Thickening the Culture

I know. I haven't posted here in ages. I'm really too busy to keep up this blog right now. Homeschooling has been hugely time-consuming, and I have to get the first draft of my book to the publisher within the next very few months. Besides, though my thoughts are often scintillating to me, I doubt that they would be to you. And no one has time to read blogs anymore, right? Where we once all connected, we've gravitated to Facebook instead, which takes so much less thought and deliberation.

I am guilty of of this too. I read blogs very rarely these days, even those written by my friends. I just don't have the time. I get up at five a.m. to try to do a little bit of research and reading before the day begins, and, once it does, I'm rarely sitting down, unless it's to drive somewhere. (Which means, come to think of it, that I'm actually sitting down quite a lot, since I seem to have become some sort of simulacrum of a suburban housewife, constantly driving to places that neither promise nor supply either satisfaction or rest.)

But I did read Melanie's thought-provoking post the other day, and have been turning it over in my mind. Melanie notes the movement among Catholic mothers -- or at least those who have an online presence -- to revive lost traditions. In the end, she finds herself mourning the loss of a "thick" Catholic culture (a term I love), one that draws American Catholics together in shared celebration, fellowship, and purpose:

We create ersatz holidays that have passing reference to the farmer’s world, we yearn to be connected to the seasons in a liturgical way, but most of us are grasping at straws, we have no idea really what we’re yearning for . . . . We have in our day no harvest feasts or mystery plays, no Michaelmas goose to share with out neighbors. But let us… Let us what? Let us be received? Certainly we are received at Mass, but is that enough? Time and time again I hear that it isn’t. It’s not enough to live the faith on Sundays, it must permeate our lives. And we try, we Catholic mommy bloggers. We try to revive an authentic Catholic culture in our domestic churches. But it seems to me we must do more. We must somehow make these traditions live outside the four walls of our homes, we must make our parishes as well as our homes the seats of authentic Catholic culture 

This is a real cri-de-coeur, to which I unite my own. How does one do this? How do we re-create what has been lost? Melanie suggests that we go outside of our homes, that we make common cause with other people in real life. But will we?

I started this blog in 2007, and the very next year we moved from New York City, where I imagined I'd always live, to northern Appalachia. The difference between the two places, in social customs and much else, is hard to overstate. When you live in a walking-around city, you make friends. When you're shut up in the private realm of your own automobile, you don't.

I assumed that, in a new place, I'd always make friends at church.  But I didn't. There is a vibrant community of orthodox Catholic mothers here, but they did not invite me in; I was so different that i might as well have moved here from Mars. When I received my doctorate and posted a picture of myself in my cap and gown on Facebook (at Lincoln Center, no less,  where my university holds Commencement), one of the mothers in this group said to me, "I didn't know you were still in school," evidently a shocking and bad thing for someone of my station. As a matter of fact, it was only this fall, six years into our sojourn here, that I was invited to one of this mothers' group's weekly meetings, and it was only because someone had gotten wind that I was homeschooling; I would never have been invited in if I had kept my older son in public school, evidently (I declined -- not because I'm too proud, but because it seemed futile).

(This is an actual real-life picture of me, a first for this blog. Did you know that when you get an advanced degree in music, your hood is pink, and your gown has pink trim?)

I'm convinced, sadly, that syncretizing a newly-vibrant Catholic culture out of recipes and crafts cobbled together from Pinterest and other mothers' blogs is destined to fail, or at least to fail to "thicken," and that the main reason for this is that we are all doing it in our own homes with our own children, and then posting about it on the internet. In short, we are not going out to meet each other -- not even in church, much less in the street. And if we don't meet each other, we can't invite each other over. We are not breaking down barriers; we are, in fact, raising them a little higher with our lovely photos of what we've accomplished and you can too! But comboxes do not make a community, and those crafts, no matter how lovely, are not a substitute for traditions and lore passed down from generation to generation.

