Mary the Apostle

Does anyone really exist, or are people only who we make them into?

Yesterday a bunch of folks in my quirky Twitter world were tweeting away about St Mary of Magdala, the apostle to the Apostles. A lot of people in my circles are set on exonerating Mary, and with good reason. She picked up a bad reputation throughout the middle ages. I was fascinated to discover that a rise in a presentation of a penitent Magdelene occurred during the Catholic Reformation, when the whole Church was repenting and looking for a model of contrition.  In retrospect, learning that was probably the turning point toward a favorable view of Church history and a frustration with retroactive indignance: no matter how we’ve messed up, there is always a reason why.

And boy, did we mess it up with Mary of Magdala. For better or worse she is part of our collective consciousness as a loose woman, a characterization which is found nowhere in Scripture. Better writers than I have documented the conflation of various biblical women into Mary. If we look at the evidence, we see that she was a dear disciple and a leader among the Apostles, but even those of us who struggle to proclaim this are evangelizing the in the shadow of myth, aware that what we are trying to do is fundamentally an un-doing.

Yesterday I was also privy to conversations about another Mary, and her sister, Martha, both stars of one of the few Bible stories that features two women.  Unfortunately it also features sibling rivalry and the chastisement of a hard-working woman, something hard-working women everywhere have been trying to explain away ever since.

I couldn’t help thinking, in the midst of both of these discussions, “how much does any of this matter?” If we get these women figured out, does it really change anything? They lived 2000 years ago and have long since gone to a place where their reputations cannot harm them. Reimagining them doesn’t change them – but it does change us.

We rely on our sacred narratives for permission on how to behave.  If Mary and Martha is a story of passivity vs. activity, we know who wins. And for women, that’s what we’re stuck with, because so few of our sacred stories have female characters. I wonder if men pore over the characterizations of Peter, Thomas, or other Apostles, go searching for the “stories about men” the way some women scramble to find in “stories about women” evidence that God loves us, and that we matter too.  I doubt it – all history is “stories about men”. Why would they imagine themselves Matthew or Zaccheus when they could be Paul? They could be Jesus.

This is not to disparage the exegetical or imaginative skills of the wonderful men I know who look to the Bible for guidance.  They are lucky to have so many models, and in truth I often share their models – loving Zaccheus as inspiration to short people everywhere, and Peter as a model of loud-mouthed-bozo-makes-good. We should take inspiration where we get it. But I won’t pretend that women and men are on a level interpretive playing field.

The woman at the well tells me it’s ok to question and to challenge. Phew. The woman with the alabaster jar tells me I can be lavish in my giving. Good to know. The woman with the hemorrhage (are we noticing a theme of namelessness here?) tells me I can take initiative. That's a relief, since I probably would have anyway.  When I look over my academic history I realize most of my Scripture study has been focused on these women.  I have spent countless hours picking apart these stories, searching for historical context and literary types, and anything else that would help me understand these few, mostly nameless female characters.

So who is Mary of Magdala, and why does it matter? The historical Mary is long gone, lost forever to the mythologies that make figures a reflection of our age.  Can our age allow her to be what the simplest evidence points to: a faithful follower of Jesus who stayed with him until the end, and a proclaimer of the Gospel? 

Every year we read or sing the Easter Sequence, in a translation packed with facile rhymes. And every year when we get to the line “Speak, Mary, declaring what you saw, wayfaring” I literally thank God. Tucked away in that tiny couplet, in which the Church talks back to the Scripture that week by week talks to us, is permission to proclaim what we see.  Sometimes that sliver of guidance is all we get, and it’s up to us to figure out the rest of what it means, for us and for history.

St. Mary of Magdala by Eileen Cantlin Verbus. Copyright FutureChurch. For more information about St. Mary of Magdala celebrations, go to www.futurechurch.org

Imagination

My suspicion is that I am unbearable to shop with. I have no problem traipsing all over a store, stopping to look at any bright thing, touching everything soft, smelling every candle. I imagine each item in my life - shoes on my feet, vases in my kitchen, linens on my bed. And then I walk out without buying a thing. Part of the reason is my miserly nature, but I also am skeptical that owning whatever I'd looked at could compare to my imagination.

