Yes, it was two weeks ago, but let’s finish up anyway. This and then a post on An Enemy of the People should do it.
I was getting my hair done (because, NYC…see if they can do anything more interesting with this graying puffball) and the customer next to me was sharing her weekend plans with her stylist. She was excited for the out-of-town trip with a friend. To where?
Nashville…
(And no, it wasn’t a bridal party. Just a fun weekend. I’m sure it was fun, adding to the population whoo-whoo girls riding around in open-air busses and cycling bars….)
I had wanted to hit the New York Historical Society on Wednesday, but it was closed for a private event, so I finally got there on Friday. It was a little disappointing. I’d been there several years ago, and I remembered more of the collection being on display – specifically, I recall the entire storage area being glassed in and open for wandering. No more – there’s just a small exhibit in that area now. The main attraction was “Lost New York,” which was an exhibit of images of structures and sites that, of course, no longer stand. Beyond the original Penn Station and the Hippodrome, the saddest was the sculpture Lift Every Voice and Sing, created by Augusta Savage for the 1939 World’s Fair.
The resulting sculpture was 16 ft (4.9 m) high, taking the form of a large harp, with the strings represented by twelve black singers of decreasing size standing in long robes, supported by a long arm and hand representing the arm of god as the sounding board of the instrument – perhaps alluding to the traditional Spiritual “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”. In front of the harp, the figure of a bare-chested black man was kneeling, holding sheet music for the song. The plaster was given a dark surface treatment, and finished like basalt.
Savage named the sculpture Lift Every Voice and Sing after the poem and hymn, but the fair’s organizing committee renamed it The Harp. Exhibited outside the redwood-clad Pavilion of Contemporary Art, it became very popular at the fair, and many postcards and 11 in (28 cm) metal replicas were sold as souvenirs. There was no funding available to remove and store the plaster sculpture at the end of the fair, or to cast the large piece in bronze as Savage had with other smaller works. The sculpture was destroyed along with other temporary works when the exhibition closed after its second season in 1940.
Also, a Picasso-designed curtain for the Ballet Russe.
Also, Kewpie dolls for women’s suffrage:
The above was in an exhibit on “Women’s Work.” As was, unfortunately, this:
(“Marsha” Johnson, a male drag queen gay activist involved in Stonewall. May I repeat that: male. Featured next to an image of Sojourner Truth. “Women’s Work,” indeed. Ridiculous, insulting and wrong.)
Oh, is that not kind? Sorry. (Not really)
Most worthwhile, though, was the Tiffany exhibit – not just for the stunning shades, but for the exploration of the process, which involved a great deal of work – both in the construction and the design – by women.
(shades were formed/soldered over the wood molds)
I was walking down 8th avenue and looked a bit closer at this building:
Wait, what?
If you click on it, you’ll see the Knights of Columbus emblem and well, the words, “Knights of Columbus.” And then above the windows, etched the names of various famed Catholics important in the origins of the United States.
But no, I assumed, and that was my mistake. As you enter, there is a contemporary art exhibit, and then a room featuring a large mural. I looked at it all, looked for stairs or other doorways, saw none, asked two guards if this was it and they motioned around as a “yes.”
Nearly 12 feet tall and 200 feet in combined length, the canvases that comprise Vision of Spain were painted by Sorolla at various locations in Spain between 1912 and 1919.
I did like this Joseph and Jesus, as well:
I did hit MOMA for a bit.
This visit, I was most struck by Matisse’s The Piano Lesson, and regretted not knowing about it and having a print of it installed in our music room over the years of our piano lessons.
I suppose Starry Night is the Mona Lisa of MOMA….
I only visited the floors featuring the older moderns this time. I was impressed with the museum labels for the individual pieces and the gallery rooms. They were clear, illuminating and relatively free of jargon.
No Met or Morgan this time and the Frick was closed. I’ll be back, though. Almost half of the offspring will be living in NYC next year, so yes….
On May 13, 1940, a small photo essay was published in Life magazine, depicting an adorable little boy in Liberty County, Georgia, who had to take a blood test.
Twenty-four-year-old Ezra Jack Keats (then Jacob Ezra Katz) saw and was inspired by the images of the boy. “His expressive face, his body attitudes, the very way he wore his clothes, totally captivated me,” he said later. He cut the photographs out and pinned them to the wall above his desk. He loved them so much that he hung onto them for two decades.
