a shocking new revelation and used by two groups to promote their own agendas: professional atheists (per the Hitchens reaction in the Time piece itself) and fundamentalist Protestants, who would take her lack of “blessed assurance” emotions as a sure sign that Catholicism was, indeed, far from being Christian.  Michael Spencer at Internet Monk had to issue a warning to his commentors on his Mother Teresa post, for example, that he wouldn’t be posting comments declaring that Roman Catholics weren’t Christian.

So that was my point in the “not news” remark. Because the simple fact of the dark night isn’t – not in terms of Mother Teresa herself or in terms of Catholic understanding and experience of spirituality.  It is very good that this book and the coverage has made this more widely known to people who were previously unaware of either the specifics or the general, and it is one more gift of Mother Teresa to the world, a gift she gave out of her own tremendous suffering. What strikes me is once again, at its best, taken as a whole, how honest Catholicism is about life, and our life with God. There is all of this room within Catholicism for every human experience of God, with no attempt to gloss over it or try to force every individual’s experience into a single mold of emotion or reaction.

In that post, I linked to Anthony Esolen at Touchstone:

Dubiety is inseparable from the human condition.  We must waver, because our knowledge comes to us piecemeal, sequentially, in time, mixed up with the static of sense impressions that lead us both toward and away from the truth we try to behold steadily.  The truths of faith are more certain than the truths arrived by rational deduction, says Aquinas, because the revealer of those truths speaks with ultimate authority, but they are less certain subjectively, from the point of view of the finite human being who receives them yet who does not, on earth, see them with the same clarity as one sees a tree or a stone or a brook.  It should give us Christians pause to consider that when Christ took upon himself our mortal flesh, he subjected himself to that same condition.  He did not doubt; His faith was steadfast; yet He did feel, at that most painful of moments upon the Cross, what it was like to be abandoned by God.  He was one with us even in that desert, a desert of suffering and love.  Nor did the Gospel writers — those same whom the world accuses on Monday of perpetrating the most ingenious literary and theological hoax in history, and on Tuesday of being dimwitted and ignorant fishermen, easily suggestible — refuse to tell us of that moment.

     In her love of Christ — and the world does not understand Christ, and is not too bright about love, either — Mother Teresa did not merely take up His cross and follow him.  She was nailed to that Cross with him. 

Another post with more links to commentary.

And one more.

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7 Quick Takes

 

— 1 —

Well, hello there.

We have stuck around home for Christmas. Rather than traveling, we have been doing grandson/nephew duty for the past few days, and are happy to do it and give his parents a break. Plus, I was still fantasizing that I could “get” “work” “done” during the time here. But, par for the course: hah. Very funny.

Which means you will not be seeing much of me over the next month, and if you do, scold me and send me packing back to the Word document where I belong. I’ll toss up entries about saints and such, but we’re in crunch time now, that time in which I must think ahead to the time in which I will *not* be in crunch time, and how wonderful that will be.

I checked this out from the library today, and I told them….mid February, when the book’s done and basketball is winding down…here we go….

 

— 2 —

Spend less time analyzing celebrity deaths online, thinking of how to sadly yet wittily condemn 2016 to oblivion or bitingly condemn those condemning 2016 to oblivion… and instead spend more time chatting with your actual neighbors, seeing how they’re doing, and swapping stories about life, face-to-face. Try it. It makes for far more sanity and a deeper perspective on what’s real. Probably better for your eyes and joints, too.

— 3—

Are you a Catholic? Then you, like most Catholics, probably had one question on your mind as December 26 dawned. And that question is:

So, when’s Ash Wednesday this year?

Well,since you asked.

(Feel free to swipe and share)

A little later, so a bit of reprieve, unlike this past year when it was February 10, when Super Serious Catholics – who observe Christmas til Candlemas – have barely brushed away the last of the pine needles.

So, yes. March 1. If you’re prepping for a parish or school, check out my Lenten devotional from Liguori, also available in Spanish.

(pdf sample here)

Speaking of self-promotion, if you are a woman looking for a daily devotional for 2017, check out mine. It’s a perennial, which means that it’s not explicitly tied to 2017 moveable feast dates. But I did try to make the February-March entries Lent-ish, the April-May entries Easterish, and so on. Moreover, since most Catholic female-centric devotionals are directly pitched at women who are mothers, this might be a good choice for a woman who is not a mother, or to whom motherhood is not a defining anchor of her spirituality.  Check it out.

