Watch This

Just watch it.

This was grace - short film from Andrew Laparra on Vimeo.

H/T The Magdalene Sisters.

A Short Testament

Whatever harm I may have done

In all my life in all your wide creation

 If I cannot repair it

I beg you to repair it,

And then there are all the wounded

The poor the deaf the lonely and the old

Whom I have roughly dismissed

As if I were not one of them.

Where I have wronged them by it

And cannot make amends

I ask you

To comfort them to overflowing,

And where there are lives I may have withered around me,

Or lives of strangers far or near

That I've destroyed in blind complicity,

And if I cannot find them

Or have no way to serve them,

Remember them. I beg you to remember them

When winter is over

And all your unimaginable promises

Burst into song on death's bare branches.

"A Short Testament" by Anne Porter, from Living Things. © Zoland Books.

(H/T:  Karen Edmisten)

Wrought in Flames

"We wince in fear and shrink back as the fire dances, but those who enter the furnace in faith, they know the invisible dew of Grace and how those flames of trial consume the stubble of the passions and leave behind brilliance."

I'm on the road and don't have time for a proper blog post, but I wanted to share this very moving one from Katherine at Evlogia.

The Gifts of Blogging

As I've mentioned here before, I first began this blog as an on-line diary when I was trying to work through my grief after repeated miscarriages, and to generally make sense of the enormous changes in my life that had come crowding in upon each other in a small space of time -- conversion, marriage, motherhood, move to the Bronx.  I invited four friends to read it and, before long, as these things do, its readership snowballed, and the number of readers with whom I had a personal relationship was dwarved by those I did not know.  Then I began getting the sort of reader whose presence is strongly felt on the Catholic interwebs -- the orthodoxy-policing, mote-in-your-eye sort of reader who believes he understands your motives and knows your soul.  At the same time, I acquired readers of great sensitivity, kindness, and thoughtfulness, some of whom, though I've never met them, have become true friends.

Around the time that we left New York, one real-life friend of mine, who I did not know was a reader here, misunderstood something I'd written, and sent me a personal email repudiating me and rejecting my friendship on the grounds that I was dangerous to his spiritual well-being.  He accused me of having no talent for music (though he'd attended some public performances of mine and had subsequently asked me to sing at his father's wake and funeral), marriage (though he'd previously asked me to marry him), or motherhood (I have no idea on what he based this opinion, though he seemed to glean from this blog that I blamed motherhood for the fact that I didn't have a high-powered opera career, something I can't imagine ever having written since it's not something I actually believe).  Moreover, he suggested that, although I seemed to see myself as a "magdalene," I was actually more like one of the Gadarene horde (I'm guessing that he thought I equated myself with the Magdalene because my doctoral dissertation was about the reappearance of Magdalenian imagery in the visual culture of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, in paintings that also used music symbolism, and because I used the email address newmagda1en - at - gmail.com, a reference to an 1873 novel by Wilkie Collins, The New Magdalen, which was one of the sources for my dissertation research).  I believe that this same friend had some of his acquaintances leave remarks in the combox making similar arguments.  I cried over this for months, and went to confession about it seven or eight times.  My first confession after the fact was at a monastery near my new city, where the priest suggested that I stop writing my blog because it might be the fruit of vanity.  I thought about that, but decided that he was wrong.  For not only is this blog anonymous; since it became public, early on, I have only hoped and prayed that it would be a means of some solace or consolation to those who, like me, are penitents, and who, like me, mourn and struggle on our way to Christ, Whom we nevertheless love above all else.  Besides, this blog is about the mote -- or rather the beam -- in my own eye.

In the past day, I have seen a remarkable work come about through the agency of this blog that I can only attribute to the Holy Spirit.  One of the wonderful friends I've made here, whom I've never met in person, responded to my request for prayers for my friend N., the homeless, undocumented immigrant who lives in a shelter in Queens with her four-year-old, by sending me a sizable check to give to her.  This check is going to be converted to a money order for N. and sent to her immediately.  I am overwhelmed with gratitude, and so happy to note once again that God makes His will known using even the frailest of instruments -- us sinful men, and the etheric clouds through which we transmit our fleeting thoughts.