“As the years went by, these pictures would find their way back to my walls, offering me fresh pleasure at each encounter,” he explained. “[Later], while illustrating children’s books, the desire to do my own story about this little boy began to germinate. Up he went again—this time above my drawing table. He was my model and inspiration.”
As you’ve no doubt already guessed, the little boy in the photographs became Peter, the protagonist of The Snowy Day, Ezra Jack Keats’s enduring, widely beloved classic. Though he had worked as an illustrator for years, and co-written a book (My Dog is Lost!)in 1960, The Snowy Day was Keats’s first solo project.
Books that change the way you think about something will sometimes leave you raging as much as agreeing; it is not easy to have your cherished assumptions challenged. One of those assumptions I had when I arrived at university was an essentialist, black and white view of the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism. I only came to read Alexandra Walsham’s Church Papists (which was brand new at the time) as a result of procrastination, because I always used to sit in the history section of the college library. I noticed the new book and picked it up out of curiosity while putting off writing an essay, and quickly found myself angered by Walsham’s focus on a group of people who I thought should not have existed – Catholics who outwardly conformed by attending Protestant services. To my mind, post-Reformation English Catholics were the brave recusants – surely these Church Papists had not been real Catholics? But Walsham brilliantly demonstrated that religious history is always more complicated than it first appears – an insight that I have taken with me ever since. Few phrases are more important to the historian than ‘Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that…’. I owe that awareness of complexity to Professor Walsham.
New York brings out these ruminations in me. I have lost the thick skin — if I ever had it — that protects you from picking up on other people’s pain as you jostle for space on the subway or a crowded sidewalk. It exhausts me and haunts me.
The betrayal of Judas remains, in any case, a mystery. Jesus treated him as a friend (cf. Mt 26: 50); however, in his invitations to follow him along the way of the beatitudes, he does not force his will or protect it from the temptations of Satan, respecting human freedom.
In effect, the possibilities to pervert the human heart are truly many. The only way to prevent it consists in not cultivating an individualistic, autonomous vision of things, but on the contrary, by putting oneself always on the side of Jesus, assuming his point of view. We must daily seek to build full communion with him.
Let us remember that Peter also wanted to oppose him and what awaited him at Jerusalem, but he received a very strong reproval: “You are not on the side of God, but of men” (Mk 8: 33)!After his fall Peter repented and found pardon and grace. Judas also repented, but his repentance degenerated into desperation and thus became self-destructive.
For us it is an invitation to always remember what St Benedict says at the end of the fundamental Chapter Five of his “Rule”: “Never despair of God’s mercy”. In fact, God “is greater than our hearts”, as St John says (I Jn 3: 20).
Let us remember two things.
The first: Jesus respects our freedom.
The second: Jesus awaits our openness to repentance and conversion; he is rich in mercy and forgiveness.
Besides, when we think of the negative role Judas played we must consider it according to the lofty ways in which God leads events. His betrayal led to the death of Jesus, who transformed this tremendous torment into a space of salvific love by consigning himself to the Father (cf. Gal 2: 20; Eph 5: 2, 25).The word “to betray” is the version of a Greek word that means “to consign”. Sometimes the subject is even God in person: it was he who for love “consigned” Jesus for all of us (Rm 8: 32).
In his mysterious salvific plan, God assumes Judas’ inexcusable gesture as the occasion for the total gift of the Son for the redemption of the world.
In conclusion, we want to remember he who, after Easter, was elected in place of the betrayer. In the Church of Jerusalem two were proposed to the community, and then lots were cast for their names: “Joseph called Barsabbas, who was surnamed Justus, and Matthias” (Acts 1: 23).Precisely the latter was chosen, hence, “he was enrolled with the eleven apostles” (Acts 1: 26).
We know nothing else about him, if not that he had been a witness to all Jesus’ earthly events (cf. Acts 1: 21-22), remaining faithful to him to the end. To the greatness of his fidelity was later added the divine call to take the place of Judas, almost compensating for his betrayal.
We draw from this a final lesson: while there is no lack of unworthy and traitorous Christians in the Church, it is up to each of us to counterbalance the evil done by them with our clear witness to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.
