Heather King's Blog, page 19

THE SAME SMALL STAR

AFFINITY

By R.S. Thomas

Consider this man in the field beneath.

Gaitered with mud, lost on his own breath,

Without joy, without sorrow,

Without children, without wife.

Stumbling insensitively from furrow to furrow,

A vague somnambulist; but hold your tears,

For his name also is written in the Book of Life.

Ransack your brainbox, pull out the drawers

That rot in your heart’s dust, and what have you to give

To enrich his spirit or the way he lives?

From the standpoint of education or caste or creed

Is there anything to show that your essential need

Is less than his, who has the world for church,

And stands bare-headed in the woods’ wife porch

Morning and evening to hear God’s choir

Scatter their praises? Don’t be taken in

By stinking garments or an aimless grin;

He also is human, and the same small star,

That lights you homeward, has inflamed his mind

With the old hunger, born of his kind.

I’m on an R.S. Thomas kick. 1913-2000. Welsh poet, Anglican priest, major curmudgeon, deeply private. Not seemingly cut out to be a pastor–few people skills. Suffered, obviously. Considered to be in the top tier of contemporary Welsh poets.

Read a wonderful biography of him a while back: The Man Who Went Into the West, by Byron Rogers.

His work cuts me to the quick.

When I read “Affinity,” I thought Yes. That is who I write for.

Not the erudite, the intellectually self-sufficient, the preeners and self-congratulators.

But those who are on their knees weeping, not even so much out of gratitude or reverence or awe, but from sheer exhaustion. From utter poverty of spirit.

Interesting piece on the Flying Wallendas, trapeze artist family, in the most recent issue of The Current, the newsletter of Rhode Island’s Portsmouth Abbey. The abbey is dear to my heart–I’ve visited a couple of times and have dear friends there. I’m also terrified of heights and am fascinated by people who devote their lives to walking on wires or sheer cliff faces high above the earth. Must expore further.

Also read Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile and Repair, by Rosa Lowinger, a Jewish-Cuban art conservator, based loosely in LA. “How, I wondered, was it possible that non one in my family had ever told me that Havana, the place where we were from, was so closely aligned to my work? More importantly, how had I managed to reencounter this ornately decorated, sagging city at the precise moment when I was beginning to see a link between restoration of the materlal world and personal healing?”

“Dwell time,” by the way, is a term of art.

“In art conservation, we avoid…harsh processes. We are the masters of the slow and steady, using only methods and materials that do their job without inflicing damage. This takes many different forms, but in cleaning, the measure of how long it takes for a product to work on a substrate is called dwell time. Dwell time can also mean the total time a person spends at an airport, or looking at a web page, or the time a family lingers at a border, waiting to get into a country, or the time you live in a city before moving on.”

Additional interesting fact: “The earliest surviving Christian paintings were made at a time when adherence to the religion was punishable by death” (via scholar Joachim Gaehde).

And here’s my latest YouTube: a little reflection on Alfred Hitchcock’s evil-comes-to-a-small-town masterpiece, and Monsignor Romano Guardini’s The Rosary of Our Lady.

ICONS OF THE GEM WORLD

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

The Los Angeles Natural History Museum is mounting a super-duper show in Exposition Park through the spring.

The museum recently unveiled “100 Carats: Icons of the Gem World,” an exhibition of some of the highest quality rare gems on earth, including the world-famous Jonker I diamond, which has not been viewed publicly for decades.

“Right this way!” you can almost hear the carnival barker’s cry.

Says Lori Bettison-Varga, the museum’s president and director: “Gems of such magnificent size and quality have never been displayed before in this quantity in one exhibition.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

MANAGING TO BECOME A TRUE ARTIST

“Such was the inexhaustible power of art that Hokusai believed that he–and perhaps even we–could become one with an image. Every morning he drew a Chinese lion then threw it out the window to ward off disaster…Hokusai’s final image–wintry, transcendent–shows an inky-black dragon rising about the snow-capped circumflex of a tiny Mount Fuji. He gives his exact age on the page as eighty-nine. He is as we all should be when contemplating our end, our aspiration undiminished. These were his last words: ‘If heaven will afford me five more years of life, then I might manage to become a true artist!’ “

–From “Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death,” a wonderful book by British art critic Laura Cumming, ostensibly about the Dutch Golden Age, but as well about her love for her late father, the mysterious life and death of the painter Carel Fabritius (“The Goldfinch”), the power of art, and the human quest for meaning… 

There’s a nice First Things review, hot off the press, by Bishop Erik Varden on philosopher Zena Hitz’ book, The Religious Life. (Though not in their league by a long shot, I’ve written of Bishop Varden’s The Shattering of Loneliness and of another book by Hitz, Lost in Thought).

