7 Quick Takes

—1 —

First off, new book this week – the Great Adventure Kids Catholic Bible Chronicle. More on it here.

— 2 —

Today? A funeral. No, not for anyone I know – Musician Son is playing organ at a funeral in a parish across town. Blessed Sacrament, which is, in my mind, the most beautiful church in this diocese. It’s the home of the main Latin Mass community.

(Forgive the Instagram captions – from Thursday’s practice.)

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— 3 —

Here’s a page with the parish’s history. Construction was finished in 1930, but the interior decor dates to the mid-1950’s.

— 4 —

Last night we headed to our local independent film venue, Sidewalk Film, to see The Killing of Two Lovers produced by and starring Clayne Crawford, who was a featured role in one of the best television series of the decade, Rectify. He also had an ill-fated stint on the television reboot of Lethal Weapon, co-starring Daman Wayans from which he was, er, fired.

Crawford is from Alabama – Clay, which is east of here. And he was there at the screening and did a Q & A afterwards – which is why I wanted to go and take, especially, one of the two still living here, who has a strong interest in film and filmmaking. And it was worth it – this was an extremely low-budget production (30K) filmed over 12 days in a tiny town in Utah – and most valuable was Crawford’s exploration of the limits – but also the benefits – of working on a shoestring.

— 5 –

I’m going to have some Catholic-related Juneteenth content coming up later today, I hope. But until then, here’s a link from 2019 featuring interviews conducted by the Federal Writer’s Project/ WPA in the 1930’s, with formerly enslaved people – the article ran in the Montgomery paper on Jefferson Davis’ birthday that year, a day which, absurdly, is still celebrated as a state holiday in Alabama.

— 6 —

Here’s more about the project from the Atlantic.

— 7 —

Okay, let’s end with this. As much hate as I direct towards social media, yeah, yeah, I know good can come of it. Lots of good. Of course!

Here’s an example – a local (Birmingham area) young woman who fosters teens. Her TikTok is a treasure trove of advocacy and information – her philosophy about fostering teens, what she does, how she provides for them, why she fosters and lots of encouragement to others. Really worth checking out – the world is full of folks doing really good things for other humans. To the extent that social media can share their good news – okay, okay, it can be a good thing. I guess.

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Followers and Loads of Kudzu

I read two novels this week – in print! Thank you, libraries!

The first, Blackwood , by Michael Farris Smith, is a Southern Gothic type novel that didn’t quite work for me.  The central, driving tension did: how we cope with what we have done and what we have failed to do – and what has been done to us. Basically (and I’ll say it outright, since it’s the opening scene of the book) – a man, who, as a boy, witnessed his father’s last moments of life, a suicide. (But I’ll hold something back here, since its reveal is a good, jolting shock) – He spends his life wondering about his own role and bearing wounds of childhood trauma that even precedes his father’s death.

And I’ll say, that the way in which all of this circles around at the end is, indeed, grace-filled and redemptive, and even surprisingly so.

But the other part of the story is gothic, haunted, creepy, with kudzu as the metaphor and strange, damaged, damaging people doing strange deeds under the vines. Life is being choked out, the doings are hidden, and, it seems, nothing short of burning it all down will rid the world of the evil.

I mean, okay. And it was pretty readable, albeit sad, but the Gothic-ness was a little labored for me.

So let’s move on to Followers, which was more interesting, but flawed as well.

Here, we jump between time zones, so to speak: the recent past (2015/6) and the future (2051). In the recent past, we focus on Orla and Floss – one aspiring writer, stuck on a celebrity blog who believes she can and will do better and more, and the other an aspiring celebrity with all of the self-regard and conniving that aspiring celebrities generally have. And so, they join forces in order to reach those planets of fame and fortune.

In the future, we have Marlow, who has been raised in a place called Constellation, which is essentially a 24-hour Land of Social Media, where everyone’s lives are lived online, so to speak, in front of millions of followers.

Somewhere in between the two eras was a mysterious (for most of the book) disaster referred to as “The Spill” – which seemed to have wiped out the internet and the means of communication and information sharing that we know today, and the reaction to which scared everyone off the Internet,  which then allowed the government to step in and take control of it all. The Spill and the aftermath also made devices as we know them today, obsolete – replacing them with “Devices” that are implanted in the wrist and feed everything – thoughts, information, images – directly to the brain, confusing the individual as to what he or she is generating and what’s coming from outside.

Pretty complicated, but it mostly works, although I felt it was a bit long. Author Megan Angelo casts a healthy critical eye over the power of social media and the Internet, and what it does to us as individuals and the kind of culture it builds and supports.

Ellis thought so, too. “Hold on!” he said, waving his hands. “Save it, Mar. This is your authentic reaction to becoming a mother. You’ve gotta share it with your followers.” He opened the bathroom door and prodded her out, to where she could be seen. 

It’s about the hunger to influence, to matter in a big way, to feel important, and to do so by getting people interested in you or your narrative. I think the novel does a good job of exploring this in an imaginative way, skewering what highly merits being skewered, but there’s a missing piece. The focus is on characters who hunger for the influence –  but just as interesting to me is what makes that possible: the hunger to be influenced. What drives, not just those who want followers, but the followers themselves. That’s the other part of the dynamic and it could use some skewering, too.

But for the most part, Followers is a pretty entertaining, sharp look at the power of the Internet and social media, and how stupid it all is, and how, in the end, it distances us from the Real – as in this really quite beautiful and true passage:

Where could Marlow possibly be, besides, where she’d been told to go?

Here. Here, cutting through choppy, silt-filled water, away from all of them and closer to the truth. Marlow had been taught that being watched put food on the table, that there wasn’t a better way to live. But she had seen, on the sidewalks of New York, all the happy nobodies — people whose days weren’t built around lengthening the trail of attention spans floating behind them. They were paunchy and muttering and somehow more alive, and they made Marlow feel sorry for Floss and Ellis, with their endless performing, and Honey, with her army of dark-hearted disciples. They might have had all the followers, but they were never finished chasing.

Marlow was done being looked at. Now she was doing the looking, and finally seeing things differently. She found, in the sunrise, all the colors the pills had kept from her for years: a shade of orange she loved. A yellow that reminded her of when it was her favorite. A pink that might have been fine after all. She was hearing something, too, in the space her device used to fill: a brand-new voice inside her head, telling her to keep going. 

She leaned over the boat’s railing, into the spray, and listened to the voice. She was almost positive it sounded like herself. 

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7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Well, here we are, just about one week and counting from, we hope, The Return to College. Out of five classes, all but one will be (as far as we can tell) face-to-face, and I don’t mind paying for that.

What a ride.