Last summer I heard a series of lectures by John Bell, who snarkily referred to the imagination as "the bogus gift of the Holy Spirit". The magic of what happens inside our heads is intangible, so we don't value it, or talk about its power. My beloved Augustine declared "to reach the goal is nothing else but the will to go" - but unless we have imagined our goal we can't begin the journey.

The great story of the conversion of Ignatius is that he read the lives of the saints, and when he imagined himself doing great things like they did, rather than the "great" things he read in his chivalric novels, he was filled with a satisfaction that didn't abate. And so his imagination propelled him into heroic action because he listened to it and made it reality. 

I was captivated by the line in President Obama's speech last night about expanding our moral imagination. I'm not going to parse every line of the speech or imply that he was making a sweeping statement about the role of imagination in our moral development. I will simply say I was happy to hear the use of our imaginations stated as a worthy aspiration. What is empathy if not the imagining of the inner life of another?

Beyond empathy, our imaginations shape our moral life. I try every day to be better than I was the day before, because I can imagine a life in which I am better than I am. The relentless pursuit of improvement to which we are called can be exhausting.  We are guided in that pursuit by a vision that is ours alone, purportedly trapped in our imaginations yet freer than our habits.

A Soul that Shouts

One occupational hazard for a church musician is that we rarely come across traditional hymns that are new to us: we’ve literally heard it all before. But just a few years ago I got the gift of a new Advent/Christmas hymn when I heard Gabriel’s Message for the first time. I like the tune (when it’s not done too slowly!), the refrain is catchy, and the poetry is above-average. When I got to church last weekend I was happy to find it on the song sheet.



Like many singers, I have the capacity - either enviable or regrettable - to sing on auto-pilot while thinking about any number of things (for instance, yesterday I discovered I could sing the entire Halleluiah Chorus from memory while deciding what to have for dinner). Last Sunday I found myself analyzing the text to Gabriel’s Message. “Then gentle Mary meekly bowed her head/to me be as it pleaseth God, she said.” At the word "meek" I groaned, thankfully silently, since I was singing into a microphone.

“Mary was that mother mild.” “A Virgin pure both meek and mild/In Bethlehem brought forth her Child” “gentle Mary laid her child”… There are plenty of problems with the idea that all women will feel an unqualified affiliation with Mary, who is often presented as the only role model Christian women are allowed to have. There are even more problems with the relentless stereotyping of Mary as docile and tame. Do we really believe a shrinking violet would have had the nerve to do what she did?

This week we are hearing the Gospel readings from Luke 1, starting with the Annunciation on Monday and concluding with the Canticle of Zechariah. Today’s Gospel is Mary’s Magnificat, an unapologetically bold declaration of praise. This is a saint I can get behind. So with all due respect to late Romantic Marian piety, I’m taking Mary back.

The idea of an ideal woman as meek and submissive may seem like an anachronism, but we’ve kept her alive in our religious iconography, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I’m sick of it. Give me a role model who questions an angel, bravely says yes, deals with a life lived in the rumor mill, does some bossy maneuvering at a wedding to restock the bar, and proclaims God’s praise and promises. When my soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord it doesn’t do so timidly - my soul shouts, and there’s a possibility that Mary’s did too.

Remembering the Four Churchwomen

"The church's role is to accompany those who suffer the most, and to witness our hope in the resurrection." - Maura Clarke

On December 2 we remembered the four churchwomen killed on that date in El Salvador in 1980. Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan were raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran military during the terrible period of oppressive violence that lasted in that country for more than a decade.

One news report commemorating the event mentioned that the killings of these women opened the world’s eyes to the atrocities being committed in El Salvador. It’s important that we look at the context in which this awful event occurred, and that there is plenty of blame to go around. Conversations I've had this week about these women often turned to a number of topics- the School of the Americas, Oscar Romero, US involvement in Latin American conflicts (with a healthy dose of my guiltiest pleasure: Reagan-bashing).

