Lenten Grocery Penances for Bourgeois Outcasts

At the evening Mass on Ash Wednesday I sat in the pew realizing that, for all my pushing away the truth of the matter, I am a failure. The proof could not have been starker -- here I was, sitting in my coat in an unheated church in the ghetto of a once-thriving, now-crumbling Rust Belt town, far away from all the things that, to my mind, had long defined not only my own life, but even life itself -- the things that had nurtured my belief that I was special, out of the ordinary, made for something important.

My older son was with me, half asleep in the pew. I shook him awake to get in line for ashes, and when it was his turn, the priest -- a gruff, stern, socially-awkward west African man with a heavy accent and a hortatory preaching style, who is known to have conflicts with some of his brother priests in the diocese and who has been mostly benignly ignored by our parishioners -- murmured to my son, as he daubed the ashes onto his brow, "Remember that you are dust, my brother. And to dust you shall return." I was struck by this entreaty; after all, Father didn't call me "my sister" -- and I mentioned to my son that Father's words to him were special. And I believe that they were, because Father loves my autistic son, and I heard his words as not only an exhortation, but also a greeting cast out across the chasm of loneliness, from one outcast to another. I recalled Father hearing my confession a couple of years ago, when I was still wallowing in my own sense of exile and loneliness (well, I still am), and I mentioned it to him; he said, "Oh, my sister. I understand." In loneliness, I became his sister. As outcasts, we were next of kin.

Of course, I've mentioned my feelings of isolation in my new hometown too many times to count. They stem from the obvious: I'm far away from home; my friends and family are at a significant remove. I can go through a day hardly seeing another adult except through the glass of my windshield; driving, while making my life incalculably better, has increased my sense of isolation, and also, I fear, my complacency. When I was still walking everywhere, I was forced to confront the poverty of my fellow walkers in the city; now I am safe from them.

Not that this place hasn't also forced me to confront my child-of-the-utopian-seventies notions about poverty, too. I have reached out to a couple of poor mothers here, and found their lives and their children's lives to be hobbled by the kind of disastrous decision-making that right-wing pundits like to rail about. But I have made disastrous decisions too. I think I know something about the fear and despair that drives people to cling to even the most harmful and toxic attachments, and I have seen that the lives of the poor are shot through with a loneliness much worse than my own.

I see now how we hold ourselves back, apart, and away from people who are not like us, and how I have done this, too. My singing was the thing that I imagined could keep me safe from the misery of broken human promises and relationships, and of stumbling and falling attempts at human love. I had something I could use to put up a wall of protection between me and the lives of utter loss and failure that are common to the poor women I have known: a key, a tool, an instrument, a wedge.

To counter this still-prevalent attitude in myself, I'm doing grocery penance for Lent again this year. I'm going shopping at Aldi's instead of Wegman's, for starters, and putting the price-point difference in our Lenten sacrifice Jar to buy formula for medically-fragile Chinese orphans. This means that I have to forego the smug sense of self-satisfaction that Wegman's lulls me into, the sense of being with other people like myself: clean, bourgeois, well-educated, able to pick out the freshest and most beautiful groceries in a warmly-lit, expansive space. Instead, I must stand out in the cold waiting, along with the gray-faced night-shift workers, the toothless, tubercularly-coughing women, and the lank-haired young mothers of children in dirty coats who ought to be in school, for Aldi's to open its doors and let us in to its boxy cheerlessness, to fill our rented carts with foods in knocked-off packaging (the Benton's graham cracker box looks so much like the Honey-Maid one, but just isn't), with brand names, like Cattlemen's Ranch and Happy Farms, both vaguely euphemistic and reminiscent of Chinese communism. 

And it also means that I have to strive to stop exalting myself, my knowledge, my gifts, and trying to use them to pry open the world to give me the things that I want, and to try instead to accept and desire being forgotten.

In "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," one of the songs he wrote to texts by the Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert, Mahler succeeded in creating a sense of stilled timelessness, of dying to self and to the world. The text says, in translation:

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world's tumult
And I rest in a quiet realm.
I live alone in my heaven,
in my love and in my song.

May it be so, eventually, for all of us.

On Craggy Island

I'm sure, gentle reader, that -- if you're not already a fan -- you would be shocked and horrified by the extreme irreverent humor of the old RTÉ sitcom Father Ted. For the uninitiated, the show's premise is that three venal, callow, and feckless men (who happen to be priests) are exiled together on a benighted island off the west coast of Ireland, having been sent there as punishment for various egregious infractions committed on the job. For Father Dougal, it was the unmentionable "Blackrock incident," in which many lives were irreparably damaged; for drunken reprobate Father Jack, it was "that wedding at Athlone," his actions at which are never revealed, but the mere mention of which causes a leer to light up his ravaged face. The titular character, Father Ted himself, made off with a parish fund meant to send a sick child to Lourdes, and went to Vegas. Now, in their shared disgrace, the three fallen priests must learn to cope in a strange, backward place, far from the not-inconsiderable perks of their former lives and under the thumb of a corrupt bishop, while having cups of tea continually forced upon them by their overzealous housekeeper, Mrs. Doyle. (The photo above shows Fathers Dougal and Ted protesting the showing on Craggy Island of the controversial film "The Passion of St. Tibulus.")