Zena is on sabbitical and driving cross country and, after a mutual friend introduced us, took the time to stop in to my place for a meal and coffee over the weekend. That was a lovely treat!

ADRIAEN COORTE, STILL LIFE WITH FIVE APRICOTS, 1154

Other than that, trying to keep body and soul together. After mentioning Fr. Donald Haggerty’s book, Conversion, I’ve had two reports of sightings: one reader recently attended a retreat given by Father, and another caught one of his Masses at St. Patrick’s over the weekend. Mystical Body. Together in the Eucharist. I’m continuing to move through his book slowly and will have more to say. Meanwhile, I’m very grateful to him.

Who can plumb this mystery of suffering, in the middle of which is love? It hurts. This morning, momentarily overcome, I looked up and saw the photo of Caryll Houselander that hangs to the left of my desk (the gift of another priest, and a friend).

I knew to the marrow of my bones, though I’ve hardlly glanced at the image in weeks, that Caryll has been interceding for me, praying for me.

She is a Dear Companion, and one day we will get to sit down, swill tea (we’ll have tea cause she’s British, or maybe I’ll have coffee and she can have tea), and laugh and cry our heads off!

OUR VOCATION IS LOVE

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:

Last summer I gave a retreat entitled “The Vocation of the Artist” at Kylemore Abbey in Connemara, Ireland.

The retreatants varied in age, nationality, demographic, and religious orientation.

Some but not all were working artists.

One young American woman was painting a series of Irish holy wells. Another, from Dublin, had designed stamps for An Post, the Irish postal service. One man, a Joycean scholar, wrote for The Irish Times. A 36-year-old woman taught at an inner-city Dublin school.

Our credo was a quote from Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov: “If you want to work on your art, work on your life.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

SLITHERING ON IN OUR SMALL, GLORIOUS LIVES

I feel at odds with myself this week, not sure why.

Have been reading Conversion: Spiritual Insights Into an Essential Encounter with God (!) by Fr. Donald Haggerty, a moral theologian and spiritual director who serves at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC. You may know him from his reflections in Magnificat, which are always great.

I talk about the book a bit (and some other things) in the video below.

What struck me earlier today was this:

“Is there something more to give to God that until now has been withheld? Something essential that calls for recognition? Something I am refusing to see? The question of a possible blindness in our soul can have a way of rising up at times in the silence of prayer without a satisfactory answer…Was a request from God missed? An invitation ignored?….”

Maybe, he says. But then again, “What he may desire at present is simply our complete surrender to his will in our current circumstances. That is enough, and yet it is also a very difficult thing. This must be a surrender that cuts deeply and irrevocably into our soul, and it is not easy. It is another form of conversion.”

It’s been interesting accepting my current circumstances here in Tucson. I like it here. It’s very beautiful, in its way: people do come to the Southwest from all over the world. But it’s a far cry from California, not to mention LA. The electric excitement, the melting-pot exuberance, the cutting-edge fashion, food, style–even though that was never my milieu, a certain amount of that is nice to be around.

Plus the natural beauty, the abundance, the variety of the things that will grow there: simply by sticking succulent cuttings in pots you can have a more or less rioutous garden. People tend to have a certain level of education, awareness, et cetera. Big city vs small city stuff that holds true across the board. But then there’s just the vastness and overwhelming beauty and openness and the magnificent California weather. The place is deep in my bones. Which doesn’t mean I was always (or really ever) happy there–is anyone ever really “happy” for any length of time?–nor that I regret moving, at all; nor that I want to go back.

Still I gave up 30 years of roots, such as they were, and now won’t live long enough to establish that kind of longevity anywhere. It’s left me in a new way with nowhere to lay my head in a sense. Trust me, people are not dying to get to know me here! I offered to give a free talk to college students at the nearby Newman Center and they were like…”Unh…right. Let us get back to you on that.” That was in January, 2023.

