Listening to Classical Music: A Moral Imperative?

I'm still too busy to post much, but I thought this provocative essay by a composer who's also on the theology factulty at Wyoming Catholic College was worth sharing.

If one knows that Palestrina or Bach or Handel or Mozart or Beethoven wrote superior music, then choosing consistently to listen to less excellent music would be a moral fault. It could even be a mortal sin . . . for example, listening for pleasure to songs about sexual perversion or [to] Satanic heavy metal would be mortally sinful. However, since we must strive to flee even venial sins lest they prepare the way for mortal sin, it is always better to assume that today’s popular music, produced mostly by hedonists who are generally singing about sins, is a slippery slope leading to some kind of intellectual pollution and consent.

. . . . For a person attracted by the goodness inherent in art, there can be no divide between entertainment and profundity or worthiness. We should only want to listen to that which is beautiful; to settle consciously for something less is a lessening of our humanity, of our rationality. It would be like saying that only a church needs to be holy, while a home can be profane. No, the home itself must be made holy, it must be a “domestic church,” a sort of monastic enclosure for the bringing up of saints. The divide between entertainment and fine art is a form of dualism. . . we should elevate our souls to the point where what is intrinsically best or most beautiful is what gives us the greatest pleasure and restfulness. In other words, we should aim at a condition where anything we choose to do—whether for relaxation, leisure, or work—is equally noble, excellent, and praiseworthy. When I am in a serious mood, I should sing, play, or listen to Bach or any other great composer; when I am in a light mood or in need of relaxation, I should also sing, play, or listen to Bach or any other great composer.

While I would defend with my dying breath the superiority of anything Beethoven ever wrote to practically anything else created across genres in the history of humanity, I'm not sure I agree with Kwasniewski. He works from the assumption that the classics of the western art-music canon are morally superior to other music (or "musics," as we say in the embarrassingly-desperate-to-be-hip world of musicology), but his definition of that which is musically "intrinsically best or most beautiful" is, at best, a tautology.

In the realm of Kwasniewski's aesthetics, could John Coltrane and John Cage be elevated into the moral pantheon along with Beethoven and Bach? And what about John Prine? They would be in mine. Kwasniewski anathematizes the musics that stir up ache and longing, but what does he say to the musics that assuage them, like this?

A Map of Mercy

The monk must learn how to sin, to be broken, to stand in need, so as to taste the mercy of God. His heart must be shattered and then mended. It thus becomes a map of Christ's mercy. Scars remain deeply engraved on it, making the heart of the monk a testament to the unrestricted forgiveness of God still on offer to every human being.

-- Michael Downey,  Trappist: Living in the Land of Desire

H/T: Dark Speech Upon the Harp

Yesterday is Not Today

I haven't been posting much here, in part because I don't have as much free time for musing, let alone writing, with a new two-year-old around, and in part because the demands of quotidian life have been more pressing lately than this blog. I've noticed something similar with the other blogs I still manage to read, which number far fewer than they used to for the same reasons.

There are also other vaguer and more existential reasons I've been blogging less. One is something that gradually occurred to me on one of my now-daily drives through the place that I live. I don't enjoy driving much yet; in fact, I keep myself up some nights thinking about the places that I have to get to the next day and planning routes to them that will not involve having to make a lot of left-hand turns. I've also found, curiously, that though I'm inclined to profanity in my non-driving life, I've been uncharacteristically restrained in the car: I find myself uttering "Please get off my tail already" under my breath rather often, and, if someone cuts me off, which is frequent, I might let loose with a mild epithet like "Oh, man!" I think that swearing is usually inspired by a kind of self-righteous indignation, and I just don't have the confidence as a driver to assume that I'm right in any driving situation.