When we first moved here, I admit to feeling a bit like Ted and his comrades, having been uprooted from a much more enjoyable place and a much more connected relationship to it, and placed in a semi-rural area ravaged by social problems similar to, but, it must be said, exponentially greater than those in the city. I was lonely; I was isolated; I couldn't drive; I couldn't find a teaching job to replace the dearly-loved one I had to leave in New York.  I couldn't figure out the suchness, the quiddity, of my new environs and its denizens. And, worst of all, I felt that I was in a dull, dreary place that was a poor match for my . . . specialness, the specialness I'd long believed to be my birthright.

All of which makes me realize, three years into this adventure, how good, how necessary it was for me to be uprooted from my formerly beautiful life as a teaching artist and intellectual mom in New York City, where everything was just the way I like it. It was necessary for me to leave aside -- not that I've completely succeeded -- my idea of myself as someone special, someone deserving of a certain amount of connection, attention, and enjoyment.  I used to walk the streets of my new town and admit to God that He'd really slammed me down but good this time -- all right, Uncle already -- and could He please shine a little light on my now drastically-narrowed path and, little by little, though not in any dramatic, epiphanic way, He did. Little by little, it began to dawn on me that a good life is not necessarily the life that we planned. I even began to consider that I might try sacrificing my own yearning for aesthetic fulfillment for the more pressing and immediate needs of those around me.

There are other good things about this place: the natural beauty, my son's wonderful school and his masterly violin teacher, the fact that the income-to-cost-of-living ratio made it possible to adopt our son Jude, who is coming home soon. And learning how to drive has made me feel like a normal person -- maybe not normal in the old way, the kind of normal conferred by walking for miles through neighborhood after city neighborhood, meeting friends and colleagues, performing, teaching at my inner-city urban college -- but normal in the sense of having a place somewhere, a locus from which I might possibly be able to make other, different contributions.

I will lead the blind on their journey;
by paths unknown I will guide them.
I will turn darkness into light before them,
and make crooked ways straight.
These things I do for them,
and I will not forsake them.

-- Isaiah 42:16     

The Red Flower

When I was a child, my next-door neighbors had a poster on the wall, a stark image that showed a swathe of black earth silhouetted against a white sky. A single fiery-red flower pushed up out of the black soil. I told the mother of this family that I thought the poster was beautiful, but she, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish refugees, told me that she found it disturbing herself. To her, the lone red flower seemed to be blooming out of troubled soil, in earth that had perhaps been ravaged by war and watered with blood.

If you go to school in New York State, you learn New York State history in third grade, and this was a subject that I particularly loved. It confirmed my suspicion that the ground beneath my feet was not inert, but was, rather, alive, fertilized by the hopes and prayers of hearts that had not long since ceased beating. It also brought home the truth that the soil of the city had itself been watered with blood. I lived across the street from the very spot where Peter Minuit bought Manhattan island from the Lenape Indians; later, I lived on Fort Washington Avenue, which had been a Revolutionary War fort, as had Fort Tryon Park up the street and Fort Lee across the Hudson River in New Jersey. The blood of soldiers watered that ground; the lordly Hudson once bristled with warships. The infamous Draft Riots of 1863 added the blood of lynched black New Yorkers to the soil around what is now Grand Central Station. In school we learned, too, about the digging of the Erie Canal, which opened the American West and joined it to New York and to the rest of the world, and about the Underground Railroad, which branched out through upstate New York to places like Elmira, Ithaca, and Rochester, where Frederick Douglass published his newspaper, The North Star. We learned about the great waves of immigration, about peoples exiled and displaced, fleeing from danger and persecution. And we learned about the men who had died digging the subways, building the bridges, and connecting the reservoirs of upstate Delaware and Sullivan Counties to the municipal water lines of New York City. While New York cannot, without some hyperbole, be called a war-torn land, there’s no denying that all kinds of blood flows figuratively through its history.

I started thinking about the the red flower growing in barren soil at Sunday Mass when the Gospel about Christ going into the desert was read. I felt sharply my painful absence from that place, watered with blood, that is my temporal Not-Exile, and I imagined what the Israelites might have felt, wandering around and around in an unfamiliar wasteland, on the way to something promised but as yet unknown and unrevealed. Compared with my beautiful land of Not-Exile, the place where I now live is a kind of epistemological desert, too.  When I moved from Manhattan to the Bronx, an old friend of mine observed that he didn’t know that anyone ever moved there willingly, except to be buried; when I told him, later, I was moving here, he was stumped for a reply. 