I was particularly touched by Melanie's mention of making challah from a recipe of her husband's great-grandmother. I have often felt wistful about Jewish culture, which, in some ways, is the original "thick" culture. Jews -- at least religiously observant Jews -- have a shared sense of purpose and fellowship. They have jokes. They have excellent liturgical music. I used to sing the High Holy Days services in an eight-voice choir at a well-heeled synagogue near the U.N., attended by many diplomats, and the music we sang truly imparted to me, as a performer, a powerful sense of God's wonder and awe. That hasn't ever exactly happened to me at church. At synagogue, the elders fuss over the youngsters, and help guide them in the faith and inculcate in them a shared sense of cultural and spiritual endeavor. Some oof the ultra-Orthodox, like the Chabad Lubavitchers, have what can only be called a cult of joy. I had a Lubavitcher student back in New York who used to play at all the big Hasidic weddings in Brooklyn -- he was a jazz drummer -- and he often invited me to attend them. I didn't feel comfortable crashing, especially as an outsider, but I longed to witness the ecstatic music and dancing I had heard about. Joy! And what do we have? Well, if it's joy, I haven't tasted it, at least not in our culture or our so-called fellowship, in our music, in our gatherings, or in the ways that we deal with one another at Mass or outside of it. The Catholics here are cold, cold, cold.

I do not know if it's the same elsewhere. I've heard that midwestern Catholic churches are legendary for their outreach and hospitality; certainly the Protestants have that all over us, too. A few years ago there were some faint stirrings of a new Catholic agrarian-localist movement, inspired by the writings of people like Eric Brende and the briefly-Catholic Rod Dreher; but I don't know anyone who attempted such a lifestyle or whether it worked out for them.

I think in the end one has to assess the place where one finds oneself, and try to push into it, to knead it a little -- indeed, to thicken it with one's own flesh-and-blood actions. How do we do this? I don't know, but I suppose each in her own way, utilizing her own gifts. I think we have got to get out from behind our screens and do something in our communities, however small. I think of this often in my car as I drive around my down-at-heels new city (though it's not so new now), looking out at the depressed and impoverished pedestrians walking for necessity, not for joy, against the bleak landscape. Sometimes, at those moments, I find myself chanting aloud: "Make the desert bloom! Make the desert bloom!" I'm quite sure we are called to do this, though I'm not quite sure how.

No Gay Friends

Having reverted rather dramatically to the Catholic faith about ten years ago, I have an interest in conversion narratives (an interest which extends to my professional life, since the book I'm currently writing for a British publisher, one of the reasons for my currently scanty blogging, is about religious conversion in Victorian England). In light of this, I got hold of a book that made a bit of a bump in the Christian press a few months ago, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, the conversion memoir of Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, a reformed lesbian and erstwhile professor of feminist studies and queer theory. (I like that her name means "rosary"; she is Italian-American and was raised Catholic, but her conversion was into a Reformed, i.e. evangelical Presbyterian, denomination.)

This is not a book review; I'm only a few dozen pages into the book. I have to confess to being slightly put off by its slapdash writing and virtually-nonexistent copyediting (though I suppose a small Christian publisher like Butterfield's doesn't have much of an editing budget), but the book is both more complex and more honest than most conversion narratives I've read. What interests me most, though, is what Butterfield, after her conversion, did with her past. After becoming a Christian, she felt constrained to jettison not only her career, but also her friends, and she writes: "I felt like a vampire -- possessing no reflection in mirrors. I realize now that this is what it means to be washed clean, to be truly made new again. The past really is gone. The shadow of what was remains, but the substance is truly taken away." But is it really?

One of the things that stood out for me in the early pages of Butterfield's book was her description of  hospitality in the gay community.  She describes how "[on] Thursday nights, I had a regular tradition: I made a big dinner and opened my home for anyone in the gay and lesbian community to come and eat and talk about issues and needs." Wow, I thought; it sounds so beautiful. It reminded me of Christ, after the Resurrection, cooking breakfast for his friends on the beach and calling them to come and eat. Why can't we have that? Why can't we do that? Or is such friendship and camaraderie, such openheartedness, the special province of the marginalized and oppressed? I felt myself filled with longing for the community that Butterfield describes -- the community from which (thought I haven't read far enough to ascertain this) I am assuming she later cut herself off completely.