 

— 4 —

 

A couple of election-related pieces that echo points I’ve tried to make here.

One of my favorite bloggers, just-retired U of Wisconsin law prof Ann Althouse, writes in relation to an essay in Elle by a woman super-concerned about how to raise a son in “Trump’s America.”

Since President Trump will be out of office by the time your child is 8, I’d suggest not talking about any of that. Piazza frets about “explaining sensitivity and nonviolence” to the boy. I’d suggest demonstrating it, beginning by not going out of your way to express contempt for the President.

A child — boy or girl — lives with real people, and these people set the example that the child will copy. It’s not really very much about explanations and characters on television. How about not putting on the television and not talking about politics and sex in front of young children? Give them a real, comprehensible, simple, gentle environment that is on their level.

Piazza worries about explaining “the president’s picks for attorney general and CIA director voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.” Frankly, she shouldn’t try to explain that to anyone, since she doesn’t even understand it herself. Votes against the Violence Against Women Act were not votes for violence against women. If you don’t know why, at least have some modesty and restraint about your potential to confuse and unnecessarily rile other people.

Let children be children. And let adults who don’t want to understand law — including things like federalism — have some peace. Your hysteria is not helping….

…Explanations are overrated. The power of the presidency is overblown. Find love and meaning where it really is.

It’s much simpler than you’re willing to say, perhaps because you have a career writing columns about feminism and politics. That’s nice for you, but be careful. It’s a brutal template, and you are having a baby.

And Kevin Williamson on the absurdity and fundamental wrongness of our imperial presidency and why for God’s sake do we have to have Obama’s America or Trump’s America or anyone in particular’s America , when, you know…it’s not supposed to be that way. 

The idea that a large, complex society enjoying English liberty could long endure without the guiding hand of a priest-king was, in 1776, radical. A few decades later, it became ordinary — Americans could not imagine living any other way. The republican manner of American presidents was pronounced: There is a famous story about President Lincoln’s supposedly receiving a European ambassador who was shocked to see him shining his own shoes. The diplomat said that in Europe, a man of Lincoln’s stature would never shine his own shoes. “Whose shoes would he shine?” Lincoln asked.

As American society grows less literate and the state of its moral education declines, the American people grow less able to engage their government as intellectually and morally prepared citizens. We are in the process — late in the process, I’m afraid — of reverting from citizens to subjects. Subjects are led by their emotions, mainly terror and greed. They need not be intellectually or morally engaged — their attitude toward government is a lot like that of Trump’s old pal Roy Cohn: “Don’t tell me what the law is. Tell me who the judge is.”

For more than two centuries, we Americans have been working to make government subject to us rather than the other way around, to make it our instrument rather than our master. But that requires a republican culture, which is necessarily a culture of responsibility. Citizenship, which means a great deal more than showing up at the polls every two years to pull a lever for Team R or Team D, is exhausting. On the other hand, monarchy is amusing, a splendid spectacle and a wonderful form of public theater.

But the price of admission is submission.

 

— 5 —.

I have a contribution to a “Best Books I read in 2016” article, but it hasn’t been posted yet. This is a place holder for that.  But I can tell you right now, without knowing who else contributed and what books they’ll discuss, mine will be the lowest brow. Guaranteed.

 

— 6—

Oh, can I come back to this point? A year does not “suck” or need to be prayed to  end or told to go home because celebrities died.

Source

— 7 —

 

Have you seen this? Do you need a time-suck? Try this site, Radio Garden, in which you can just move your cursor and explore radio stations streaming from around the world. There have always been websites with lists of such stations (which I like because you can find stations by genre), but this is the first one that I’ve seen with this kind of framework. My quick conclusion: Everyone around the world is listening to really bad music at the same time! We are Family!

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!

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15 years!

I realized this past weekend that September 1 marked the 15th anniversary of The Loyola Kids Book of Saints. 

It was the first book I wrote. About the same time I was working on Prove It God, but this one came out first. It was a crazy time, that spring of 2000. (In publishing, it generally takes about a year from submission of the manuscript to publication. It can be done faster – DeCoding Da Vinci took two months – but generally not.)

