Empire is its own undoing
— Diane diPrima
I will note that November’s letter was almost completely ready until I got stricken with COVID and found myself limping toward the finish line of the year. December, of course, was completely swallowed up by the holidays, January’s set aside in favor of deadlines, so now we are in January.
I have perverse deadline habits: clearing out my email inbox, unsubscribing from Kohl’s emails, clearing out my phone’s Safari windows, writing these newsletters, listening to books on tape instead of writing, or texting the group thread about Wordle results. Please share with me your Wordle thoughts — I have so many, always.
It’s all part of the process, we like to joke. Procrastinating, avoiding the blank page on your computer screen, telling yourself “I will sit down and write,” and sitting down to do anything but. Or doing many other chores: cleaning the carpet, scrubbing the shower, cleaning out old letters in my closet (I have done all of these in the past weeks) instead of writing.
Eventually, though, all the detritus has been cleared away, you have a clean inbox and a clean closet, and there’s nothing else you can do but sit down and write. So here are some of the things I’ve been writing in the past few months, between room-tidyings and dish-washing.
Affectionately yours,
Keats in the Sheets
“There is no greater Sin after the 7 deadly than to flatter oneself into an idea of being a great Poet”— to Benjamin Robert Haydon, May 1817
— From the Blog—
it shall not be so among you
I am never tired of reflecting on this passage in Matthew that holds within it (like so much of the Gospel) the imaginative key to a gentler and kinder world. It’s nearly impossible to achieve, it seems, this imagination of power as something more like service than domination.
I wrote this to mark the symposium on the priesthood which took place this weekend at the Vatican. As someone who was hurt by a man holding the office of a priest, I have spent most of the past decade puzzling over the priesthood—not its theology so much as its practical realities, the live forces shaping the experiences of the men who inhabit it and the people they interact with. Currently, I am working on a story about priestly formation in the United States and how it is part of the larger culture in shaping men with power to abuse others. I have a google alert set up for this article, and, so far, as my partner pointed out, the possessors of child pornography who show up in the Google alerts are police officers, priests, and psychologists. So far they have all been men. And they have all been holding positions of power over others — they have the power to make others vulnerable to them.
It’s damning for anyone to abuse. But particularly for men who are stewards of a faith that is, at its heart, the antithesis of power and domination.
“One way to verify the call to the priesthood must be to never aspire to any power.” Every priest should have these words painted over their beds, I said to James.
Oh wait they do, I realized. It’s a crucifix. And yet…
And yet somehow they—and we—are unable to see in the broken body of God, the most pure communication offered by the Word, his message regarding earthly forms of power: it shall not be so among you.
Read the full post here.
Keats in the Streets
“I am however young, writing at random—straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness” to George & Georgiana Keats, May 1819
—Sweet Unrest writing out in the world—
I have spent the past five months since ending my summer internship at Religion News Service freelancing full-time, and it’s been a marvelous adventure. Here are some of my favorite stories:
The people versus Mammon: worker-owners cooperatives in the US
“The only way that capitalism can be reformed into a system compatible with Christianity is if it were no longer structured to produce losers,” the theologian Joseph Torma writes in Divine Design: the Cooperatist Alternative to Competition.
Francis’ invitation is to an economy that is based on giving rather than taking, on people rather than profit, on cooperation rather than competition. It is an invitation to those on the margins, and to those who are willing to cast their lot in with the losers. Across the United States, from North Carolina to California, men and women have begun to cooperatively build this alternative economy. The seeds of Catholic Social Teaching are at the root of each venture – and Francis calls the Church to foster them.
Reporting on this movement has meant reframing my own imagination. I got to interview some truly inspiring people who are working in creative and surprising ways for a new world.
Read the full story here.
Evidence of Dorothy Day’s radical sainthood heads to Rome
The more than 50,000 pages of newspaper articles and diary entries by Day, artworks made in her honor, a CD of music celebrating her and other documents — even her FBI file — were carefully collected by a diocesan commission, with the help of hundreds of transcribers, some from as far away as India, who turned Day’s sometimes incomprehensibly sloppy handwriting into legible evidence.
“One of the reasons this has taken a while is that she had her own newspaper — never an unpublished thought,” Korgen told Religion News Service in a phone interview.
“Never an unpublished thought,” is, as the kids say, iconic. Day is quickly becoming my homegirl, the Worker beat my most prized non-possession, and this article my golden child when the Associated Press picked it up from Religion News Service.
You can read the full story here.
This band wrote a song in honor of Dorothy Day. Now their album could help make her a saint.
One cloudy November Saturday, Eric Krewson sits in the warmth of St. Joseph House of Hospitality in the East Village in New York City, where Dorothy Day lived from 1968 to 1975. Sharing a breakfast of pancakes, eggs and undercooked bacon, Eric listens to the stories of the community he has commemorated in song.