But anyway, it dawned on me as I was driving my kids somewhere how much driving changes a former New Yorker's life. I don't mean the obvious facts of greatly-increased mobility and independence, but the fact that, in a car, you become a sort of secret agent. In New York, your agency is out there on the street.  In New York, I was accustomed to being looked at -- not because I'm particularly stunning, but because everyone there is looked at. There's much more of a sense, there, that one's life is lived openly in the public square. In New York, after all, to get to where you're going you have to ride on a subway or bus with many other people, and then walk down a crowded street with many other people. There are many daily functions, including eating and making phone calls, that you're constrained to do in public each day (in my opinion, clipping one's nails, applying full-face makeup, and shaving do not fall into that category, though I've seen people do all of these and worse on the subway). if you're an extrovert, you thrive on this sense of shared purpose, even if it's shared only by virtue of circumstance or necessity, and if you're an introvert, you develop a coping strategy, a game face. I suppose I was a little of both, but I never went to the bodega without lipstick on, I dated a couple of men I met on the subway, and I went to and from my bread gig in high heels, no matter how painful they were by the end of the day (though I stopped wearing high heels after 9/11, just in case I ever had to run away from someplace really fast; one of my friends who lived in my building did, in fact, have to limp eight miles home in stilettos on that day, since the subways and buses had shut down).

This is a different place, though, and in a car, no one sees you. For a former New Yorker, it conveys a tree-falling-in-the-forest sort of feeling. It doesn't matter how my hair looks, and it matters even less what I am thinking about. Most people are just trying to pass me illegally, which is fine with me. I put on the classical-music FM radio station and play guess-the-composer, a game I've always enjoyed, and I have the sense that I'm creating my own little pod which keeps at bay the pervasive sense of lassitude and purposelessness that I see in the jobless men and the women in their pajamas and the boarded-up buildings that I drive past each day. Since my car has no air-conditioning, I sometimes wonder what effect the music that escapes through my open windows might have upon the denizens of my new city. What does it do to you to hear unfamiliar Schumann or Beethoven on a relentless summer day? Do the thrilling strains of the Seventh Symphony act as some kind of cooling agent, or some sort of rising agent, on the system? Can they change the heart?

Sometimes I sing along. Sometimes I turn off the radio and do vocal warm-ups. It doesn't matter what I do. And that is the crux of the matter.

A few years ago, on the eve of the Feast of the Ascension, I had a dream that Christ ascended into heaven on the cross. We know that's not what happened, of course, but I think the message in the dream was that we ascend by descending, as it were -- that is, by accepting humility. Indeed, the more I drive around my depressed little town in my hot little car with three hubcaps missing blaring classical music, the more I get the sense that, as John the Baptist said, I must decrease. And for someone who's used to being looked at that can be a little hard.

I noticed that my last post, the poem "Skyscrapers," went up on the five-year anniversary of my very first post. This blog started as an online diary, and, in writing it, I have written candidly about some of my sins and obscurely about others. I have tried to excavate my own memory in the hope of transmuting it into something beautiful, of spinning refuse into gold. Sometimes I still think that might be possible, but more and more I'm beginning to feel that I have to stop living in the past. God will transform bitter, devastating memory according to His own purposes if I let go of it and give it over to Him; it's not up to me. As Saint Ignatius's "Suscipe" prayer says:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. Thou hast given all to me. To Thee, O lord, I return it. All is Thine, dispose of it wholly according to Thy will. Give me Thy love and thy grace, for this is sufficient for me.

Perhaps I need to stop mining the ore of memory in order to be able to go forward into a new kind of smallness and quietness, a kind of fruitful unimportance. So much of my memory is the memory of sin, and, as someone who knows a lot about these things once told me, you don't need to tell people about your sins, because your sins are lies. In fact, as this person said further, your sins are shit, and you don't go around showing people your shit.

Since a great deal of this blog's content has been an exploration of my past sins, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be keeping up with it. I also have a big writing project coming up that's going to take up most of Jude's naptimes for the foreseeable future. For now, though, I will continue to check in here when I'm feeling inspired.

I will close now with a poem by Paul Bowles, which in many ways evokes the way I feel right now (Bowles, a composer as well as a poet and novelist, wrote a fine art-song setting of his own poem, but I couldn't find a decent performance on Youtube).

Once a Lady Was Here 

Once a lady was here.
A lady sat in this garden,
And she thought of love.
The sun shone the same,
The breeze bent the grasses slowly
As it's doing now.
So nothing has changed.
Her garden still looks the same,
But it's a diff'rent year.
Soon the evening comes down,
And paths where she used to wander
Whiten in the moonlight,
And silence is here.
No sound of her footsteps passing
Through the garden gate.
No, nothing has changed.
Her garden still looks the same,
But yesterday is not today.

The Healing of Memory

It is worth noting that Dante places the full healing of memory at the top of Purgatory, long after earthly death and the long process of atonement for one's sins. Setting aside dementia, injury, or some other illness that affects one's mental faculties, it is in man's nature to remember, to carry with him through his life memories of events both good and bad. Why would that be? How does one reconcile God's love with the burden of painful memories?
 