The first sentence I bolded in particular helped me pin what is missing in the current Big Theme of “accompaniment.” The emphasis is on God’s initiative, God’s mercy, God’s love for us. All well and good. And a truth that needs to be heard and embraced by all of us.
But as I listen to this repeated so frequently, I start to feel infantilized — and not in the good sense in which Jesus speaks that we are all to be like children – open and trusting, – but rather in the sense that I am being told that I am helpless and, more than anything else in my life, need to be patted on the head and told I am okay.
On the contrary, Catholic spirituality has always emphasized personal responsibility – sometimes to an exaggerated extent that ends up laying heavy, needless burdens, but which also always ends up being reformed and corrected in the course of things.
But the fact is that the story of God’s people, from Israel through the Gospels, is the story of people whom God encounters and then invites to accompany him– a journey that requires sacrifice and even radical change. Paul is quite clear: our goal is to put on the mind of Christ, not seek confirmation of the rightness of our minds.
The Good News that is the climax of this story is the gracious gift of the Incarnation – yes, God accompanying us in the flesh – but then inviting us to him. The act of the Incarnation is not a blanket pronouncement that Creation is once again sanctified. It is an invitation for those of us who have fallen to move in the direction of the One.
Face it. When Jesus invites people to “follow me” in the Gospels, what always follows is sacrifice. Sometimes that sacrifice is articulated by Jesus himself:
Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,take up his cross, and follow me.For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it
…everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times more, and will inherit eternal life.
Other times we just see it from the events unfolding: the apostles leaving their livelihood and their families. Matthew and Zaccheus leaving sinful livelihoods behind. The women of Luke 8 leaving their homes – where they presumably had responsibilities – to become a part of Jesus’ band.
We hear a great deal about accompaniment these days, and it is a good thing for us to hear: that we are not alone in the world and our true home is with God. Many people feel as if their decisions and habits have cut them off from God, irrevocably. This is not a new story.
Understanding that, it is then my turn.
I am gifted with freedom.
Freedom to ask, freedom to respond, freedom to counterbalance the evil with good.
Using a resource like this, you don’t have to spend a dime for resources – it’s all online, and you can fight the terrible Catholic Parish Habit of charging people for catechetical resources and experiences.
“Come and see!”
(And pay.)
Below are the two main pages provided for this talk:
Written by Donna Marie Cooper O’Boyle. Originally published by Sophia, but now apparently out of print – hence the (rare) Amazon link above.
Here are a couple of the interior illustrations:
Blurbs for the book have specifically mentioned the illustrations as worthy of note. So if this appears on your radar, remember that the very talented artist has other books:
Remember the format: Left-side page has an illustration and a simple explanation for younger children. Right-side page has a more in-depth explanation for older students. This entry is in the section entitled, “At Home.”
Merton’s vision corner and the (locked) Cathedral. Someday I’ll make it there for Mass and a visit to their museum. I also want to visit the Merton Center at Bellarmine.
River from the pedestrian bridge over the Ohio, between Kentucky and Indiana. I was a little surprised they didn’t have any touristy “welcome to Indiana” or Kentucky signs on either riverbank. But a great walk and riverfront park nonetheless.
Street festival, and object in the yard which I identified as a flagpole with the help of Google Lens, so it’s good for one thing at least.
Here I drew him celebrating the Asperges rite before Mass; the text of the psalm recited seemed especially resonant: Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, O Lord, and I shall be cleansed; Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. The altar boys assisting the priest are themselves lepers; one holds the bucket of holy water and the other grasps the edge of the cope in a way that reflects the scene depicted on a wall hanging behind him: the cure of the woman afflicted by an issue of blood, touching the hem of Christ’s garment.
The plants and animals that appear in the ornamental border and halo are ones that lived on Molokai in the time of St. Damien. Most of them are endemic to Hawaii, and some are now extinct.
The damask pattern is my own design. Explicitly religious pictures seem not to have been used commonly in medieval fabrics, perhaps because of the impropriety of cutting them. Here I have chosen images that are whimsical but suggestive of the overall subject of the pictures. These include pigs and crabs (a reference to the Mosaic doctrine of uncleanness that was made obsolete by the New Covenant), and thorns to indicate suffering.