Then again no-one’s much interested in me, or anyone, in this world! So I don’t take it personally. Also though I can be pushy I’m just not the type to barge in and start shaking everyone’s hand. I tend to hang back. So be it.

For a while I thought I was supposed to make a concerted effort to change my basic temperament (I have made such attempts many times over the years but always snap back, like an elastic that’s been overstretched, to my original position). Now I see I am just where I’m “supposed” to be. Stripped down. No great ramen around the corner to cheer me up. No friends writing screenplays or putting on one-person shows or doing gigs. No temptation to mistake the “electric energy” around me for my identity; to believe that I am somehow inherently glittery, cutting-edge, attractively cosmopolitan; to suffer the illusion that externals in any way define me.

In fact, I’m exactly the same person and live the exact same kind of monastic life I did in LA, in slightly different surroundings. I trudge to Mass by myself, as often as I can, alone, as I have done since 1996. I pray. I take a walk. I read. I virtually never go out at night.I keep up with a wide variety of people. I accept any invitation or request I can. I travel a certain amount, almost always to visit someone, give a retreat, see a museum, and/or take in natural beauty. This week a couple of different visitors are coming through town so that will be wonderful.

I guess I do actually live fairly “simply,” though after reading a Gulag prison memoir it doesn’t seem so simple.

In any case, as Fr. Haggery says, even a love for beauty can’t come before Christ. I do feel I was called to Tucson for some reason that has not perhaps entirely been revealed and maybe never will be. We worry, we humans–have I missed an invitation, a call, a request from God? Or am I just thinking my life should be a little more glittery, a little more…remarkable? That I should be surrendering in a way that makes a little more of a splash…

To even ask the latter question makes me realize: No. Just keep slithering on in your glorious little life. Offer your prayers, works, joys and sufferings of this day. Do your 20 minutes of yoga with Kassandra. Get your list together for Trader Joe’s. Sweep up for the zillionth time the tiny mesquite leaves that get tracked through the house everytime you go outside. Work on this week’s column. Answer your emails and balance your checkbook. Say the Angelus at noon. Thank God you don’t live in a Russian prison camp.

And if you see a figure swathed in a second-hand Army-green Barbour coat with a fleece-lined hood, making its way up Third Street toward Campbell, cluthing a Rosary and mouthing the Luminous Mysteries around 4:45 tonight…that’ll be me, en route to Mass.

Inside, I’ll be singing.

IT WAS ABOUT FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON

Today’s Gospel reading is John 1:35-42:

“35 The next day John was there again with two of his disciples, 36 and as he watched Jesus walk by, he said, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” 37 The two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus. 38 Jesus turned and saw them following him and said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” 39 He said to them, “Come, and you will see.” So they went and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day. It was about four in the afternoon. 40 Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, was one of the two who heard John and followed Jesus. 41 He first found his own brother Simon and told him, “We have found the Messiah.” 42 Then he brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon the son of John; you will be called Kephas” (which is translated Peter).”

The passage is rich–but what jumped out at me was “It was about four in the afternoon.” Why is that relevant?

We often know what time of day events took place in the Gospels. The disciples and Jesus’ followers found the empty tomb in the morning. Jesus met Mary Magdalene in the garden in the morning. Morningn can also be a terrible time of anxiety. He also came before the high priests after a sleepless night and was questioned in the morning.

He met the woman at the well at high noon.

It was night when he went out on the boat and walked on water. The Last Supper…The Agony in the Garden…

Four o’clock is toward Vespers, toward dusk. It’s not quite five o’clock when the very last workers came to the vineyard, but it’s toward the end of the day. Our hardest work is done. We’re feeling a little more relaxed, a little mellow. After walking the road to Emmaus, four o’clock might have been about the time the disciples asked the man who had made their hearts burn within them if he wanted to join them in the breaking of bread.