God doesn't erase our memories because they help to constitute us as individuals, and His creatures whom He loves. Rather than blot out our memories of injuries, heartbreaks, and sins we've endured and committed, God forgives us our offenses and preserves the memory so that we might recall the love He has for us.

Fallen Sparrow is back, and I'm so glad.

Lent for Losers

Another Lent has drawn to a close, another year's forty days of self-abnegation, self-denial, and self-emptying, during which, as in other years, I have barely shown up.  Usually I tell myself that I don't really need to give up anything for Lent, but, rather, to commit to a more devout and rigorous prayer practice, and then I've ended up doing neither.  I started off this Lent, for instance, saying a modified version of the daily office, but that fell by the wayside somewhere.  I also thought I should try to stop swearing (which, for what it's worth, I only do when I'm in a room by myself or inside of my own head -- well, mostly, anyway), but on the Thursday after Ash Wednesday, I found myself starting my morning by eating a brownie for breakfast and dropping the F-bomb.  And so it went.  Every day for forty days I did something somewhere on the scale from neurotic to egregious. And I generally only said the entire rosary when I woke up in the middle of the night, as I often do, because it's a surefire way for me to get back to sleep.

This year, as in years past, I sought to rationalize my lack of effort by telling myself that because I was dealing with some difficult things in my life on a daily basis (my mother's fatal illness, my son's autistic behavior), I didn't need to impose other penances on myself (in other years, it was other difficult things: recurrent miscarriages, moving away from New York, or what have you).  Tonight I went to Stations of the Cross for the first time this whole year.  I also went to confession for the first time since the week before Christmas.  And my confession was as trite as it possibly could have been:  that I had had a bad Lent, and that it was through my own lack of effort, as well as through shifting the blame for my sinfulness onto other people and situations.  This was particularly embarrassing, since I feel sincerely penitent concerning my grave sins, and have no trouble owning them.  It's the small sins -- my daily fecklessness, pettiness, selfishness, and cruelty -- that I would deny with my dying breath if I could.

Tonight Otepoti (who, quite wonderfully, is visiting me from her home in what she calls the ass-end of the world) and I had a discussion about sin.  We were talking, specifically, about whether committing bad acts made one essentially bad, while, conversely, committing good acts made one essentially good.  Otepoti wisely observed that we are all essentially bad -- which dovetailed nicely with a realization I had the other day that we are, also, all essentially disabled.  Only God is good.  Only God is sound, only God is whole. And it is only -- only -- through His mercy that we are saved from our own neuroses, pettinesses, and egregiousness.

We are all losers.  That is why, at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.  That is why we need Him.  That is why we cling to Him, why we celebrate His death and resurrection.  To paraphrase another wise woman, if it wasn't for Jesus, we'd all be bad.

A blessed Triduum and Happy Easter and much love to you all.

"We belong to a Communion of Sinners"

What kind of man would choose alcohol over family, work, and even his own health?  What kind of man is willing to admit that, at the very core of who he is, there is something profoundly distasteful and unnatural? . . . . A person exactly like you and me—not with some passing, analogous resemblance, when squinted at through a pious lens—but exactly like you and me.

I'm on light posting this month because of an intense level of busyness, but I wanted to make sure to link to Simcha Fisher's column at the National Catholic Register today.  It hits hard in exactly the right place.

Naked

In the 1990s, my first husband, M., had the type of day job that was much coveted among struggling New York artists.  He worked in the word processing center of a global investment bank, using the most arcane and esoteric features of Microsoft Office to create marketing materials that helped bankers pitch high-level investments to potential clients.  The work was highly skilled and well paid, and, best of all, the word processors didn't have to deal with the bankers themselves, for whom, it must be admitted, they had little respect.  That was the job of the word processing center supervisor, who was the liaison between the center workers -- all of them highly-educated, underemployed artists, or doctoral candidates who would probably never finish their dissertations -- and the bankers, who were generally first- and second-year analysts just out of college, living four or five to an apartment (but always in doorman buildings in tony neighborhoods) and working a hundred hours a week in expectation of Christmas bonuses that often far exceeded their annual salaries.