“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”. The brief conversation we heard in the Gospel passage, between a man identified elsewhere as the rich young man and Jesus, begins with this question (cf. Mk 10: 17-30). We do not have many details about this anonymous figure; yet from a few characteristics we succeed in perceiving his sincere desire to attain eternal life by leading an honest and virtuous earthly existence. In fact he knows the commandments and has observed them faithfully from his youth. Yet, all this which is of course important is not enough. Jesus says he lacks one thing, but it is something essential. Then, seeing him well disposed, the divine Teacher looks at him lovingly and suggests to him a leap in quality; he calls the young man to heroism in holiness, he asks him to abandon everything to follow him: “go, sell what you have, and give to the poor… and come, follow me” (v. 21).
“Come, follow me”. This is the Christian vocation which is born from the Lord’s proposal of love and can only be fulfilled in our loving response. Jesus invites his disciples to give their lives completely, without calculation or personal interest, with unreserved trust in God. Saints accept this demanding invitation and set out with humble docility in the following of the Crucified and Risen Christ. Their perfection, in the logic of faith sometimes humanly incomprehensible consists in no longer putting themselves at the centre but in choosing to go against the tide, living in line with the Gospel. This is what the five Saints did who are held up today with great joy for the veneration of the universal Church: Zygmunt Szczęsny Feliński, Francisco Coll y Guitart, Jozef Damien de Veuster, Rafael Arnáiz Barón and Mary of the Cross (Jeanne Jugan). In them we contemplate the Apostle Peter’s words fulfilled: “Lo, we have left everything and followed you” (v. 28), and Jesus’ comforting reassurance: “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the Gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time… with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (vv. 29-30)….
….Jozef De Veuster received the name of Damien in the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. When he was 23 years old, in 1863, he left Flanders, the land of his birth, to proclaim the Gospel on the other side of the world in the Hawaiian Islands. His missionary activity, which gave him such joy, reached its peak in charity. Not without fear and repugnance, he chose to go to the Island of Molokai to serve the lepers who lived there, abandoned by all. Thus he was exposed to the disease from which they suffered. He felt at home with them. The servant of the Word consequently became a suffering servant, a leper with the lepers, for the last four years of his life. In order to follow Christ, Fr Damien not only left his homeland but also risked his health: therefore as the word of Jesus proclaimed to us in today’s Gospel says he received eternal life (cf. Mk 10: 30).
On this 20th anniversary of the Canonization of another Belgian Saint, Bro. Mutien-Marie, the Church in Belgium has once again come together to give thanks to God for the recognition of one of its sons as an authentic servant of God. Let us remember before this noble figure that it is charity which makes unity, brings it forth and makes it desirable. Following in St Paul’s footsteps, St Damien prompts us to choose the good warfare (cf. 1 Tim 1: 18), not the kind that brings division but the kind that gathers people together. He invites us to open our eyes to the forms of leprosy that disfigure the humanity of our brethren and still today call for the charity of our presence as servants, beyond that of our generosity.
(written when he was still a Blessed. Loyola has never done a revised edition, which is unfortunate.)
Speaking of Hansen’s Disease, a few years ago, I read The Colony, which is about the history of the leper colony at Molokai. It’s quite fascinating, and perhaps the most important figure I’ve learned about was one who was quite well known during the early part of this century and who now has, following his presently more famous colleagues, Sts. Damien and Marianne of Molokai, his canonization cause in process, the diocesan phase having been completed a few months ago.
In late July 1886, a ship pulled into Molokai, Hawaii’s leper colony. Father Damien de Veuster always greeted the newcomers, usually lepers seeking refuge and comfort. But one passenger stood out, a tall man in a blue denim suit. He wasn’t a leper; he was Joseph Dutton, and at age 43 he came to help Father Damien. The priest warned he couldn’t pay anything, but Dutton didn’t care. He would spend forty-five years on Molokai, remaining long after the priest’s death of leprosy in 1889.
Joseph’s journey to Molokai was full of twists and turns.
For about a year or so after the war, Dutton remained in government service and oversaw the morbid task of disinterring thousands of Union soldiers who had died while serving in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. Each body was placed in a coffin and hauled to national cemeteries established at Shiloh and Corinth. Dutton described this as “delicate work,” having to pinpoint and retrieve the scattered remains of soldiers only identified by crude markers. “So far as possible I made it a rule to be present at the disinterment of every body,” the meticulous officer stated. By the end of his assignment, Dutton claimed that he supervised the removal of 6,000 bodies.
