Clairity's Place

Christ Meets the Samaritan Woman

2010-03-07T13:51:00.001-06:00

During my last two years of high school and first of college, I was deeply involved with the pro-life movement. I helped at a counseling center located in the same strip mall and across from an abortion clinic. I wept once after a girl who spoke with us, even having an idea what she was doing, went ahead with her abortion. One afternoon I was going to class at the local community college and during a break I met a young woman. I have no idea how the subject came up, but it turned out that she had previously worked at that same clinic, quite possibly at the same time that I was volunteering across the parking lot. Our conversation was amicable, we didn't bother with the arguments, but I recall that she had quit her job from discouragement at the lack of responsibility on the part of her clients.

I was struck by Christ's words in today's Gospel addressed to the despised Samaritan woman, adulterous and not an adherent of the true Jewish practice.

“If you knew the gift of God
and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink, ‘
you would have asked him
and he would have given you living water.” (Jn 4:10)

He doesn't avoid the subject of divorce. And still she does recognize Him, as Messiah, as a promise of life. Everything changes from receiving this living source.

Like many others (for one example see Gregory Wolfe's "Why I Am a Conscientious Objector in the Culture Wars"), there is always the risk to get lost in the cause. I became discouraged with activism at that young age and have never been quite convinced since. Having said that, I recognize that some are called to a single-hearted engagement, full of love and sacrifice, and I honor that. Circumstances and interests have drawn me down another path.

I was already active in pro-life work when the Roe v. Wade decision came down like the plague. The stakes are incalculable as life has infinite value, each one, and there are the related horrors that are unfolding now which were predictable from the start. Sometimes a woman is won over at the steps of the clinic, as in a fascinating recent local case, when a woman intending to abort threatened a protester with a knife. She was arrested, sentenced to probation, and forgiven by her would-be victim. Instead, the thanked the woman for her witness, for ultimately changing her mind and saving her baby. It was that strange meeting that changed everything.

It's not for me to dictate, even if I have opinions, how we in the Church will manage given the moral norms we can't compromise which are increasingly in conflict with social policies. But we should consider how we will continue to meet people across a cultural divide where the other can seem as abhorrent as a leper. How will our Catholic institutions continue to offer hospitality to all? And when will we come to terms with the fact that reasoning alone will hardly convince anyone, without a new presence to accompany them on a difficult journey with the promise of joy.

Fresco from the Roman Catacombs, Christ with the Woman at the Well

Weakness of Faith and the Irish Church Scandal

2010-02-20T10:23:00.003-06:00

The Pope's meeting with the Irish bishops over the pedophilia scandal did not bring closure to the crisis. Nor could it. This is the long task for the Irish church as it is for the U.S. From reports, the Pope pointed to a "weakening of faith" as the cause of this crisis. This seemed abstract to many, even "shocking" to one victim advocate, as most are looking for more resignations and rules. On the contrary, it is the incisive key not only to the past but to the future where the temptation to power lurks in so many forms.

Faith in Christ engenders the community where trust flowers as in the best of families. Conversion as a life process is fostered in fellowship and with the sacraments. Formalistic roles and rituals without the heart of faith resist the change that every human heart requires for healthy relationships. John Waters, who has been following this crisis at ilsussidiario.net, describes this loss of the practice of faith in recent decades:

Irish Catholicism had long since ceased to offer a coherent version of Christianity to the generations it had itself educated out of poverty and ignorance. Despite the fervent shows of devotion at the time of Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1979, the writing was already on the wall. Although now speaking to one of the best-educated populations in the world, the Irish Catholic Church was still pushing the same limited and simplistic moralism it had promoted in the dark days of post-Famine Ireland, an essentially fear- and rule- based religiosity that achieved no productive engagement with the freedoms that had become available to the generations born after the middle of the 20th century. The scandals of the 1990s and after, therefore, provided the perfect alibi for those generations to reject the Church and all it stood for, exposing Irish Catholicism to charges of rank hypocrisy and enabling many of the formerly faithful to dismiss certain inconvenient elements of the Church’s teaching.

The victim's work is a challenging one. There is the human need for acknowledgment and for some form of justice, something admittedly in short supply in the real world and even where it should first be found, among believers. This is owed to those the Church is responsible for in her ministries. Then there is the need to practice forgiveness, for the good of oneself as well as another, which particularly given the seriousness of the offense can hardly be done without the help of the innocent One who offered himself for every last one of our sins. This can be a very long process which demands our patience and prayers.

But as Waters points out further on, a scandal is always most convenient for all those who would project all evil outside themselves.

There are, of course, elements of disingenuousness about these responses. Reports of sexual abuse by priests have been deeply shocking for many people, but few can say that they were unaware of the picture outlined in last year’s Ryan Report, concerning physical abuse and maltreatment of children in church-run institutions over many decades. But, far from relieving the Church’s situation, this has made things worse, because the society now seeks to find ready scapegoats for a cultural phenomenon in which many more people – judges, policemen, social workers, child protection officers – are implicated than are now willing to admit to their roles. For as long as the church remains the centre of attention, the other guilty parties will be able to avoid the wrath of a culture seeking to purge its guilt and shame by expressing as much outrage as is humanly feasible.

The forms of violence that we practice today are not so easily recognized and reviled, but we will be called to account for them later and may not be found innocent. Speaking of children alone, with abortion as the obvious and catastrophic pinnacle: we also accept the severing of families as normal; we hand our young people over to "safe sex" practices, short-cutting the maturing process they need for lifelong bonds; we push and stress out and over-medicate kids to produce an image of ourselves that we could never be. Without faith, which admits that not we but Christ is the answer to our wobbling hearts, we will do all this and more.

