september
high holy days season
Why should we be of the tribe of Manasseh when we can wander with Esau? Why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses? Why should we be owls, when we can be Eagles? — John Keats, February 3, 1818
“It’s not fair,” is a constant antiphon of young children. And in the Roden household, “life’s not fair,” was the most frequent parental response.
Child psychologist Jean Piaget notes that developing this moral imagination is an essential facet of childhood development. Children, particularly those from ages 10-13, begin to develop a keen sense of justice—of what is due to themselves and others. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, what is mostly due to themselves. The empathy to imagine what they owe to others is (usually) a few developmental stages later.
But “it’s not fair” is not just a childish complaint. It can be a powerful statement that leads to social change—it can prod a society to develop a common good that really is more communal.
Nonviolent resistance—the Catonsville Nine’s draft card burnings, the Freedom Riders, the Singing Revolution—can be powerful means by which men and women of good conscience can cry out, “it’s not fair.” But the limit of resistance is that resistance does not necessarily indicate an alternative. Resistance can point out what’s not fair, but doesn’t automatically give birth to fairness.
As far as responses go, “life’s not fair” may be accurate, but it’s not true. The world—at least as Catholics see it—is ordered toward justice, and the fundamental truth of the universe is that we are made for communion. We are made for unity with one another. We’re made for inclusion in God’s life, which isn’t generally described as fair, but is certainly made of all the deeper things that fairness indicates—beauty, goodness, generosity, joy, and love.
It occurs that to me that to live as a Catholic—to live as that strange category called a saint—means to live with this vision of the world: as a community of humans destined for unity with one another. The kingdom of God is here, Christ says. We still see it imperfectly, as in a mirror. But how can we ever see it face-to-face unless we ourselves choose to live out this economy of love?
It’s both a communal question and an interpersonal question: how can the structure of our communities participate in the generosity of God? And how can I, when interacting with my neighbor?
So I’ve been thinking, the past several days—months, really, with others who are wondering the same things—how to move beyond simply calling out the world’s ills to trying to live in a way that ushers in a more fair, just, and loving world. How can we articulate and then enact a vision for our lives that participates in Resurrection? An event which, famously, does not sidestep or discount the crosses of injustice, but carries their wounds within it, and transforms them.
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—
Nicodemo at Mass
At Mass yesterday, the priest walked out and soldiered through the prayers despite his stutter. He paused. He took a breath, if need be. But he marched us through the liturgy with an admirable resolve.
He was interrupted, right after his respectfully succinct homily, by a woman yelling.
This woman was elderly. At a certain point, age stops being fine distinctions. It’s not something you can eyeball, it’s something that is measured in aches and pains, in movements and limitations. Things you can’t know just by looking, you can only know by feeling.
She was old. And dressed in clothes I remember my preschool teacher wearing in the early nineties: a knit vest, a-line skirt, tidy croc sandals. She looked like she had wandered off the set of My Brilliant Friend—a Hollywood version of a Siclian nonna. She had a few bags—no more than I have carried with me on errand days.
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 stylings out in the world—
My summer at Religion News Service has come to an end, but it was truly any scholar of humans and their religion’s dream. The breadth of stories I got to cover was an omnivore’s delight. And there were several enterprise stories I had been hoping to write and reporting out for the better part of a year that I finally got to bring to completion. One of them is below:
‘You can’t think yourself out of racism’: Black religion scholars call for conversion
(RNS) — Recently an assistant professor of African studies at a Catholic university was preparing to oversee a doctoral student’s oral examination when she heard from the theology department, in which she serves as a student adviser and teaches cross-listed courses.
The professor was told, two weeks before the exam, that a comparative theologian would sit in on the examination with her. The exam did not go smoothly because of the clearly differing expectations of the two examiners. The episode disturbed the professor, who is Black: “There was a reluctance to see me as a peer,” she said, “and a hesitation about my qualifications as a scholar of religion.”
Though her appointments are in art history and African studies, “I’m a religion scholar,” she told Religion News Service. “That’s what I am.”
You can read the full story here.
I also had the joy of talking to a bunch of creative people about what they do and why it’s important for them spiritually, including Molly Burhans of GoodLands, millennial Catholic hero.
You can read that piece here.
Keats Reads
“The Literary world I know nothing about” to George & Georgiana Keats, Feb 1819
—Highlights from the Good Reads shelf—
If you have not read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, I feel bad for you—and for myself two weeks ago, who numbered among your company.
This book, rather than any newspaper or internet publication, has been an excellent guide through whatever church scandal has been overtaking headlines for the past few weeks. The tale of papal showdowns with powers and principalities, heresies and scandals, fear and false martyrdom is as old as the church it seems.