At what point do our saints stop being people and become symbols? Can we remember these women as individuals in their own right and as part of a grander narrative? I think there’s a tendency in hagiography (particularly when it comes to women) to miss the trees for the forest. We miss the particularity of their holiness by focusing on What The World Learned From Them.

"I hope you come to find that which gives life a deep meaning for you. Something worth living for--maybe even worth dying for." -Ita Ford

If these women were merely victims caught up in the world-wide turmoil of the late Cold War, if this were only about the lingering effects of European colonization of the Americas, or the American support of oppressive regimes, or a civil war in which few were acting morally, we wouldn’t admire them. Through the memories of those who knew them and through their writings, we find evidence of an integrity that both put them in harm’s way and gave their lives purpose. They knew who they were and what they were called to do, and they didn’t let the world around them muddy the waters.

Integrity is the quality we need from our modern saints. To stand firm among the swirl of our complex world, to remember one’s mission while being bombarded by competing values, to keep the spark of divine love alive in our hearts while being told that we should fill our hearts with only ourselves, that is to be holy. We may think that we have something new going on here, but wasn’t Jesus also caught up in a complex political and social environment, and put to death for refusing to deny who he was?

The four churchwomen followed Jesus by not denying who they were, even though the path they were on led to martyrdom. Their conviction is admirable (or foolish, depending on how you look at it), and shouldn’t be ignored when examining the bigger conflict in which they were caught up. It’s a horror that simply living an honest life of service can lead to a brutal death. We do a disservice to the women’s memories if we focus only on the salaciousness and drama of their death and fail to notice the simple holiness of their lives.

We're all sinners, everyone of us, and a radical change is needed for all of us. - Ita Ford

[I will never be a successful blogger if I don’t lose this habit of thinking things through before I post about them. What good does a post about the four churchwomen do two days after the anniversary of their killings? If I don’t cut out my processing time I may never be a successful blogger, but I just might turn into a writer. ]

Try, try again

My immediate family has never had a birthday present ritual. If someone sees something they like want to give someone, they buy it, and maybe give it to them on their birthday, or maybe give it to them whenever, or maybe they just buy the person a burrito the next time they see them. Because my birthday is always around Thanksgiving, I usually see my parents in the week before my birthday, and we take that as an excuse to eat cake. On my 25th birthday my mother brought out an Entertainment Book, dropped it on the kitchen table with a clatter and announced "Happy Birthday...your brother had to sell these for school".

Still, two nights ago my mother slipped into another room after dinner and returned with a familiar looking box from a local jewelry store. She handed it to me and laughed "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." When I opened it I wasn't surprised to find a gold chain with a single, small pearl.

When my apartment was broken into a few years ago all that was taken was jewelry, because that was all that I had. There were only one or two things that I truly lamented losing, and one was the little Add-a-pearl necklace I'd had since I was a girl. Most of my cousins also have them, and as birthdays and holidays passed we'd get another pearl here and there and have them added to our necklaces. Mine only had thirteen or so pearls on it (or maybe seventeen? For whatever reason I'm certain it was a prime number), and since I'd reached adulthood and passed the age of getting little gold boxes on my birthday, it seemed destined to stay at that number of pearls.

It wasn't until I realized that it was gone that I started to cry. My grandmother had been dead two decades, and I knew that the loss of this sign of her love didn't mean she loved me any less. The other wonderful women in my family, my aunts and my mother, were all still in my life - in fact, no one in my mother's large family had died since my grandmother's passing twenty years prior. Still, I was raised among sacramental people, treasuring signs and objects, and the loss of that particular object was devastating.

Not only was I raised to be sacramental, I was raised on Roman time, so it's no surprise that it took 2+ years to replace the necklace. I couldn't help but think of my mother's admonition to 'try, try again' as I heard the readings for the First Sunday of Advent (and not just because they mention a house being broken into).