Photo: Crucifix, La Mercè Basilica, Barcelona

Local Sorrows: Break Any Woman Down, Dana Johnson (Book Review)

2010-02-18T10:26:00.000-06:00

This is not a book I would have found on-line. It's one of those books I found by slow shuffling through a local bookstore. A while ago, I was at the USC bookstore in LA, waiting for my daughter, and wandering. Without the little award balloon on the cover, I probably wouldn't have picked it up for a look. These are stories from the hood, South Central Los Angeles, and they're very good.

I'm so impatient with books now, especially with pretentious prose. It's that past-forty hoarding of time. This book I accepted eagerly, because I was invited into a pure vernacular. It's hard to raise the outrage for pity parties or victim chronicles because these are the incessant demands of the media and wear us out. Even if Johnson's stories dive deep into some shady places, the stories are about the shadows lodged in one's own heart. There are stories here that made me grieve, not for poverty and death so much as for timidity and hardheartedness, what I find in myself.

There's a particularly painful story about a girl whose cousin is dying, "Something to Remember Me By". She's completely resistant to this fact. Her cousin is trying to help her along, but she refuses, refusing life as well as death. She doesn't want to talk about the three-piece white suit he plans to wear for his funeral; she doesn't want to dance when they go out. She recalls going to church the first time and hearing Gospel music and being so moved she then had to flee, until her aunt made her return.

The reverend hollered and pointed and stomped his feet, stopping only to wipe his dripping brow. And when the choir sang, the ladies in the front row screamed, and the organ was so thick and loud I couldn’t breathe. I ran down the aisle and out of the church. Aunt Mavis came after me and asked me what was the matter … “Auntie Mavis, it feels like I ain’t got no clothes on.”… She retied the blue ribbon woven through one of my pigtails and took my hand to walk back into the church. I sat under her for the rest of the service, scared and squeezing my eyes shut, trying to keep out the spirit.

There is also the timidity of an 11-year-old girl in "Melvin in the Sixth Grade", a black teenager befriended by a white southern boy, who then denies him during a test of friendship. The same girl, Avery, is found in "Markers" as an adult who feels helpless to acknowledge her strong impoverished mother.

What happens during an ordinary party among three friends, in “Three Ladies Sipping Tea in a Persian Garden”, reveals something else always bubbling just below the surface:

As I walk I remember a moment earlier in the day when the sun had not quite left our side of the world and Sharzad was painting my toes and Nasim was telling me that I should wear eyeliner to bring out my brown eyes, and there was this thing, a feeling like a voice, a nagging voice, trying to tell me something, maybe trying to tell me a way to be. It felt like being so happy and so sad. I couldn't name it. Almost, though. Almost. I was so close to getting it, like that song of Zeba's I can almost remember. The melody, I have, but the missing words to the lyrics, I don’t have. They’re just on the tip of my tongue.

I was startled by the way these stories prod at that resistance to life and ultimately to goodness. It's rare to read a book that so directly addresses our fears.

The Catholic Hospital

2010-02-17T10:28:00.001-06:00

Msgr. Albacete's column this week at ilsussidiario.net is on the difference of the Catholic hospital: "What Defines a Catholic Hospital?" It comes down to presence and hospitality. This difference risks to be lost as Catholic hospitals are bought up by mega-health systems.

I visited my doctor at one such hospital in the Bronx. It used to be called “Our Lady of Victory” Hospital. It was a small, community-oriented hospital, open to the amazing diversity of people in its neighborhood. I remember the statue of Our Lady outside the main entrance as if welcoming the varied sons and daughters into their common home to share, even in the midst of their sickness and pain, the victory of Her Son. The statue is, of course, gone, and the chapel with the Blessed Sacrament is now a meditation room. I asked my doctor’s secretary, a “New York Puerto Rican” whether she has worked there before “Our Lady of Victory” Hospital became part of the Montefiori health care empire, and she said she had. Then I asked whether she noticed any difference now from the way it was then, and she said: “Things are more efficient now, but something is missing, a warmth, a human warmth associated with Our Lady” (I don’t think she had read Dante’s reference to the “caldo…” in his Hymn to the Virgin!).

The threat to identity is not only due to financial strains. Speaking of another Catholic hospital, Albacete points out that we ignore history and miracles and in particular the Eucharist, which is neglected just where He should be most prominent.

First of all this hospital is the place of the miracle, accepted by the Holy See, that led to the canonization of the first American born saint: St. Elizabeth Seton. On the hallway that leads from the lobby to the elevators there is a big portrait of Mother Seton, at the entrance of the chapel where the Blessed Sacrament is kept. Still I have not been able to find a single person in the hospital who knows this particular and important event in the history of the U.S. The Eucharist is not celebrated in the chapel of the hospital. Instead is celebrated in a nursing home connected to the hospital and at a regular parish down the street, in the same block of the hospital complex.

When I asked one of the sisters who used to run the hospital why no Mass was celebrated at the hospital, she answered: “Because not too many people would be able to attend the Mass, and those who wanted to go could go to the nursing home or to the parish.” I tried to explain to her that the celebration of the Eucharist has nothing to do with number of people that attend. If only one person, one patient could go it’s worthwhile; in fact, if no one goes, Mass is still a miracle at the source of all miracles, including the one that led to Mother Seton’s canonization. Our relation with the Eucharist is the first stage of what makes us human and therefore of the warmth that defines a true Catholic hospital.

What is true for the Catholic hospital is true for the Catholic school is true for the Catholic social agency. In the large network of state-funded Irish orphanages of decades ago, evidently the Catholic presence was lost, and institutions became horrors.

