If you’re a long-time reader, you’ll remember previous newsletters often included more links—to things I’ve written and things others have written. I decided to bring that back for this week, since this summer has been clipping along at an alarming rate. A year ago, James and I were hiking through Galilee, and I was finishing up my time in Jerusalem, but that feels like one to three lifetimes ago.
Sometimes I have a hard time remembering where the time has all gone this year. Then I remember I have spent most of this cycle around the sun absorbed in the past. I have spent most of my time since July of 2023 in 1964 or 1967 or 1972 or 1979 or 1987, piecing together a chronology of several specific people in those specific years. That is, I’ve spent most of the past year in archives: searching through papers, walking through stacks. My present has been the past for entire days or weeks.
I also spent half of the past year cooped up in the Rancho, reading, writing, underlining. Waking up and writing. Sitting in Barnes and Noble during an entire day of writer’s block, trying to soak up inspiration by reading Killers of the Flower Moon or Annie Dillard. Time slips through your fingers quickly when you’re immersed in words.
Earlier this month, I visited my goddaughter in Georgia—her mother and I went on a hike to a waterfall outside of Atlanta. Standing at the wooden platform at the fall’s base, my mind did what it does best when left to its own devices, making lists (the classes I took during my senior year of college, how many different apartments I’ve lived in over a decade, or the plays I did in middle school). This time, I made a mental catalog of all the summer afternoons I’ve spent by falling water.
This particular little Georgian waterfall reminded me most of the small waterfall in Upstate New York James and I hiked down to two summers ago on our walking pilgrimage. That fall was right on the edge of a bison farm, and we walked down a woody hillside to bathe our feet and cool down in the water streaming through a small rapid of stone. Last summer, we hiked up a waterfall with his godson, and they immersed themselves in the water while I watched. I thought of the waterfall I found on a walk with Pippin the dog while home in Minneapolis in June.
“Meditation and water are wedded forever,” said Herman Melville. I’m not proud that most of my anamnetic activities take the form of making lists. But I hope you can, sometime this summer, find a waterfall near you to hike to and meditate by for a few hours one afternoon. That’s the sweet unrest we’re all looking for.
Sweet Unrest in the Streets
A section featuring recent scribblings out in the world.
“Kingdom of God,” U.S. Catholic
When U.S. Catholic asked me to write a piece on Christian anarchism, I was intrigued: anarchism is a word bandied about frequently by Catholic Worker types, but what does it actually mean, I wondered? I got a few smart folks to offer me some ideas:
Although medieval and modern theologians tried to interpret the Sermon on the Mount as an eschatological promise or a personal mandate, early Christians saw it both as a social and personal ethic. The life and teachings of Jesus provide the fundamental principles of Christian anarchists: Do not resist evil, do not judge, and do not return evil for evil.
Christian anarchists continue to interpret the Sermon on the Mount as an ethic to be lived here and now to bring about the kingdom of God within and among us. The Christian community in Jerusalem, described in Acts chapters 2 and 4, matches the description of an anarchist’s ideal society. Scripture describes the disciples partaking in common prayer, common ownership of goods, and mutual aid.
Read the full story here.
Peter Maurin Conference, Chicago
This is not my own “writing,” per se, but I have been assisting James and company with publicizing the Peter Maurin Conference, happening in Chicago September 6-8.
You can read more about the conference in a lovely little write up in Today’s American Catholic.
Conference organizers pointed out Maurin’s proposal for parishes to become places of encounter, where people from a variety of social, economic, and professional backgrounds could collaborate “in the making of a path from things as they are to things as they should be.”
The conference will take up this invitation by replacing traditional academic paper presentations and panels with roundtable discussions—an idea that has resonances with the working methods of the ongoing synod on synodality, and which shares the synod’s hope for less hierarchized, more inclusive social and ecclesiological spaces.
Read the full piece here. And you can learn more or register to attend on the website.
Friends’ Words
Colin Miller, “Thinking Christianly About Technology,” at Church Life Journal
We are fans of Colin’s writing here at Sweet Unrest. And we cheer for any writing about technology in the year 2024 that does not stop its critique at iPhones or the internet but takes a swipe at the community-and-peace-of-mind-destroying monstrosities known as “cars.” See below:
The blind spot, for us, is all the little ways that tools habituate us every day. When we drive a car, for instance, we become habituated to speed. We get used, in other words, to the fact that we can go sixty miles an hour, and this quickly morphs into the habit of thinking that we should be able to get anywhere within a mile of where we are in about one minute. And we know that the habit has really taken hold, because, like all habits, it affects not just the way that we think, but how we feel and act. So, when I am expecting to get somewhere at the rate of a mile a minute, and then I hit a traffic jam, I am immediately impatient, irritated, and maybe even a little indignant (as if my car gave me a right to go fast). This is how I know my car has gotten deep down into my soul.