Once his cemetery duties ended, Dutton became superintendent of a distillery in Alabama. The once-promising quartermaster, possibly battling depression from a recent divorce and the grim cemetery work he had been tasked, found relief in the bottom of a bottle. In 1870, broke and alone, he drifted to Memphis, Tennessee, looking for work. He took a job as a clerk with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company. Afterward, he served as a special agent for the War Department investigating claims of persons who had remained loyal to the Union. His drinking got out of hand, and sometime between 1875 and 1876, Dutton decided enough was enough and swore to never take a drink again.
By the age of 40, now sober, he began to seriously consider his purpose in life. He turned to religion and was baptized a Catholic in April 1883. He took the name of his favorite saint, Saint Joseph.
Father Damien—then a patient himself—greeted him as “Brother” on July 29, 1886, and from that moment until Damien’s death on April 15, 1889, the two maintained an intimate friendship. Dutton dressed Damien’s sores, recorded a statement about the priest’s purity, and worked tirelessly to honor his memory and legacy in following years. He led the movement to name the main road “Damien Road” and wrote both personal letters and newspaper columns about his sacrifice. Included in Dutton’s collection at Notre Dame are strips of Damien’s cloak, other liturgical vestments, and several finger towels that he saved in envelopes.
In his 44 years in Kalaupapa, Dutton touched thousands of lives through his selfless service. He headed the Baldwin Home for Boys on the Kalawao side of the peninsula, where he cared physically and spiritually for male patients and orphan boys. From laboring as a carpenter and administrator, to comforting the dying, to coaching baseball, Dutton immersed himself in his community without accepting credit; to him, work was always about answering God’s call instead of personal fame or selfish desire.
He is one of the many American “saints in the pipeline” about whom I presented at a local parish last fall. Here’s his slide. Full set of slides available here.
I have to leave in a bit for a family-related jaunt up north (not as far as NYC, but still north). While I’m there, I hope to finish up my NYC blogging and do a lot of reading.
ESSAY: “Mary: Evolution of a Bookworm” by Joel J. Miller: “It’s unlikely the historical Mary could read at all, but medieval Christians transformed her into an icon of literacy,” often showing her with a book in hand, whether as a child learning to read from her mother, Saint Anne; at the Annunciation, with the book of Isaiah, the Psalter, or a book of hours splayed open on her lap; or teaching her own child, Jesus, how to read. Drawing on the research of Laura Saetveit Miles, author of The Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England [previously], Joel J. Miller discusses how images of Mary reading “rode a wave of rising female literacy and simultaneously encouraged its expansion.”
Like most people, we used to think that you have to drive to reach interesting, beautiful remote places. Then we discovered how much of the country is walkable by public transport, particularly by rail. These are some of the walks done by Steve Melia, aka the Green Travel Writer, between railway stations around Bristol, where he lives. The purple and blue lines are day walks. The orange ones involved an overnight stay.
Railwalks.co.uk was formed when Steve met Daniel Raven-Ellison the founder of Slow Ways and Andy Stevenson, creator of Point2 Guides and whose research area is walking guide materials development at the University of Worcester.
But valuable as these perspectives may be, it was another insight that finally compelled me to write this post. Two or three weeks back, Audrey Watters wrote in defense of walking in her excellent newsletter about fitness tech, Second Breakfast. The title of that installment was a line from the filmmaker Werner Herzog: “The world reveals itself to those who walk.”
That’s a wonderfully concise and profound observation. Of course, I was inclined to agree with the sentiment because it captures something I have been articulating, at much greater length, for some time now. The world is not simply present to us in its fullness and depth by virtue of the fact that we are capable of glancing at it. Instead, if we are to see the world, we must attend to it with care, patience, and even love.
This kind of attention can only unfold under certain conditions—solitude, silence, stillness—and in relation to certain virtues—humility, perseverance, charity. Among the conditions conducive to attentiveness I would also include deliberate slowness. Past a certain speed, we simply cannot perceive the world in depth…
….To walk, then, is to inhabit a fitting scale and speed. It is the scale and speed at which our bodies are able to find their fit in the world, and the world rewards us by spurring our thinking and disclosing itself to us. Perhaps this is the deeper fitness we should actually be after.
Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?
…might just be one of my favorite Scripture verses. An arresting, pointed reminder.
Why are you standing around? What are you looking at?
In leaving, Jesus is profoundly present. Just before he left this earthly realm, he gave quite specific instructions…be my witnesses…make disciples of all nations.
A reminder:
In this age of easy global media reach, in this age that celebrates individual achievement and impact, we are tempted to think that of course the ideal way to be obedient to Jesus’ instructions is to make a difference and set the world on fire.
Well, yes. Sort of.
But don’t forget where that starts.
It starts in our lives, in our particular state in life. It begins with, first, our own relationship with God, our own stance, our own openness, our own humility. And then the circles widens: family, neighbors, fellow workers.
To fulfill our duties in ordinary life, letting the love of Christ live and grow in us, bringing Christ to each and every interaction whether it be washing dishes, conducting a meeting, comforting a child, hammering a nail?
To do that? Even those quiet, ordinary tasks are ways to be his witnesses to all nations.
We all live hidden, “unhistoric” lives, lives hidden from the world, yet lives that change the world around us for good or ill in untold unknown ways. We have a choice—to live a hidden life of deceit or of integral holiness. Nothing is hidden from God, nor even man entirely.
I’m going to use my own space right here to offer a bit more of a review, with some more specific comments and yes, critiques.
Short take: A+ for effort and intention, no question. A regretful B- for execution. The CWR piece gets to the heart of why – that there’s a huge internal missing piece, I think. Or at least a failure to connect some dots.
The problem is made clearest in the dramatization of the stories. I highlight a couple of issues over there – fundamental ones – but I’ll go into a bit more detail here. In short, for the most part, the dramatizations fail to communicate the heart of the story.
A caveat, first. This isn’t necessarily about what the stories “mean.” As Flannery herself said….
When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making state¬ments about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.
When a professor wrote to her offering an interpretation of “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” she responded:
The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be. If it were a legitimate interpretation, the story would be little more than a trick and its interest would be simply for abnormal psychology. I am not interested in abnormal psychology. . . .
The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.
My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.
So there is a fine line here – to avoid a reductive, simplistic “theme” or “message” – but also, to acknowledge that a story does carry meaning and it’s possible to dramatize a story and lose that – say, if in The Gift of the Magi Della sold a silver dish to fund Jim’s gift, and not her hair.
So let’s look at a couple of the stories as dramatized in Wildcat.
(Before I get going, I”ll say that I think the vignettes of “Parker’s Back” and “Good Country People” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” were better than those I’m going to dissect below, but even they suffered from not getting to the core of the thing.)
First off, “The Comforts of Home.” If you’ve seen the movie, you might expect me to go especially off on this one, but I’m not going to at all because I think I understand what Hawke is doing here. I had hoped to be able to ask him about it at the Q & A in NYC, but as it turned out, it was not an audience talkback, but just an interview by a reporter from Indiwire. And he pretty much ran off afterwards (much to the irritation of a gaggle of professional autograph seekers I passed outside later, who were loudly complaining about how quickly he’d jumped into a waiting car when he emerged from the theatre.).
Anyway – As Wildcat opens, we see a fake movie trailer for a film called Star Drake which is really the short story “The Comforts of Home” – it’s in black and white in the most lurid, sensationalist 50’s melodramatic formatting you can imagine. Very entertaining. But of course, with also very little relation to the actual story. What I think was going on here was a message to the audience and a reflection of the way in which O’Connor’s stories have often been received: with an emphasis on the grotesque, the violent and the sensational, and with everyone pretty much missing the point.
Just wait, I felt it was saying to me – you don’t get her. You think this is what she’s about with the nymphomaniac and the gun? You’re wrong, and we’re going to give you a clue. Just watch.
It’s strange and disorienting and not immediately or easily comprehensible. Just like Flannery’s writing, which is the point. This is the entry point, and it makes sense. A disorienting entry point to meeting a disorienting writer. I liked it.
But as the film proceeds and the story vignettes are interwoven with aspects of Flannery’s life that, it is suggested, inspired them (problematic for reasons I write about here), the deficiencies of the film’s vision emerge. Let’s talk about two of the dramatizations in particular: “Revelation” and “Everything that Rises Must Converge.”