As I said, it was crazy, with tons of life stuff going on. I procrastinated and before I knew it the holidays had sped by and I was facing a March 1 deadline. So I wrote it in six weeks.

(Lesson learned. Ever since, when planning out projects, I never ask for a deadline between January 1 and April 1. You hit mid-November and it’s almost impossible to get writing done and then you look up and it’s January 10 and you have a deadline in a month. Awful.)

And it’s still in print, which is great. It still sells well, which is even better.

 Loyola wanted a book of saints for children and they were familiar with my column-writing, so they invited me to do this.  I struggled a while with the organization.  I really wanted to make it different from other saints books, which are either organized chronologically through history, chronologically through the liturgical year, or alphabetically.  I wanted a more compelling, interesting organizational principle.  So was born the “Saints are people who….” sections, as you can see below.

Good for read-alouds from about age 5 on, independent reading (depending on child) from about 8 on. The emphasis is on helping children see the connection between their own journey to holiness and the saints’.

Saints Are People Who Create
St. Hildegard of Bingen,Blessed Fra Angelico,St. John of the Cross,Blessed Miguel Pro

Saints Are People Who Teach Us New Ways to Pray
St. Benedict,St. Dominic de Guzman,St. Teresa of Avila,St. Louis de Monfort

Saints Are People Who See Beyond the Everyday
St. Juan Diego, St. Frances of Rome, St. Bernadette Soubirous, Blessed Padre Pio

Saints Are People Who Travel From Home
St. Boniface, St. Peter Claver, St. Francis Xavier, St. Francis Solano, St. Francis Xavier Cabrini

Saints Are People Who Are Strong Leaders
St. Helena, St. Leo the Great, St. Wenceslaus, St. John Neumann

Saints Are People Who Tell The Truth
St. Polycarp, St. Thomas Becket, St. Thomas More, Blessed Titus Brandsma

Saints Are People Who Help Us Understand God
St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Jerome, St. Patrick, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Edith Stein

Saints Are People Who Change Their Lives for God
St. Ambrose, St. Gregory the Great, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Camillus de Lellis, St. Katharine Drexel

Saints Are People Who Are Brave
St. Perpetua and St. Felicity, St. George, St. Margaret Clitherow, St. Isaac Jogues, The Carmelite Nuns of Compiegne, St. Maximilian Kolbe

Saints Are People Who Help the Poor and Sick
St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Martin de Porres, Blessed Joseph de Veuster

Saints Are People Who Help In Ordinary Ways
St. Christopher, St. Blaise, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Bernard of Montjoux

Saints Are People Who Come From All Over the World
Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, St. Paul Miki, Blessed Peter To Rot, Blessed Maria Clementine Anuarite Nengapeta

If you have used this (or the Book of Heroes) in any setting – especially the classroom – and have found it useful, would you write a testimony to that fact? 

We are working on a marketing push for fall 2017, and I thought it would be great to have blurbs from people who have actually used the books. So if you are a parent, librarian, catechist or classroom teacher, have something to offer and are willing to have your name and institution used in marketing materials, please send me an email – amywelborn60 – at – gmail.com – and I will pass it on to Loyola.

 

Thanks so much!

 

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St. Teresa of Calcutta

The full text of Pope Francis’ homily:

Following Jesus is a serious task, and, at the same time, one filled with joy; it takes a certain daring and courage to recognize the divine Master in the poorest of the poor and to give oneself in their service.  In order to do so, volunteers, who out of love of Jesus serve the poor and the needy, do not expect any thanks or recompense; rather they renounce all this because they have discovered true love.  Just as the Lord has come to meet me and has stooped down to my level in my hour of need, so too do I go to meet him, bending low before those who have lost faith or who live as though God did not exist, before young people without values or ideals, before families in crisis, before the ill and the imprisoned, before refugees and immigrants, before the weak and defenceless in body and spirit, before abandoned children, before the elderly who are on their own.  Wherever someone is reaching out, asking for a helping hand in order to get up, this is where our presence – and the presence of the Church which sustains and offers hope – must be.