Most of us are probably familiar with that quote attributed to Mother Teresa to the effect of "some jerk on the beach might knock down your sand castle - build one anyway". I worry that people are tempted to take the suggestion that "we know not the day or the hour" as an excuse to do nothing, because who knows when Christ will return and transform it all?

It's true, we don't know what's coming. I try to believe in the liberation of uncertainty. If I really don't know what's coming - when the Lord will return to us, when the bottom will fall out, when my stuff will be stolen - I am free to just build. For all we know someone could yank my necklace off my neck tomorrow - that didn't stop my mother from giving me a tangible sign of her love and our memories.  My apartment could burn down tomorrow - that didn't stop me from cleaning up this afternoon. The people I love, everything I love, could be taken from me in a heartbeat - that does not stop me from loving with my whole heart every minute of the day.

We can't predict when destruction and sorrow will come for us, but we can't predict when redemption will knock on our door either. So we 'try, try again', building and rebuilding. When the unexpected comes all I can hope is that I am caught doing that which creates the world as it should be. Until we can enjoy the world as it should be, we keep trying, doing our part to increase beauty and love, clothing ourselves in the armor of light.

To reach the goal is nothing else but the will to go

“Too late have I loved you, O Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new!” Yesterday was the Memorial of St Augustine, one of Christianity’s most celebrated theologians, who had quite a way with words (who could forget “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet”!). His Confessions is considered the first autobiography, and the honesty with which he writes about his sordid youth and spiritual growth is quite moving.

Just over a year ago I rhapsodized about Ted Kennedy, and how rare it was in modern politics to find someone who was able to reinvent himself and improve while in the public eye. Because I can be such a silly, foolish person, I take great comfort in the examples of people who accomplish great things despite being real dopes sometimes.

Augustine is really my kind of saint. Give me someone messy over somebody neat anyday. Don’t get me wrong, I hold the precocious little saints like Dominic Savio in high regard, but I’m not sure I would have wanted to be friends with him. So many people want saints to be neat and tidy – born with some sort of magic that allows them to be heroic. Does that let us off the hook a bit, if we were born without the magic?

I was greatly disturbed in spirit, angry at myself with a turbulent indignation because I had not entered thy will and covenant, O my God, while all my bones cried out to me to enter, extolling it to the skies. The way therein is not by ships or chariots or feet--indeed it was not as far as I had come from the house to the place where we were seated. For to go along that road and indeed to reach the goal is nothing else but the will to go. But it must be a strong and single will, not staggering and swaying about this way and that--a changeable, twisting, fluctuating will, wrestling with itself while one part falls as another rises. (Confessions, Book VIII.8.19)

You don’t live with a mouth like mine for as long as I have without learning how to apologize. For sure, sometimes my apologies are just words, crafted to get me out of something. But the upside of frequent apologizing is that it causes me to really evaluate my thoughts, words, and actions, and occasionally to do what true conversion requires: to change.

On separate occasions over the last two weeks people described me as “athletic” and “happy all the time”. I was really touched by those observations, because they are both things that I had to work so hard for. (I feel the same way when people say that my top notes are easy – not always so!) More than a magic blessing or earth-shattering conversion, I think that most of our change is as simple as deciding who we want to be, and working on it. I wanted to be athletic because I saw all my friends having fun at races, I wanted to be happy because I knew that negativity was a drain on the people around me. (I wanted to have an easy top because I wanted to get hired). Every time I get on stage I try to improve one thing from a previous performance – making those baby steps is all we can do. I wish I didn’t need so much improvement, but like Augustine (and Ignatius, and both Francises, and Dorothy Day, and...) I’m imperfect. Luckily, like them, I too am graced.

That is enough for me.

“There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.
He asked himself, ‘What shall I do,
for I do not have space to store my harvest?’
And he said, ‘This is what I shall do:
I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones.
There I shall store all my grain and other goods
and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you,
you have so many good things stored up for many years,
rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’
But God said to him, ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you;
and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’
Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves
but are not rich in what matters to God.” - from Luke 12, today's Gospel

Sometimes I worry that I am a hoarder. You’re probably thinking that there is not a lot of ambiguity in that designation, that it should be pretty easy to know whether I am or not. And anyone who has been to my itty bitty apartment, or seen me on one of my merciless clutter purges, or knows that I only spend money on books, food, and wine, knows that letting crap pile up probably isn’t among my compulsions.

