Poor Baby: Heather King on Abortion

As I've mentioned before, this blog used to attract some very vocal haters. I'm not sure why, but I think it may have had something to do with my status as a post-abortive woman and a revert -- almost a convert really, since I'd been raised in a very catechesis-light progressive-Catholic milieu. It seemed to me, from some of their barbed comments and vicious personal emails, that these readers believed that my gratitude at being forgiven my sins was insufficient because I had not demonstrated a close enough affiliation with the political right, and, as has become more and more apparent in the years that I've been writing this blog, many orthodox Catholics do align themselves tightly with this particular political philosophy, in spite of the fact that it has little to do with Catholicism. But if you've been reading this blog for more than five minutes, you already know that this is not a political blog, and that I'm not that personally interested in politics.

When I read Father Robert Barron's interview with Heather King about her own post-abortive healing, I wondered if the haters were going to get in a twist about her, too. Maybe they already have, but let's hope not. Most of us here love Heather and wish her well. And most of us, while we don't necessarily rush out to take suffering by the hand, know that those who suffer deeply, and who do so with an awareness of suffering's redemptive nature, are not only blessed, but are also a blessing to those around them.

Bring the Wounded to the Church

[Project Rachel founder Vicki] Thorn said that the abortion debate “is so emotionally charged, not because it is a moral and philosophical debate, but because it is a heart experience. I believe that everyone knows someone who has had an abortion.

“We must always speak with gentleness and not condemnation, because it is our charge, as laid out by Pope Benedict XVI, to bring the wounded to the Church for healing.”

Read the rest.

Happy Brahmsday

The most humane composer of all time would be 178 years old today.  To celebrate, one of the most beautiful of his works, "Zum Schluss" (In the End), the last song in the Neue Liebesliederwalzer, set to a text by Goethe:

Now, you Muses, enough!
In vain you strive to show
how misery and happiness
change places in the loving breast.
You cannot heal the wounds
that Love has caused,
but solace comes, dear ones,
only from you.

The Medicine of Brokenness

I've made a bedtime CD for my son that includes the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing "Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen" from Bach's Cantata BWV 82, "Ich habe genug," whose opening text is a gloss on Nunc dimittis, the words uttered by Simeon upon beholding the Christ.  

I have enough,
I have taken the Savior, the hope of the righteous,
into my eager arms;
I have enough! 
I have beheld Him, 
my faith has pressed Jesus to my heart; 
now I wish, even today with joy 
to depart from here.


Fall asleep, you weary eyes,
close softly and pleasantly! 
World, I will not remain here any longer, 
I own no part of you 
that could matter to my soul. 
Here I must build up misery, 
but there, there I will see 
sweet peace, quiet rest.

The shimmering, controlled intensity of LHL's remarkable performance -- especially the way that she crescendoes and then diminuendoes every syllable of every word of every phrase -- not only give the listener a sense of the singer's profound intimacy with this music and these words, but also convey the sense that she was going beyond interpretation, anticipating her own untimely death with equanimity and even hope.

As he's going to sleep, my son always asks when "Lorraine" is going to sing.  He asks about the times I saw her perform, and wants to know what she wore and what her hair was like (in her legendary performance of this piece, she wore a hospital gown, and her hair was scant and straggling).  He asked me tonight if he came with me to see her when he was a baby, and if Lorraine held him, which made me think of her in the role of Simeon himself.  We always pray that she is in heaven with God.

Tonight I thought of her, and the gift of healing and profound compassion that she poured forth in her singing.  It occurred to me that some of the same behaviors I recently wrote about critically here were also behaviors that my heroine had herself engaged in -- the breaking up, for instance, of a marriage, not to mention the embracing of strange gods.  I cannot rationalize the suffering she participated in and perpetrated, in spite of my great admiration for her (and I have participated in and perpetrated suffering enough myself).  I can only pray for her, as my son and I do together each night.  I have found it to be true that one's own great brokenness can be distilled into a medicine for others, and I believe that Lorraine allowed herself to be this medicine.  I pray for her healing then and now, and for the healing of all of us here too, towards which music can go such a long way.