The book jacket states that Butterfield now lives in North Carolina with her husband and children, and I suppose that this kind of fragmentation of a formerly sprawling community into a nuclear family is not only the (hetero-)norm, but also the gold standard for a Christian family, but it made me wonder nevertheless how well such a narrowing and siphoning off of a once outwardly-directed hospitality would work. After many years of commitment not only to a sexual identity, but also to what sounds like sincere friendship and generosity within a community of the like-minded, what would it feel like to become someone else, someone suddenly rootless? Does the new community of believers who are strangers successfully take the place of the old community of hardened sinners who are beloved friends?

And then there's marriage and home life. If you marry young, when you're still becoming who you are, you and your spouse grow together in mutual recognition and come to share a certain language, a particular lexicon of references. But if you marry later, when you are already essentially who you are -- as I have done, and as Butterfield must have done -- I think there's a certain area in which you must always be a stranger to your spouse, and a certain degree to which you will have to attempt to translate the understanding of the world at which you arrived in the past, as if it were in a foreign language. If Butterfield's former friends are now strangers, she must now be engaged in the work of turning strangers, including those in her own home, into friends. Does this work?

The person that I believe myself essentially to be -- a lover of beauty, an associater of the workaday and the pedestrian with transformative aesthetic experience -- seems distant now from the person who performs the actions of my everyday life. When I think about my old life, I feel a sense of profound dislocation from its suchness, which was mainly concerned with finding meaning and beauty in the mundane. Now, perhaps like Butterfield, my life is primarily taken up with attempts to get through the day, to fulfill my commitments, and to make friends of the strangers with whom I live.

It's tempting to make a little joke here about having no gay friends, which was a bon mot in the opera world back when I was in it, and referred mainly to sopranos who chose unflattering audition- or recital-wear: "She clearly has no gay friends," we would say, because, obviously, if she had any, they would have put paid to these unfortunate sartorial decisions.

But when I think about it, it strikes me that I too have made it a practice to jettison people, places, and things when I felt that they had become (to quote the Catholic writer who once asked me to marry him, and later denounced me as a blasphemer and a bad wife, mother, artist, and person) "detrimental to me spiritually," or maybe when I felt they had just grown a little tiresome. So often in my life I've wanted to change, to be different from what I've been, to become somehow better, kinder, purer, and more sincere; and getting rid of personal effects, or dumping my friends, or going to hang out in new places were symbolic gestures that helped me believe I was inching forward in what I thought was a good direction. I left a thrift-store men's cashmere overcoat hanging over a chicken-wire fence once, because I felt it represented a dark time in my life; I gave away the flowing hippie skirts I'd purchased in the hopes that they would encourage a certain man to love me, since they would signal to him that we wanted the same vaguely-conceived alternative lifestyle; I gave a pair of expensive earrings from Tiffany's to my neighbor because of their painful associations; I left boxes and boxes of books in the basement of my building for the taking. And I placed my first wedding ring on one of the side altars at my old parish church a few years after that marriage went awry, and just walked away.

And I received my conversion. And eventually I got married and had a family and then moved away in space as well as in time from the site of my old self and my former understanding. Am I like a vampire? Am I washed clean? I don't know; but I do know that, when I walk through my new neighborhood at twilight, I sometimes wish for my old life. I sometimes wish for one of my old, far-flung friends to be there, one who would understand perfectly the lexicon of this particular darkening cloud, of that particular warm light illuminating a room in a house and pouring onto the grass outside, of the scent of this particular mock-orange tree, and would say, "Oh yes -- that." I do not know yet if Rosaria Champagne Butterfield wishes for these things too. I have to keep reading.

Epiphany and Manifesto

Yesterday was my son's sixth birthday. We started the day with a birthday tradition of wild dancing in the kitchen to Brahms's Hungarian Dance no. 5 in F-sharp minor (above; the sound quality is poor, but it was one of the few performances on Youtube that I actually liked. The one we use for wild dancing -- and the one I love am bestsen -- is the solo piano version by the great but sadly-short-lived American Brahms proponent Julius Katchen), and then it was time for school.

One of the things I love am besten is taking brisk walks in the cold, and school is good for that. It's about three-quarters of a mile in each direction, and on the way back I have time to look around and think. The combination of Brahms and the cold early-January weather, though, is a poignant one for me, bringing up memories of countless cold walks in the desolate post-industrial neighborhoods of the wintry Bronx, walks that were nevertheless wonderful and full of all kinds of interior riches influenced by the bleak exterior landscape.  Here there's none of that. But there's still Brahms.