I wish that made me rest easier about today’s Gospel. Even if I don’t accumulate stuff, I am often tempted to store up treasure for myself. The things I hoard are intangible: affection, esteem, opportunity. There is a fear that we all share, an uncertainty that is part of being human, and we all find ways to fight the fear off by building up reserves of what we think we need.

Yesterday was the feast of St Ignatius, whose famous Suscipe concludes “Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me.” I wish I were able to mean those words. Would God’s grace been enough for me if I had to do something that caused people to not like me? Would it be enough if I abandoned my self-centered charm? Would I be satisfied by divine love if I made a choice or commitment that closed certain doors to me? Rather than putting all of my eggs in God’s basket, I have spread them out over countless baskets, just in case…

If we are going to hold the saints up as our idols, we need to be realistic enough to acknowledge the cost. One of the most treasured quotes from Pedro Arrupe reads: More than ever I find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life from my youth. But now there is a difference; the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in God's hands. He offered that reflection after a stroke that rendered him unable to speak. Perhaps to truly surrender to God involves a destruction, a shattering. After all, surrender is a war metaphor.

Is that part of the beauty of prayer, that we repeat these phrases, like “that is enough for me” even when our heart isn’t in it? Lots of people call us hypocrites because we pray “Thy will be done” or “peace be with you” and then go off and behave in the silly, destructive ways we always do. I’m not sure it’s hypocrisy – I think it’s hope. We are hopeful that someday we will conquer ourselves, or be conquered, and be able to truly mean the things we pray for. All of our prayer is a plea for transformation. We want nothing more than to arrive at the day when God’s grace is enough for us, even though now we let all our little wants get in the way of that larger goal.

Augustine wrote How shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord, when by the very act of calling upon him I would be calling him into myself? And still he prayed. Knowing how hard it is should be no excuse for stopping. It is dangerous to offer our memory, our understanding, our will, our freedom as Ignatius did, because someday God might take us up on our offer. When the things we think define us are stripped away, may we find consolation in what we think is desolation. May we understand more fully that our hearts are made for love, restless until they rest in God. May the barns and silos we can’t help but fill with ourselves not come between us and the grace for which we are destined.

All you holy men and women, pray for us.

Last weekend I sang the ordination of two new priests. Having only sung one ordination prior (7 years ago), if you had asked me about the rite, the only thing I would have remembered was that it includes a litany of saints.

For a jaded old church nerd like me, it takes something special to move me (for instance, it's rare that the Agnus Dei lights my fire). Certain liturgical elements, thanks to their rarity, catch my attention (I'm a sucker for a good Sequence) and a litany is one of them. This weekend we sang Becker's popular setting of the litany. As we invoked saint after saint, while the newest members of the presbyterate lay prostrate, I became unexpectedly emotional.

The assembly repeated "pray for us" as we called upon saints familiar (Mary & Joseph), arcane (Chrysogonus & Hippolytus) and particular to our Jesuit community (Ignatius & Francis). On other occasions I have sung litanies that put Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day and Pedro Arrupe alongside Linus, Cletus and Clement. Where do we get the confidence to call upon our heroes to petition God on our behalf?

Any Catholic concerned with public perception keeps all this saints hoo-ha quiet if they can. Maybe we hedge a bit, acknowledging that we admire these people, but leaving out the more radical part of our claim to the saints: we believe there is something so generous and holy about them that they will back up our prayers.

As we asked for prayers on Saturday, what really took my breath away was the list we had in front of us, one that only skims the surface of our wealth of heavenly intercessors. And even when we mumble our response, or can't hear the cantor, or let our eyes and minds wander, the saints are still on our side, welcoming us into their communion. What greater advocates can we have than the saints named and unnamed, living in love with God forever?