Mother Teresa, in all aspects of her life, was a generous dispenser of divine mercy, making herself available for everyone through her welcome and defence of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded.  She was committed to defending life, ceaselessly proclaiming that “the unborn are the weakest, the smallest, the most vulnerable”.   She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity; she made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crime of poverty they created.  For Mother Teresa, mercy was the “salt” which gave flavour to her work, it was the “light” which shone in the darkness of the many who no longer had tears to shed for their poverty and suffering.

 

The articles at Angelus News – the Archdiocese of Los Angeles – are all very good, including this one by David Scott.

One of the most telling aspects of the Missionaries of Charity is how challenging it is to find information about their present activities online. They do not have a dynamic, smooth online brand or platform, they are not on social media, and it is even hard to just find a list of their locations. In fact, it’s impossible. This is the best I could do – on a web page devoted to volunteering with the MOC.  

I was interested in finding out if and how local news covered the MOC in their area in light of the canonization. It wasn’t an exhaustive search, but here’s some of what I found:

In Washington, DC:

At the Missionaries of Charity facility in Northeast Washington, he now helps care for 51 ill and aging men and women alongside 34 nuns and nuns-in-training. It is a place apart from the rest of Washington, secluded from curious neighbors by expansive gardens. And it is a place suffused with veneration for Mother Teresa, who will become a saint in the Catholic Church on Sunday….

…When their founder officially becomes Saint Teresa of Calcutta at a canonization Mass at the Vatican on Sunday, her nuns will celebrate all over the world – including in the District, where they maintain a presence in three locations.

There’s a contemplative order, a few nuns devoted to prayer, not works. There’s a facility the nuns operate for homeless single mothers in Washington’s Anacostia neighborhood. And there’s the nursing home, on a hill overlooking in the Woodridge neighborhood, near the District’s eastern border.

NYC:

The sisters live in a brick building with a banner of St. Teresa’s centennial stamp from 2010 hanging outside the front of the home facing a housing project. The sisters live without computers and wash their clothes by hand. They avoid pageantry for the good they do—rarely granting interviews or permitting media to enter the convent.

“We’re doing God’s will for us because this is our vocation,” said Sister Clare, who entered the Missionaries of Charity in 1979.

“We will only have true joy and peace when we do what God wants. So we’re called to this life and God has given us the grace to live this life. When this is your vocation, you receive a joy to be with the poor. It is true there are many sacrifices, but also many joys. If we live it, we will have joy.”…

 

…Past the garden, an entrance to a soup kitchen and homeless shelter awaits. Some 80 men and women, sitting at tables in separate rooms, are led in prayer before enjoying an early lunch of pasta with pie or cake for dessert.

Painted in royal blue, the walls of the eating area sport pictures including ones of St. Teresa and another of Jesus at the Last Supper as well as prayers such as the Hail Mary written on poster-size paper. Upstairs from the eating area is the homeless shelter for 18 men, who arrive at 4 p.m. and leave before 6 a.m. Two volunteers oversee the shelter at night.

“The sisters are really kind and wonderful to the volunteers. They are helping the poor with food and clothes as well as their spiritual lives,” said Cesar Mateos, a teacher for children with special needs in Spain who was volunteering in the Bronx for the month.

Norristown, PA:

Mother Teresa herself founded the house in 1984 — one of 17 in a division that covers the Northeastern United States and Eastern Canada — at the request of the local archbishop.

Since that time, a rotating group of four sisters has lived in the house and fulfilled the vows of the order: chastity, poverty, obedience and free service to the poorest of the poor.

“All our work is immediate service,” said Sister Regis. “We are not going for continuous work, that someone else can do. Today the person is hungry, today the person has no place to stay.”

Along with an army of volunteers from are Catholic parishes, the order runs a soup kitchen that serves lunch most days. The community also operates an emergency women’s shelter with 16 beds and holds Sunday school for children. The sisters are also missionaries, providing services in tandem with evangelizing and prayer.