M. was very good at his job (he was good at everything he did), and he and his supervisor, a young black grandmother named Margaret, held one another in affection and esteem.  But his temper was such that, in those pre-iPod days, after he threw his Discman at his typing stand in response to a banker's unreasonable request and told Margaret to tell the banker to do the effing job himself, she said to him, "M., I love you, but I can't have you on my shift no more" (my friend Soprannie, who worked with M., was an eyewitness to this event).  After that, M. worked the evening shift.

Margaret was a born-again Christian who used to reminisce, not entirely without nostalgia, about her pre-conversion days of nightclubbing, promiscuity, and recreational drug use.  "Thank God for Jesus," she used to say.  " 'Cause if it wasn't for Jesus, I'd be bad."  We used to laugh at this, as if it were Margaret's standard shtick, but today at Mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, I realized how starkly honest she had been.  The priest noted that the Bible begins with the story of a woman -- Eve -- and ends with the story of another woman, the New Eve, the woman in Apocalypse who is clothed with the sun and has the moon and stars at her feet.  I thought about the fact that the Bible opens in paradise, where the man and woman are naked before one another and are not ashamed, and how, by page three, it's all over:  the angel drives our first parents weeping from the valley of joy and delight with a flaming sword, and now we eat our bread mixed with ashes.

The old joke is that, if you look hard enough, you can find your own phone number in the Bible.  Well, I know mine is in there.  Like our first parents, I have been tempted with the Ur-temptation, the one that has us believing we can have power equal to God's, which is certainly the root of all the nightclubbing, promiscuity, recreational drug use, and so forth.  But the education in evil I received before my conversion was nothing compared to what I've learned about it since.  I suppose it takes an egregious sinner to sneak up in among the righteous and see how very, very many of them take the stance of the Pharisee in the temple, and yet do not see themselves reflected in that parable.  (This is true in a special way in the pro-life movement, which is full of post-abortive women who hesitate to speak openly the joyful news that they have been forgiven, for fear of the poorly-concealed horror in which they are held by some of their less-egregiously-sinful comrades.)  I myself have incurred scorn in the comboxes on this blog from virtuous Catholics, who appear to believe that I don't deserve to call myself a penitent, penitence being reserved, perhaps, for those who sin but lightly.  Well, wake up, people: man is fallen, and we're all naked under our clothes, and not in a pretty, Renoir sort of way, either.  In this season of penitence, it's best to admit that, if it weren't for Jesus, you'd be bad. Maybe you'd be bad like Margaret, maybe you'd be bad like me, or maybe you'd just find your own particular level of badness.  But there are few transgressions of which that the human heart is not capable, no matter how virtuous the mind that believes it controls that heart; and to the good people who say to themselves and each other, "I would never do that" (an assertion I've often heard made, for instance, about abortion, from those on both the pro- and anti- sides), I say, "How do you know?"  We should pray in all humility that we'll never be tempted to see that (or any other sin) as a good option.  As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.  That means yours.

Which is why this feast day is so great.  Our last chance, our true medicine, our only hope, was born to a young girl not, perhaps, unlike the one pictured above, in John Collier's startling painting of the Annunciation, who was just like us, except for the fact that God honored her by removing from her the indelible bruise and brokenness resulting from our first parents' devastating fall.  O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us egregious sinners, who are the happiest of all people because we have recourse to you and your powerful intercession.

Now is a good time to revisit this stark, powerful performance of the old carol "Remember, O Thou Man."

Another Catholic Approach to Single Motherhood

"Restoring those who are broken from sexual sin and who desire to live life differently — a life focused on Christ — is a burden the church must share. What an awesome opportunity for a spiritually mature woman to come alongside a single mom as a mentor and friend.

A regular time together praying and studying God’s Word will help her mature in her walk with the Lord. Allowing her opportunity to observe life as you live it — meal preparation, family time, and providing wholesome conversation and wise counsel on a frequent basis — can provide teaching moments that will benefit her for a lifetime. Introducing her to a small group or class in the church where she and her baby are welcomed and plugged in will be vital to her restoration.

These are just a few examples of things the body of Christ can do. Staying connected with young couples or single moms who have chosen life should continue beyond the celebration of the child’s birth if we truly desire to fulfill the law of Christ in bearing one another’s burdens.

You will find it is not a burden after all, but a tremendous blessing as your family line extends to include these precious souls as part of your own."