[Two notes on the litany - I tried to find a recording of the Becker setting to which to link, but I was unable to find one that wasn't either out of tune, goopily sentimental, or one singer overdubbing his own responses to the invocations. Also, after the ordination I said something flippant about not knowing why a piece of music that is mildly cheesy was so moving. Luckily I was with the Jesuits, one of whom had a characteristic reply enumerating all of the evidence for this being the superior setting of the litany. Typical]

In lieu of a sound clip, I will include a photo of myself and one of my favorite saints.

My heart broke loose on the wind

In the 1200s St Dominic preached against the Albigensian heresy.

That’s not the lede I expected to write about my recent trip to the symphony, but all of my reflections on the premiere of Lieberson’s Songs of Love and Sorrow led me back to a lesson I’d taught on Dominic earlier that day. Composed as a companion piece for Lieberson’s Neruda Songs, Songs of Love and Sorrow also sets poetry by Pablo Neruda, this time putting the powerful Chilean poetry in the mouth of a baritone rather than a mezzo-soprano.

As a stereotypical stodgy New Englander, a lot of Neruda’s work feels foreign to me. His expressions of emotion are tactile and earthy, with a lack of inhibition that makes me feel even more uptight in comparison. I’m probably not alone in approaching Neruda (and anything else that challenges me that much) with an overly intellectual detachment, trying to analyze its rich physicality with the sobriety of an over-trained mind. Plena mujer, manzana carnal, luna caliente [Full woman, flesh-apple, hot moon] – for we priggish Americans, it can be easier to hold images like that at arm’s length.

That detachment was impossible last night. Lieberson’s evocative setting energized Neruda’s poetry, but even more revelatory was the very experience of live music.

We are bodies, living in a world we can touch, feel, see, smell, hear. The sonic experience of orchestral forces in a live setting is incomparable, a fact of which I am reminded on every trip to the symphony. The magic of skill and intention forming sound waves that surround us is a perfect example of the blessings of our physical world. Add to that the power of a perfectly calibrated human voice – an example of every part of the human body working together perfectly, art truly incarnate - and you have a recipe for transformation.

Cantas y al sol y a cielo con tu canto/tu voz desgrana el cereal del día,/hablan los pinos con su lengua verde: trinan todas la saves del invierno. [You sing, and your voice peels the husk /of the day’s grain, your song with the sun and the sky,/the pine trees speak with their green tongue:/all the birds of the winter whistle.]

A rich human voice, an orchestra, an emotive musical setting of sensual poetry created the perfect storm, tearing me away from the elite intellectualism honed over many years in the ivory tower. My brain was ripped out and I was only body, heart and blood and guts and skin.

So what does this all have to do with St Dominic? The Albigensians, like many before and after them, professed that the human body and all other matter was evil. Although the Albigensian heresy died out in the decades following Dominic’s preaching, that principle still lives in the hearts and minds of many Christians. We go to church and are scared to open our mouths and sing, never mind move our bodies or touch the person next to us. We believe our faith and our identity are found in what we think rather than how we embody that belief through physical action. Trying to stay on the right side of gluttony we avoid any indulgences, ignoring the many gifts of God that come to us through our sensations. We’re mostly brain, a little heart, and no guts. We’re scared – of sin, of our appetites, of our power.

But to look at the people who truly embrace the physicality of our creation, they don’t slide into gluttony or sin but achieve something truly mystical. Earth’s crammed with heaven/and every common bush afire with God (Elizabeth Barrett Browning). By means of all created things, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin). The king saw his image/in your faces/when he made you mirrors of/all heaven's graces,/a garden of surpassing/sweetness, a fragrance/wafting all graciousness (Hildegard von Bingen).

It’s easy to spend a lot of time with my head in the clouds, hoping for things not seen. But everything in the here and now was created and proclaimed good – including us. What a gift it is to get out of our heads and into our bodies, touching the earth that sustains us, touched by the art that occasionally inflames our senses until our old ways burn up and we become something new in their clean, pure ash.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind. - Neruda

A friend even more cynical than I (a horrifying prospect, I know) declared that there should be no mention of the holiday today, but I can’t resist commenting on what is probably the most overblown of all Hallmark holidays. Even though on the liturgical calendar February 14th is the Feast of Sts. Cosmas and Damian (and today it happens to be the sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time), for the rest of the world it is Valentine’s Day, and love is in the air.