So, next week: Hopefully get his old car sold (anyone in Alabama want a 2006 Mazda Miata?) get serious about lists and shopping and such. I’m not anxious about it because he’ll have a car with him and in case he needs toothpaste, he can just pop out to Wal-Mart and…go get some. There isn’t that concern to Buy All The Things because he won’t be able to restock for weeks or months.

But we do want to get most of the stuff before we go. Added to the usual this year: Masks? Check. Sanitizer? Check. Thermometer? Check. Etc. He has all of this textbooks. He’ll be in a single room, so no roommate concerns, and that also lessens the Pandemic Prevention Pressure.

— 2 —

I’m in Living Faith today. Here ’tis. 

Before this – here. 

— 3 —

My new favorite Twitter account. Language alert, blah, blah, blah.

 — 4 —

Working hard here, every day. Process?

In the evening, take a look at the material to be written about the next day. Read any unfamiliar Scripture passages. Let it simmer.

Get up the next morning, first thing revise the two or three chunks written the day before. Then write two-three new chunks.

Done by 10 am, usually.

Onward!

— 5 —

In case you missed it earlier this week:

I’ll Fly Away – The Sister Servants from Sister Servants on Vimeo.

Learn more about the Sister Servants here. 

 

— 6–

Here’s a really excellent article on Hemingway and O’Connor, turning on the imagery of blood and yes, bulls. It’s very, very good. 

It is also noteworthy here that Mrs. May is described as being “pierced”—that word associated with suffering and with the cross—and that the piercing coincides with a kind or rapture or “ecstasy,” a word whose Greek root means “to stand outside of oneself” and suggests a transcendence of self. O’Connor’s heroine is cast as a modern-day version of Bernini’s St. Teresa in Ecstasy, who is pierced, in the midst of her visionary rapture, by a visiting angel.

Along similar lines, Hemingway associates the violence of the bullring with ecstasy, particularly the faena—the final third of the bullfight wherein the matador performs his capework with the bull before killing him. In Death in the Afternoon he writes of this rapture, describing the faena as a ritual

That takes a man out of himself and makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding, that gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy; moving all the people in the ring together . . . in a growing ecstasy of ordered, formal, passionate, increasing disregard for death (206-207).

The ecstasy O’Connor and Hemingway describe—and that Bernini depicts— is the culmination of intense bodily sensation leading to enlightenment of the soul. The natural leads to the supernatural. Time becomes one with eternity. Suffering is redeemed. It is mystical, transcendent, and deeply Catholic.

The uses of violence by both Hemingway and O’Connor remind us of the reality human life is grounded in: we are all living “on the verge of eternity” (O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 114), and the way we conduct our lives in the here and now has a spiritual dimension. Violence reminds us of our unceasing proximity to death, and this knowledge can serve as a conduit to grace.

 

— 7 —

Tomorrow? St. Dominic, here in the Loyola Kids’ Book of Saints.  Only a page is available  online, so here it is. He’s in “Saints are people who teach us new ways to pray” section.

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7 Quick Takes

—1 —

One outing this week: to Noccacula Falls, which is in Gadsden, about an hour away. It’s off I-59, which is the interstate you’d take if you were going from here to Chattanooga or Knoxville.

We’d been several years ago – so long, Kid #5 had no recollection of it. (Kid #4 was working). That time, however, I think we just did a brief stop on our way somewhere else and just looked at the falls from above – we didn’t venture down on the Gorge trail, which allows you to go behind the falls.

We did this time.

A very nice day. The weather’s been really pleasant this week – lows in the actual low 60’s, which is quite unusual and surely won’t last.

For video, go to Instagram.

— 2 —

Movies this week:

Master and Commander – none of us had ever seen it before. A great movie, quite rousing, must have been spectacular on the big screen. It’s a real shame no more were ever made.

But…speaking of Russell Crowe…have you seen the trailer for his new movie? It looks ridiculously insane. 

And he looks…different.

— 3 —

Then Hobson’s Choice. What a wonderful movie. I’d seen it long ago, when – perhaps a few of you remember – some PBS stations would run Janus Films on Saturday nights. Anyway, although some regular television stations ran older films late night or on weekends and the networks still broadcast made-for-theater movies (NBC Monday Night at the Movies!), what they showed was very mainstream, of course. By the time I was in high school, cable had come into our world – WTBS and WGN mostly, in those early days, and they showed movies. But never any art house or foreign films.

So….those Saturday night Janus Films on the Knoxville PBS stations …that was where I first saw Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, The Four Hundred Blows, M,  La Strada, Metropolis and so many others.

Here’s a contemporary article about PBS purchasing the rights to broadcast these films. 

And yes, Janus Films still exists as a rightsholder and distributor.

— 4 —

And oh yes, Hobson’s Choice. The only place it was streaming was through HBOMax, so I grabbed a 7-day free trial (remind me to cancel it on Tuesday, will you?) and got it rolling.

Based on an early 20th century play, starring Charles Laughton, Brenda de Banzie and John Mills and of course directed by David Lean, it’s a marvelous, easy comedy with a strong female lead and a charming love story based, initially, not on passion or even initially much attraction – but built on mutual respect (and, okay,  a little fear) and partnership. John Mills bracing himself for his wedding night – and the transformation that comes the morning after – is very funny and illustrative of how to express true things about sex and marriage in subtle, artful – and comedic – ways.

 

— 5 –

Next movies? Not sure. We only have a couple of days before people head off for a little visit to family, so we must choose wisely. I’m leaning towards The Man in the White Suit and Wages of Fear. 

Quite a change, isn’t it, from forty years ago, when, besides those Janus Films, the best we could get was a commercial-laden, chopped up showing of His Girl Friday on a Saturday afternoon.

— 6 —

 

The cover of the edition that’s in my memory from my parents’ shelves.

Over this past week, I read Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene for the first time. There won’t be another time. It’s definitely my least favorite Greene, although, being a Greene, it’s not an unpleasant read. I suppose I prefer my Greene with a bit more politics and a little less wacky female character. A couple of passages worth remembering:

I met my Aunt August for the first time in more than half a century at my mother’s funeral. My mother was approaching eighty-six when she died, and my aunt was some eleven or twelve years younger. I had retired from the bank two years before with an adequate pension and a silver handshake. There had been a take-over by the Westminster and my branch was considered redundant. Everyone thought me lucky, but I found it difficult to occupy my time. I have never married, I have always lived quietly, and, apart from my interest in dahlias, I have no hobby. For those reasons I found myself agreeably excited by my mother’s funeral.

 

“Are you really a Roman Catholic?’ I asked my aunt with interest.