I was struck by what Fr. Carron said some time ago about missionary efforts by AVSI, that even when more funds are available, they would never set up a mission without the presence of those believers who carry this awareness with them.

Homo Viator

2010-02-15T10:31:00.000-06:00

It was strange, just days before the Christmas bombing attempt, to watch George Clooney's smooth concourse through airports as Ryan Bingham, the traveling man with exceptional flying credentials and scant human connections.

The metaphor may be too cute, but the script and acting painted a vivid picture of the times. The upper Midwestern wedding scene is a classic. The Canadian director and scriptwriter Jason Reitman also produced Juno in 2007 and the film had that feel to it.

The social cues are confused, and the cultural props for relationships have been removed. Even for the well-intentioned, platitudes don't hold up. The generational clash between Bingham and a tech-savvy young colleague implies an accusation of selfishness, for having left young people without the signposts for communal life.

Even Ryan's cynical answer to the question "How much does your life weigh?"can't protect him from the journey.

Taken for a Spin

2009-12-30T16:56:00.000-06:00

Taken looked like a straightforward action flick with the compelling theme of a father, a former CIA operative (Liam Neeson), who crosses the Atlantic to rescue his daughter. The premise of the overworked dad out saving others while neglecting his family may be overworked, but we were willing to buy it as he had recently sacrificed his career to make a late connection with his daughter. The film becomes ever more improbable as it rolls across a tight timeline and through the Parisian underground.

We find out in short order that the people who kidnap these thoughtless girls are evil, and that Bryan Mills can only deal with such people in one way, the way he's always done it. By the first gratuitous torture scene I had had enough, and by the second I stopped watching. In the end, Mills saves his daughter and redeems his absence by fulfilling the dream her mother couldn't grant her with money alone.

By coincidence, Stanley Fish tweeted his latest column on revenge films, and in particular on Taken. After citing a long list of candidates for the genre, Fish reveals our stake as the audience:

The formula’s popularity stems from the permission it gives viewers to experience the rush violence provides without feeling guilty about it. The plot gives the hero the same permission when a wife or daughter or brother or girlfriend ... is abducted, injured or killed.... Once the atrocity has occurred, the hero acquires an unquestioned justification for whatever he or she then does; and as the hero’s proxy, the audience enjoys the same justification for vicariously participating in murder, mayhem and mutilation. In fact, the audience is really the main character in many of these films.

It can be no coincidence that our post 9/11 torture qualms are "settled" in a worst-case-scenario with a fictional representative of those charged with doing the necessary dirty work to save us and our way of life.

It's not reassuring that a sequel is in the works.

Called Out of Darkness / Anne Rice’s journey through atheism and back to God

2009-07-13T10:59:00.001-05:00

Anne Rice, bestselling author of over twenty gothic and religious novels with some 100 million copies sold, is best known for her novel Interview with the Vampire, later filmed with a cast of Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and then young Kirsten Dunst. After almost forty years of declaring herself an atheist, living within what she now calls a "nihilistic universe", she returned to her childhood Catholic faith in 1998. A few years later, Rice announced that she was discontinuing the series featuring her famous vampires and witches and, as a Christian, would write entirely new works of fiction.

Rice addressed her fans in a recording on YouTube last year, explaining that while her earlier 21 novels had been a prelude to faith and "transformative stories", she would be leaving them behind, due to her "return to faith and ... commitment to Christ to write for Him and to write for Him alone." She explained: "I'm somebody different now." In her recently published conversion story, Called Out of Darkness, Rice described the path of those earlier dark novels: "[My] books transparently reflect a journey through atheism and back to God. It is impossible not to see this. They reflect an attempt to determine what is good and what is evil in an atheistic world. They are about the struggle of brothers and sisters in a world without credible fathers and mothers." Since her decision to dedicate her writing to Christ, she has published two bestselling books of historical fiction based on the Gospels: Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2005) and Christ the Lord: Road to Cana (2007).

Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession was published last year and is consciously directed toward readers who have followed her career and may have little familiarity with the Catholic faith. The account is generous in description and explanation of the deeply religious New Orleans culture of the 40s and 50s. The Mardi Gras celebration the city is famous for was not the raucous affair we know today, but was then a family-oriented event. Her parents were devout and well-educated, and she had a close family life, but at the center loomed the tragedy of her mother's alcoholism. Rice was in high school when her mother died, and when her father remarried, the family relocated to Texas, a Bible belt state with few Catholics. In the confusion of adolescence and her discovery of the modern world, she lost her faith. She married, and her first child, a daughter, died at a young age of leukaemia, after which she started her writing career. She has another son, Christopher, and was recently widowed after a marriage of forty-one years.

Rice does not flinch from recounting personal struggles, but doesn’t dwell on them, focusing more on recreating with her keen aesthetic sense the sights, sounds and smells of a profoundly religious culture with French and Southern roots. She explains terms and practices, and introduces saints and historical events, while her vivid writing conveys the beauty and mystery of Catholic practice. Rice notes that her encounter with faith was not first through the Bible or any other texts, as it occurred before she learned to read. Her first faith experiences were sensory, and she describes the smell of wax candles, the dark chapels with their plaster saints, the wooden pews and the paintings of the Stations of the Cross, all planted in a particular and beautiful geographical setting. As an example, she recalls leaving a convent as a child and associating the sacred place with its lovely surroundings: "The blossoms on the trees were pink and a shower of pink blossoms had descended on the bricks so that this was a path of petals on which we walked. I remember thinking, tiny child that I was, that this was so incredibly beautiful that it hurt me. I wanted never to lose this beauty, and I must think about that sidewalk about once a month." She recalls the charity of her cousins and a memorable summer spent working with the Little Sisters of the Poor in a lovely home for the elderly with "gorgeous gardens". Her story recounts her long path back to faith, always associated with religious objects and places.