My guess is many of us wouldn’t find the holiday so odious if not for the sappy and absurd commercials that abound in the weeks leading up to the holiday. We are told just how to show people that we love them, with consequences for failure to comply often implied. Everyone’s focus narrows on that aspect of love that is romantic love, exclusively between two people.

It doesn’t surprise me that a media which wants to control us focuses on that piece of love’s wide expanse. Love in its totality, love that makes missions and martyrs, that drives us to creativity and to creation, is far too powerful for the powers-that-be to promote or even acknowledge. One of the most famous quotes from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin predicts “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

Another quote about love (one that has begun to tire me a little, I hate to say) is the famous Arrupe quote which ends “Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.” I am so lucky that most of the people with whom I work, live and socialize, are driven by love. Love manifests as commitment to a cause, to other people, to justice, to art, to learning. As I have tried over the last few years to make my commitments more intentional I have realized that the main reason I have over-committed myself throughout my life is that I really do love people and I am always trying to expand the circle of my service so that I can work with greater and greater numbers.

Today’s Gospel ends with this: “woe to you who are rich,for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.” I’m sure many preachers today will be connecting that with the theme of Valentine’s Day, and here’s my contribution to the cause. What frustrates me the most about the mythology of love surrounding this holiday is that it suggests a perfection that is never really possible. Flowers, candy, jewelry, and even other people will never meet our deepest desires. When we imagine that our lives are perfect, like those rich and fulfilled in today’s Gospel, we close ourselves off to the transformative love of God which only meets us in our need. When we distract ourselves with a million other things that we think will satisfy us, we deny the truth and the virtue of the yearning that drives us forward to greater communion and greater service in love.

What I do is me, for that I came.

Even for someone as prone to tears as I am, I know I have finished a good biography if I cry at the end when the subject dies. The last book that moved me like that was Christophe Wolfe’s biography of J. S. Bach, and it goes without saying that I knew what was coming in the end. “Winston & Franklin” on the other hand, made me eager for the demise of both protagonists. Last night I got misty reading the end of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life by Paul Mariani. I’ve always admired Hopkins’ poetry (and Mariani’s, for that matter) but had only a passing familiarity with the circumstances of his life - I knew he was a convert, a Jesuit, lived throughout Great Britain, died young, achieved no literary fame in his lifetime.

On the other side of having read this biography, that’s still the story. I now have a greater understanding of his trademark sprung rhythm, a term for which I’d only had cocktail-party level comprehension. New Hopkinsian terms like inscape and instress have worked their way into my vocabulary and will likely disappear once I’m off what promises to be a “Hopkins kick” and have moved on to another temporary obsession.

Every biographer is going to focus on one element or another of a subject’s life, and throughout much of this book we read about Hopkins desire for sacrifice - he sacrifices reputation and relationship to ‘swim the Tiber’, he sacrifices his writing and creativity seeking obedience to his order, and he sacrifices much of his health in that same spirit of obedience. From what I know of Mariani’s other writing, the biographer has undertaken spiritual journeys of his own, including the Spiritual Exercises. The knowledge, both intellectual and spiritual, of Hopkins’ Catholic (and Jesuit) world makes all the difference in his writing about the poet. I imagine it is hard to write about a man who punished himself too much - who probably took himself too seriously - while loving and respecting the man and his actions. Mariani never laughs at or dismisses Hopkins’ deep desire for sacrifice or communion with God.

What I do is me, for that I came. I know I’m not the only person for whom that is one of Hopkins’ most memorable lines. My little liturgist rises up at this affirmation that what we do matters - not what we think, or believe, or intend, or someday might do.