She replied promptly and seriously, ‘Yes, my dear, only I just don’t believe in all the things they believe in.’ ”

 

“But surely you must have despised the man after all he had done to you?“
We were crossing the long aqueduct through the lagoons which leads to Venice-Mestre, but there were no signs of the beautiful city, only tall chimneys with pale gas flames hardly visible in the late-afternoon sunlight. I was not expecting my aunt’s outburst.
She turned on me with real fury as though I were a child who had carelessly broken some vase she had cherished over the years for its beauty and the memories it contained. “I despise no one,” she said, “no one. Regret your own actions, if you like that kind of wallowing self-pity, but never, never despise. Never presume yours is a better morality.”

 

In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness. So Dickens’s wife and mistress had to suffer so that dickens could make his novels and his fortune. At least a bank manager’s money is not so tainted by egotism. Mine was not a destructive profession. A bank manager doesn’t leave a trail of the martyred behind him.

And then, what sums up the entire book, beginning with a childhood memory:

I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and fires and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert.

(The last is a reference to a dahlia that had not flourished under his care, and had therefore been a source of disappointment to him.)

— 7 —

Today is the solemnity of  the Sacred Heart of Jesus

In a time and culture in which hardly any of us understand what love actually is, in which dehumanizing hate and contempt dominate public discourse, a daily prayer (you can find some here) focused simply on love might just have surprising power.

In a church culture which often reflects contemporary values that emphasize achievement and self-actualization and fulfillment by doing the Next Big Amazing Thing in Your Very Big Amazing Life, a daily prayer centered on opening ourselves to sharing the love pouring forth from the heart of Jesus in just ordinary ways might provide a welcome refocus as we get our bearings for summer.

Here are the pages on the Sacred Heart from The Loyola Kids Book of Catholic Signs and Symbols. 

Click on each image for a larger version.

More about the book – and the others in the series – here. 

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EPSON MFP image

Tomorrow (June 20) is the memorial of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin:

From The Loyola Kids Book of Catholic Signs and Symbols. 

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7 Quick Takes

—1 —

Well, that was interesting. Somehow, this post went viral, as we say, yesterday, with thousands more hits than I usually get around here. Very odd. I still don’t know why or how.

This also got a big bump, mostly because Ross Douthat retweeted a reference to it. Just glad to get the message out there!

Click back for other posts – on how 9th grade homeschooling ended up and on season 2 of Fargo. 

The other “extended reach” story of the week involved musician son-in-law, who had a song featured at the end of Tony Kornheiser’s podcast. 

— 2 —

The Real Lord of the Flies. A fascinating piece.

 

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”

They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).

Much more hopeful turn of events than in the novel.

— 3 —

America ran a very nice piece on Wyoming Catholic College:

The first class every student takes is an introduction to the Experiential Leadership Program, ELP 101. In the summer before the start of the new school year, freshmen take a wilderness first aid course, then embark on a 21-day backpacking trip in the Wyoming backcountry. Like most everything at W.C.C., the course is grounded in Western philosophy. “The term ‘gymnastic,’” the Philosophical Vision Statement of the college reads, “comes from the Greek gymnos, meaning ‘naked.’ Gymnastics, broadly speaking, refers to the naked or direct experience of reality.” Through their direct encounter with the grandeur of nature, the founders believed, students would grow in virtue.

Students continue their outdoor education all four years at W.C.C.: a week of winter camping after the first Christmas break; week-long hiking, rafting or rock-climbing excursions once a semester; and a required course in horsemanship. But it is the 21-day trip that forms the foundation of what will follow in and out of the classroom.

“There’s nothing more empowering than when those students can go backpacking in wolf country and grizzly bear country by themselves without an instructor,” Mr. Zimmer says. “And that allows them to know that [when they take] the final they’re going to have in humanities or Euclid or Latin, they’re going to be fine. Just like their 21-day trip, they have to put effort and energy and time into their training.”

Ms. Stypa agrees. “There are so many nights out there where you’re freezing or it’s raining, and your sleeping bag got wet and someone has a blister that needs to get taken care of. And it’s 11 p.m. and you’re supposed to get up at 6 a.m., and it’s just hard,” she says. “That toughness that it gives you sticks with you when you come back into the semester when you’re slammed by paper after paper.”

She also described a more subtle connection to the classroom. “You’re just thrust into the wilderness, into the mountains and these mountain lakes, snow and wildlife and lightning storms. It’s terrifying, and it’s beautiful,” she says. “And then we come back, and we study poetry, and we talk about ancient Greece and ancient Rome. And I think you really draw on your experience and fill your imagination as you’re reading the Great Books.”
Jason Baxter, an associate professor of fine arts and humanities, also finds a deep resonance between the freshmen expedition and the Great Books curriculum. “There’s something severely beautiful about ancient texts, which are not trying to accommodate us in any way,” he tells me over tea at Crux, the corner coffee shop staffed by students and frequented by faculty and local residents alike. “And there’s something fascinatingly analogous to the Wyoming landscape, which is severely beautiful but does not exist in order to accommodate human beings. Without railroads or now interstates, we would not be here.”

 

— 4 —

You know the tune Tuxedo Junction? 

Well….Tuxedo Junction is actually here in Birmingham, Alabama. I did not know that until this week.

The second floor of the Belcher-Nixon building located in Ensley was the dance hall and center of all The Junction happenings. Many talented performers hailing from Birmingham got their beginnings by entertaining there.

Among these was the acclaimed musician and performer Erskine Hawkins. In 1939, Hawkins released the Birmingham favorite “Tuxedo Junction” in honor of his hometown. He writes about the magical place that he can count on to raise his spirits, where he can lose himself by dancing the jive all night to his favorite jazz.

 

— 5 –

A really, really good piece on fear and faith, taking off from Cyprian or Carthage’s work On Mortality – written in a time of plague. 

The paradoxical nature of a Christian view of life and death shows up remarkably in Cyprian of Carthage’s treatise On Mortality. Written only a few years after he became bishop in 248, in the midst of a ravenous plague that nearly destroyed the Roman Empire, Cyprian reflects on what it means for Christians to be alive to God, and so not to fear death.

The plague broke out in Egypt around 249 (the “exotic” East for a Roman) and had reached Carthage by 250 or 251. Historian Kyle Harper suggests either pandemic influenza (like the Spanish Flu) or a viral hemorrhagic fever (like Ebola). Ancient sources say that it could have carried away 5,000 persons a day, decimating the population by as much as 60% in some cities. Another source says that it seemed to spread through contact with clothing or even simply by eyesight. It is often called “The Plague of Cyprian” because it is the Carthaginian bishop who provides one of the most graphic accounts of its effects: severe diarrhea (“As the strength of the body is dissolved, the bowels dissipate in a flow”), fever (“a fire that begins in the inmost depths, in the marrow, burns up into wounds in the throat”), and incessant, “intestine-rattling” vomiting (§14). In some cases, a person’s hands or feet were putrefied to the point of falling off, resulting in disfigurement or a loss of hearing and sight.

