ambiguous season
happy birthday, miriam of nazareth
How was Jerusalem? people ask.
I mean, Jerusalem is everything you feel with deep feeling in the marrow of your heart and the deepest level of your bones. So it is always and in every way like dying and coming back to life. Jerusalem is one of those holy places for me like South Bend or Manhattan, that is a sure home on this planet. This summer, for once, I came to see Jerusalem as Holy in the way that it is often talked about being, but so seldom is.
Despite that, in terms of narrative action, Jerusalem was a lot like the rest of the summer, which was, despite the travel, kind of indistinguishable from the rest of my day-to-day life. I typed words on a screen or read words on a screen. I sat down with people and asked them a lot of questions. Sometimes it got uncomfortable! I read a lot. I spent a lot of time in libraries, like the library I am in now in Chicago, typing.
I was surrounded by a lot of paper and a lot of typeface, either digital or material. Words. I was surrounded by words.
The thing about words is that they do create a kind of culture you float in. Sometimes this culture can be revelatory and sometimes it can be a bit of a buffer against the world outside of you. It can illuminate or innoculate you. This is unfortunate. Words only exist for communication, for relationship. What’s the point of saying anything if you’re not going to step outside of the realm of your individual animal experience of the word? Well, it turns out, people say things to reinforce their own experience, too. It’s funny the very things that liberate us can also stunt us.
Words also emphasize the interior. Perhaps they over-emphasize the interior—I still haven’t landed on a stance about words—so that no matter where you go there you are, a small white girl from Minnesota leaving traces of Steinbeck, Tolstoy and Maud Hart Lovelace always chemtrailing behind you.
I haven’t landed on a fundamental stance—a grand unified theory—of words because words are ambiguous little amphibians. You can say or hear so many of them to so little purpose, it seems. Words are ambiguous. And it surprises me how afraid people are of ambiguity. How little space we leave for things that are not like us. For no apparent rational reason other than fear. I see this, of course, most often in myself. Why are we so afraid of things that we don’t have a read on right away?
Last night, at Mass with the Jesuits, Jayme Stayer gave a homily on the Lord’s Prayer, and praying Your Will Be Done. I must admit, those sorts of things—the Akedah, Your will be done, everything you have will be taken, etc—always makes me feel like a wrong word in front of a silence. How does one do anything when the right thing to do is always the opposite of what your dirty will demands?
This, of course, is not the correct interpretation of this sentiment or this prayer. That is not what saints meant by God’s will being done. But it is a feeling that I think is rife among young people, searching for certainty in a Church that often tends towards abusive and coercive interpretations of a Savior whose power is not at all manipulation, and is entirely invitational.
For me, perhaps even more important than Jerusalem this summer was Nazareth. There were fewer words read, no screens scanned, and less pressure to ask just the right question to unlock the cache of answers sought, and more silence.
The Basilica of the Annunciation is perhaps the most stable church in the entire world, resting as it does on the old ruins of a Crusader church and a Byzantine Church, all purportedly resting on the ancient site of Mary’s yes. A good word, if there ever was one.
And, to me, when all is said and done, I am not sure what Isaac we are meant to put upon the altar, or what my stubborn will means vis a vis to God’s, but I do know that it is the yes of Mary that the crowning glory of all creation. That is something I can rest upon. Something one might even found a church upon. The yes of Mary is one of those sure homes on this planet where you can pitch a tent or pin your hopes upon. And perhaps it is our own yes, like hers, to the strange, the ambiguous, and uncertain that makes our earth like heaven.
Good News
Other places to check out good reads and good thoughts. The name of the game is ecology, people! In this season is sustainability, small agriculture, turning plots of grass and nothingness into something beautiful, eating vegetables grown less than 100 feet from your front door and our innate human identity as stewards of the earth and creative nature-folks in the image of a God straight out of Genesis. Out this season is being either bourgeois or a consumer, plastic kitchen utensils, and tomatoes off a semi-truck! The following links reflect these seasonal trends.
A New Task for Catholic Educators: Teaching How to Be Human in a Digital Age, by Lesley Kirzeder at Church Life Journal
Just when you think I had said enough about Marshall McLuhan and the digital age…Lesley has more to say. Great piece for a new school year and the needs of our children and real, human beings in an increasingly digital and virtual world.
Recent statistics show that children ages 8–12 spend an average of 5 hours 33 minutes daily on devices, not including homework or device usage at school; for children ages 13–18, the average on-screen time outside of school and homework is 8 hours 39 minutes per day.[1] Myopia is rising so rapidly that by 2050, studies show half of the world’s population will be near-sighted.[2] Our children’s neuropathways are being formed in specific ways by reading and working on screens[3], and the mental health crisis has yet to slow, as evidenced by the now over 200 school systems suing social media companies.
Read the full article here.
“How a Program is Restoring Ecosystems and Cultivating Unity,” by Kelly Sankowski on Grotto Network
Kelly writes about an initiative to re-populate native plants on the properties of houses of worship in her Toledo area.
Many houses of worship own large pieces of land that have the potential to be used to strengthen the ecosystems and communities around them. As Molly Burhans from Goodlands has mapped out, the Catholic Church is the largest private landowner in the world. Yet, much of that land sits as empty parking lots or difficult to maintain lawns that require a lot of resources and are detrimental to local ecosystems.
It reminded me of James’ parking lot planters for Solidarity Gardens.
Read Kelly’s full article here.
Maurin's Program, Mondragon, and The Reconstruction of the Social Order, by James Murphy at The Maurin Academy
James is giving a talk on Tuesday, September 26, in the evening, on Peter Maurin, Mondragon, and how their programs are not a new deal, but an old game. Come learn about what the world could look like if we created an economy based on human dignity and helping our neighbor and ourselves become better and not just better off.
Register here.
Hymn to the Virgin
I don’t write hymns, but I wrote an essay once for her.
When imagining Incarnation—in both our intellectual and pious imaginaries—we too often recite a story something like this: notional God theoretically unites to abstract human nature. The story is more like a mathematical formula. 1 + 1 = 2, and Incarnation remains simply a more subtle cosmic algebraic formula in which 1+1 = 1. But this is not what it is to be or to take up flesh. To become a human person means to be born: a physical, messy, risky business. To be born means to be thrown into the world drama in a specific time (e.g., 1991, the Renaissance, 4 BCE) and a specific place (e.g., Newark, the American Southwest, Edina Children’s Hospital).
Read the full thing here
the wren
poked out
from the cup
of my fist
and was still
her eye, honour bright
to my vast eye
the whirr
of her pulse
ecstatic
the wren the wren
was a panic
of feathered air
in my opening hand
so fierce and light
I did not feel
the push
of her ascent
away from me
in a blur of love, to love
indistinguishable
my palm pin-pricked,
my earthbound heart
of her love’s weight
relieved. And, oh,
my life, my daughter,
the far away sky is cold
and very blue.
-The Wren, The Wren by Philip McDaragh