Brahms's music dominates the inner landscape of my life.  His music is so inextricably woven into the warp of my earlier life, from my childhood listening to my mother's LP of Glenn Gould playing the Op. 117 and 118 Intermezzi, to my earliest days of performing his art songs as an undergraduate voice major,  to later and more mature performances, including a turn in the four-soloist version of Liebesliederwalzer when I was still a soprano, and, most recently, the solo version of Ziguenerlieder in my last recital for my Doctor of Musical Arts degree in voice performance. (We had a three-recital requirement, and I made sure to program Brahms into each one. In the first of these recitals I performed George Crumb's song cycle Apparition for voice and amplified piano, based upon excerpts from Walt Whitman's elegy on the death of Lincoln, When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, which was truly one of the greatest musical experiences of my life. I also sang a short group of Brahms songs early in the program, and one of my best friends -- a non-musician but no stranger to twentieth-century music -- said afterward, "The Crumb was just astonishing . . . but I loved the Brahms.")

I think now that if I hadn't had access to the kind of order and beauty that the practice of classical music has allowed me to take hold of, I would have fallen apart even more in this place where there is no discernible order, and not so much beauty, to my everyday life.  We left New York when I was just finishing my doctorate, and I was teaching music, studying music, writing about music, and performing music with my esteemed instructors and colleagues. But here, my practice of music is largely solitary. I still have a few gigs a year, nearly all of which involve travel, which means that what I work on at the little piano in my living room does not ripple out into the community at all, and essentially has no effect upon the place where I live, and is brought instead into other marketplaces and other communities, and I wonder why it is that the people and places that most need beauty that have the least access to it.

I have been thinking of A., too, whose life is lived minute to minute as she attempts to meet her own and her children's basic needs with the scanty survival skills she's learned in a hard place. The beauty of Brahms's music, and the music of so many others, has scarcely been short of salvific for me: it shines light upon the soul's darkness; it converts the tattered rags of a wasted day into a rich tapestry. I've always thought of this music as having not only real form, but also real, tangible substance, as if it were something that you could actually erect standing structures out of, something you could build with. And perhaps you can: as misshapen as my inner self might be, it was trained like a vine around the trellis of music (in other ways, it could be said, though certainly hyperbolically, to have been stretched like a tortured body upon the rack of music). In any event, the discipline of music gave order to my life where there was none, and gave me all kinds of mad coping skills in the face of crumbling chaos. But A. has never heard it, and perhaps never will.

My son's wonderful violin teacher came with his quartet from Budapest to New York City in the 1960s. He has told me about playing school concerts in the inner city ghettos, and about how well-prepared and attentive the children were. Their teachers knew, then, that their young charges needed this music -- as who doesn't? But many teachers and educational theorists today reject that notion, believing instead that students, especially disadvantaged students, need forms of cultural expression that speak specifically to their circumstances. I don't deny that there is a place for particular, time-and-place-specific, vernacular art. But to say that each subculture should be sequestered with its own small and particular and self-referential art forms is to deny -- again to speak hyperbolically, even Beethoven-esquely -- the universal brotherhood of man; it's parochial at best, and bigoted at worst.  All people, and especially all children, deserve to learn and to study and to know the great soul-strengthening and spiritually-deepening works of the great wielders of the highest forms of artistic expression of our culture, which, for all of us living here, is western culture. And they deserve to learn and to study and to know these things not because they make you smarter or better at math or better at sports or whatever the hell, but because they are beautiful, and they speak to the essence of what makes us human.

Where that leaves me, I don't know. It's still cold out, and I'm still listening to Brahms. Happy Epiphany, everyone.

After the Airport

I followed a God into this story who heals and redeems, who restores wasted years and mends broken places. This God specializes in the Destroyed. I've seen it. I've been a part of it. . . . He sticks with us long after it is convenient or interesting.

. . . .  Oh let us be a community who loves each other well. Because someone is always struggling through the "after the airport" phase.

Amazing post by an adoptive mother about parenting traumatized children.