It was not a physical loss of sight, however, that worried Cyprian most. It was rather a loss of spiritual sight. 

 

— 6 —

Cyprian invites his hearers to see the plague as revelatory for how we view our life in reference to God. As an occasion for Christian sanctification, a time of plague reveals what we really care about, what we really love. The plague, in other words, makes visible what normally remains hidden in our ordinary lives of comfort and distraction. 

What a significance, beloved brethren, all this has! How suitable, how necessary it is that this plague and pestilence, which seems horrible and deadly, searches out the justice of each and every one and examines the minds of the human race—whether those who are well care for the sick, whether relatives dutifully love their kinsmen as they should, whether masters show compassion to their ailing slaves, whether physicians do not desert the afflicted begging their help, whether the violent repress their violence, whether the greedy, even through the fear of death, quench the ever insatiable fire of their raging avarice, whether the proud bend their necks, whether the shameless soften their affrontery, whether the rich, even when their dear ones are perishing and they are about to die without heirs, bestow and give something!

Although this mortality has contributed nothing else, it has especially accomplished this for Christians and servants of God: that we have begun gladly to seek martyrdom while we are learning not to fear death. These are trying exercises for us, not deaths; they give to the mind the glory of fortitude; by contempt of death they prepare for the crown. (§16)

The plague is a test, a spiritual exercise, not a death. 

 

— 7 —

Here’s a short story for you. It was a finalist for the Dappled Things J. F. Powers competition, but not the winner. So here it is – I wanted to put it on a platform that was not my blog, and Wattpad was the quickest way to go. It undoubtedly does not quite fit the site, but it was easy and let me keep my italics, so it won.

It may not be there forever, as I’ll still keep looking.

And here’s a novel  –     from Son #2! (Check out his other writings here)

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7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Fascinating:

Construction on the Church of St. Dismas began in 1939.  It was the brainchild of Fr. Ambrose Hyland (1900-54), the chaplain of the facility, who had previously celebrated Mass in the prison auditorium, which he thought was “not adequate” for their needs, said Fr. Bill Edwards, chaplain of the facility 2002-11. Fr. Hyland went on to “put his heart and soul into building the church, which created a good environment in which the inmates could worship.”

Materials and funding for the church were donated; gangster “Lucky” Luciano (1897-1962) was an inmate at Clinton in the 1930s and donated red oak for the pews. Other significant donations include two angel carvings said to be from the flagship of explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521). The angels were donations from the Magellan family.

Inmates supplied labor to build the church, trained by prison guards, volunteers and other inmates. Among the most notable was forger Carmelo Louis Soraci, who used his talents to create the structure’s colorful stained glass windows, modeling faces after the inmates he knew.  Soraci’s contribution led to his being freed from prison in 1962. Deacon Bushey told the North County Catholic, “It’s really a beautiful church, and the vast majority of the population will never see it.”

Other notable features include a Lourdes grotto located outside the church.  The structure was dedicated in 1941, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.

See the slideshow here

2

Elsewhere in the state of New York:

A New York City public arts program has said it will not build a statue in honor of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, despite the saint receiving the most nominations in a public poll. 

She Built NYC was established in June of 2018 under the patronage of Chirlane McCray, wife of New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, to create more statues of women around the city of New York. The public were asked to nominate women for a potential statue and the campaign received over 2,000 votes for over 300 eligible women.

The results of the nominating period were published in December, with Mother Cabrini receiving 219 nominations – more than double the number received by second-place finisher, Jane Jacobs. 

Despite the public vote, the New York Post reported on Aug. 10 that the selection committee, led by McCray and former New York deputy mayor Alicia Glen, had excluded the first American saint from the planned statutes, instead choosing to honor Rep. Shirley Chisolm, Katherine Walker, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Elizabeth Jennings Graham, Billie Holiday, and Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias. They received the third, fifth, seventh, 19th, 22nd, 24th and 42nd-most nominations, respectively. 

LGBT rights activists Johnson and Rivera were biological males and will be featured together in a single statue. Both were self-identified “drag queens” and co-founders of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. The pair received a combined 86 nominations.

So….two men will be recognized as notable New York women.

Got it.

I keep telling you….

— 3 —

Some of us may not give two figs about college football, but it’s always great to see SEC Shorts back in business:

 

-4–

Learn to read, you know, books again:

But what does this science have to do with the discussion surrounding modern, digital culture? Wolf outlines three major concerns with the way digital media affects the malleable neurology of our reading brain. The first is the way in which it encourages our novelty bias. Already wired to give primary attention to new signals in our environment, a feature which protects us in the event of danger, it takes concentrated effort and time to teach the brain to focus on letters and words. However, the scrolling and constantly updating sound bytes of the internet split our attention. As Wolf describes it, “In multitasking, we unknowingly enter an addiction loop as the brain’s novelty centers becomes rewarded for processing shiny new stimuli, to the detriment of our prefrontal cortex, which wants to stay on task and gain the rewards of sustained effort and attention.” As we give into this rhythm of reading, we lose what she calls cognitive patience. Not only do we struggle to focus our attention on the page, but we fail to spend time with the content of our reading. The digitally-trained brain has a harder time pausing to digest the meaning and implications of what has been read. In this way, the highest purposes of reading, self-reflection and the pursuit of wisdom, are lost. 

Her second concern addresses the substantive nature of the page. The physical dimension of print provides readers “a knowledge of where they are in time and space” and “allows them to return to things over and over again and learn from them.” She calls this the recursive dimension of reading. Screens do not have quite the same “thereness” as hard copy. The words disappear as we scroll, and we therefore lose the sense of their permanence. In early years the recursive dimension is especially important as children experience repeat encounters with a book. Wolf says, “It involves their whole bodies; they see, smell, hear, and feel books.” 

Such repetition allows them to develop the quality which comprises her third concern: background knowledge. Human beings can only acquire insight by comparing new concepts with those they already know. Wolf recounts her attempt to read Ethiopian children a story about an octopus. They had never seen or heard of such a creature and could not comprehend the context in which the story took place. For modern children of the West, Wolf sees a similar problem: “That environment is providentially rich in what it gives, but paradoxically today, it may give too much and ask too little.” 

 

–5 —

Today, I’ve got a post up about St. Rose of Lima – worth your time, I think. I hope!

As well as an earlier post on St. Bernard here and here. 

Also check out a post earlier this week on what the television shows Dead to Me and After Life say about death, loss and grief. 