And it must be admitted that it’s a strange feeling to go from a place where, among other advantages, things function smoothly on a massive scale – a place where things work – to a place that is a relative desert. Not only is my new town dogged by social dysfunction -- a dearth of jobs, an aging population, and a disappearing middle-class -- it also has few consolations to offer in the way of culture, comfort, or aesthetic niceties, and I suppose this is no paradox. The commercial functionality of life in New York is so well–oiled that, if you’re sick in bed and can’t drag yourself to the pharmacy to get a prescription filled, they will deliver; if you’re hungry or thirsty at 3 AM and facing a bare refrigerator, you can go down the corner to an all-night diner or a Korean deli/salad bar and eat your fill. This kind of high-functioning service economy assumes, of course, that you have cash (or credit) in pocket to pay for it. There’s no sense of “come, all you who have no money, and eat your fill”; even the neo-back-to-the-landers who have marched on the borough of Brooklyn, establishing indie slaughterhouses and artisanal pickle-fermenting joints there, put out product that only people with a certain amount of disposable income can afford to buy. A service economy designed for those who can afford it is one of the reasons there’s been an underground exodus of the urban poor from New York to towns like mine in northern Appalachia, where the assumption is, correctly, that here you can get more for less. 

Fortunately, I can drive now; I don’t need the drugstore to deliver. But it took me a long time after we moved here to shake the sinking feeling that would come over me in the middle of the day, when I was either stuck at home with my preschooler or hitting a wall in one of the wide-ranging editing or translating projects I’ve worked on in the past year, and I would realize that I couldn’t just get up and stroll out for a cup of coffee.  To be able to do that is just, for want of a better word, nice. It’s something that makes an appreciable difference in the flow of one’s quotidian life, something that truly adds, to use an overused phrase, to the quality of that life. For one thing, it brings you into contact with other people, which doesn't often happen here, nor, I suspect, in a lot of other semi-suburban communities.

In New York, everything has already been done for you. Someone else opened the twenty-four hour drugstore; someone else, either a neo-back-to-the-lander Brooklynite or Starbucks, roasted that coffee and put it in a cup for you, provided a soft chair for you to sit and drink it in, and even set out a few well-worn kids’ books to keep your little ones amused while you snatch some private time in a public place. And this snatching of private time in public is, itself, a really special thing, which I didn’t realize until I moved to a place where people stay in their houses and shop in suburban shopping malls. The shared and public aspects of urban life help to forge and bond a community.

Yes, in New York, to quote Elizabeth Bishop, “somebody loves us all.” In my new home town, no one loves nobody. Though not, as far as I know, by blood, my own little place here has been well-watered with my tears.  Here, I understand nothing; I don't speak the language; I don't know which way to go. I feel as if I'm in a place without maps. The days are long and bleak. Nonetheless, as difficult, frustrating, and ego-bashing as my own small exile is, I believe quite strongly that it is necessary; as lonely and opaque as this place is to me, I believe that God wants me to be here, and I pray that I will be able to bring forth some sort of blossom out of this rocky earth. In fact, I believe that's what I have to do. Perhaps removing me from my home and chipping away at my loves and attachments is actually a demonstration, somehow, of God's mercy.

Exile and Genealogy

Jude will soon be here. My husband is traveling to China in March, where he will be met by our great friend Otepoti. Jude will technically become our son, appropriately enough, on the feast day of Saint Joseph, the adoptive father of the Lord.

I have been reading Testimony of Hope by Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận, a collection of the spiritual exercises he preached to the papal household in 2000. Cardinal Văn Thuận, who was imprisoned by the Communists in his native Vietnam for thirteen years, begins his exercises by reflecting on the first chapter of Matthew, which describes the temporal genealogy of Christ. "For Asians," he notes,

and in particular for me as a Vietnamese, the remembrance of ancestors has an immense value. . . I myself know the names of fifteen generations of my ancestors going back as far as 1698 . . . Through our genealogies, we come to realize that we are part of a history greater than we are, and we welcome with greater truth the sense of our own histories.

Jude will know next to nothing about the ancestors who are, to use the Italian word, his genitori, the ones who physically and biologically generated him, or about his family history.  My husband and Otepoti will visit the orphanage to which he was brought after being found by the police, and the place where he was found, in order to be able to salvage some scraps of his unknowable past. But essentially Jude will be a deracinated person, transplanted into our family. I wonder what this will feel like for him as he grows older.

I must confess that, compared with Cardinal Văn Thuận, I know next to nothing about my own genealogy. I know when three out of my four pairs of great-grandparents came to this country (all at roughly the same time, about a hundred years ago). I even knew one of my great-grandmothers very well, because she lived with my family when I was little. But of the others, I know very little, and that's unlikely to change.

A few years ago I had a gig in Rome, and afterward I traveled south to the village of some of my own genitori to meet my distant Italian cousins for the first time. Although it was a marvelous trip, I felt very strongly while visiting that I was nothing like them, that I had nothing in common with them, that I was wholly unmarked by the biological circumstances of having been engendered by the same ancestors. While we shared certain physical characteristics, our lives, our circumstances, and our ways of thinking diverged so much that it was hard to believe we were branches of the same tree.  But the truth is that I had felt myself from a young age to be a deracinated person, too, without much commonality with the culture of my family, and in some ways I had consciously striven to set myself apart from that culture and that family.