San Francisco (story is from 2015)

Six days a week the Missionaries of Charity and volunteers serve a home-cooked dinner to about 100-150 mostly homeless people, many of whom live near or under the freeway that passes over the intersection of Potrero Avenue and Cesar Chavez Street in San Francisco. The Missionaries cook the meal at their home at 55 Sadowa, near St. Michael’s Korean Church. They serve the food around 4 p.m. every day but Thursday, the sisters’ dedicated day of prayer. The tables are set up just outside the fence of the ballfield at James Rolph Playground. The sisters help in many ways, including cutting fingernails and trimming beards and hair.
The Missionaries of Charity, founded by Blessed Teresa of Calcutta in 1950, came to San Francisco in 1982, when Blessed Teresa established a novitiate in a convent adjacent to St. Paul Church. Shortly afterward, the Missionaries opened a hospice for AIDS patients, the Gift of Love, now located in Pacifica, and a home for pregnant women, Queen of Peace.

And finally, in Kentucky. If you click through to any of these stories, include this o Kentucky. If you click through to any of these stories, include this one. I had no idea there was a Missionaries of Charity foundation in rural eastern Kentucky:

Typical days include about six hours of visiting with the sick and needy.

Among those who received a visit from the sisters on Tuesday were Carol and Roy Church.

Roy has a number of health problems and is recovering from recent foot surgery. As he reclined on a small bed in the front room of their home, Sister Suma Rani took a peek at his dressings.

“Time to cut,” she told Carol Church, pointing to the long nail on Roy’s big toe. “Be careful.”

They chatted about how each member of the family was doing, the coyotes that howl at night and the bear that ambled across the family’s front yard.

The nuns offered a bit of advice about a struggling teenager and, before they left, they prayed.

“That’s the best part,” Carol Church said.

She said the nuns have given them food, helped get repairs made to their ceiling and floor and cared for their children at their summer Bible camp.

“They have done so much for us,” she said. “They do for everybody around here.”

 

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7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Looks like Fall Project is definitely a go. I’ll start work in earnest next week, with a deadline of mid-November.

— 2 —

It’s September! That means if you are in parish, school  or diocesan ministry you are definitely thinking about Advent now. Well, think about this – the daily devotional I wrote for Liguori Press. It will be available in a month, and in Spanish, too. So check it out and spread the word. 

. — 3 —

 

School’s going fine. Cuneiform tablets are being made by some, element symbols being memorized by others, and I think life is starting to flow a little more smoothly now. We do need this weekend, though.

(Via snapchat – amywelborn2)

 

 — 4 —

Recent reads:

Tonight I dashed through Maugham’s novella Up at the Villa. It’s slight, melodramatic, with rather unbelievable stock characters doing foolish (and worse) things. Obviously not Maugham’s best, but not a waste of an hour of my life, Vols and Hoosiers winning in the background.

They made a movie of it back in 2000 starring Kristin Scott Thomas (I saw that and I thought..of course) and Sean Pean (What?).  From the trailer, it looks dreadful and A.O. Scott says as much in his review. The trailer also tells me that the film goes in a slightly different direction that Maugham’s story, but life is too short for me to bother to find out why or how.

— 5 —

Earlier in the week, I read another Mauriac I checked out of the library – The Frontenacs which seems to be called The Frontenac Mystery in most English language editions.  The Frontenacs are a family, and while they are, as is usually the case in Mauriac, flawed and limited  by money and propriety concerns, the takeaway here is a bit less mournful than usual. Unfortunately, that means that the book itself feels lighter, the characters more sketchily drawn and the ultimate sentiment more…sentimental. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are determined to Read All the Mauriac.

Weekend reading will be The Razor’s Edge. 

(Go to a post earlier this week on The Good Companions, if you are interested.)

— 6–

If you want a long, jaw-dropping read, take a look at this LA Times series (running through Saturday) about the Stanford Law-graduate married couple who planted drugs in the PTA president’s car because they decided she’d dissed their son in aftercare.

 

— 7 —

 

I was poking around looking for some historical material on ad orientem and related matters and ran across this archive of the Catholic Northwest Progress newspaper (Archdiocese of Seattle). There are any number of reasons you might find it interesting, but I was looking for what people were told about the Mass changes and how they were reported. For that, look in the issues of late 1964-1965.

Interested in Mother Teresa material? Here’s my blog post on her – and what I wrote about her in the Loyola Kids Book of Heroes – from earlier this week. 

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!

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Mother Teresa

As you know, Mother Teresa is being canonized this coming Sunday, September 5.