Perhaps you know the outline of “Revelation.” We meet self-satisfied Ruby Turpin in a doctor’s office. Ruby is forever dividing humanity into categories, judging them, and being really thankful that she is not in one of those lower categories – especially not Black or white trash, but Jesus gave her a choice, yes, she’d choose the former – a nice, clean Black woman would be fine. While waiting, her smugness becomes quite evident in her conversations. There’s a college girl named Mary Grace reading a Human Pscyhology textbook, and she becomes so enraged by Ruby that she throws the book at her, throttles her and calls her “an old warthog from Hell.”
At the end of the story, after Ruby has stewed over this, she goes to feed the pigs on her farm. She’s still angry, an anger that is directed, no longer at Mary Grace, but at the universe, for she intuits that the girl’s accusation has come just might be a sign. Filled with rage, she shouts, “Who do you think you are?”
The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly, like an answer from beyond the wood.
She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it.
And after, comes the vision – the famous vision of the varied, ragtag, messy march to Purgatory as “even their virtues were being burned away.”
Even their virtues were being burned away. That is, anything – even our self-perceived goodness – that builds up our pride, our conviction of self-sufficiency, superiority and our sense that we are not just like everyone else.
In Wildcat, we get the waiting room scene and a truncated peak at the final vision that does not include that critical moment of the echo – which is the moment that shocks Ruby, that reveals the sin of her pride, that voice demanding back to her: Who do you think you are? We’re left with a sense that Ruby is, yes, shocked into some kind of awareness, but the essential element of cutting the life out of her pride is missing.
“Everything that Rises Must Converge” suffers from the same problem but, I think, even more so.
The story is simple: Julian and his mother are on a bus, on the way to her “reducing” class because the doctor has told the mother that she must lose twenty pounds. The mother is your garden-variety patronizing racist and Julian is your garden-variety patronizing anti-racist (which actually is just another manifestation of racism).
Short version: the mother is proud of her hat and, of course, racist. A Black woman gets on the bus with a little boy – and she’s wearing the exact same hat. During the ride, Julian is thinking and articulating various presumably anti-racist thoughts, but it is really all just a manifestation of pride. Whether or not he believes anything he’s saying, the reason he’s saying it is to feel and express a sense of superiority to his mother.
As they get off the bus, Julian’s mother decides to give a coin to the boy. Julian begs her not to, knowing how the Black woman will receive the gesture. Julian’s mother forges ahead and yes, the Black woman wallops her with her purse. The action shocks Julian’s mother, sends her into an almost catatonic state, which Julian ignores at first, continuing to lecture her about her sins. And then, the mother collapses:
Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again, walking as if one leg were shorter than the other. A tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him.
“Mother!” he cried. “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” Crumpling, she fell to the pavement. He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying, “Mamma, Mamma!” He turned her over. Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed.
“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.
So when you read this story, what is evident is that Julian’s arrogance and pride is just as much the subject of the story as his mother’s – perhaps even more. And yes, in the Flannery mode, both Julian (the Apostate?) and his mother’s pride is shattered only when it’s, well…shattered.
In Wildcat, the basics of the first part of the story are dramatized, and Julian’s (played by Maya Hawke, awkwardly) smugness is apparent, but it is a minor note in a story in which the mother’s racism takes center stage – as the dramatization is juxtaposed with moments of bigotry and pride Flannery observes around her (producing a reductiveness I look at here). When you read the story, you are struck most of all, though, by Julian, and our attention is drawn to him and our hearts are broken by him when he realizes, all too late, what he done and what he had failed to do.
The film’s version doesn’t indicate any of this, with its focus on the mother to the exclusion of Julian’s own prideful presence.
I’ve spent a lot of time on this, and don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed Wildcat and very much appreciate what the Hawkes have done here. The moments focusing just on Flannery herself are very, very good and Maya Hawke should be nominated for awards for her performance. There are some moving moments – a couple that indeed made me well up. I enjoyed the film and will go see it again when it hits Birmingham later in the month. I also understand the limits of what anyone can do on film in regard to spirituality without being pedantic or preachy – heck, I spent hours and hours and hours over the past few months talking about it!