In Testimony of Hope, Cardinal Văn Thuận notes that the "book of genealogy of Jesus Christ" is full of unexpected, even bizarre, disruptions of the biological family line.  Abraham chose Isaac as his heir, rather than his first son, Ishmael.  Isaac "wished to bless Esau, his firstborn son, but according to the mysterious plan of God . . . blessed Jacob." Jacob, in his turn, chose neither Reuben, his firstborn, nor Joseph, "the beloved and best of all his sons," but rather Judah, who with his brothers had sold Joseph into slavery.  Likewise, the women Matthew mentions "find themselves in strange situations. Tamar is a sinner, Rahab a prostitute, Ruth a foreigner. The Gospel does not even dare to name the fourth woman; she is simply 'the wife of Uriah'" -- Bathsheba, with whom David committed adultery and whose husband he contrived to have killed.

But, as Văn Thuận asserts, "This list of sinners' names presented by Matthew in the genealogy of Jesus does not scandalize us. Rather, it exalts the mystery of God's mercy."

While not, in the terms of immigration law, a refugee, little Jude will be coming to us from a place of suffering and persecution. What I hope is that our home and our family will not be a place of exile for him from what he might under other circumstances have considered his true home. While in one sense he will be uprooted, deracinated, a person from nowhere, I want him to know the full citizenship that only love can confer. We are all in exile, refugees from the true home, and God in His mercy has adopted all of us; those of us not biologically engendered from the bloodline of Abraham He has most mercifully grafted onto the tree of the royal house of Israel. May we never forget His mercy in having adopted us, and may we all know the full citizenship of love.

Above: Belgian refugee children in England, 1940.

In Which I Bitch and Moan a Little

I was leafing through an old women's magazine today while waiting for an appointment, and I found an interview with the actress Holly Robinson Peete, in which she contended that parenting a child with autism is like dealing with the problems of a typical child, only magnified by ten. That sounded like a high factor to me; after all, a mother-of-many at the Latin Mass remarked once about my son: "He's as much work as four or five would be!" (which I took as my cue to never go back).

Yes, it is hard work. Some days -- today, for instance -- are nothing but tears, and I feel locked inside of a world that's impossible to describe to anyone.  I'm sure this is compounded by my loneliness and isolation and sense of being in exile here.  Some days I wonder if anyone will ever understand him, or understand me, without making erroneous assumptions and faulty judgments about us.  And my son is high-functioning, intensely verbal, noticeably gifted, and in love with learning, so I probably have no right to my tears, when so many other mothers spend all their time trying to enter and topple the locked fortresses in which their non-verbal children dwell. I don't want to be too grandiose.  In spite of our struggles and pain, my wonderful son with autism is just right for me, and I pray that I'll be just right for him.

Gerard Nadal believes that the burgeoning number of autistic children in our midst is a gift from God, and that God intends to use this "epidemic" to teach us how to truly love. It may be our only chance.

Quick Takes: Kennst du das Land?

1. I've been absent here because I had a semi-important gig yesterday in New York.  I performed with wonderful colleagues, in a hall that has some of the best acoustics in a hundred-mile radius, in a program of music about childhood and disability.  In the audience were many friends, family members, mentors, former professors and former students.  One of my former students, a Phishhead, had crocheted warm, hippie-style winter hats for my whole family, and brought them to the gig.  I had dinner with Mrs. C and her new daughter; I hung out in Riverside Park with Really Rosie, and I walked for miles and miles, filling my lungs with the slightly smoky air of my native land.  I wonder if there's any more beautiful time of year in New York City than the month of October.

2. My accompanist drove like a fiend last night and we arrived back home in the small hours, having narrowly averted a disastrous encounter with a deer, which she grazed with her driver-side mirror while swerving to miss it.  I scraped myself out of bed this morning to take my son to school, and, since I hadn't unpacked, I pulled on some clothes spilling out of a Bergdorf Goodman bag filled with cast-offs from my gorgeously-dressed, same-size sister-in-law in New York.  My usual attire in the provinces is scuffed corduroys, droopy sweaters, and clogs, but today I showed up at school in skin-tight pants, boots, a fitted coat from Paris, flat-ironed hair from a New York salon, and traces of last night's stage makeup. I felt as if I were in a strange uniform made for life on a strange planet. It wasn't so much that I felt as if I were walking on the moon, but more as if I was breathing on the moon; the air had become so thin that I felt as though I was inhaling it through a leaky oxygen tank, the only thing that would enable me survive in a foreign land.

3. Luckily, I remembered to pull a package of chicken thighs out of the freezer when I came into the darkened house last night, so we'd have something to eat today.

4. "Kennst du das Land" (Do you know the country), one of the songs sung by the enigmatic character of Mignon in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, was one of the most frequently-set song texts in the nineteenth century. Schubert's four settings are well-known, but it was also set by Schumann, Liszt, Wolf, and Tchaikovsky, among many others.  Mignon is a young, androgynous circus performer who is in exile from a half-remembered land, which she describes (in Walter Meyers's translation):

 Knowest thou where the lemon blossom grows,
 In foliage dark the orange golden glows,
 A gentle breeze blows from the azure sky,
 Still stands the myrtle, and the laurel, high?
 Dost know it well?
 'Tis there! 'Tis there
 Would I with thee, oh my beloved, fare.