In the future, Rice intends not only to write her series on the life of Christ, but also hopes to author a series of supernatural novels from a Christian point of view, inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

John Updike's American Lives

2009-03-01T09:28:00.000-06:00

John Updike, the famed American author of over 20 novels, several short story collections, light verse, and criticism, died recently at age 76. His best-known character was Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the subject of five novels, distributed at one per decade–two of which, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, earned Pulitzer Prizes. Updike was most in his element when unearthing the mentality of “the American Protestant small-town middle class.” He once wrote, “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.” He also dubbed himself the “chronicler of suburban adultery.” His narration of the sexual appetite, more desperate than titillating, won the UK Literary Review magazine’s 2008 Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award.

Updike’s work is marked by theological concerns. His grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, and Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth also influenced his work. He once described his own faith in Pascalian terms: “I was crushed by the purely materialistic, atheistic account of the universe. I am very prone to accept all that the scientists tell us.... But I can’t quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were, and say, ‘This is it. Carpe diem (seize the day), and tough luck.’”

The fear of death and abdication of Christian belief, favorite Updike themes, are painfully examined in an early short story, “Pigeon Feathers.” David, the protagonist, is 14 and disoriented, as his family has just moved from town to his late grandfather’s farm. While arranging books, he comes across H.G. Wells’ The Outline of History and finds what for him is a shocking denial of Christ’s Resurrection: Jesus is made out to be a minor political figure who was revived after a crucifixion and then died some weeks later. David confronts the challenge to his childhood faith: “Survivals and misunderstandings more far-fetched were reported daily in the papers. But none of them caused churches to be built in every town.”

Deeply shaken, the boy next has a sudden and vivid intuition of death, of a burial where “no one will remember you, and you will never be called.” Further, he perceives the terror of a universal extinction: “And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars.” David seeks to counter this unbearable scenario with any scrap of hope, a word or a sign, that he can salvage from his surroundings. He goes to Sunday School, expecting to find a confirmation of belief. Instead, he stirs up embarrassment with his questions about individual consciousness after death. The Reverend Dobson flatly denies such a possibility. “David, you might think of Heaven this way: as the way the goodness Abraham Lincoln did lives after him.” David immediately perceives the lie: “In the minister’s silence the shame that should have been his crept over David: the burden and fever of being a fraud was placed upon him, who was innocent...”

His parents are no help either. He realizes that they had not been “consolers of his troubles; from the beginning they had seemed to have more troubles than he. Their confusion had flattered him into an illusion of strength.” His father is hopelessly cynical, and his mother argues that to desire immortality is “so greedy,” given all the goods he is receiving in his life. She tries to reassure him: “When you get older, these things seem to matter a great deal less.” The boy’s abandonment is complete, but even in this desert he finds something to cling to: “The sight of clergymen cheered him; whatever they themselves thought, their collars were still a sign that somewhere, at sometime, someone had recognized that we cannot, cannot, submit to death.” Updike continues to uncover this destructive Christian apostasy in other stories, including his Rabbit series.

Updike once defined America as “a vast conspiracy to make you happy.” Harry Angstrom is the everyman Updike chooses to follow across the decades, taking a microscope to the claim of the American dream. In the first of the series, Rabbit, Run, the protagonist is an ex-jock who, after his glory years, finds work a bore and marriage a trap. Within days of his second child’s birth, the kitchen gadget salesman has gone AWOL from home and taken up with a call girl whom he believes he is now in love with. “All vagrants think they’re on a quest. At least at first.” Updike explained that the name “Angstrom” was a reference to Kierkegaardian angst and that he wrote the novel as a response to Kerouac’s On the Road to show “what happens when a young American family man goes on the road–the people left behind get hurt.”

Jack Eccles, a young minister in Harry’s wife’s church, chases after his new pet project, trying to patch up the youthful marriage. The two have theological discussions over golf and, whenever he can, Harry flirts with the man’s wife. But the clergyman has no faith to offer, only the dictate that since “marriage is a sacrament,” Harry needs to stay with his unloved wife. For Harry, this isn’t compelling. Harry adds truth to the truism: “If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.”

Jack, like Harry, is something of a runner, and his wife resents his exclusive attention toward everyone outside their family. On another of his rounds, the minister makes a courtesy call to Harry’s family’s Lutheran pastor, the famous Updike character Fritz Kruppenbach, whom Eccles considers an “unctuous old thundering Hun.” Eccles is cut off as he tries to explain his take on the Angstrom family problem. “Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job…. I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer…. In running back and forth you run away from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful.... When on Sunday morning, then, when you go out before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. …. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.”

As the story unfolds, a tragedy occurs as a result of a frustrated episode of lust and Harry’s inability to stay in his place. When the burden of death and culpability are crushing him, Harry asks the minister if it is enough to be faithful to his family to work off this sin, and Eccles lets him down. The minister admits that he doesn’t believe in the way Harry does and commits the ultimate Protestant heresy of relying on works for justification instead of the blood of Christ. He advises Harry, “We must work for forgiveness; we must earn the right to see that thing behind everything.” By the end, at the very moment that Harry has an intuition of divine mercy, the husband reneges on his part and instead of forgiving her, unloads responsibility on his wife. There is nothing left for him to do except to hit the ground running, again.