Eric and the band he headlines, The Chairman Dances, wrote a song that celebrates the friendship of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the founders of the Catholic Worker movement. And that song will shortly be on its way to Rome. The guild preparing Day’s cause for sainthood has included a CD of the song with the materials they are sending to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
Again with the Worker beat. I found Eric’s music through my friend Crawford (who found it through that repository of culture, Twitter.) Eric was one of those great sources who stayed in touch even though an article didn’t pan out after our first interview, and kept me updated about his music and his work until there was a propitious moment where his work spoke to the news cycle!
You can read more about Eric’s music here.
Keats Reads
“The Literary world I know nothing about” to George & Georgiana Keats, Feb 1819
—Highlights from the Good Reads shelf—
The Bluest Eye
I have never read Toni Morrison until I began writing a profile on her for Grotto Network last fall. This is a sin of omission. Toni Morrison (and I will die on this hill) is the American Catholic writer that Dana Gioia, Paul Elie and all the First Things/Image Catholic literati crowd have been looking for.
M. Shawn Copeland is the only theologian I know of who meditates upon Morrison’s work theologically, but theologians interested in the revelatory nature of story should follow Dr. Copeland’s lead. Flannery O’Connor is elevated for her depiction of the gothic, but Morrison’s poetic realism is harsher, bleaker, and reflects the realities of American life that any contemporary reader can recognize. This country is cruel. The Great American Writer doesn’t shy away from its inane atrocities, but finds the harsh, far-from-cheap grace within the humans wading through them.
Morrison’s stories are bleak, stark, harsh, poetic, rich, and beautiful. Her images burn into your brain. The softness of hands on breasts. A flashlight in the dark that brings deep shame and powerlessness, embarrassment. Fascination with the beautiful. The blurry imaginative world of children. The harshness of love, its tenderness, and the long march of pain through generations eventually (if you’re lucky) finding some kind of resolution or at least catharsis.
The Bluest Eye was Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970, and subsequently banned in several counties. The American Library Association listed it as the ninth most-challenged book in the United States in 2020.
Mr. Brown’s Bylines
“Brown, who is always one’s friend in a disaster, applied a leech to the eyelid, and there is no inflammation this morning though the ball hit me on the sight.” to George & Georgiana Keats, May 1819
—Pieces from good friends, and from writers whose words have been a friend to me—
Vivian Cabrera, “‘Encanto’ Puts the Spiritual Journey to Self-Love on Screen,” FemCatholic
Vivian wrote a lovely review of Encanto that takes representation spiritually seriously and talks about the freedom of not really knowing what you’re doing!
As the eldest daughter of immigrants, the pressure always fell on me to get everything right. This is something I think most eldest daughters can relate to, and something we have in common with both elder Madrigal sisters. They also felt the pressure to not make mistakes and to carry their family on their shoulders. For us in the real world, the familial and societal pressure looks a little different, but feels the same.
Read the full review here.
John Gribowich, “Father John Gribowich on the Universal Call to Holiness”
This has been a season of intense discernment. John’s reflection on Christ’s invitation to holiness within the immediate circumstances of our lives came to me just at the right moment. As Thomas Merton says (I paraphrase), we are often concerned with living a holiness that is not ours. Searching for Christ is perhaps a mission of restlessness or wandering somewhere else, but holding on tightly to “the dearest freshness deep down things” at the heart of our daily lives.
Yet the mission of the laity does not consist of simply taking on explicitly Church-related work; it consists of living Christ in the midst of their “worldly” vocation. And it is here where the notion of vocation needs more of a universal definition. Lay people have vocations as husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and single persons, but they also exercise their vocations in specific ways as doctors, lawyers, business persons, trash collectors, and fast-food servers. Each and every situation is an opportunity to live Christ because each and every situation necessitates an encounter between persons—the living Christ encountering the living Christ. And it is this regard that the institutional Church has dropped the ball.
Read the full reflection here.
Marisa Iati, “What’s today’s Wordle answer? It depends on which site you use”
Marisa has been covering important stories from California wildfires to the Geoffrey Burrill Grindr schedule at the USCCB, and now Wordle. Her writing is always top-notch and her stories are always fascinating. If you, like me, are too invested in Wordle, this is journalism for you. Democracy dies in darkness, and it ain’t croaking on Marisa’s watch.
Rozance was among scores of people who were surprised this week to find that the popular word-deduction game had started serving them a different answer than their fellow puzzlers. The game’s communal appeal had come partly from the fact that there was only one answer per day, shared by players everywhere. As of Tuesday, there are two potential solutions, depending on which site someone is using.
Emphases added by me, a Wordle fanatic.
Read the full article here.
And now, at once adventuresome, I send
My herald thought into a wilderness:
There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress
My uncertain path with green, that I may speed
Easily onward, thorough flowers and weed.
— John Keats, from Endymion