One point is that all time is consecrated, hallowed. There is not a moment out of the 24 hours when Christ was not at some point awake, keeping watch, pondering, praying, preaching, healing. But there is always something especially holy about the approach of dusk. Millet captured it beautifully.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET, THE ANGELUS, 1857-1859

“[I]f prayer and love mean anything at all they mean entering into a dialogue with God. The essential starting point for this must be that we on our part are ready to listen, open and attentive to the Word. ‘The disciple is to be silent and listen.’ How can you hear the Word until you are silent? Monks should diligiently cultivate silence at all times.’ When St Benedict devotes one chapter to the keeping of silence (in addition to the many references scattered throughout the Rule) it is about much more than not speaking. He is as concerned about the cessation of the inner noise as of the external chatter…Unless I am silent I shall not hear God, and until I hear him I shall not come to know him.”
–Esther de Waal, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict

Speaking of dusk…the day has gotten away from me! I spent at least three hours booking a single flight, more on that later as it is time for my Vespers walk and prayer. Also tennis season is again in full swing. Brisbane, Auckland…I do have Tennis Channel Plus.

More on silence, humility, and Bishop Fulton Sheen, with whom I’m just barely becoming acquainted.

THIS WAS THE SKY LAST NIGHT AS I HEADED HOME…

A NEW YEAR’S TIP: WRITE YOUR OWN OBITUARY

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Recently I read a book called “God of Surprises” (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, $22.99), in which author Gerard W. Hughes suggests, as a spiritual exercise, writing your own obituary.

In a 2022 column, Father Ron Rolheiser makes a similar suggestion, pointing out: “There comes a time in life when it’s time to stop writing your résumé and begin to write your obituary.”

I’m always at my best in the early morning after a lengthy time alone with Jesus and two cups of strong coffee, which, happily, was the state in which I came upon the passage in “God of Surprises.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

And this week’s video: On Fiducia Supplicans, and the Perils of X/Twitter:

O COME LET US ADORE HIM

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Having family with whom you live, or nearby, is a great grace. Another kind of grace is not having family nearby, in which case, if you’re lucky and your friends have especially generous hearts, you’re invited to be with, eat with, and participate with other people’s families. To enter in, while also remaining in some sense a stranger.

I find the best kind of people are the ones who are hungry to talk, to share, and hungry for someone to listen. That’s kind of your role in these kinds of situations. And I find if you can and do listen, beneath the entertaining, fascinating, sometimes horrifying details (though the person isn’t performing or consciously trying to tell a great story, the details come out, especially if you ask about them) is the voice of the human condition, the cry of the human heart.

Also, families often have children which, if you’re my age, are often your friends’ grandchildren. So that is another huge, strange gift.

I mention this because if you live a lot of your “real life” in your mind and heart, as I do, mingling socially, and entering into the life of a family that’s not your own, can be daunting and also–here, I reveal myself–seem like a “waste of time.”

Instead I find–I go away humbled, inspired, well-fed, with many interesting questions roiling around in my head, and most of all deeply, eternally, grateful.

That goes for whether I’m in the home of a Catholic friend that’s bedizened with prayer cards, icons, and Madonna candles, or a home that’s more or less secular.

Because if you can’t find Christ with a child in your midst–and the matter-of-factly self-sacrificing mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and others who care for, support, nurture and love the child–you’re not going to find him anywhere.

“But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but of God.

And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.” John 1: 12-14.

May your Christmas season be filled with glory, grace, and truth.

BECOMING A BENEDICTINE OBLATE

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

I spent the first week of Advent at St. Andrew’s Abbey, the Benedictine monastery in the unincorporated community of Valyermo (Spanish: “Barren Valley”) located an hour and half northeast of LA in the Mojave Desert.

My history with St. Andrew’s goes way back. In 2000, four years after I came into the Church, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Who to turn to? How to face my mortality? Where to pray?

At the time I was barely acquainted with the “retreat” concept, but to get away by myself in silence and solitude proved to be a tremendous balm.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

OUR CALL TO BE MORE OF THE SAME

Two things I avoid like the plague are stores with more than maybe three people in them, and lines at the PO. Thus I have my own method for Christmas gift-giving, which consists of mailing out cards and giving a bunch of money to various charities. Making cookies. Having a couple of books sent. Bringing some choice foodstuffs to the places I’m invited for open houses or dinner.

When my siblings and I lived closer to home, we had a gift swap for a few years. The joke was that while most families had a maximum, we had a minimum. Like you had to cough up at least five bucks. I miss those days!