Healing the Suffering of the World

The Divine Infancy in us is the logical answer to the peculiar sufferings of our age and the only solution to its problems.

If the Infant Christ is fostered in us, no life is trivial.  No life is impotent before suffering, no suffering is too trifling to heal the world, too little to redeem, to be the point at which the world's healing begins.

The way to begin healing the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us; to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ; and, in rocking that cradle to the rhythm of love, to swing the whole world back into the beat of the Music of Eternal Life.

It is true that the span of an infant's arms is absurdly short; but if they are the arms of the Divine Child, they are as wide as the reach of the arms on the cross.  They embrace and support the whole world; their shadow is the noon-day shade for its suffering people; they are the spread wings under which the whole world shall find shelter and rest.

-- Caryll Houselander, The Passion of the Infant Christ

Complaint

Today is the birthday of William Carlos Williams, the New Jersey doctor and great modernist poet, who wrote in his autobiography: 

I have never felt that medicine interfered with me but rather that it was my very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for me to write. Was I not interested in man? There the thing was, right in front of me. I could touch it, smell it. It was myself, naked, just as it was, without a lie telling itself to me in its own terms.

Here is the poem that appeared today on the Writer's Almanac in honor of his birthday,  I had never read it before, and it affected me the way great art across genres usually does, like a punch to the gut.

They call me and I go.

It is a frozen road
past midnight, a dust
of snow caught
in the rigid wheeltracks.
The door opens.
I smile, enter and
shake off the cold.
Here is a great woman
on her side in the bed.
She is sick,
perhaps vomiting,
perhaps laboring
to give birth to
a tenth child. Joy! Joy!
Night is a room
darkened for lovers,
through the jalousies the sun
has sent one gold needle!
I pick the hair from her eyes
and watch her misery
with compassion.

How You Get Unstuck

This is not the sort of thing I usually link to, and I only found it myself through a confusing concatenation of links and recommendations, as one does sometimes:  an online advice columnist in an edgy online cultural journal, The Rumpus, extending help to a woman mourning a late-term miscarriage  (I clicked through some of the other articles, and they looked to be the sort of garbage that I try to stay away from).  But I was riveted and moved by the columnist's harrowing story of her young clients, and how she finally resolved to help them salvage their lives.

It is heartbreaking that the lives of so many are untouched by beauty, or even by kindness.  It is heartbreaking that so many children are betrayed.   It seems that the young girls Sugar writes about were very fortunate to have encountered her.

Please be warned that Sugar describes painful situations of abuse in some detail, and uses offensive language.

The Scent of Water

As a child, I spent a great deal of time at the neighborhood library, which had a brilliant, sympathetic children's librarian who often recommended books for me. As I grew older, approaching adolescence, she told me that she thought I would love the English writer Eliazabeth Goudge (pictured above). For some reason that I no longer recall, I never did read any books by Goudge, until now. My friend Janet, whose acquaintance I made through one of the felicitous online encounters that are a particular pleasure of blogging (she comments frequently at Maclin Horton's blog, where there has been much discussion of Goudge lately), encouraged me to buy myself Goudge's novel The Scent of Water for my birthday earlier this summer, and I'm very happy that I took her advice.

The novel is about Mary, an unmarried, middle-aged woman who leaves her life in London to take possession of a house in an isolated rural village. The house has been left to her by a distant cousin whom Mary had met only once, on a luminous, life-changing occasion, when she was a child. Living there, Mary finds slow and quiet waves of grace and transformation breaking over her, and a healing of the past, which affect her neighbors in their turn. The book is prefaced by a quote from the Book of Job: "For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof was old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant."

As one preoccuppied with an awareness of the possibilities of grace, transformation, and healing of the past, I find the book to be profoundly moving and to offer a great deal of truth. One character, a writer, notes, "if you understand people you're of use to them whether you can do anything for them or not. Understanding is a creative act in a dimenstion we do not see." Later, Mary considers that "love alone doesn't go far enough . . . It must be charged with understanding." The desire to understand others, no matter how strange or repellent they seem, is, I think the root of the compassion I wrote about in the post just below this one.