The author excused the shock of his writing with the urgency of the communication. “I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”

When I taught the short story “Separating,” which concerns a divorce, for a literature course in an evening school, I found that the class, many of whom were divorced, had trouble catching the subtle moral slippage Updike uncovered in the destruction of a family. Updike’s Protestant Christian tradition was a prod to question many of the assumptions of our culture, particularly around the myth of self-fulfillment. While he delivers the voltage required to get our attention, careful reading is needed to appreciate the full critique. His body of work offers an encyclopedic documentation of our materialist, achievement-oriented culture, and his characters are enfleshed with that irrepressible human desire–expressed in lust and avarice, suffering and boredom–that keeps breaking through numbing pleasure and resignation toward death.

Published in Traces No. 3 2009

Life for the Greeks

2009-02-02T11:18:00.000-06:00

I was in a coffee shop the other day with my fat Fagles translation of The Iliad. I got confused on the change, and apologized. The server excused me since I was reading an “intense book”. Yes. It is as intense as anything I’ve read, this war story. There is no ideological blunting on the glory of the cause. Young flesh is shredded page by page. Doomed heroes play out their fate.

Rereading this story after my first time thirty years ago, I am surprised that the story and the language is as beautiful and compelling as any literature I’ve read in the meantime. The hidden comforts of family intimacy (Hector and his wife and son), the pleasures of hard work and comradeship, and the trials of suffering and death are as vivid in Homer as anywhere. The metaphors of the rhythms of daily life are juxtaposed with war. They love and party; they delight in food, drink, friendship, sex. Betrayal and cruelty are just as outrageous, perhaps even more so.

For the Greeks there is a kind of hell and heaven and an in-between state of wandering, but even the idyllic Elysian Fields are not as real as life on earth. Apparently, when Virgil’s Aeneas goes to visit Achilles there, the hero would trade his afterlife for the poorest farmer’s on earth. There is an intense desire for life, and death is a true tragedy. Heroism doesn’t assauge the bitterness. The worst calamity was for fathers who would lose all their sons in the war. It was an incalculable loss, to not have the consolation of a son to continue the line.

Achilles says of his friend Patroclus: ”Now, by heaven, I’ll arm and go to war. But all the while my blood runs cold with fear—Menoetius’ fighting son … the carrion blowflies will settle into his wounds, gouged deep by the bronze, worms will breed and seethe, defile the man’s corpse—his life’s ripped out—his flesh may rot to nothing” (Book 19).

We seem to worry more about retirement accounts than continuing a family line. We grieve, of course, for loss. But we also have a cold resignation toward death. Either it is accompanied by a presumption of vague post-death happiness, or being snuffed out is no big deal, as in the atheist billboard campaign: ”There’s probably no God… now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

I’m not sure we still have this taste for life. I wonder why not.

One Day at a Time

2008-11-01T11:45:00.001-05:00

Irène Némirovsky died at Auschwitz on August 17, 1942. The author was a Russian immigrant living in France, a Jewish convert to the Catholic faith and a young renowned novelist. A Romanian bishop prince baptized the family at the Saint-Chapelle in Paris and continued to visit the Epsteins up to the time of their capture. Their daughter received First Communion while the family was living in the countryside and wearing Jewish stars on their coats.

Sixty-four years after her death, a manuscript, which had been carried from place to place by her daughters who were in hiding during the war, was recovered and published. The incomplete novel Suite Française includes two handwritten sections, of the five planned, which were transcribed by her daugher. Since the story would encompass the entire war, the author noted that she could not yet plan certain parts of the rest of the book since only God knew the ending. The story, written between 1941 and 1942, is a contemporaneous narrative of war by a Jewish non-citizen fearing for her imminent deportation, a remarkable feat since a writer would normally require decades to transform retrospective experience into art.

Suite Française grapples with the problem of the individual versus the collective at the point of crisis; the author observes that we find out who we really are at the moment of trial. What predominates in the published sections narrating the invasion n France and the occupation are contrasts and contradictions. In a description of a railway bombing, she wrote: "Panic-stricken, some of the women threw down their babies as if they were cumbersome packages and ran. Others grabbed their children and held them so tightly they seemed to want to force them back into the womb, as if that were the only truly safe place."

The hero of the novel is Philippe, a priest and Christ figure in his care for troubled boys and ultimate sacrifice. The character Hubert says of his brother: "But saints like Philippe, why are then sent here? If it's to save us, to make up for our sins, it's like offering a pearl in exchange for a bag of stones." In her journal, Némirovsky wrote: "There must also be a reminder of Philippe. Which all in all would correspond to my deepest conviction."

Némirovsky emphasizes that freedom is the most precious gift that can't be taken away in any circumstance. The gentle couple Jeanne and Maurice have been betrayed by their employer and await news of their missing soldier son. Jeanne asks Maurice: "You've seen people at their most cynical, their most disillusioned, and at the same time you're not unhappy, I mean, not really unhappy inside!... So what makes it all right, then?" He answers: "My certainty that deep down I'm a free man.... It's a constant, precious possession, and whether I keep it or lose it is up to me and no one else... What's important is to live: Primum vivere. One day at a time. To survive, to wait, to hope."

Published in Traces, no. 10 2008

Waiting for Something to Happen

2008-10-12T11:21:00.000-05:00

Naturally, the ten-o’clock bus to Chisinau did not show up. Nobody said or knew anything; Rora and I just waited with everyone else for a couple of flaccid hours, and then the twelve-o’clock bus showed up. If you wait long enough, something will happen—there has never been a time when nothing happened.

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

Manzoni Cafe

2008-09-12T11:20:00.001-05:00

Manzoni Caffe

Manzoni Caffe, originally uploaded by *clairity*.