Contemplative Life with "The Smallest in the Kingdom"

A year after my re-conversion, and shortly before I met my husband, I briefly dated a moderately prominent ortho/trad Catholic journalist, who one night confessed to me his irrational horror of people with developmental disabilities, and his fear of fathering a child afflicted with them.

We remained friends for a time after our dating relationship ended and he'd begun seeing someone else, when he spoke once more about his fear of having a child with Down syndrome.  His innamorata, it seems, was approaching the age at which the rate of bearing babies with Down increases to 1%.  I reminded him that this statistic suggested that, should they marry and have a child, the odds were 99% in favor of the child not having Down.  This did little to reassure him, however, and he was no more comforted by the ample testimony of parents of children with Down syndrome of the blessings these children bring to a family.

Today I read this remarkable story on the blog Laodicea about a contemplative order of nuns, the Little Sisters Disciples of the Lamb, which is partially comprised of young women with Down syndrome.  May God prosper this wonderful order abundantly, and may these holy women of God pray for us all.  For all we know, in the mysterious economy of God's grace, they may be instrumental in my erstwhile friend's salvation.

Thanksgiving

Enbrethiliel of Sancta Sanctis is one of the most thoughtful, elegant, and stylish (in the writerly sense) bloggers on the Catholic interwebs.  She took my breath away today with the closing of a typically provocative and well-considered post:

"Perhaps, one day, I'll look back at everything I've screwed up and see the grace that helped me to do any of it at all."

I think I will adopt this felicitous thought as the motto both of Thanksgiving and of this blog. 

Hard Grace

I wonder sometimes if I'll ever get used to life as it really is, if I'll ever reconcile myself to the fact that it has little if anything in common with the dark, redolent landscapes suggested to me in my youth by the songs of Brahms and Schumann and the poetry they set. In my younger days, I imagined that I could recreate my life whole out of those ingredients, plus maybe a bowl of flowers, some macrobiotic groceries, red lipstick, and a thrift-store coat. Things seemed like so much more than what they were; I could practically feel the molecules moving along the surfaces of the created world, and I expected objects to live and breathe and tell me their stories. I also imagined that I was the translator of phenomena, that I needed to make the hidden stories of things known through my own artistic work. I thought that if things looked a certain way, smelled a certain way, and sounded a certain way in my daily experience, everything would be all right. In short, I believed that aesthetics trumped nature, nurture, neurosis, and the whole host of other uncontrollable variables that end up carving a life out of the seemingly endless run of days. Oh, and grace. I didn't know much about it, nor about mercy; but I did have the sense of an invisible thread of goodness that somehow tugged me safely through some shocking and desperate situations.

But grace is not always aesthetically satisfying. It's hard to distinguish sometimes between the gift of humility, which is like a long exhalation of relief, and the feeling of being kicked down howling into the dirt. Grace has led me further away from the beautiful perceptions that used to make up my days -- the vetiver perfume worn by a bohemian German woman who sat next to me at the ballet one day when I was fourteen, the swirl of cream spiraling down into a glass of black coffee, the delightful label on a can of imported tomato paste, so beautiful that I removed it and pinned it up on the wall -- and deeper into the repetitive, drone-like tasks that actually do make up the days of most adults.

I sometimes think that the adults in my life recognized certain proclivities in me as a child and trained me for them, with the result that I lived as an artist and lacked practicality almost entirely. I also behaved in ways that were hurtful to those around me. I think the adults felt themselves to have been thwarted by responsibility and circumstance from paying court to beauty as they had wished to, and so trained me to do it for them. But in the end, like most people, I eventually had to learn the hard lessons of adulthood; I just did so later than most, and with more resentment.

When everything whispered beauty to me, I lived in a kind of perfumed solitude, which has devolved now into ordinary everyday loneliness. And it's almost a year since we moved away from New York, and I still can't drive.

But Mark Strand wrote in his beautiful poem "The Continuous Life":

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

Above: The Table (1925) by Pierre Bonnard.