 Knowest the house, its roof on columns fine?
 Its hall glows brightly and its chambers shine,
 And marble figures stand and gaze at me:
 What have they done, oh wretched child, to thee?
 Dost know it well?
 'Tis there! 'Tis there
 Would I with thee, oh my protector, fare.

 Knowest the mountain with the misty shrouds?
 The mule is seeking passage through the clouds;
 In caverns dwells the dragons' ancient brood;
 The cliff rocks plunge under the rushing flood!
 Dost know it well?
 'Tis there! 'Tis there
 Leads our path! Oh father, let us fare. 

Here, Schubert's D. 321 setting is sung by the great Christa Ludwig.

Irwin Gage is the pianist. 

The Tattooed Mothers You Will Have Always With You

My father, whose illiterate grandparents came to America about a hundred years ago (on the run from personal tragedy, as well as from crushing poverty and from the hated Camorra who terrorized Naples and its environs), used to urge his children to look their best at all times, saying that only the rich could afford to dress badly, because, for the rich, a sloppy appearance had no consequences. 

I was thinking about his exhortation the other day while I waited in the pick-up line for my son outside the neighborhood elementary school.  A disturbing -- disturbing to me, anyway -- number of the other mothers sport visible tattoos: not just things like hearts and flowers on their ankles, but things like large pairs of bat's wings across their shoulder girdles.   Now, there are plenty of tattooed mothers of young children in New York City, too (including some in my own family), but most of those mothers self-consciously partake in a sort of countercultural-outsider ethos, and tend to be employed in various creative professions, in which their appearance doesn't matter as much as it would if they were working for the man; their life goals, they presume, will be unaffected by the in-some-ways-shocking state of their skin, because they have put themselves outside the mainstream.  But there are two ways to be outside the mainstream.  The self-conscious, creative-class, New York City tattooed moms generally possess a level of education, or of family money, or, for want of a better term, of cultural capital, that ensures that they will not suffer major consequences from what would seem to be a willing self-exile from the workaday world enabled by symbolically marking their flesh. The tattooed moms in my community, on the other hand, do not have this luxury, and their marked skin sets another bar between them and meaningful employment.  So I wonder: is their tattoing truly subversive -- subversive in a way that creative-class tattooing is really not -- because it's a gesture of acknowledgement that, in being poor, they are already irrevocably outside the mainstream? Is it a self-marking of despair?

For the record, I have no tattoos, and I find them unappealing on men as well as women, which I suppose makes me a sort of oddity in my cohort (even up-and-coming opera singers I knew back in New York had tattoos).  And I wonder how the subculture of tattooing and body modification made its way from the edges of Bohemia in large urban areas to half-forgotten, post-industrial backwaters like the place I live now, a place that suffers from the worrisome combination of entrenched and widespread poverty and a dearth of meaningful and well-paid jobs, and how its meaning changed en route.  Sometimes I want to say to the other mothers in the pick-up line, "Why did you deface yourself like this? What does this mean to you, and what does it mean, socially, here, in this place?"  It seems to me that the poor and disenfranchised cannot afford to get tattoos, and I don't just mean that the hundreds of dollars each tattoo costs could be better spent.  I mean that there are certain consequences that come with putting yourself outside the mainstream, and that those consequences are particularly harsh if you don't have a cushion of money or education to soften them.

The public library in my new town -- there is only one -- is my absolute favorite place here. I get a rush when I walk through the front doors.  You could fit four of my branch libraries back in the Bronx into the Children's Room alone.  It is clean and beautiful, and they let me take out all kinds of books on interlibrary loan, and they call me on the phone to let me know when my ILL loans have come in.  I take the bus there once a week, and, as I descend the bus steps, I feel the eyes of those waiting to board linger upon me, because people who look like me don't ride the bus here.  By people who look like me, I mean people who aren't overweight and in their pajamas though there is also a certain ethnic sameness to the people here which I don't share, a sameness which I suppose comes from centuries of intermarriage among the Europeans who first settled in these hills.  People who ride the bus are poor, very poor indeed, too poor for even a few-hundred-dollars' beater car. Another non-tattooed mother in the pick-up line, who teaches remedial reading at the community college, told me that when her students have spent their financial aid grants on textbooks, they're generally strapped for ways to buy food and bus passes for the rest of the semester.  In the end, it's very expensive to be poor.

I walk from the bus stop to the library past small, decrepit apartment buildings with "No Loitering" signs affixed to the front doors, past empty storefronts, past a boarded-up old tavern whose walls are choked with climbing weeds.  One room of my massive library has been turned into a FEMA disaster assistance site, as have several churches downtown, including the parish where we attend Mass.  As I collected my books at the checkout desk the other day, I overheard one of the front-desk workers on a personal phone call.  She was broke, she was telling her friend on the phone, not sure when a child-support check was going to come, and lacking even in milk and bread.  When I left, I passed a family with young children waiting on the church steps across the street for the FEMA center to open.  They all waited patiently, with suitcases piled on the sidewalk around them. 