They’re proud of poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni in Milan. If you haven’t already, be sure to read his historical novel The Betrothed.

The Pain You Deny

2008-08-01T09:22:00.004-05:00

In lovely prose, Norwegian author Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses chronicles a child's stepping over the threshold to adulthood as a recollection of old age. Trond at 67 lost his beloved wife three years previously in a car accident and moves to a secluded country house where he is determined to live alone. He lives in grim resignation, pushing himself to self-reliance as he nurses his aging body. A meeting with a man who was once a childhood neighbor brings memories rather than being the occasion for friendship.

Trond's father is the feature of the story of their last summer together. He is an able and brave man, as the son discovers when he learns of his father's resistance work at the Swedish border in World War II. The lessons his father teaches stay with him. The son still fixes things by visually recalling his father's skilled use of tools. The father takes risks and loses, whereas the son has been successful from the time he moved out on his own. And by the father's choice, this is the last time they are together which will affect the son's marriages and relationships with his own children.

In particular, the father teaches his son that the pain starts only as soon as you allow it. When the boy avoids mowing a patch of nettles, Trond is told: "You decide for yourself when it will hurt," as the father pulls up patches of them with his hands. The boy learns to feel ashamed of his pain.

Stealing horses refers to the boys' practice of riding the neighbor's horses, but the meaning extends to a human treachery that will lead to various calamities, particularly for children. The beauty of the landscape is offset by this human flaw for which the narrator can find no particular explanation, and only an attempt at denial remains at the end.

"The wind still came icily down between the houses from the river, and my hand felt swollen and sore where the nails had pierced the skin when I clenched it so hard, but all the same everything felt fine at that moment; the suit was fine, and the town was fine to walk in, along the cobblestone street, and we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt."

The Martian Chronicles

2008-07-01T09:03:00.003-05:00

Ray Bradbury's book The Martian Chronicles may be a sci-fi thriller, but it's rated as a classic for decades. This was my first time through, and the prose was fresh and beautiful. The stories, strung together, recount the colonization of Mars in the 21st century, a New World populated and provided for by Earth with all the comforts and confusion of home.

The Mars and Earth Men are trapped in mentalities that don't allow them to really meet each other. The violence is unremitting from the first encounter, and it can be triggered simply by misunderstanding. The revolutionaries who see clearly that this New World is something going terribly wrong are the most ugly in their bloody resistance, as in the story "Usher II", an incarnation of Poe's horror gallery.

The most haunting story for me was "There Will Come Soft Rains," in which a well-equipped house recites poetry to its dead residents. The cold loneliness is as palpable as the conclusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey, even if the ending leaves a spark of hope in the rubble. One of the early residents, after the death of his entire family due to disease, constructs robots as intricate replicas of his loved ones. After nuclear annihilation, one of the last men on Mars meets one of the last women, and upon meeting her, he turns and flees.

This mad scientist wields technology like a pistol in the hands of a three-year-old; his capacity for destruction may be great enough to extinguish life. If wisdom doesn't come prepackaged with the know-how, then we have to question this insane presumption of self-sufficiency.

Life and Fate

2008-05-01T09:19:00.004-05:00

Vassily Grossman's huge novel Life and Fate, another classic in his country's premiere literary form, is the story of the Battle of Stalingrad, told through a huge cast of characters, including guest appearances by Hitler and Stalin. Grossman was something of an embedded journalist for five months during the siege. He met such characters as the famed sniper Vasily Zaitsev who is memorialized in the film Enemy at the Gates. Grossman, a Jew, with co-author Ehrenburg documented extensively the slaughter of Soviet Jews in a work titled "The Black Book". Grossman's article on Treblinka in 1944 was the first credible published account of the death camps of World War II. Simultaneous scenes from concentration camps and the prison camps of the Gulag feature in his novel.

In 1961, Grossman's 1000-page manuscript was "detained" by the KGB. The author appealed directly to yet another historical character in his novel, Nikita Khruschev: “There is no sense, no truth, in the present situation, whereby I am physically free, but my book, to which I have given my life, remains in jail,” he wrote. “I ask you to release my book.” An additional copy had been rescued for posterity and was first published in the West . The novel was first published twenty years after his death.

This book offers a fine historical perspective of the events of the war. Here the Russian army struggles for the threatened freedom of its country. Tanks are gathered in the Urals for a final counter-offensive which will encircle Hitler's armies and end the siege. So this is about freedom.

Except the story involves so much more. The Russian characters in particular have their own struggle for freedom in play; and not only the Russians, as a few German soldiers reveal their personal conflicts with their leader. The Russian units have their political officers along, who give lectures in correct doctrine and make reports on the men and their speech and conduct.

The problem of freedom circles further in, not just in internal and external social terms, but through the fissures of conscience of individuals, particularly after the purges of 1937-38. Few were not complicit in some way in the denunciations which often led to a sentence of "ten years without correspondence", which actually meant the detainee was executed. As a counter-example, there was the woman who was given a ten-year sentence because she refused to denounce her husband. Grossman offers confirmation of Hannah Arendt's thesis that the horror of such a totalitarian machine was that it recruited its own prisoners to do the work of guarding and killing. Grossman contends that the concentration camps would have continued to run smoothly even had the captors left.

Each character faces this question personally, though most poignantly through the character of Nikolay Krymov, a staunch ideological party man who was responsible for many denunciations. He is on some level haunted by his decisions, but holds to them until he himself is arrested and the false accusations mount. The characters wish to believe that an arrest would never have been made from their denunciation unless the charge was true.