Crime and Communion

Speaking of old stomping grounds, my favorite crossing-guard is a black woman who hails from my old neck of the woods. She was born and raised in Yonkers, and later lived in Newburgh in upstate New York, a very tough town which, from what I gather, was the site of her near-total destruction from drug addiction. She got clean, found God, and moved here years ago to start a new life. In addition to being a well-loved school crossing-guard, she has a night job as the female warden at the county jail, and occasionally as we stand at the corner chatting after school drop-off she tells me about the women who are brought to jail in the middle of the night and their crimes (which are mainly robberies and drug offenses). She has a bad hip and a shunt in her heart, but she says she'll be standing on the corner with her stop sign in her hand as long as she "can still hop along."

Though I don't remember it all that well, I'm told that I was almost barred from receiving my first Holy Communion, so poorly did I acquit myself in the pre-sacrament interview with the priest. I apparently didn't know any of the answers to the catechetical questions. And yet I loved CCD, and I especially loved my First Communion prep class teacher, Mrs. B. I used to stay after class to help her clean the classroom. I remember being very excited the day that she took us into the church and showed us how to bless ourselves with holy water, and I wondered, as I erased the blackboard after class, if the proximity to the blackboard of my hand dipped in holy water would somehow bless it and all the words that would be written upon it in times to come.

Mrs. B. had ten children, and, though I didn't know this at the time, she was married to a bookie. Evidently there were as many telephone lines in her apartment as there were children, and her husband was in and out of jail. I found this out only recently, when my father mentioned seeing his name in the paper now and then on the occasions of his arrests.

I had occasion this fall to attend Mass at the parish in which I grew up, and, when I went up to receive Communion, there was Mrs. B., proffering the Most Precious Blood. I couldn't help smiling broadly when I saw her. It seemed truly good and right that we were both there together.

Me Too

[The] great Romantic symphonists [are] great companions, especially on those nights when talk is impossible, when the only understanding companion is the radio. Some of the greatest pleasures I’ve had in life are late nights in bed, tired and restless, and turning on a low-fidelity clock radio. Classical music stations not infrequently abandon the Baroque and Classical top 40 late at night for the longer, deeper, darker works of Romanticism. I first heard [Ralph Vaughan Williams's] 9th and Prokoviev’s 7th in just those moments, and was utterly fascinated. It seemed I was hearing a profound riddle of a bed-time story, a lullaby of contemplation, and in my own moments of fear and doubt knew that there were others listening in tandem to the broadcast, and that the radio was offering companionship to us, and that we were not alone.

-- George Grella, writing at The Big City

Update:  A great radio tradition is going on right now:  the annual Bach Festival on WKCR, Columbia University's radio station. From December 21 to December 31, WKCR plays something like Bach's entire recorded output, and there are some neat oddball segments like jazz commentator Phil Schaap's show featuring Bach in jazz. Lots of room for great radio moments.  Listen here.

Solidarity Forever

Rod Dreher has a post up about cohousing, which is evidently a new idea to him (it's not to me; I had a vaguely revolutionary boyfriend once who was interested in trying it, and had even gone to visit a cohousing community upstate to see if it might be for him; he was disappointed, though, that this particularly community was centered around caring for its elderly members, as his unstated, but real, hope was to recreate the free-love atmosphere of 1967).

Rod Dreher's post was timely for me. I miscarried over the weekend, and, since I knew this would happen and that I would need help with things like housework and childcare, I made a few phone calls on Friday while out with a friend and our children to try to arrange this with family members. My friend asked if I couldn't call my parish to find someone who could bring over a meal or two. The notion surprised me; I would never even have considered it, because that sort of thing doesn't happen in my community. I wonder it this is an indication that American Catholicism has diverged irrevocably from its roots in immigrant communitarianism, and it calls into mind all kinds of questions about the uncomfortable relationship between Catholic solidarity and American individualism (the latter of which, incidentally, Joan Didion blamed for the fiasco of the 1960s youth rebellion). Perhaps some of you are lucky enough to live in parishes or other faith communities where the members approach one another in the spirit of Christian charity. I wonder what that might be like. As it is, my experience as a Catholic has had little of the sense of loving community about it, which is something for which having an online community is a kind of antidote.