All of this makes me wonder, and wonder again, about the calling I've always strongly felt:  to show other people, to teach other people, to guide other people to the sublime beauty of the western classical music tradition. Pope John Paul II wrote in Redemptor Hominis about the essential humanity of man's natural "nostalgia for the beautiful," and noted that this "creative restlessness" is part of our longing for God.  But what good is it to tell my tattooed cohort about how uplifting,  how deepening, how connecting, how humanizing, how healing is the stuff with which I usually deal? To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht in Threepenny Opera, "First food, then aesthetics."

And, too, all of this brings me face-to-face with my own hard lack of charity.  I do not love these poor; I fear them. They seem so shaky, so unstable, to me; they are so different from me. Though surely not all of these poor are addicts, they remind me of the junkies I used to see around New York, who you could tell were junkies because they were rail-thin, were young but looked old, walked really fast and crookedly, and, when they had fixed, moved in strange, jerky ways, as if they were marionettes.  I found them terrifying and repellent even as an adult.

Last week, Mark Gordon wrote a hard-hitting and moving piece for Vox Nova about helping the poor. "[Am] I responsible for helping poor people that I know personally?" he asks himself, then answers:

Yes. Am I personally responsible for helping the poor in my community? Yes. Am I responsible for working toward a just social and political order in which poverty itself is eventually eradicated? Yes. Am I responsible for helping the poor in foreign lands? Yes. The poor who are in this country illegally? Yes. The poor with substance abuse problems or criminal backgrounds? Yes. The poor who don’t appreciate my help? Yes. The poor who disgust me in their helplessness? Yes. All the poor? Yes.

OK, I thought, I'm good with a lot of this.  We continue to support N., who's desperately poor and illegal (though I admit to grumbling as I stand at the sink and wash dishes because we just sent the money that was supposed to have gone to a new dishwasher to her when she was in danger of being evicted). I have no problem helping the illegal poor; the fact is, I have a lot more in common with them than I do with the tattooed moms in my community.  The reason the illegal poor are here is that they're strivers, adventurers, risk-takers, and extremely brave; they work their asses off; and most of them share my religion.  The poor in my community, on the other hand, frighten me. They are not like me. They reject the things I hold dear.

Nonetheless, as Sister Mary Martha wrote in response to a reader who voiced his objections to Appalachian culture more strongly than I have (yes, I know she's not a real nun, but that doesn't make her wrong):

Jesus never had a job and just lived off of other people who put Him up in their houses and fed Him AND all his friends. He actually told His friends to STOP WORKING and hang out with Him. His final words to them was a commandment to never even try to earn money and have any money or nice clothes or even shoes. Lazy slobs. No wonder they were all killed.

Jesus loved sinners. Remember? We never have to condone sin to love a sinner. God does it every single minute. It makes me extremely sad to think that we can not let go of calling people some kind of name and that we insist it is just fine and dandy to do so.

Can you imagine if Father stood in the pulpit said "white trash" and meant it? Why is it not okay for Father to say that, but okay for you?

Maybe it's time to bring back the ruler.

Food writer Mark Bittman (whose recipes I love, but who, as a professional chef friend of mine memorably put it, is prone to a kind of "soapboxing tinged with a**hole") wrote a recent post displaying a similar sort of arrogance and lack of understanding when it comes to the food choices of the poor (yes, similar to my own arrogance and lack of understanding about the poor in my community).  Many people in the combox put him straight, and, as one writer put it in a letter to the Times:

Mark Bittman would persuade poor families that nutritious food prepared at home can be cheaper than the fare available at fast-food outlets. He points out that if you can drive to McDonald’s, you can drive to Safeway, but doesn’t mention other realities.

Shopping after work means crowded stores and long wait times, which are likely to interfere with child-care arrangements. Then the meal must be prepared, which with Mr. Bittman’s recipes entails chopping, dicing, shredding, sautéing and cooking. After the meal, the preparer must clean up or persuade someone else to do it.

A trip to McDonald’s allows a family to spend time together having their food brought to them, enjoying the meal and walking away, in less time than is needed for the Safeway option. 

A big selection of healthy foods isn’t available at fast-food prices. Until it is, Mr. Bittman shouldn’t lecture people who are making not-unintelligent tradeoffs.

In the end, there is an appalling lack of love among some of us who are well-fed, well-educated, and even champions of beauty -- of love, that is, for the unbeautiful.  I suffer from this lack, and I pray that God will show me a way to truly love those I would shun.  But I fear this love, too, and its consequences.

Five Hundred Miles

This song has been on my mind.  It seems to me such an essentially American song: simple, strophic, tuneful, and mournful, sharing its themes -- of a trip taken far from home, of loneliness, of a kind of exile imposed in equal measures by the exigencies of circumstance, and by those arising from personal shame and pride -- with other great American songs (like "Poor Wayfaring Stranger," for instance, or Woody Guthrie's "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad").  It's supposed to have been written by Hedy West, a singer on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the late 1950s-early 1960s, who based it on songs sung by her Appalachian grandmother, and wrote it from the point of view of a railroader.