Please Pray

For Christine, the wife of a friend and former singing colleague of mine. She is having surgery tomorrow for a melanoma in her brain; she also suffers from multiple sclerosis. Her husband, in addition to being a marvelous artist, is a faith-filled man. He has started a blog about his wife's progress, and this is an excerpt from a recent post:

We were marveling at the kindness and generosity of all of our friends and family and how we realize that this great peace is directly associated with all of the prayers. We are also conscious of the fact that despite Christine’s suffering with these two difficult diseases that she has shouldered for many years, there is a plan in all of this that has God’s hand in it. It is often said that the Lord works in mysterious ways. Perhaps to us, these ways are mysterious. But He know exactly what He is doing.

So why is our adorable Christine dealing with all of this (and so gracefully, if you don’t already know)? We have surmised that everybody who is reading this blog, and the [others who have] sent correspondences are all playing a part in [an] unraveling plan for increased faith. People are expressing themselves freely on a public website about prayer. Impressive. I think that there are folks out there who will be persuaded to begin to reestablish that spiritual communication, whether it just begins with “Thanks, Lord” or becomes as elaborate as a rosary., just because of these public assertions that are visible and out there. That’s fortification right there. The love that has been expressed for Christine and our family has been awe-inspiring. This great pronouncement and outpouring of love and prayer has allowed us to relax and has set out minds at ease. It has also, most importantly, increased our faith. The point is that somewhere along the line in this complex process, faith is growing and flourishing.

May we all know the joy of seeing our sufferings work for others' good.

Happy Birthday (Re-post from November 8, 2008)

. . . to Servant of God Dorothy Day (1897-1980), shown above at Mass with César Chávez and Coretta Scott King.

In her own words:

"'[P]hysical sensations' allured me. I lived a social-activist Bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village, New York City. I think back and remember myself, hurrying along from party to party, and all the friends, and the drinking, and the talk, and the crushes, and falling in love. I fell in love with a newspaperman named Lionel Moise. I got pregnant. He said that if I had the baby, he would leave me. I wanted the baby but I wanted Lionel more. So I had the abortion and I lost them both. . . .

I hobbled down the darkened stairwell of the Upper East Side flat in New York City. My steps were unsteady. My left arm held the banister tightly. My right arm clutched my abdomen. It was burning in pain. I walked out onto the street alone in the dark. It was in September of 1919. I was twenty-one years old and I had just aborted my baby.

. . . . Lionel, my boyfriend, promised to pick me up at the flat after it was all over. I waited in pain from nine a.m. to ten p.m. but he never came. When I got home to his apartment I found only a note. He said he had left for a new job and, regarding my abortion, that I 'was only one of God knows how many millions of women who go through the same thing. Don’t build up any hopes. It is best, in fact, that you forget me.'

. . . . I always had a great regret for my abortion. In fact, I tried to cover it up and to destroy as many copies of The Eleventh Virgin [her 1924 autobiographical novel, in which she wrote about the abortion] as I could find. But my priest chided me and said, 'You can’t have much faith in God if you’re taking the life given to you and using it that way. God is the one who forgives us if we ask, and it sounds like you don’t even want forgiveness — just to get rid of the books.' I never forgot what the priest pointed out — the vanity or pride at work in my heart. Since that time I wasn’t as worried as I had been. If you believe in the mission of Jesus Christ, then you’re bound to try to let go of your past, in the sense that you are entitled to His forgiveness. To keep regretting what was, is to deny God’s grace."

(See "Dorothy Day's Pro-Life Memories" by Dan Lynch.)

John Cardinal O'Connor, the late Archbishop of New York who opened her cause for canonization, said of Day:

"[A]fter becoming a Catholic, she learned the love and mercy of the Lord, and knew she never had to worry about His forgiveness. (This is why I have never condemned a woman who has had an abortion; I weep with her and ask her to remember Dorothy Day's sorrow but to know always God's loving mercy and forgiveness.) She had died before I became Archbishop of New York, or I would have called on her immediately upon my arrival. Few people have had such an impact on my life, even though we never met."

Servant of God Dorothy Day, pray for us all.