Heather King's Blog, page 21

EMPTINESS/FULLNESS

Professor Zena Hitz, in A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, writes of our longing for eternity and asks, “How much of our life or work is about our children?”

“The lives of childless persons like myself have meaning thanks to other people’s children. I am a teacher. I pass on to young people the habits of mind I learned myself when I was young…If there are no young people, there is nothing and no one to teach; those habits of mine will die with me and my contemporaries. So too with any endeavor: starting a company, planting a farm, building a skyscraper, lobbying for justice.”

We’re hard-wired, in other words, to long for eternity, to long to pass on what we’ve learned, for life to continue after we’re gone.

That means children.

And this longing for life to continue is one reason why the teachings of the Church on marriage and family make total sense. Those of us without children support–in a sense, lay down our lives–for other people’s families and children.

Fall in Tucson is spectacular. It’s still in the 80s during the day with cool mornings and cooling evenings. The sky at dusk is enough to make a person weak at the knees. Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Savings so sunset’s around 6 this time of year and I often start out on a walk around 5.

I did that last night, wandering up and down the streets and alleys of my neighborhood, watching the light shade purple on the Santa Catalina Mountains, listening to the mourning doves, feeling the caress of the desert air.

There’s a park near my house, a block long, a couple of blocks wide, and when I first moved here I thought–How ugly. Himmel is a far cry from, say, Central Park–but then again, what isn’t?

The grass is brown much of the year. There are no groovy water features. There are tennis courts and a soccer field and (maybe this is the same field) a baseball field.

But over time I’ve come to notice the oleanders that fringe the whole southern edge. the vermilion flycatchers that flit among the mesquite, the hawks soaring over the fraying palm trees. People gather here to do tai chi, practice juggling, play folk music, hold drum circles, set up chairs in the shade and chat. The Himmel Park branch library sits on the northeast border.

Twelve-step groups stake out a tree, sit in a circle, and recover beneath the pines. People walk their dogs, exercise, meditate, toss Frisbies, hold clandestine phone conversations.

But in a way, I’ve come to see, HImmel Park belongs to the children. They come out in droves after school and on the weekends, shouting, sprinting, panting, gamboling. I seldom walk through as opposed to around the park and in fact usually give it a wide berth in favor of the relative solitude of the residential streets.

Last night, though, drawn by the children’s exuberance and distant cries, I deliberately walked their way. A soccer game was in progress and whole row of parents had set up shop on the sidelines, snacking and chatting and cheering the kids on. On the outskirts fathers played catch with their sons. A mother taught her toddler to walk. The shadows were lengthening. There is something about the sight of children playing at dusk that stirs the heart.

I was an observer, not a participant. All I did was walk by and drink in the sight and sounds. But over me washed a profound sense of well-being. Of belonging, of gratitude, both for my own life and for these parents who were doing the hardest and most important work any human being can ever hope to do. I’d been praying the Rosary so Mary at the foot of the Cross was mixed in there somehow.

And I looked at these kids, who were not mine, for whom I had done not a single corporeal work of mercy, and thought. Through my celibacy I am laying down my life for you and all like you.

In a way of course that is nothing. It’s nothing compared to what an actual parent does. But I didn’t have to compare. I didn’t have to feel less than or other than. I felt an incredible sense of peace, of Consummatum est, of I am loved, I am forgiven, again–that I belong.

Also I didn’t cry, which is unusual, not tears of sorrow and remorse but not tears of joy either. I just felt solid. It is right and just, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Oh Lord…

In a way my life, like every human life, has been a long, long desert. Ireland this summer was a desert. But I have somehow returned refreshed, renewed, transformed in some new way. Nothing cataclysmic, or that I can much articulate or put my finger on. But it has something to do with freedom from bondage, and in particular the bondage of wounds around love, sex, abortion, childhood, my own (sainted) mother, the fact that I wasn’t up to being a (biological) mother myself.