(In case you didn’t know and thought that had already happened…well, no)

I’ve pulled material from several old posts together and gather them here. Some links were dead, but what’s still alive I share with you.

First, for children. I wrote about Mother Teresa in the Loyola Kids’ Book of Heroes. 

You can read most of the entry here, at the Loyola site – they have a great section on saints’ stories arranged according to the calendar year. Some of the stories they have posted are from my books, some from other Loyola Press saints’ books.

When we think about the difference that love can make, many people very often think of one person: Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. A tiny woman, just under five feet tall, with no tools except prayer, love, and the unique qualities God had given her, Mother Teresa is probably the most powerful symbol of the virtue of charity for people today.

Mother Teresa wasn’t, of course, born with that name. Her parents named her Agnes—or Gonxha in her own language—when she was born to them in Albania, a country north of Greece.

Agnes was one of four children. Her childhood was a busy, ordinary one. Although Agnes was very interested in missionary work around the world, as a child she didn’t really think about becoming a nun; but when she turned 18, she felt that God was beginning to tug at her heart, to call her, asking her to follow him.

Now Agnes, like all of us, had a choice. She could have ignored the tug on her heart. She could have filled her life up with other things so maybe she wouldn’t hear God’s call. But of course, she didn’t do that. She listened and followed, joining a religious order called the Sisters of Loreto, who were based in Dublin, Ireland.

Nine years ago (was it really that long?? Yes..), when the excerpts from Mother Teresa’s journal detailing her “dark night” were published, I wrote several posts. All have links to other commentary.

The first is here.  One of the articles I linked there was this 2003 First Things piece.

A second post, in which I wrote:

My first post on the story of Mother Teresa’s decades-long struggle with spiritual darkness struck some as “dismissive,” and for that I apologize. That particular reaction was against the press coverage – not the Time article, but the subsequent filtering that I just knew would be picked up as a shocking new revelation and used by two groups to promote their own agendas: professional atheists (per the Hitchens reaction in the Time piece itself) and fundamentalist Protestants, who would take her lack of “blessed assurance” emotions as a sure sign that Catholicism was, indeed, far from being Christian.  Michael Spencer at Internet Monk had to issue a warning to his commentors on his Mother Teresa post, for example, that he wouldn’t be posting comments declaring that Roman Catholics weren’t Christian.

So that was my point in the “not news” remark. Because the simple fact of the dark night isn’t – not in terms of Mother Teresa herself or in terms of Catholic understanding and experience of spirituality.  It is very good that this book and the coverage has made this more widely known to people who were previously unaware of either the specifics or the general, and it is one more gift of Mother Teresa to the world, a gift she gave out of her own tremendous suffering. What strikes me is once again, at its best, taken as a whole, how honest Catholicism is about life, and our life with God. There is all of this room within Catholicism for every human experience of God, with no attempt to gloss over it or try to force every individual’s experience into a single mold of emotion or reaction.

In that post, I linked to Anthony Esolen at Touchstone:

Dubiety is inseparable from the human condition.  We must waver, because our knowledge comes to us piecemeal, sequentially, in time, mixed up with the static of sense impressions that lead us both toward and away from the truth we try to behold steadily.  The truths of faith are more certain than the truths arrived by rational deduction, says Aquinas, because the revealer of those truths speaks with ultimate authority, but they are less certain subjectively, from the point of view of the finite human being who receives them yet who does not, on earth, see them with the same clarity as one sees a tree or a stone or a brook.  It should give us Christians pause to consider that when Christ took upon himself our mortal flesh, he subjected himself to that same condition.  He did not doubt; His faith was steadfast; yet He did feel, at that most painful of moments upon the Cross, what it was like to be abandoned by God.  He was one with us even in that desert, a desert of suffering and love.  Nor did the Gospel writers — those same whom the world accuses on Monday of perpetrating the most ingenious literary and theological hoax in history, and on Tuesday of being dimwitted and ignorant fishermen, easily suggestible — refuse to tell us of that moment.

     In her love of Christ — and the world does not understand Christ, and is not too bright about love, either — Mother Teresa did not merely take up His cross and follow him.  She was nailed to that Cross with him. 

Another post with more links to commentary.

And one more.