Strangely, as in the case of lead character scientist Viktor Shtrum and the others throughout, it is at the crux of human resistance and weakness that the person feels most free. This freedom comes from the self-knowledge of weakness and from a refusal to betray the most human impetus toward unity with all the others. Those Jewish doctors who walked into the gas chamber and did not volunteer themselves to continue the slaughter were among those who met this most human test. For others it is facing up to past wrongs to usher in change. Such freedom for Grossman is fostered particularly in the intimacy of family life, between husband and wife, and in the bonds of parents and children. And sacrifice is the price of this ultimate freedom

The Fool

2008-02-20T11:22:00.000-06:00

“I am Gimpel the fool. I don’t think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that’s what folks call me.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Gimpel the Fool”

"Good People", David Foster Wallace

2007-02-08T11:23:00.000-06:00

There on the table, neither frozen nor yet moving, Lane Dean, Jr., sees all this, and is moved with pity, and also with something more, something without any name he knows, that is given to him in the form of a question that never once in all the long week’s thinking and division had even so much as occurred—why is he so sure he doesn’t love her? Why is one kind of love any different? What if he has no earthly idea what love is?

Peguy: Poet of Work

2005-06-24T11:15:00.000-05:00

There is nothing in the world better than the life of an honest man. There is nothing better than the baked bread of daily duties…. Above all, let us cling to this treasure of the humble, to this sort of implied joy which is the flower of life, this kind of healthy gaiety which is virtue itself and more virtuous than virtue itself (“The Humanities”).

Charles Péguy (1873-1914) had a lifelong interest in the problem of work for man—both as the means of providing for his physical needs and because of the meaning of the activity itself for his life. The French poet led an active life in politics, journalism, and as publisher and writer for the journal Cahiers (Notebooks), by which he barely sustained his own family of five. His final avocation, as a soldier, cost him his life in World War I.

Péguy always identified with his peasant heritage. He was raised by his widowed mother and grandmother who made their living caning chairs, usually working 16-hour days. In Péguy’s youth, religion was in the background and eventually abandoned for socialism. At times his writings were anticlerical, but he found the Church an opponent worthy of notice, particularly because of some Catholic friends. In his passion for the truth he often broke with old friends and eventually gave up on his party, disillusioned with the materialism, propagandism in art, anti-Semitism and other duplicities practiced to meet political goals.

Péguy’s Cahiers changed with him. He called it his “journal vrai” (“true”) and “the most beautiful thing in the world, a friendship and a city,” for its writers were free thinkers, humanists, Jews and Protestants who remained with him even after his conversion. Péguy wrote, “Our cahiers have become a perfectly free association of men who all believe in something.” The journal published original plays, novels, stories and poetry as well as political and social essays. He claimed that a good issue would displease at least one-third of the subscribers.

A lengthy illness may have contributed to his conversion, during which time he wrestled with the problem of damnation, reflected in his play, “The Mystery of the Charity of St. Joan of Arc.” Afterward his focus moved more to religious concerns, and he wrote movingly of God the Father, Jesus, Our Lady, and the saints while remaining just outside the doors of the Church. He attended Mass for the first and last time as an adult on the feast of the Assumption, three weeks before his death, and his friends and family believe he received the sacraments at that time.

Poverty vs. Destitution

Péguy’s early encounter with destitution, while distributing bread in a Parisian slum, showed him first-hand the evils of being denied not only basic sustenance, but the opportunity to participate in a function so important for man’s identity—his work. He blamed this on a new meritocracy, which denied work to those less talented, contributing to their physical and moral decline. It was for this reason that he joined the Socialist party and proposed a utopian model, a society in which each person would share the dignity of physical labor and have an opportunity to pursue artistic, philosophic, and scientific endeavors.

In “Old France” (1911), Péguy outlined the difference between the poverty of earlier times—“To be well housed in the little dwelling of poverty”—and the destitution inflicted by the modern world, which he described as “this monster of a Paris which is the modern Paris, where the population is divided into two classes so completely separated that never before has so much money been squandered on pleasure and money refused to such an extent to labor.” The former gift of poverty he called, “a kind of unspoken contract between man and fate … an asylum,” adding that those willing to restrict themselves to poverty in those earlier days, working hard and neither gambling nor wasting their small earnings, were not continuously thrown into destitution.

Work and Culture

Péguy didn’t confine his reflections on work to the level of macroeconomics. In “The World Is Against Us” (1909) he wrote of the degradation of work as it impacts man’s dignity and the consequent effect on culture:

We live in such barbarous times that luxury is confused with cleanliness. When a workman tries to work properly he is accused of being luxurious…. [L]uxury and wealth always work sloppily, literally there no longer exists any medium through which culture could either be maintained or even through which it might seek to revive itself or merely defend itself. Through which it could return…

Péguy began to grapple with the meaning of daily labor for the Christian in his work on Joan of Arc (1909), particularly in facing war and destruction, a preoccupation in his own politically unstable times. Joan laments:

All that is needed to set a farm ablaze is a flint. It takes … two years to build it…. It takes years and years to make a man grow, it took bread and more bread to feed him, and work and more work, and all kinds of work. All that is needed to kill him is one blow…. [T]he match is not even.

It is through Hauviette, the peasant girl, “a clear-sighted little girl from Lorraine,” that an attitude is revealed of peaceful trust in God’s designs. Hauviette answers:

For well nigh fifty years … the soldier has been crushing, or burning or robbing the ripe harvest … the same French peasants plow the same fields with just the same care, before God…. That is what preserves everything…. Work. The good Lord’s work.