Finally, take a look at our Cathedral rector’s post on Mass options: “The Options that Divide Us”

Yes, the multiplicity of options that I listed above are legislated by the Church, and so are legitimate variations: I am not disputing that. What I am pointing out is the way that they have led, in practice, to a subjective approach that has contributed to our being divided into camps. We may well choose certain options, and legally — but we may choose them for the wrong reasons. And we often have done so.

The way forward, which I think will help us to achieve better unity within our worship, is two-fold:

1. Realize, through liturgical education, that worship calls us out of ourselves and challenges us – it is not something we create based on personal tastes or questions of efficiency or convenience;

2. Seek always those options that are in continuity with what was done by our ancestors.

 

— 6 —

And we’re off. It’s college move-in day this weekend, followed by Son #5 and I doing some gallivanting for a week or so. We’ll be heading to a spot that I’ve never seen before, so do check back in for posts on that. As well as Instagram, of course.

Be sure to check back in to see how my big plans about Being Educated in the car go in reality…

— 7 —

2020 Devotional available. 

Son’s new novel available.

Son posts film thoughts every day during the week – here’s his take on the new Dumbo. 

 

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

 

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True, False and mostly in-between

Earlier this month, the National Catholic Reporter ran a series of article on EWTN, written by Heidi Schlumpf. It made a blip, generated some commentary and then was gone, like almost everything else that’s written and published these days. Truth be told, despite being three lengthy articles long, there was nothing new in it, mostly because Schlumpf didn’t actually come down here to poke around and do research, but simply pulled from the public record, watched TV, collated things everyone already knows, and packaged it a la Catholic Left – which is decorated with pearls for the reader to clutch in horror as she reads, which of course happen to be the same pearls a writer from the Catholic Right would flourish with pride.

It was, in a way, typical 21st century “reporting” – which less to do with ideology, and more to do with the ease of accessing a certain level of information through the internet, a level which gives the impression of depth, but really isn’t. In other words – anyone with a computer and a keyboard could have written these stories from anywhere. 

A far more interesting story could be told from actually venturing down here to Scary Alabama, staying awhile, poking around, talking to employees and (probably more importantly) ex-employees and some of the hundred of Catholics living down here with connections of one sort or another to “the Network” as it’s referred to- or even reaching out across the country to people who’ve been involved with programming.

I’m not saying I “know anything” worth scooping on, because I don’t. I know a few people associated with EWTN, the chairman’s daughter was in my son’s high school graduating class, but honestly, I wouldn’t know the man if he crashed into me on the street. I just know that the history of EWTN is complex and more than a little fraught – because it’s a human organization, and that’s what human organizations are like. Fraught.

No, what I want to speak briefly to – besides the shallow reporting ironically enabled by the internet –  is the issue of what we miss when we’re blinkered by ideology. Just two points.

Far more interesting than the whole SCARY RIGHT WING angle of Mother Angelica’s development is how it reflects the bigger picture of American Catholicism, particularly that post-Vatican II trajectory. One small point that Schlumpf misses or ignores in her piece was that Mother Angelica was, at the beginning of her public ministry (so to speak), charismatic. I don’t know if she was personally involved in charismatic movements, but the first place I encountered her little pamphlets was via a guy I knew in college (this would be early 80’s) who was heavily into the charismatic movement – they were all passing around her pamphlets and other writings. They loved her. They were her first fan base. Many of the early adherents of her work were – and some still are – charismatic (there’s a regional charismatic conference here in town this weekend, and one of the main speakers is EWTN personality Johnette Benkovic Williams).  Even ten years ago, when we first moved here, one of the people we knew who worked at EWTN (but no longer does), was charismatic – but, this is what I’m talking about – was also involved in a newly formed Communion and Liberation group here – and had their new baby baptized in the Traditional (Extraordinary Form) Rite.

Complex, isn’t it?

Of course, to some, all of that (except the C &L part) is of a piece – all Right Wing or what have you. But of course, it’s not. It’s a big story, it’s the story, of an important part of American Catholicism that takes in the post-Vatican II world of the charismatic movement, the apologetics movement, the struggle for Catholic higher education, liturgy wars, unending scandal, power shifts between laity and the ordained, Y2K fears (yes), politics and money.

A lot of that story is reflected in EWTN’s story – not all of it – but much of it. And it’s complex and interesting. But you might have to do more than peer at a screen, read Guidestar reports and Arroyo’s book to figure it out.

The second point I wanted to bring up is related, yes, to someone I do know, but the reason I bring it up is not because I want to defend him – he requires no defending – but because it might help you develop your media-criticism skills.

For as we all know, contemporary media is mostly ideologically rooted and identified, and depends for its power on getting you – the consumer – to root for the good guys and against the bad guys and then keep coming back to the source for more fodder to energize your loyalty and contempt. To this end, hardly anyone has serious discussions rooted in reality any more and almost everyone seems to have given up trying, depending instead on simply on whatever supports your preferred narrative: labels, stereotypes, strawmen,dog-whistles and guilt-by association.

Schlumpf does this in her article with our bishop, Bishop Robert Baker. Here’s what she says about him:

Of course, the bishop with the closest relationship to EWTN is the one who oversees the diocese where the network’s headquarters are located. Bishop Robert Baker, who has headed the Birmingham diocese since 2007, serves on the network’s board of governors.

In 2009, Baker called Notre Dame’s decision to invite President Obama to speak at graduation “a travesty to the legacy of Catholic education,” and has called for politicians who support abortion to be denied Communion.

He has been a supporter of the Latin Mass; shortly after being assigned to Birmingham in 2007, he lifted the ban by previous Bishop David Foley on ad orientem Masses (in which the priest’s back is to the congregation). He requires chastity education for all Confirmation candidates and recommends Family Honor Inc., a chastity program using the controversial Theology of the Body view of human sexuality.

After the Pennsylvania grand jury report in August 2018, Baker attributed clergy sexual abuse to lust and a lack of chastity, especially the accusations of “predominately homosexual behavior and abuse.”

The diocese is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, but another important date may be even more meaningful for the diocese — and EWTN. On June 4, Baker turned 75, the age at which bishops submit their resignations to the Holy See. There has not yet been news of its acceptance, but he told local news a replacement bishop would be expected in six months to a year.

Got it?

You know what to think now, right? Spoke against Obama-denied Communion-ad orientem-chastity-blamed gays. 

Because that’s what’s important – we signal you with certain specifics torn from context – and now you’ve made the connections and you know what box this person belongs in.

