sweetest unrests
same auld lang syne
Thank you for reading this newsletter, a humble effort to capture the muse that captured Keats, who Virginia Woolf notes was the only poet of great worth to come from poverty.
This is a space dedicated to the joy of writing: a notebook where there is no other obligation other than to write honestly, write beautifully, and to try to pin down thoughts as they come and render them as truthfully on the page as they appear in the mind’s blank slate.
And it’s a great gift to have readers of the notebook: who share their insights and reactions to the quiet little insights I share here.
Since it is the end of the year, and ‘tis the season for nostalgia, here is an overview of the most popular pieces from this year. (Remembering, with Keats, that our most popular work may not, in fact, be our best.)
Meaning the sidewalk world is sort of a woods between the worlds, where people pass one another but never encounter one another. They’re zombified, Demon thinks. They’re saving their juice. But saving their juice for real life and living a zombie life half the time doesn’t really work. You either have to be in the juice economy or out of it. No servant can truly serve two masters.
Put it down, on paper or in blood. Make it real, rather than perfect. Whatever’s left in your hand counts for nothing.
But this speech seemed less like intelligent speech and more like just another piece in the puzzle of the financialized project that is the contemporary university in this age of the death of thought. Ideas have become very handy tools to rally donors rather than elucidate the truth.
This is what our friend and extended community member Paul would call: “Suburban Catholic Economics.” The Suburban Catholic Economist sayeth: We must be safeguards of our own security, since God cannot be trusted to save us. God cannot be trusted to provide—we must provide for ourselves. Cast ourselves upon the mercy of God, the way the poor cast themselves upon our own mercy? That sounds like foolishness! No thanks.
Death is unpredictable. Unlike a pregnancy, there’s no nine months to prepare, there’s no funneling of time into a single point. Or, perhaps there is: the signs of it are just more quietly advertised than a baby bump.
The five-year-old looks down at his hand like a foreign object. In the middle of his palm is a spidery splotch of blood. He holds it up to the older boy, confused. Can he clarify what this wound means? The older boy just stares, not unkindly. But saying nothing. No understanding flickers on his face. At that point, a pair of strong adult hands—wedding band on the left hand—enter the frame and begin to brush the dust off the young boy.
On Sunday, at evening Mass, John also put one dollar into the collection basket. I usually put in nothing, because, well, that’s a longer story. But watching John take a dollar and put it in the collection made us dig through our pockets and purse to join him. John sleeps on the church steps, so you might think he’s paying rent. But he’s really just that good. He is so generous it puts me, anxious, counting pennies, to shame. At Bible Study, when the resident talker began trotting out all his doubts on the existence of God, John’s rebuttal was simply: “Pray to God, ‘Help my unbelief.’” This morning he called James, since he had located a spare bed. Not for himself, he who has no bed, but for a refugee family. I think John is the one Christian alive. He gives at a personal sacrifice. And he embodies that love so fully you get the sense that none of it really means anything to him—he does not make an idol of a dollar or even a bed.
I read the letter aloud, including the line traditionally invoked to prohibit women from preaching: “She must be quiet.”
Those words, in my voice, echoed through the empty church.
Isn’t truth a funny thing?
What does it mean—to contradict in the very event of your own reading—the surface meaning of the words you speak? To read something aloud that tells you to be quiet is a strange twist of history.
But, tonight, after the rain, the street was silent. Sun peaked out of the clouds. The world had been washed clean, baptized. I felt gentleness pouring through Allison Hill. The few people out walking were meditative, soaking up the cool weather and the colors of a cloud-speckled, rain-drenched summer evening. There were no cars speeding by to disturb the quiet. This is the opposite of Noah’s Ark, I thought: the rainstorm was God’s promise of salvation.
Perhaps an opportunity to discuss the long textual history depicting Christ as the true Dionysus (a textual analysis that developed because Christians were dialoguing with the culture around them; because they believed that seeds of truth—the seeds of Christ the logos or organizing principle of the universe—could be found in the culture around them.) As for Christ, he turns water to wine (like Dionysus) but Christ calls himself the true vine (John 15:1). What if the bishops tasked with preaching Christ’s Gospel to all creatures took the Gospel seriously enough to have the humility to dialogue even with those who find religion no more relevant to their lives than the silhouette of a 600-year-old fresco?
Here’s to another year of better and more beautiful writing.
On that subject, you can pre-order my book from Liturgical Press here!