She explains that even if she were forewarned by half an hour that the Last Judgment was upon them, she would continue to play or spin or to pray because:

Everything one does in the day is agreeable to God, provided of course that it is all right. Everything is God’s, everything concerns God, everything is done before God’s eyes; the whole day is God’s. All prayer is God’s, all work is God’s; all play too is God’s, when it’s time to play…. It is all these things taken together and for all these things one after the other than we have been put on earth….

Sacramentality of Work

Péguy wrote of the sacramentality of work, that is, as the present moment of grace, in “L’Argent” (1913), as he had experienced it growing up in the countryside of

France

From the moment we got up all [life] was governed by a rhythm, a rite … everything was ordered by sacred custom. They used to tell the curés, to annoy them, that “to work is to pray.” They were unaware of the truth of what they were saying…. [F]or a sense of respect still existed, … and the existence of such respect made life into what one might call a continuing ceremony … all happenings were sacramental.

In his long poem “Eve” (1913) Péguy the Christian observed the disordering of work as a result of the Fall. The poem begins as a description of paradise and then shows the painful rupture between the present moment and its eternal meaning:

And all fidelities were like a tower,
And time and space were no more than their valets,
And time and space ensured a respite,
And all fidelities were one only love.

Afterwards you knew only time in space.
No longer did you know the youthful world,
Or that peace of heart more full and more deep
Than the huge ocean beneath the eye of God.

This split infected man’s sacred function—his work. Péguy wrote of work which had become no more than organization, classification, and counting, no longer tied to the eternal.

Women, I tell you, you would stow away God himself,
If he happened to pass in front of your house.
You would stow away the trespass and the supreme power,
If they happened to pass in front of your mind.

All is seen and appraised and sold at the door.
All is displayed and cried up and sold on the stall.
All is shown and voiced and invested and yields.
Is this the salvation which we have sought?

The only satisfaction of this desire for unity between the present and man’s destiny is in the Incarnation:

For the supernatural itself is carnal
And the tree of grace has deep-thrusting roots
And drives through the soil and searches the depths
And the tree of the stock is itself eternal.

This reflection on the intersection of time and eternity can be found again in the work on Joan of Arc, where Péguy writes of Christ’s own daily work as man, by which he raises and unites every man and his activity to himself. Jesus Christ is the answer to the meaning of work in its personal and social significance as an activity through which man meets his eternal destiny.

Touching eternity with his eye that was God’s eye,
He was at the very end and here at the same time….
With one look he grasped all of his human life….
For he had worked as a carpenter, that was his trade….
The trade of cradles and coffins
Which are so much alike.
Of tables and beds.
And also of other pieces of furniture.
Of all furniture.
Because you mustn’t forget anybody.
You mustn’t discourage anybody….
And the earth is but your footstool.

Reprint of an article published in CL Magazine, Winter 1990.

Milosz: Poet of Being

2005-02-12T11:25:00.001-06:00

Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), nobel laureate, was a Polish poet born in

Lithuania

. A writer in the resistance, he witnessed the Holocaust first hand. While working in the Polish diplomatic service, he sought asylum in

France

in 1951. In 1960 he became professor of Slavic languages literature at University of California at Berkeley, became an American citizen and published in both Polish and English.
In his Nobel Lecture, he stated that

[t]he exile of a poet, is today a simple function of a relatively recent discovery; that whoever wields power is also able to control language, and not only with the prohibition of censorship, but also by changing the meaning of words.

Resisting utopias and collective dogmas to answer the problem of being human, he wrote:

“I hear you saying that liberation is possible
and that Socratic wisdom
is identical with your guru`s.
No, Raja, I must start from what I am.

I am those monsters which visit my dreams
and reveal to me my hidden essence.

If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever
that man is a healthy creature.”

(from `To Raja Rao` in Selected Poems, 1973 - See also: Raja Rao)

He is a metaphysical poet, one who struggled against his Catholic roots, but came back again and again. He wrote to Pope John Paul II during his last days, asking him if he had been faithful in his writing. The Holy Father assured him he had. For the poet has to ask and explore, for all of us. He is both uncomfortable prophet and ecstatic bard.
Milosz affirms the mysterious and ungraspable nature of being in his poem “Esse”:

And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!

In “Encounter,” the poet remembers a past moment and the death that has intervened from then to now:

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

The beauty of the world, its dimensions, escape him and yet he longs to hold it, to cup the universe in his hands. Always driven, the poet laments his task in “So Little”,

I said so little.
I couldn`t keep up.

In an interview, Milosz describes how his own war experience was brought into his poetry, as in “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto.” His memories drive him to warn as he mourns.

But in fact, I passed the ghetto as I was riding the tram and saw all that horror with my own eyes… The main theme of the poem is the vulnerability and aloneness of the dying person, and for that reason the comparison with Giordano Bruno was appropriate; the death of each and every individual can be compared with this.

In “The Fall” Milosz compares the death of an ordinary man to “the fall of a mighty nation.” He reminds us how much is lost within the legions that make up an individual. He chronicles the weariness of old age in “Conversation with Jeanne,” which makes him wish to abandon philosophy and accept the beauty of life without wagging a finger, offering a tenderness even toward himself. In the slacking tension of his desire, his soul still reaches for the embrace of the moment’s gift. He acknowledges, “I don`t know how to care about the salvation of my soul.”
The poet writes of his knowledge of evil and the indifference of the world in “A Poem for the End of the Century.” Not all share this burden, but he affirms that it is Christ who makes the salvation of the world possible, existence itself.

Don`t think, don`t remember
The death on the cross,
Though everyday He dies,
The only one, all-loving,
Who without any need
Consented and allowed
To exist all that is,
Including nails of torture.

Nobel Prize in Literature – 1980
Books and Writers
Czeslaw Milosz Cover Page