A reminder, too, as I pointed out last week, that the very attractive-looking website on “Mother Teresa in the United States” created by the US Embassy to the Vatican does not include any links to, much less text of, her most well-known US-related moment: her speech at the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast in which she excoriated the sin of abortion in the presence of the Clintons and Gores.

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7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Working….well, I was going to say “hard,” but that would be a lie. I am working though. It looks like my Fall Project will definitely be a go – no contract yet, but as soon as I see that and get some feedback on the samples I will send next week, my days will be busy until 11/1 (my proposed turn-in date), so I’m feeling okay about taking it a little easy right now.

 

— 2 —

I took a brief afternoon trip to our Birmingham Museum of Art earlier this week. It’s free, a few minutes from my house, so why not, right?

I was a little melancholy, though, because the BMA was such an important part of our homeschooling – it being free and all, did I mention? Something about going there, especially with my youngest, would prompt a flood of conversation, musing and wondering as we looked at new pieces and pieces we’d looked at many times before.

Well, buck up, I told myself. It’s not as if the place closes at 3 pm on Friday and you can never come here with the kids again. The moment reminded me once again that I can take the Homeschool Lifestyle (which is what it is) with us even now – I just have to be more intentional about it, that’s all.

Anyway, it was a pleasant hour. I took a pad of paper, intending to just find a place to sit and sketch out some ideas. Which I did. But only after turning a corner and being a little startled by this exhibit:

 

 

 

 

— 3 —

The US Embassy to the Holy See has put up a great-looking website on “Mother Teresa in the United States.” 

How nice of them!

Now, when you think of Mother Teresa in the United States, what do you think of? What pops into my mind, right off, is her 1994 speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, the Clintons and Gores in attendance, in which she said,

But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.

And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.

By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems.

And, by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion.

Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that for most people, this is the most well-remembered “Mother Teresa in America” moment.

Is it mentioned on this website produced by the US Embassy to the Vatican? Well, the speech at the prayer breakfast is on the timeline, but unlike the other events, the timeline does not offer hyperlinks to any contemporary news accounts of it, much less to the actual text of the speech or video , all of which are available.

Such a puzzle.

 — 4 —

As many of you know, Bishop Robert Barron has a new video series – Pivotal Players – coming out soon. I wrote a prayer book companion to the series – I assume it is coming out soon, but I don’t know. Here’s a bit of information on it. 

— 5 —

Really good article on the decline in translated children’s books. Those European comics have absorbed my boys’ attention for more time than I can recount. TinTin, Asterix & Lucky Luke are favorites.

Last year I published a reference book, The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. When I set out, I knew I wanted to talk about a whole world of children’s books. But it turns out that most of the whole world is hard to find nowadays. I included entries on those foreign books that enriched the old canon: The Little Prince,Astrid Lindgren, the Brothers Grimm, and all the rest. They made us readers, these books—they made a lot of us writers, too. But they came to English 40, 60, 100 years ago—where’s all the stuff that’s happened since?

I recently went to a major London bookshop, a good one, and did some counting. I found 2,047 children’s books, of which 2,018 were by English-language writers and 29 were translations. Of those 29, the number of living writers represented was … 6.

Is this because nobody else in the world is writing anything for children worth reading? Well, even if you argue that the Anglophone world is atypical for the number and quality and—by some metrics—the variety of its children’s books, still it seems improbable. Six point seven billion people in the world whose first language isn’t English, and none of them are writing good children’s books? Nobody but us—however you choose to define that problematic “us”—has a story worth telling?

— 6–

Want to listen to podcasts about something other than people rambling on about their personal lives? Here’s a list of good history podcasts. I’d add – of course – In Our Time, which is by far the best, which I can say even though I’ve not listened to many of the others.

— 7 —

It’s always great to see others enjoying books you’ve recommended. That happened twice this week!  Eve Tushnet had a great post on Muriel Sparks The Girls of Slender Means, and Jeff Miller tweeted on his enjoyment of the very funny and amazingly still timely The Sun-Cure. 

Recently read The Sun Cure, a 1929 novel by Alfred Noyes. So good, fun, and wise. See @amywelborn2 review here.https://t.co/ZogimgWXLy

— Jeff Miller (@CurtJester) August 23, 2016

 

 

 

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!

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