There are many ways we lay down our lives for each other, of course. Celibacy, if that’s our station, is just one of them. But for me it has been a particularly rich, fruitful, utterly unexpected grace. A way of healing and of giving that seems to the world like a negative, an emptiness, but that in God’s economy is a fullness that I could never have engineered, or even imagined, on my own.

“The most precious goods must not be searched for; they must be waited for.”
–Simone Weil

SERVANT OF GOD KIRSTEN BERT

Blessed All Saints and All Souls. I take great joy in the Solemnity, followed by a day of remembrance and intercession for the dead.

I’ve been thinking this week of a young woman who died this year, a Tucson native who hosted the airbnb in which I stayed while discerning whether to move here, and who in retrospect was in large part WHY I moved here.

I chose the airbnb from the photos: a cheery whitewashed stucoo bungalow with peacock blue trim. A glider on the front stoop. Colorful native flowers and cacti.

And when I arrived, I knew at once that here was a space infused with love. In the fridge, a pint of half and half and a pound of Peets Coffee. There were condiments, snacks, a ton of teas, a lemon squeezer, cool cleaning products. There were sunscreen, vintage glass coasters with old-timey scenes of saguaros in the sunset, a washer-dryer, a comfy chaise longue, metal jalousie blinds in the extra bedroom, a built-in breakfast nook with a bowl of Lindt chocolates.

Halfway through the week I found a fresh loaf of Barrio Bakery bread on my stoop.

I stayed twice, both times for a week. Kirsten lived in a smaller place out back. She was tall, blonde, beautiful, full of grace. She welcomed me, made sure I had absolutely everything I needed, and then made herself scarce.

But the place was so wondrous I wanted to know more about her and one day I asked if she had a few minutes to chat. She ended up telling me a bit of her story. Born and bred in Tucson, had lived in Brooklyn for a while, had come back and with very little money had bought this house with the guesthouse in back, rehabbed it with the help of friends, begun renting it as an airbnb.

She’d worked in the nonproit sector all her life.

She’d been diagnosed with Stage 4 colorectal cancer that had spread to her lungs. She was treating it as best she could the way I remember it with a bit of Western medicine and a bit homeopathically. She’d also suffered since childhood with more or less severe psoriasis. Up close I could see that her arms were covered with red patches and it’s a testament to her interior and exterior beauty that it also affected her face and the wound if you will somehow only made her more beautiful.

She made a joke of it. She said she’d tried every ointment and salve known to man but it just in the end masked it and made it worse. So she simply made do. She didn’t use the word suffer but obviously at some point she had simply accepted that this was part of her human condition and had realized there was no way out or around.

So she suffered it, without self-pity, and my sense is would not have even mentioned it except that the affliction was so visibly obvious. The guesthouse where she lived had no air conditioning so in the sometimes 110-degree Tucson summer heat, she limped along (again, my phrase, not hers) with a swamp cooler.

She had every hope of recovering and her goal once she did recover was to open a kind of clearing house/center where people diagnosed with cancer or other dire illnesses could receive help in what she’d discovered to be the labyrinthine and basically incomprehensible healthcare and insurance systems. And where people could receive moral support, compassion, a caring ear.

Somehow in the midst of all that she had fashioned and was maintaining this fantastic, warm, intelligently thought-out airbnb bungalow. There were games and puzzles for kids, kid-sized chairs and a table tucked into a corner, extra pillows, duvets and towels, shelves of books about the flora, fauna, history, and culture of the Southwest.

Kirsten made a deep impression on me. She radiated a strange and rare kind of light. I’d never met anyone who was carrying such a heavy psychic, social, physical and spiritual load with such incredible grace, such a total lack of drama or self-pity. And who the whole time was thinking of others, how she could pass on what she was learning so those similarly-situated wouldn’t have to suffer the additional burden of figuring out how to treat their illness and how to pay for it.