I’m going to broaden that picture in a moment, but I want to emphasize again – I’m not doing this because I am feeling defensive – I think it’s just a very useful example of how a picture can be painted and planted in your consciousness by presenting information selectively  – and to be aware that almost everything you read is characterized by the same process – and to trust nothing. That is to say, be cautious about deciding, “This Person is Like X because this article told me these bits of information.” Even – I have to say, in the social-media defined world – when This Person is telling you these bits of information about themselves. 

And this happens to be a useful way to make this point, because, well, I live here, and I know Bishop Baker. He’s the reason we’re down here – he brought my late husband down here to work – and he baptized my youngest. I don’t keep in close contact, but, as I said, I do live here and am fairly aware of what’s going on.

So that NCR-approved list above tells you what to think and what box Bishop Baker belongs in. Well how about this:

• The harshest anti-immigrant bill ever passed by a state legislature was signed into law by the governor of Alabama on June 9. Soon after, the U.S. Justice Department, civil rights groups, and four Alabama bishops filed lawsuits to prevent its enforcement. The bishops argued that sections of HB 56 that criminalize transporting or harboring an undocumented immigrant and prohibit any actions that “encourage or induce” undocumented immigrants to live in the state interfere with Alabama citizens’ First Amendment right to freely express their Christian faith, especially the performance of the sacraments and church ministries that serve the poor. The bishops were forceful in their condemnation of HB 56, calling it “the nation’s most merciless anti-immigration legislation.” …. The historic lawsuit filed by Archbishop Rodi, Bishop Robert Baker of the Catholic Diocese of Birmingham, Episcopal Bishop Henry Parsley, Jr., and Methodist Bishop William Willimon is the first time that a group of bishops have filed suit to stop an anti-immigrant law at the state level.

 

• “Exactly. The life issues are a continuum and they go across the board. I think these issues are right now, to the pivotal bullet, and most important ones, [inaudible 00:24:04] this little hot-button issue, and that’s capital punishment. I have myself served as a priest, as a chaplain to Catholics on death row when I was a priest in Florida. Pope John Paul II had said while in the past the Catholic church did not take a strong position of opposition to capital punishment because it invoked it itself in the past, now he said we should move away from that, and he puts it in a continuum of the life issues, respect for human life. So I just throw that out for conversation. I know it’s a hot-button issue here in Alabama, and politically it’s one that’s not gone too far, but we as Catholics still talk about that to … And I have witnessed myself two executions, I had been with the inmates, and I’ve seen them face it…”

 

• Through Bishop Baker’s efforts, the diocese has developed good, healthy ties with the moderate Baptist divinity school in town – Beeson, part of Samford University. They have co-sponsored some conferences, including, in 2016 , one on racism, called Black and White in America – How Deep the Divide? 

 

• Every year, the diocese hosts a Martin Luther King, Jr. Prayer Breakfast – around the same time as the Diocesan Mass and March for Life.

 

• Bishop Baker is passionate about Catholic education as a service to the poor. He has, over the years, sponsored many different kinds of creative efforts to expand and strengthen Catholic schools in areas in great need. This school predates him and is not a diocesan school but he strongly supports it and during his time in office has done what he can to help: Holy Family Cristo Rey, part of the Jesuit Cristo Rey network of schools – recently purchased a new facility and is in the process of moving as we speak.

Holy Family’s president is a diocesan priest – former Anglican, married. Wait – but – how can I label that box? So confused!

 

• Bishop Baker oversees a diocese that’s geographically large, spread-out and diverse, including many rural communities where Hispanic populations have exploded over the past few years, as well as cities with historic roots in older immigration groups and patterns (Italians, Greeks and Lebanese), and African-American Catholics. The ministries of the diocese reflect all of that. We have very “conservative” groups, we have the Extraordinary Form of the Mass in several places, we have charismatics, we have middle-of-the-road religious orders, we have sisters in full, traditional habit, we have sisters in no habits.

 

End of Eucharistic Procession at this summer’s Eucharistic Congress. 

• Bishop Baker invited the Cenacolo community to establish themselves in this diocese.

In 1983, Mother Elvira, a Sister of Charity, opened the first Comunità Cenacolo home in Italy. A decade later, Our Lady of Hope residence for men was established in St. Augustine, and there are now four U.S. homes — three in St. Augustine, Florida, and one in Hanceville, Alabama.

“Mother Elvira’s emphasis was on the Eucharist and devotion to the Blessed Mother as a source of healing,” said Bishop Robert Baker of Birmingham, Alabama, the Church leader who has led the effort to bring Comunità Cenacolo to the United States, after witnessing the desperate struggles of drug addicts as a priest in St. Augustine.

“I have always felt the Catholic Church was weak in responding to the problem of drug addiction and could do more to use its [spiritual] strengths” to help people, Bishop Baker told the Register….“There is a value to counseling and psychotherapy,” he agreed, but the sacraments and prayer are also important for people dealing with addiction. After he was named the bishop of Birmingham, Bishop Baker helped found a Comunità Cenacolo home for men in Blountsville, close to the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament established by Poor Clare Mother Mary Angelica, EWTN’s foundress, in Hanceville.

Reflecting Bishop Baker’s concern, the diocese is hosting this in a few weeks:

 

• An apostolate that has entered the diocese under Bishop Baker’s leadership over the past year has been the Fraternity Poor of Jesus Christ – dedicated to being a presence with the poor wherever they are, including – and mostly –  on the street. And where did they first set up shop when they came? At the parish in town that hosts the Extraordinary Form!…please tell me how to label that and what to think. Again – I’m so confused!

 

• In mid-June Bishop Baker had an interview podcast with Dr. Timothy George, the (Baptist) head of (Baptist) Beeson Divinity School at Samford University. If a reporter was interested in presenting Bishop Baker’s understanding of his ministry – even if that story was slated to run in mid-July – that would plenty of time to listen and learn, I’m thinking. Here’s a transcript.  The quote above about capital punishment is from that podcast.

 

• And, of course, news-watchers might know Bishop Baker from his brief moment in the sun at this past June’s bishops meeting, when he said:

I just want to especially point out that the NAC [the National Advisory Council to the USCCB] did strongly emphasize “cultivating an ever-deepening spirituality of chastity and virtue,” and I hope we can find ways to really articulate that further. Just a general observation: I notice the name Jesus Christ hasn’t been mentioned in the course of this. . . . It might not hurt to throw that in there somewhere. . . . Hopefully, somewhere, his name could be mentioned.

You’d think.

*****

Our information lives are completely characterized by this sort of incomplete information offered to signal, label, draw lines and define friends and enemies. Anyone who has a life offline knows how false this is. How absolutely false. How about this?  Don’t live in that world. Try the messy real world of blurred lines and surprising, real people instead.

 

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Ordinariate

This morning, we attended the local celebration of the Ordinariate Mass, just begun on a regular , weekly basis.