It is important to note that this has very little to do with what we think or what our attitudes are. No: if we ride in a car we just cannot help but be this way. Whatever our better intentions are, our first intention in getting into a car is to go fast. And so, “I want to go fast!” becomes part of who we are. The placement of our body creates the disposition, and our mind, more often than not, has no choice but to follow the placement of our bodies.
Read Colin’s essay here.
Kelly Sankowski, “The Moon’s Shadow,” on Substack
Kelly’s started a Substack — a must-read. In her first post she talks about the reason for its name, and the concept of “biomimicry,” and the themes of her work:
“The Moon’s Shadow” has an element of biomimicry in it: a desire to learn both from my experience of wonder during the eclipse, and from the nature of the moon itself.
While there is no scientific evidence that women’s menstrual cycles are connected to the moon, there is a long history of people wondering about the relation between the two, since the average length of a woman’s menstrual cycle is the same as the lunar cycle (29 days). Some people think the two used to be more linked, before artificial light interfered.
I appreciate this kinship with the moon. Those of you who have been around for a while know that one of the things I like to focus on in my writing is how female bodies in particular reflect the divine, and I think there is great wisdom in what our bodies and the moon can teach us about embracing the seasons and cycles of life.
Read the full first post—and subscribe!—here.
Casey Stanton, “Initial Response to the Instrumentum Laboris” at Discerning Deacons
In response to the Instrumentum Laboris for this upcoming meeting of the Synod in Rome this October, published on July 9, Casey wrote a response detailing some of the questions, frustrations, and concerns that the synodal process has raised for women in the Church, and also the worthiness of the goal of forming the Church into an ecclesial body practiced in “walking together”:
Part of our work as Discerning Deacons is to continue to make visible the desire of the people of God to see the topic of women’s access to the ordained ministry of the permanent diaconate discerned in a way that is synodal—which is to say, open and transparent; concerned not only with theological considerations but also pastoral realities; committed to the dynamic process of communal discernment rather than particular outcomes; and rooted in the lived experience of those women who experience a sense of vocation to this ministry, which could in turn help inform the counsel offered to the Magisterium in consideration of the possibility of restoring women to the order of deacons.
Read Casey’s full blog post here.
What gives you hope?
That was the opening icebreaker question for a writer’s group I had the delight to join in last week. I could barely answer.
We — I—spend so much of our time, here at our disgruntled little house of hospitality, on these agitared corners of the internet, detailing what we are doing wrong: the wounds we are self-inflicting on ourselves, our body politics, our Brothers and Sisters in Christ. So what does give me hope???
I mean, in one sense, my entire curmudgeonly existence is grounded in hope. Critique is grounded in hope. I believe that we can do much better, that it is not so hard for us to all be a little bit better—for me to be a little bit better—than we are now. I hope that things can change. I have great hope in human beings to be better. I believe we want to do the right thing, to do the kind thing, and we have to see the broader picture: we have to see how our lives impact our brothers and sisters down the street, in factories, across an ocean. We cannot be blind to those whose lives are connected to ours whether we like it or not—thank you, multinational corporations and global supply chains.
So what gives me hope?
What can I say? When I have spent most of the day complaining about what is wrong?
On the fourth of July, James and I stopped at Mount Saviour Monastery. We walked onto a hilltop soaked in silence, baking in it, along with the heat. It sat heavy on the hilltop, and it soaked into my bones. It was like a chiropractic session: I could feel my entire body realign around this silence. My heartbeat slowed, my eyes opened wider.
My heart expanded.
It was like we had arrived at the center of the universe: the eye of the storm, and everything here was calm.
We stayed and prayed with the monks: we felt the church shake with the ringing of the bell, we lit a candle at the feet of the fourteenth century madonna in the crypt. I left feeling lighter. And that vision—that vision of quiet, of stillness, of praying the psalms together—of prayer and work—that gives me hope.
Over the course of the past few weeks since, I have found that silence of Mount Saviour Monastery in small little places: in praying morning prayer with a group of friends—old and new—on the front porch of a house together; small prayers while washing dishes or chopping potatoes, thinking of my grandmother, remembering. A deeper anamnesis than list-making.