So yes, so many of the pieces are there: her faith, her sense of distance from the world around her, her writing process and struggles, her illness, the nature of her fiction. All of that makes the film worthwhile. But what bother me is the failure to connect all of those elements with the account that Flannery herself gave of her life, vocation and writing. It’s unfortunate that a viewer of Wildcat with no previous knowledge of Flannery, would come away from seeing the film with, I suspect, no better idea after than before as to why in the world she sent her first story collection to Sally Fitzgerald with the message:
Nine stories about Original Sin, with my compliments.
I saw two plays in NYC, both from the hand of Amy Herzog – her adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (directed by her husband, Sam Gold) and Mary Jane, starring Rachel McAdams.
(People are puzzled with me because I didn’t stagedoor for McAdams – well, it was cold and I really don’t know who she is…You don’t know who Rachel McAdams is? Um, not really…..)
(Practically speaking – I bought tickets a couple of hours before curtain via StubHub at about (I think) $50 less than face value.)
Mary Jane premiered in 2017 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play in 2018, but this production is its Broadway debut. This also is McAdams’ Broadway debut, and while her performance was in general quite wonderful, the flaw in it was her volume. It seems to be better than it was when the show opened (judging from discussion board comments and reviews), but she still struggled to make herself heard and understood – at least in the first mezzanine level.
Carrie Coons played the role in the Yale production, and I can see how she would bring a quite different vibe to the part – a steeliness, in contrast to McAdams’ strong, but always just-wavering-a-little cheerful strength.
Mary Jane is, on the surface, a simple play. It’s a 90-minutes, no-intermission story about a single mother parenting a seriously disabled toddler son. Herzog and Gold had a daughter, Frances, born with nemaline myopathy, a muscular condition, who died in 2023 at the age of 12.
The play begins in Mary Jane’s Queens apartment, then, after a crisis, shifts to a hospital. (The apartment set raises up in a single piece for that.)
We never see Alex, Mary Jane’s son. He is in the apartment bedroom, and we know of his presence through the interactions of other characters with him, as well as the noise of medical equipment and procedures. When the action shifts to the hospital, we see a figure, back to us, in a bed.
The play is episodic, in a way, a series of interactions between Mary Jane and various other figures – the apartment superintendent, a nurse, that nurse’s college student niece, and a mother of a disabled infant come to Mary Jane for, as it were orientation. In the hospital all the same actresses play different characters: a doctor, a music therapist, a hospital chaplain (Buddhist nun) and the Orthodox Jewish mother of another hospitalized child. All of the actors were fantastic, especially in their distinct, dual roles.
These interactions are opportunities to explore various aspects of Mary Jane’s experience: the learning curve, the physical demands, the frustrations and fears, the strength required to fight for her child’s life, the love and the mystery the whole experience evokes.
I liked it for the same reason some don’t. The dialogue is quick and casual, mostly non-expositional – that is, we are plunged into the middle of the situation, just watching, and so we’re not having things explained to us – the elements of Alex’s condition and situation emerge in bits and pieces in the course of ordinary conversations.
Through it all, Mary Jane is, as we say, a rock. I’m not sure what to make of this. Her cheerfulness seems almost delusional sometimes. It is as if she were to allow one question or moment of sadness in, she just might break.
My takeaway was that caretakers in challenging situations are often asked – or people wonder without asking out loud – how do you do it? Herzog’s play, rooted in her own experience, is perhaps an answer: this is how. This is what it’s like, and this is how what seems to you to be a foreign, frightening country, becomes simply daily life.
The end, though. I admit, I didn’t know a lot about the play before going in and I was a little afraid there was going to be a euthanasia or even quality-of-life angle, but there was nothing of the sort. So while I won’t reveal exactly what happens at the end, I will say, it’s none of that.
Instead, there’s a vision of sorts – a migraine? Something actually spiritual? Both? It’s open-ended, as are Mary Jane’s and Alex’s fates. Does one of them die? I overheard a lot of discussion on this score as I left the theatre. I have no opinion on that, but what the rather mystical ending indicates to me is that while throughout the play we have been witness to the ordinary, this ordinary – as is the “ordinary” each of us lives, no matter our circumstance – is a way – the only way we have – to be able to actuallysee.
Charlotte was Both 