I realized about 2/3 of the way through the book that I was basically reading from poem to poem. Though I gave attention to and was interested in the circumstances of his life, all the while I was measuring out Hopkins’ life in sonnets. I turned each page hoping to see more of his familiar poetry, accompanied by the circumstances of its writing and by Mariani’s unparalleled insights on its inspiration. But would the poet have read his own life the same way? Would he have agreed with posterity on the reason for which he came?

What I do is me, for that I came. We can think we know what it is we do, for what it is we come, but perhaps like our friend Gerard that which survives of us won’t resemble our dreams and intentions. Knowing the future’s uncertainty what else can we do other than catch fire, draw flame, keep grace, offer ourselves over to God and to each other? Perhaps Hopkins would have been even more prolific, more genius (is that a possibility?) had he not indulged his religious scruples. But the brilliance that we have from him was born in that intersection of devastating sacrifice and creative indulgence. His reality - his ‘me’ - was the filthy manger in which his spark took flesh.

For that I came. The eager and inspired want to know what “that” is. It is music, it is sport, it is health, it is justice - we have ideas of our purpose and our end. Or maybe we don’t. Maybe we just slog through, with no sense of what makes us most ‘me’, what will survive, and what may reach beyond us across years to help others suss out dappled things, bright wings, God’s grandeur, our end.

Dorothy Day, pray for us

Yesterday among a million other little things, I had a few minutes to think about one of my favorite saints, Dorothy Day. I have always felt a great affinity for her in part because she passed to eternal life on the day that I was born. I know I'm not the only person in my circle of friends who admires her. Her writing talent, her sass, her commitment to serving others - all of these things have made her a role model for many and have inspired me as I have tried to grow in discipleship.

Dorothy Day was nothing if not radical - and not just in the twentieth-century political sense of the term. One definition of that word is "thoroughgoing or extreme", and that she was. She committed herself wholeheartedly to serving God and other people.

I have written previously about the gap between what I want and what I wish I wanted. There were a lot of years when I thought that the only way to live like my role models was to mimic them: I needed to live a life that looked like Dorothy Day's in order to be a disciple of Christ the way that she was. I'm just beginning to find the ways that I can follow her example by being my unique self, rather than by going through the motions of what my heroes have already accomplished in the past.

We'll only end up frustrated if we try to live someone else's life. No matter how admirable a person's actions are, they are their's alone, and trying to appropriate them is a cop-out. I'm not going to live in a Catholic Worker house, I'm not going to write for a radical newspaper, I'm not going to be arrested - at the rate things are going I'm not even going to make it to any protests any time soon. But I can find ways to be truly 'radical' - thoroughgoing and extreme - in my service and discipleship by committing myself to what I do and to those who I serve.

But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know him in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. - Dorothy Day

Ecce ancilla domini - the Fourth Sunday of Advent

Yesterday's Gospel was the story of the Annunciation. I taught a lesson on it last week which had me pretty well Annunciated out, and when I heard the familiar opening yesterday I groaned a little inside. But if you have to choose one pericope to spend the better part of a week with, that's a pretty good one to choose.

No matter how many times I hear the story, no matter how many times I make the point that Mary said yes to God, no matter how many times I pray the Angelus, there's never an answer there to the big question: Why did she say yes? There was no reason for her to suspend disbelief. Why in the world would she have believed that God had chosen her for something? There's nothing in the text that tells us why should would have believed - or maybe, more appropriately, there's nothing that would convince most of us if we were in her shoes.

Faith is a habit. My guess is that most of us have been in a position before to say "screw it. I'm saying yes. I'm diving in." to whatever has been asked of us. When there is no reason to say yes and the evidence is piling up against taking the risk, we put doubt on hold and decide to try against better judgment. Maybe we have made a habit of believing God's promises of good for us. Maybe we have made a habit of trusting the people around us to catch us when we fall. Maybe we have stopped caring about the consequences and decided to value the potential good above the potential disaster. Our boldest decisions can be illogical and unreasonable, and if we're lucky they are the daring choices that change our lives or change the world.



- Henry Ossawa Tanner's The Annunciation