The location is the tiny, historic Holy Rosary Church. We spent many Monday afternoons there during J’s freshman and sophomore years, volunteering at the parish-sponsored “reading room.” More here about that. 

(We had to stop because Mondays was the only day J could do it – early school dismissal – and another school activity popped that took over the Monday afternoon slot.)

Here’s a history of the parish:

The president of Gate City Land Company, Maclin Ross, bought the original property of Holy Rosary for one dollar in 1889 for “Church purposes”. He then deeded the land to Bishop Jeremiah O’Sullivan. This simple church with its hand carved altar was built 125 years ago to accommodate the 80 or so parishioners of that time. The first parishioners were Belgian and Irish, and as the Mark’s Village community continued to evolve Holy Rosary became one of the first truly integrated parishes in the area.

The pastor is now Fr. Jon Chalmers, a priest of the Ordinariate who also serves as the president of Holy Family Cristo Rey High School. 

We had been to Mass there once before – on the infamous Immaculate Conception Snow Day of 2017 when we couldn’t get out of the house until the evening – and Holy Rosary had, I believe, the last Mass of the day, anywhere. But that was Roman Rite/Ordinary Form.

When I saw that Holy Rosary was going to start offering the Ordinariate Form liturgy on a regular basis, I made a mental note to try to work it in – between people’s work schedules and the serving schedule at Casa Maria.

As it happens, the 10:30 time is really perfect – late enough for the sleepers to get their rest, and not so late that the day feels spent by the time you’re finished. And we don’t live far from the parish – on a Sunday, it takes us 10 minutes to get there.

And so we went – there weren’t a lot of us, but there were enough! An organist accompanied on hymns and it was a lovely liturgy – elevated language, raising the heart and mind to worship, but not stiff or wooden.

What is interesting to me – and would be striking to anyone, I think, on first exposure to this liturgy – is a greater penitential emphasis and tone than one finds in the contemporary Ordinary Form. It’s not at the level of Eastern Catholic liturgies, where you’re saying Lord Have Mercy more or less constantly throughout, but it’s definitely noticeable. Which means – if you’re noticing it, you’re noticing your need to repent and open yourself to God’s mercy – always a good thing.

And, of course, we have our ad orientem celebration, inexplicably terrifies and enrages some, but you know –  which actually makes so much sense. As the celebrant prays to God, he faces in the same direction as the rest of us, and then in dialogue, he turns to the congregation.

Not a big deal. 

 

Note: you might have expected the vestments to be purple, since it’s Sexagesima Sunday. But the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter was on 2/22 – and that’s the Ordinariate’s patronal feast – so it’s celebrated on the closest Sunday. So, white.

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Thursday

This is just going to be a digest day. I need a break from Big Blogging Thoughts. I have a story I really want to finish a first draft of this week because another one has started popping up in my head, fighting for time. I’ll return to gendered thinking on Friday. Maybe this afternoon is this morning is fruitful.

So:

Watching: Unfortunately, I spent a couple of hours night before last rewatching Mad Men again. I say “unfortunately” because I’ve already seen these episodes at least twice, so there’s no valid reason for me to spend some of my brief, valuable time here on earth with those people again.

But then it’s season 6 and we get Boss Peggy and the genius casting of Harry Hamlin as Cutler and Bob Benson.  And great, great lines like Roger Sterling,  trying to sort through his feelings about his mother’s death with his therapist:

“My mother loved me in some completely pointless way and it’s gone. So there it is. She gave me my last new experience. And now I know that all I’m going to be doing from here on is losing everything.” 

So, yeah, I got sucked in.

Stayed up too late. Again.

Reading: 

In recent New Yorker issues (checked out from the library) – an article on Nashville hot chicken – mostly about Prince’s, the establishment at the heart of it, but comparing it with latecomers, most notably the small chain Hattie B’s. We have an Hattie B’s near our house, and my youngest loves it. He probably would eat there every day if he could. Interesting to me was the cultural appropriation angle to the story – Prince’s being African-American owned and Hattie B’s started by white guys.  But – I have to say – going to the Hattie B’s near my house is one of the most diverse experiences in a diverse part of town in a diverse city.  Always a slight edge to African-American customers, usually an Asian group and most of the time at least one customer in a hijab.

This story by Emma Cline – evocative and depressing, which is fine, because life can be that way.

As I noted earlier in the week, I finished The Woman in White. Inspired by this post by Eve Tushnet, I started The Comedians  –  one of the few Greene novels I’d not yet read.

Oh – and you might remember that earlier in the week we were reading The Comedy of Errors in anticipation of seeing a production this Friday. Well, scratch that. Turns out the production is in a very small theater and is sold out. Sad!

Writing: 

I was in Living Faith yesterday. Here’s the driver who was the subject. Bought with his own hard-earned money.

I reposted a piece  on Flannery O’Connor’s book reviews on Medium. 

Here’s another son’s take on the film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Follow him on Twitter to keep updated on his movie posts and writing progress.

Joan’s eyes are wide with innocence as she navigates her interrogators’ questions, making them seem alternatively foolish and unserious. It’s both Joan’s strength and fragility, all told through Falconetti’s performance, that sells the conflict. We are with her from the beginning to the end, and it’s quite an emotional journey.

And of course, two long-winded blog posts. Just click back to the links at the top of this post for those.

Listening:

I stopped in Chick-Fil-A last night to pick up food for Son #4 since it’s Son #5’s church-thing-night where they feed him. I noticed this gaggle of women in there, all dressed in similar outfits – a little Boho, each wearing black hats with rims. They were clearly evoking someone or something and they sure were stoked, but I had no idea about who or what.

Shrugs. Gets a #8 Meal. 

After I got him his food, I headed back downtown. My destination was this concert – a free piano concert, an annual tradition at our Birmingham Museum of Art. M and I had attended last year. It was too bad he couldn’t go this year – but, hey – it was free and in the same vicinity as his church thing, so why not use that hour in an elevated way instead of killing time on a screen?

Well, traffic was horrendous. I was reasonably certain that the 2017 Van Cliburn competition silver medalist wasn’t attracting that kind of audience, so as I stopped at a light with a river of red taillights in front of me, I tried to figure out what was going on –

Ah – 

Fleetwood Mac 

Now it all comes together, not least the Stevie Nicks fan club in Chick-Fil-A. 

Well, I finally found parking a few blocks from the museum – really, I should have just parked at the Cathedral – and hustled down there. As I walked in the front door, applause echoed through the building, much louder than it should have been – the museum as a large auditorium on the ground floor, and this was just up the stairs, right in front of me.