From the 40 Days for Life blog.

Mercy Is as Mercy Does

Yes, another post on single motherhood. This is the issue that just won't go away, at least for me, at least until I've finished this blog post.

When I came back to the Catholic Church in 2002, my return was not motivated by the shining example of faithful Catholics around me (admittedly, I didn't know that many). It was, rather, a vertical phenomenon. I had a personal, spiritual experience of Christ's forgiveness for the sin -- abortion -- that I thought could never be forgiven, in spite of the fact that I'd long since confessed and been absolved for it. I am a devotée of the Divine Mercy because I have known Christ's mercy most intimately in my own life, and I recognize that He is always pouring Himself out for us, and always challenging us to take up what He's poured out and to approach the suffering and the sin in our midst with a compassion modeled upon His own. Blessed Julian of Norwich wrote of how, at the beginning of her conversion, she "conceived a great desire, and prayed our Lord God he would grant me in the course of my life . . . the wound of compassion." I believe that compassion can only grow in us when we've come to recognize our own hopeless woundedness, and, moreover, that acting upon it requires us to incur and accept further wounds. Saint Faustina wrote in her Diary of receiving a vision in which she was given to understand that, when God looks at the world, he looks at it through the wounds of His Son. Thus, I believe, we are called upon to accept further wounds as we seek to alleviate the wounds of those around us.

This does not mean that we should descend to dangerous depths in the service of our brothers. It does mean, however, that when we condemn others' sinfulness, we are demonstrating both willful ignorance -- willful, that is, if we have read the Gospels and profess to follow them -- and extreme folly. I mean, Our Lord really couldn't have been much clearer when he said, "Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone."

Yet there is stone-casting aplenty on the Catholic interwebs, and the self-appointed moral scolds who profess our faith seem to take a perverse pride in their ability to detect and call out others' sinfulness. I can only ascribe their seeming indifference to the peril in which they place their own souls to a particular kind of blind spot. I've seen this blind spot up close many times since I started hanging around with conservative Catholics, most recently and hurtfully when a rather well-known Catholic writer and apologist who had been a very supportive friend (and a one-time suitor) misinterpreted something I had written about Barack Obama on this blog, and sent me a personal email in which he recited a litany of my past and present sins, giving prominent place to "the unspeakable crime that [I] committed against [my] own unborn child," which had happened long before he knew me, as well as accusing me of being in league with the devil. I cried about it every day for about two months, and sought the advice of a very trusted and holy priest to try and discern whether I was in fact abominably evil and had just conveniently chosen to overlook it. In the end, though, I had to conclude that this generally good man had been seized by a folly born of (self-) righeous anger, and had acted with dangerous precipitousness, and I started offering up prayers and sacrifices for him, notwithstanding the fact that I wouldn't be sorry if I never saw nor heard from him again.

This is why we have priests, I suppose: to help us to discern clearly, to bring us back from the brink of self-destruction, and to remind us that even the best of us frequently misinterpret the teachings of the Gospels, blinded as we are practically every minute of the day by our insane but innate urges toward pride and self-justification. Which brings me back to the point of this post. I have been reading the book pictured above, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by two sociologists, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, who teach respectively at the University of Pennsylvania and Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. The two lived among and studied hundreds of single mothers in impoverished white, black, and Hispanic neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and found that, contra the commonly accepted wisdom presently abroad in the culture, poor single mothers do not disdain marriage. In fact, they revere and idealize it. The reality of their lives, however, and of those of the men who seduce them (often when the women are in their teens) with the heart-stopping line "I want a baby by you," results far more often than not in the early rupture of their fragile relationships. When a man says "I want a baby by you," the clear implication to these women and girls, even when the experience of friends and kin has demonstrated otherwise, is that the man will stay: the baby will be a bond between them, an unassailable pledge, and the women who become pregnant hope that they may be married when the man has proven he can provide for his young family. Neither a marriage nor a steady job is usually forthcoming, however; the early promise of love and family happiness is often disrupted when men, confronted with the pregnancy they'd desired, deny paternity, use drugs and alcohol, abandon their girlfriends and even beat them viciously, sometimes with the intent of inducing an abortion. And yet, almost all the young women studied say that their children were their salvation, spurring them to become mature adult women with new purpose in lives that had formerly been devastatingly bleak, which can't be entirely a bad thing.