Mostly I’ve taken to hanging around sanctuaries, the tabernacle, and/or the nearest monstrance. The Advent liturgies and readings are surely the most beautiful of the year, the most filled with hope, joy, and light. Which I, for one, sorely need.

Continuing with my thin-line-between-passion-and-pathology DIY YouTubes:

I “love” Christmas. I can barely sleep the week before December 25. And yet I’m edgy, too, and teary, and sad. Many old and new friends are sick, undergoing surgery, suffering cancer recurrences, contemplating moves to assisted living. The nation is suffering; the whole world is suffering. “We have in our day no prince, prophet, or leader, no place to offer first fruits.”

Meanwhile, In conjunction with my novitiate as a Benedictine oblate, I’m (re-) reading Esther de Waal’s Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict.

Here’s a passage about the vow of stability taken by Benedictine monks and oblates:

“A life of stability is a life that can be contained within the limits of measured space since essentially it is about spiritual and not geographical space. The stability of space and of relationships are all the means towards the establishment of stability of the heart…During his stay at the Trappist monastery of Genesee one of the things that Henri Nouwen disovered about himself was just this lack of single-mindedness….He looked back over his recent life and found how disjointed it was, how it lacked any sort of unity, how the lecturing and traveling and the counselling and the praying were all separate and how this encouraged fatigue and exhaustion. He called this ‘the divided heart’ “….

“The ingredients of [the stability for which Nouwen longed] are entirely undramatic. A few days earlier Nouwen had been reflecting on the importance of sameness. He knew that he wanted to be different, to attract attention, to do something special, to make some new contribution. Yet the monastic situation was calling him to be the same and more of the same. Only after we have given up the desire to be different and admit that we deserve no special attention is there space to encounter God, and to discover that although we are unique and that God calls us each by name, that is completely compatible with the unspectacular, possibly the monotony, of life in the place in which we find ourselves.”

More and more, I do feel my life is of a piece. It’s not so much that my heart is divided as that I sometimes wonder where to put it.

But speaking of wanting to be spectacalar, last week I conceived of the notion to give a little gift or tip to my sainted mailman, Robert. I know his name because we exchanged notes one time about a package that was being held for me. Plus I have always had a deep deep place in my heart for the mailman (or mailwoman–our next-door neighbor Diane Jones was our mail lady in North Hampton, New Hampshire for a time way back it seems to me in the 60s or so).

There’s Robert! I think when I hear the clank of the mailbox cover or the little beep, followed by a thud, that means he’s just delivered another book by tossing it over the fence. Also when I went to Ireland oer the summer, Robert somehow contrived to put my mail aside for three whole months.

I researched and found you can’t give mail deliverers cash, but you can give gift cards not redeemeable for cash and not to exceed 20 bucks in value. So I made a special pilgrimage to Starbucks on foot, my heart singing, and got a $20 gift card and the little sleeve to hold it. I wrote a nice message on it: “To Robert, from Heather,” thanking him for his faithful service. Yesterday I taped it on the inside of my locked mailbox with a Post-It that said, “For Robert.”

He usually comes around 3 and when I went out around that time to check, lo and behold, the USPS truck was just pulling up, right in front of my place. Robert! I thought. But another guy stepped out instead.

I said, “Oh hi! Is Robert around? Is this still Robert’s route?”

And he goes, “Robert? Do you mean Richard? Yeah this is his day off. He’s back tomorrow.”

Somehow this is entirely indicative of my life, much of which consists of trembling interior gratitude and the working up of delusional connections with people who barely know I exist (and whose names I can’t even get straight).

I went out and edited the Post-It to read “To Robert/Richard (?) I think I may have gotten your name wrong. Forgive me.”

Like the poor guy doesn’t have enough on his plate five days before Christmas.

FANTASTIC STATE OF CALIFORNIA POPPY-FESTOONED ORNAMENTUNBELIEVABLY DELICIOUS HOME-MADE BLONDE ESPRESSO BROWNIES

FROM SAINTED FRIEND (I DO KNOW HER NAME) WHO ALSO DISLIKES CROWDED STORES AND LINES AT THE PO BUT BRAVED THEM ANYWAY IN ORDER TO SEND THESE TRULY WONDERFUL GIFTS. LORD, I AM NOT WORTHY…