And sure enough, the space that usually holds the tables for the museum’s restaurant was filled instead with rows of chairs with a baby grand at the head. As they were explaining as I snuck in the back, the piano in the auditorium was broken, they were unable to fix it, so here they were.

It was a lovely concert – although being in the back row on a floor that wasn’t graded meant that of course I couldn’t see anything. Which was fine – it forced me to really listen in a closer way.

He played:

César Franck | Harold Bauer Prélude, Fugue et Variation, op. 18

Johann Sebastian Bach Toccata in C Minor, BWV 911

Ludwig van Beethoven Sonata No. 31 in A-flat Major, op. 110

I will say that listening to my son play his pieces dozens, if not hundreds of times, has taught me a great deal about music and made listening in concert settings – which I always enjoyed anyway – even more interesting.

Contemporary Catholic motherhood talk is still miles better than secular talk, but still, it tends to miss a few beats, I think. The talk is still all about me. About how motherhood makes me a better person.

Well, it does, yes.

But the most amazing thing about motherhood – about parenthood – is the gift of cooperating with God, even unintentionally and accidentally – in putting unique human beings into the world, people with interests and gifts and their own weird journeys.

And, to bring it back around to a self-centered bullseye on this Valentine’s Day – how that expands our world, doesn’t it? To help create a community in which you’re enriched and grow by engaging with all that they engage with – their sports, their movies, their music, their work experiences, their people.

Who would we be without them?

 

 

 

 

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Wednesday

New readers: Please consider sticking around around. I blog almost every day. It’s random and scattered (as the sidebar indicates) , but you might find interesting things. Once in a while.

What kind of blog is this these days? Well, I just said it – random and scattered. It functions mostly as a way for me to stretch my writing muscles a bit every day before I get into either work-work or my ongoing attempts to Be Creative. 

Back in the early days of blogging up to about ten years ago, I ran a blog that was, perhaps, like one of your more active Facebook pages today. I blogged about current events, usually posting 5-10 times a day, had a super active (and mostly great) comments section and, somehow managed to write about two books a year. While having a couple of babies after forty.

Then you, know, life changed, and my husband died (ten years ago on 2/3 – hard to believe) and it just wasn’t the kind of blogging I wanted to do anymore, really. As I’ve said before in this space, when I was doing a lot of intense current-events blogging, getting into the fray wasn’t a problem, because I had someone who was here to assure me after I shut the computer down, “No, you’re not crazy. Well, you’re sort of crazy. But not that crazy. And you mean well.”

But without that – without someone who has your back in the sanity-department, you (or at least I) are really taking some mental and emotional health risks in engaging too heavily online. IRL is much, much better. Always.

But I do continue to write and even to blog here. Most of my blogging reflects things I read. I’m very interested in history, as I say again and again, because it helps me understand the present moment. I don’t have many missions in life, but one of them is to nag whoever is in earshot about the invaluable perspective knowledge of the past brings.

And I don’t blog every thought that I have on every issue. I tend to be cautious on that score because I want to have the whole picture – or as much of it that’s available to me – before I comment. That’s why I don’t say a lot, for example, about Pope Francis. I have opinions, sure, but the whole thing is so opaque and weird to me that it’s impossible for me to pin down what’s worth me saying for public consumption. At this point.

So I’m into sharing information and occasional insights. I’m a teacher, I’m the child of teachers and the daughter of a librarian. Ask my poor kids about the experience of being homeschooled by me – someday one of them will probably write a memoir called Death by Teachable Moment. 

Oh, and the travel. I write a lot about travel, and there will be much, much more of that, God and the DJIA willing over the next few years, as Son #5 and I embark on a homeschooling/roadschooling journey when Son #4 goes off to college in a few months.

Basically: I read things, I see things, and write about some of those things, trying to figure out Big Things.

So, one of the things I do around here when nothing in particular strikes me is throw together a digest of what I’m currently reading, writing, watching, listening to and cooking. This won’t be that interesting – we are still mostly in recovery mode from the oldest attending the March for Life.  Here’s today’s.

Writing: Finished That Thing. A week early. I could have held onto it and looked at it a couple of more times, but why? It’s fine, and if they want revisions – now they have a week more to wrestle them. The sooner to invoice you, my dear.

And now…what? I have another story I need to get out of my head, and then I need to focus on something bigger. Not sure what. I want to start and finish something by June 1. Something.

Oh, and I added links to our 2016 Italy trip to the “Travel” page. 

Reading:  That’s what this will be, mostly. I’ve not watched or cooked much over the past couple of days. Mostly I’ve driven my car. Two ortho appointments, one other doctor’s appointment, school dropoff and pick up and a Metallica concert.

No, I didn’t go to the Metallica concert. My 14-year old did, accompanied by a friend. He’d been gifted with the tickets by his oldest brother, who lives in NYC and had hoped to come down for the concert, but was unable to because of his work load. So he took a friend, and they had a great time (I’ll get a fuller report this afternoon.)

On Twitter a few weeks ago, I remarked on the contrast:

Oldest kid at 14, 20+ years ago: Not allowed to watch The Simpsons.
Youngest Kid at 14, present day: Sent off to Metallica concert with a friend by himself.

— Amy Welborn (@amywelborn2) January 5, 2019

Of course, to be really fair, as someone responded:

In fairness Metallica is now what Sha Na Na was to you and me

Heh.

So, okay – reading. Not much of that either. Hopefully things will calm down soon and I can focus on words on pages again. I started Sheed’s Transatlantic Blues last night – I’ll give it a bit more attention today to see if it’s a keeper. Oh, the other night I started Chekov’s Ward No. 6, but found it just too depressing.

Since today is the memorial of St. Marianne Cope, I went back and read the poem Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote about her.

Perhaps you know Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote an “open letter” in defense of Fr. Damien, against a gossipy, bigoted accusatory published piece written by a Presbyterian minister in Hawaii. Stevenson had visited Molokai – after Fr. Damien’s death – and was strongly affected by it, and was moved to defend the priest.

You can read that letter here.

During his bit more than a week on Molokai, he spent time with Sr. Marianne Cope, of course, and even purchased a piano for the colony. He also wrote a poem about the experience, the gist of which is that even though the sufferings of those with Hansen’s Disease might cause one to doubt the existence of God, that course is corrected by the loving presence of the Sisters:

To the Reverend Sister Marianne, Matron of the Bishop Home, Kalaupapa. 
To see the infinite pity of this place, 
The mangled limb, the devastated face, 
The innocent sufferers smiling at the rod, 
A fool were tempted to deny his God. 
He sees, and shrinks; but if he look again, 
Lo, beauty springing from the breasts of pain! 
He marks the sisters on the painful shores, 
And even a fool is silent and adores.

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