 My friend Rodak has recently made me a Peter, Paul, and Mary convert (which didn't take much), and here is their almost-heartbreaking version of the song:  

Here is Joan Baez's winningly ingenuous version.

And perhaps my favorite, by the Australian group The Seekers, which sounds slick in comparison to the simplicity of the others, but whose beauty can't be denied.

Happy Fourth of July to all my American readers.

Music and Memory, part 13: By the Waters of Babylon

"Sing to us," they said, "one of Zion's songs."  O how could we sing the song of the Lord on alien soil?

I hope to have my driver's license by the end of the year, but I need to practice a lot more than I have been, and practicing has proven logistically hard to arrange.  This month I've been taking my son, who I anticipate will be diagnosed with a high-functioning autism spectrum disorder, to an agency that provides occupational therapy to help him develop his fine motor skills and find creative ways to address his sensory-seeking behaviors.  This agency, while lovely, is located in a post-industrial ghetto, surrounded by abandoned factory buildings and bordered by a defunct railroad track with tall weeds growing up through the ties.  We can take the bus within a half-mile of the agency, but then we have to get off, walk down a struggling neighborhood block, and plunge through the desolation.  The first time we did it, I was more scared than I've ever been anywhere in New Yor City, but made it seem like a fun adventure to my son.  Then I got used to it, and started to become interested in our surroundings.  Sometimes we see a solitary figure walking on the tracks.

Yesterday we were running late for various reasons, and I called a cab to take us to my son's appointment.  The cab driver was a young woman whose beauty was unmarred by her multiple tattoos and piercings.  The agency my son goes to has the words "handicapped" and "children" in its name, and she asked me about it and what they did. Her son, it turned out, received services for a high-functioning spectrum disorder from another agency, one that I've heard is located in an environ slightly scarier than ours (there is a high number of spectrum disorders among boys in my new city, but that's a different story).  My cab driver's hands on the wheel were slender and long-fingered, unencumbered by any jewelry, including a wedding ring.  For some reason that I can't explain, my heart went out to her.  While I waited for my son in the waiting room, tears came to my eyes and I prayed for her.  I kept thinking of how we are all in Babylon, in exile from what is good and beautiful.  And it seemed to me that those of us who strive to bring heaven down to earth, to create small utopias of goodness where there appears to be none, are perhaps in the most desolate kind of exile of all.  Of those people who order their lives according to daily mass and prayer practices, I know of few who have any real sort of peace in their hearts.  Just as I cling to the cross out of desperation, knowing that there is no salvation without it, the people I know who engage in orderly devout practices sometimes appear to be white-knuckling it.  And I stress that there is nothing wrong or untoward about that; it's simply the way it is.

I thought about the wide social gap between my cab driver and myself, and about the fact that disability is the great leveler.  And I thought about all the beautiful things I've always wanted to do, here and elsewhere:  there must, I've always thought, be something I can do to help other people with the skills that I have.  But the skills I have are so specialized, and there's so little concrete, applicable need or place for them.  Going to sing beautiful music for the pierced and tattooed is not going to save them.  Bringing beautiful music into the schools is not going to save their children, whether spectrum-disordered or otherwise.  I remember doing a small concert tour in rural Wisconsin about ten years ago, and, before one performance, speaking to a high-school chorus.  I observed their rehearsal, and noted that the best soprano was about six months pregnant.  During question-and-answer, a boy raised his hand and asked, "What are you doing here?"  I scrambled for a sincere answer that wouldn't further widen the gulf between us -- something in between the cynical "It's a gig," and the idealistic "I'm here to show you something beautiful that will uplift your soul and help you make a deeper connection with our shared humanity."  I don't remember now what I said.

I consider myself lucky to have been brought up in what may have been one of the last homes of my generation whose inhabitants listened to classical music.  There's no doubt that this family pursuit formed the basis of my life as a musician.  As a result, however, I have spent my entire adult life practicing a craft that has little-to-no value or perceived benefit in our culture, and for which there is a tremendous dearth of opportunities to make back the copious amounts of money invested in advancing to the level of professionalism.  There's been talk recently about the necessity for classical musicians to become "teaching artists," doing outreach in the schools, but with education budgets cut to the bone, and with -- The Mozart Effect notwithstanding -- unquantifiable outcomes for the students expected to benefit from this exposure -- this might just be another pipe dream (my trip to Wisconsin ten years ago was funded by local educators influenced by the ambiguous Mozart-effect research).

There are varying degrees of exile.  I remember well the existential friction I felt practicing my profession as a singer and dissertation-writing musicologist once I had gotten married and moved to the Bronx -- an existential friction I would give much to struggle against now.  There was an old man in our neighborhood, a successful retired plumber from the County Roscommon, who had bought an old house a block away -- a house where a bishop had been born, grown up, and come back to live in his retirement and finally die -- and was renting it to an Irish music school.  The plumber from Roscommon knew my singing (it would have been hard not to if you walked past the corner where we lived on a summer day), and he came over on the very day I was home having a miscarriage to offer me unlimited access to the house for my practicing.  I was in no emotional state, and I politely rebuffed his kind and neighborly offer, because it wasn't really space I needed to practice my craft; it was child care.  But soon thereafter, we moved here.  And I realize now that I wasn't in exile in the Bronx anywhere near to the extent that I romantically believed.