I wish that the Catholic commentators who kick these single mothers to the curb would read this book. Perhaps then they would understand that there are other parts of the picture besides a sexual behavior that offends their sense of morality. They might then redirect their (self-) righteous anger away from poor women whom they believe have been led away by the monstrous Pied Piper of Feminism to the land where they can have all the illicit sex they want and force "taxpayers" to support the babies that result. These commentators might then learn that the great majority of these poor single mothers work, and they might also turn their attention to the social conditions -- among them the disappearance of urban manufacturing jobs that used to keep at bay the burgeoning of a poor underclass -- that have led poor young girls in blighted and dangerous neighborhoods into early sexual behavior and unwed motherhood. And, oh yeah, they might remember that men are involved too, and that the singleness of the mothers in question is usually due to their abandonment by the fathers of their children. (Then again, it appears that the latest rant of the above-linked commentator is indeed an attempt to hold men accountable for their sexual behavior, although she doesn't extend her logic to consider their impoverished partners who become pregnant outside of marriage.)

At any rate, in the end, I can only agree with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that "[i]f we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."

The only antidote for our massive blind spots is to do as someone once suggested: "Dear friends, let us love one another." May God help us to follow this extraordinarily difficult and counterintuitive commandment.

"Beautiful city, we must part," part 2: The Groans of August

It's time for my yearly post on the month that obsesses my imagination.

This is the first time I've spent my favorite month outside of New York City in many years, and August in Appalachia, at least in my corner of it, has nothing at all in common with August in New York City. Back home in the city, the alert observer could perceive the shift in the position of sunlight and the not-unpleasant burning smell in the air that marked the change from high summer to summer's end, and all the uncertainty and the promise of newness that this strange, shifting time -- the real start of the New Year in New York -- brought with it. Here, there's no sense of change apparent, at least to my senses, which were developed and trained under a different set of circumstances: except for the mist rising from the mountains in the early morning, high summer continues.

I'm still walking around in heartbroken longing for my old city and for many parts of the life I once lived there, but it occurs to me more and more that walking around in heartbroken longing has been a constant in my life at least since adolescence. And the truth is that August, far from being a month worthy of commemoration, has traditionally been for me a month of awful loss and absurd failure. This brings me back to my old dilemma: does God want us to be happy? Or does he perhaps ask those of us who are inclined to grief to suffer it for Him, offering that suffering up for others in the expectant hope that He, in the strange efficacy of His economy of mercy, will use it for their healing and their joy? I know, in spite of all the self-esteem propaganda and New Age relativism I absorbed that told me I was essentially a good person, that I am not in fact a person who deserves joy, and the individuals for whom I most often consciously choose to offer my grief are probably not either. But I think some people need joy in order to live and heal, and I pray that God will give it to them, because He loves them so much.

As anyone who's read this blog for a time knows, I'm a pretty egregious sinner who's made some irrevocably bad decisions that have had dire consequences on the lives of others, as well as on my own. Every day upon waking, the prayer comes to my mind that God might use me for good. But how might He do this? Can the leopard change its spots? I am still that person, that egregious sinner, that, for want of a better word, raging diva. But somehow, since the moment of metanoia that changed my heart in 2002, I'm also a different person. I want to trust that God will find a way to use the raging diva that He saw fit to reform for the purpose of demonstrating His unfathomable mercy to other egregious-sinner chicks like myself. Hopefully He'll make His ways somewhat clearer to me as I walk around, hearbroken with longing in August in Appalachia.

Above: "Dining Room Overlooking the Garden" by Pierre Bonnard, an image that has always looked like August to me.

"Having Confessed"

Having confessed he feels
That he should go down on his knees and pray
For forgiveness for his pride, for having
Dared to view his soul from the outside.
Lie at the heart of the emotion, time
Has its own work to do. We must not anticipate
Or awaken for a moment. God cannot catch us
Unless we stay in the unconscious room
Of our hearts. We must be nothing,
Nothing that God may make us something.
We must not touch the immortal material
We must not daydream to-morrow's judgment—
God must be allowed to surprise us.
We have sinned, sinned like Lucifer
By this anticipation. Let us lie down again
Deep in anonymous humility and God
May find us worthy material for His hand.

-- Patrick Kavanagh, from from Collected Poems © W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Mourning Into Joy, Part 3: Is There a Doctor in the House?

Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
and whose sin is covered. Blessed is the one to whom
the Lord shall not impute sin.
-- Romans 4:7-8

I'm going back to New York in a couple of days to defend my doctoral dissertation, "Music, Sin, and Redemption in Victorian Visual Culture." It's an exploration of a mostly-forgotten aspect of the portrayal of salvation history in the visual arts -- a trope dating from the patristic era that equates music with sin, and its abandonment with redemption. This trope, or so I contend, for various reasons reapppeared in 1850s England, and can be seen in certain paintings (as well as literary treatments) of fallen women from that time. The preeminent example of the music-sin-redemption conflation, however, as I have discussed in previous posts, is no woman, but rather David, the great musician who became king, the egregious sinner who was nevertheless a man "after God's own heart" (Acts 13:22). David, after being awakened by Nathan from denial of his sinfulness (adultery with Bathsheba, resulting in a son who dies in infancy, and the contrived murder of her husband Uriah on the battlefield), casts down both harp and crown in mourning, or so he was commonly portrayed as doing in medieval illuminated incipits of Psalm 51 (the "Miserere"). David is shown above, in a sixteenth-century painting by Lucas Cranach, spying upon Bathsheba as she bathes; note that he has his harp with him; having not yet seduced Bathsheba, he has not yet discarded it in grief.

I am honored by the presence of Thomas H. Connolly, the authority on Cecilian iconography, on my dissertation committee, especially because his work has been a revelation to me both in my scholarship and in my journey towards God. His book Mourning Into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint Cecilia is nothing less than a chronicle of salvation history, and his friendship has been a great gift. I was led to his work by various inexplicable events in my first week of graduate school, and to him personally seemingly by chance by a young woman who'd left the novitiate of the Sisters of Life to become a nurse, whom I met once and never saw again; she had been a member along with Connolly of a Catholic student-faculty consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, where Connolly taught until his retirement.

When I was confirmed, the bishop asked, upon hearing my confirmation name, if I were a musician. When I answered in the affirmative, he instructed me to "pray to Saint Cecilia often." I have often forgotten to do so; Cecilia is so far away from our own time and experience, and my main man these days is Fr. Hermann Cohen, like David a sinner, a Jew, and a musical penitent. But I would like to ask those readers so inclined to please speak to Cecilia about me, even if just one word, between now and October 31. I hope that my defense will not only earn me my degee, but will also afford glory to God, the true author and revealer of all beauty. Please also ask for help for my son, from whom I've never been away before, and his father, who'll be taking care of him solo.

Mea maxima culpa

I did something once of which I'm deeply ashamed and which continues to haunt me today (okay, that part about "once" was a little joke): I wrote a paper for a man I was in love with. I saw him yesterday after many years; he's just entered my graduate program as a new doctoral student. It must have been a good paper.

Chastisement

I started to miscarry naturally over the course of two days. It was the most pain I've ever been in. My nine-months-pregnant friend took me to the ER (she went into labor and delivered a 10-lb. baby boy at home the next evening), where I eventually had an emergency D&C in the middle of the night. I got up at 3 AM to pump and dump some breastmilk for DS so as to cycle the anaesthesia through my bodily fluids more quickly. I have been ambivalent about weaning him, but he seemed able to get to sleep fine after a bout of crying in the middle of the night. I told him we couldnt nurse, but rocked him and sang "Buckeye Jim" in my voice cracked from the anaesthesia tube.

I will never believe the "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" ethos and scenario that most people espouse around this type of event. It assumes that some -- any -- people are good, and "Why callest thou me good? No one is good but one, that is God" (Mark 10:18). Nor will I believe the new-age platitudes that people whom I respect for reasons other than their ability to reason have beeen offering, along the lines of "that soul chose its destiny (which was to gestate in me and perish at eight weeks, then be scraped out of my womb) as a service to you . . . there's no judgement; everything is perfect as it is," etc. The one thing that resonates with me is the concept of God's justice. We like to focus on His mercy, which some say trumps his justice; in fact, St. Faustina emphasized that his mercy was his greatest attribute, or so he told her in his apparitions. But there must also be balance and proportion; there must also be justice. Could be, as my confessor suggested, that I am being chastised for my many, many serious sins. Not punished, but chastised; made chaste, as it were, purified in the consuming flames of suffering. If this is the case, I pray that it will work this time.