Eco’s ecclesial drama is wrapped up in a monastic murder mystery (or is it vice versa?) The murder mystery, Eco said, is the essential novelistic form for asking the question, how do we know the truth? It’s the perfect testing ground for William of Baskerville’s empirical form of reasoning that is the latest trend in the novel’s fourteenth-century setting. As the narrator, the Benedictine monk Adso says:
“I had the impression that William was not at all interested in the truth, which is nothing but the adjustment between the thing and the intellect. On the contrary, he amused himself by imagining how many possibilities were possible.”
Adso is a delightful Watson to Wiliam the Franciscan Sherlock.
But the solution to the murder mystery is, for the season Agatha Christie reader, unsatisfying. Because the real body in the library is not a human corpse but a corpus of knowledge. And the real question is not whodunit but who and what is it for. The battle of faith and reason is Eco’s real story. And although Eco (a card-carrying skeptic) may not tell the full story of faith, his novel is an incisive look into the struggles of enlightenment and of being a community of believers on earth united by earthly and spiritual means.
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—
Kathryn Post, “From luxury stays to ‘champing’ in the sanctuary, churches adopt pandemic-era Airbnb models,” Religion News Service
Kathryn’s a phenomenal journalist I worked with this summer who has a killer knack for finding unusual and surprising stories. Her pitches each week always had me hooked, and I always learned a lot reading the final result!
(RNS) — After the death of their founding pastor a few years ago, membership at Cullen Missionary Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, took a nosedive.
With less revenue coming in pledges and the expenses of keeping the church, which would take up nearly a city block, running, “we had more space than we knew what to do with and didn’t have the people or resources to pay for it,” said current pastor Andre Jones.
That’s when the Cullen MBC turned to Church Space, a platform akin to Airbnb that allows houses of worship to rent their sanctuaries, fellowship halls and kitchens to other congregations and organizations for as much as $30,000 a year.
Read the full thing here.
Hani Barghouthi, “'We stand tall': Michiganians march again at Motor City Pride following hiatus,” The Detroit News
The most concrete fruit of my time at Columbia is a diploma I have used twice to swat the mind-bogglingly large flies that somehow sneak through my air conditioning unit into my bedroom. It’s wildly effective. Worth every penny of that 70K.
Second only to that is my friendship with Hani. Hani’s a lovely soul whose passion for justice and care for his subjects comes through in every line of his writing. He’s a great secret-keeper and soup-maker and kept me fed throughout the year until he passed the baton onto my boyfriend and moved to Motor City.
Detroit — For more than a year, Arleta Greer was not able to perform the most important part of her job, the one described in large block letters on her T-shirt: give a warm hug to young LGBTQ folks who may not be able to get one from their family.
This year, when in-person Pride parades gradually spilled back onto streets in the United States and abroad following a mostly virtual presence in 2020, Greer made it her mission to give out as many hugs as she could.
Motor City Pride 2021 was no different. The parade, customarily held during Pride Month in June but delayed because of the pandemic, kicked off Sunday at noon with a brief message from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Joined by Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II.
Read the full story here.
Larry Chapp, “So-Called ‘Synodality’ and the Myth of ‘Hyper Papalism,’” Gaudium et Spes 22
Larry Chapp’s blog has been introduced to me by aforementioned boyfriend and it’s a reliably satisfying Communio-esque take on current church affairs. This particular piece is thought-provoking and moving.
I am not opposed to true synodality. But if it is merely a structural answer to what is at root a deep spiritual malaise in modernity, then it will be nothing more than a manufactured artifact of that same modernity and just as toxic. It will deflect our attention away from repentance and conversion and will in no way foster transparency. If the Pope must hold another synod of bishops I have a suggestion: how about a synod on the sinfulness of lies and deceptions. A synod that truly plumbs the depths of what transparency means in a Christological context. A synod that issues anathemas against child rape and those in the clerical ranks who enabled it. A synod that orders a change in canon law such that it is now forbidden for a bishop to order fresh cut flowers for his residence every day or to charter private plane flights for a lucrative speaking gig at a venue only one hour away by car. A synod that says Grindr is the antichrist. And instead of holding the synod in Rome, how about holding it in the poorest Catholic diocese in the world, with a closing ceremony where the bishops burn their fancy cassocks, give away their pectoral crosses to the poor, and put on sackcloth and ashes.
Read the full post here.
Until next time! May these beautiful, rich days of this sanctified season be a season of turning our hearts more fully to love.
There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times. — Annie Dillard