Where we live now, I see an exile much more severe all around me.  My heart's longing is to comfort that exile, but I am currently stymied as to how.

If I Forget Thee Jerusalem

By the rivers of Babylon
there we sat and wept,
remembering Zion;
on the poplars that grew there
we hung up our harps.

For it was there that they asked us,
our captors, for songs,
our oppressors, for joy.
"Sing to us," they said,
"one of Zion's songs."

O how could we sing
the song of the Lord
on alien soil?
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!

O let my tongue
cleave to my mouth
if I remember you not,
if I prize not Jerusalem
above all my joys!*

*Alternately translated as:  "May I never be able to play the harp again if forget you, Jerusalem!/May I never be able to sing again if I do not remember you,/if I do not think of you as my greatest joy!"

Thoughts on Divine Mercy Sunday

I was married in a torrential rainstorm on the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday five years ago, which was also the day that Pope John Paul II died (a photo of the former event is above).  It seems to me mystically appropriate that our beloved Pope was born into eternal life on the vigil of the feast that commemorates the once-suppressed message of Mercy -- a message that he did so much to spread.

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I learned the Chaplet of Divine Mercy from the Sisters of Life back in 2004, and few days have passed since then that I haven't said it.  It has been a good fit for me as a devotion:  it's short, it goes by quickly, and it hammers home relentlessly the point that God's mercy trumps his righteous justice, which is, I suppose, why some Traddies shun it.  After all, it's human nature to insist that those pathetic stragglers who showed up on the job at the eleventh hour not be paid a full day's wages.  It's human nature to reel in horror when you see your father having a huge party for your wastrel brother who spent down his fortune on booze and whores.  But if God were only a God of justice, we would fear Him, but we would not love Him.  And God wants our love, and wants it freely given.  And who could not love so good a God as He, who looks at us, as He revealed to Saint Faustina, through the wounds of His Son, with compassion for our fallenness, our brokenness, our sin?

This blog was started as a sort of interior argument with my former parish priest, who suggested, after I had two traumatic miscarriages in four months, that God might be chastising me (not punishing, but chastising) for the sin of abortion that I had committed, and been absolved for, many years earlier.  This sounded wrong to me, so I mentioned God's promise to Jeremiah:  "I will forgive their sins and remember them no more"; Father R. countered me with an admonishment not to take Scripture out of context, "like," he said, "the Protestants do" (I suppose he believed that God's message applied only to the post-captivity Israelites).  I then brought up the well-known passage in Saint Faustina's diary, in which her confessor suggests that, the next time someone claiming to be Jesus comes to visit her, she should ask him to tell her what she said in her last Confession.  When He comes again, she does so, and Jesus answers, "I do not remember" (which seems a clear reference to Jeremiah 31:34).  Father R., however, explained to me that Saint Faustina was canonized for her holiness, not for her scriptural authority, and that her diary was full of self-contradictory passages.  I stopped inviting Father R., an exiled paisan in an Irish parish, over for homemade Italian food, and started avoiding whatever confessional he was working out of on Saturdays; I would graciously let as many people as necessary cut ahead of me so that I wouldn't end up spending any grille time with the man I had started calling, in my mind, names like Father Black Cloud and Savonarola.

But the truth is, I cried every day for months about that conversation with Father R.  And finally, I realized he had missed the point entirely, which is exactly why I need Jesus, and why he needs Jesus, and why we all do.  Christ died so that we wouldn't have to suffer in hell for all eternity.  He died for the forgiveness of sins.  Every time we say the Apostle's Creed, we profess our belief in the forgiveness of sins.  Another priest told me that it was Divine Providence that had led Father R. and me to cross paths, so that I could pray for him.  When I remember to, I do.

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In our neighborhood in our new city, an old man has stuck a tiny, faded picture of the Divine Mercy in a corner of his living-room window.  The first time I walked past his house, I was unbelievably grateful to see it.  I've walked past it hundreds of times now, and, for some reason, every time my little boy is with me on my walk, he says, at the exact moment we pass the Divine Mercy house, that he wants to go to the New York Botanical Garden, which was not far from where we lived in the Bronx, and was a place where we spent many happy hours.  This reminds me that the Divine Mercy is inextricably bound up, in my experience, with the Bronx.  I learned the devotion in the Bronx, on the Sisters of Life's retreat.  I came to live in the Bronx on April 2, 2005, the day of my wedding and the Pope's death, and, though I felt in exile even there, I came to fiercely love that most neglected and forsaken of boroughs.  If, as the Buddhists say, the lotus blooms out of the mud, then the Divine Mercy devotion reminds me that Christ, the gardener, brings beauty even out of barren, bloodsoaked soil.  "Where sin did abound, there grace abounded evermore."  In some mysterious way, the Divine Mercy devotion, for me, turned both the godforsaken Bronx and my godforsaken soul into good soil.  This is what you get from a God whose mercy trumps His righteous justice.  What's not to love?