After I’d made the decision to move, and some dear friends drove the UHaul, I put one of the couples up at Kirsten’s place, so sure was I that they’d love it as much as I did. Knowing that she was ill and not wanting to intrude, we nonetheless invited her to a little pizza party gathering we had one Friday night and she walked over and stayed with us for an hour or two which I’m sure was an effort.

She was so special I wanted them to meet her (and vice versa of course). I had told them a bit about her and we didn’t speak of her illness that night, just chatted about Tucson and the local culture and how much we all loved and appreciated her space. But she made such a deep impression on my six friends that they all, unbidden, asked about her in the months to come.

Kirsten gave me a housewarming gift: a pottery cup imprinted with saguaros.

I told her that the door to my new place was open to her, any time, entirely at her convenience. She thanked me warmly, said she’d love to come but wasn’t sure with her strength on the wane. I wasn’t a real friend, of which I am certain she had scores. So though I never saw her again, I thought of her often.

Somehow late last year I came across a GoFundMe page that her brother had started for her.

That’s how I learned, a couple of months ago, that Kirsten died on June 2 of this year, a few months short of her fiftieth birthday.

So she’s been much on my mind as The Day of the Dead approached. It’s a strange fact that people don’t quite acquire their full stature until they do die. And I realized recently, two and a half years down the line, that if not for Kirsten, for her charming, spirit-filled place, her crazy generosity, her welcome, her essence, and most of all the way she carried her suffering, I might never have moved here at all.

How unaware we are, much of the time, of how deeply we are influenced by others. And of how, unbeknownst to ourselves, we are influencing them…

The other day I went to noon Mass at St. Augustine’s and afterward walked the 25 minutes or so to Kirsten’s old place down near 22nd in Armory Park. There was a For Sale sign out front with a note attached “Do Not Disturb Occupants.” The trellises flanking the front that would have been covered trumpet vine were empty. The yard seemed sparse and bare. The thousand loving, thoughtful touches that go into making a house a home were largely absent.

I stood out front for a minute, and made the Sign of the Cross and said a Hail Mary and thanked her. And then I walked back to St. Augustine’s thinking of how everything passes. Kirsten had had her short, glorious reign on earth, and at that particular spot on earth. By the world’s standards, already it was almost as if none of it had ever happened.

Already it was almost as if she had never poured her heart, suffering, body and soul into this magical airbnb.

SO. BUT. Does it not matter, the love and labor in the first place?

YES!!!! It matters absolutely. Maybe in the deepest sense that is what Catholicism says. It matters, every last neutron. It matters absolutely.

So today I honor Kirsten Bert, whose life touched mine ever so briefly, but on my part ever so deeply.

I will treasure, always, my third-class relic as a reminder of how to conduct my life here in Tucson, and wherever else I may be.

Let’s remember all those today whose mostly unseen lives have sustained, shaped, and nurtured ours.

Eternal rest grant unto Kirsten, O Lord. And let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace.  Amen.

LOOK: HOW TO PAY ATTENTION IN A DISTRACTED WORLD

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

New York-based consultant Christian Madsbjerg writes, speaks, and teaches widely on the “practical application of the human sciences.”

“Humans adapt instantly to change but often without understanding the long-term consequences,” he writes. “At ReD [his firm], we tried to keep this radical openness to the transformation of even the most profound and philosophical questions as part of all projects. The future is never a theoretical prospect for any of us. You can observe it in all your everyday reality. The most challenging thing for all of us to see is what is really there.”

TED talk language, in other words: What does that even mean?

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

A PATH IN THE WOODS

I’ve been going through my books, notebooks, jottings, scribblings, etc.

Tucked into one journal was a print-out of the five Rs to a good day-end examen:

Relish the moments that went well and all of the gifts I have today.

Request the Spirit to lead me through my review of the day.

Review the day.

Repent of any mistakes or failures.

Resolve, in concrete ways, to live tomorrow well.

At the top, in my own handwriting, were a few musings:

–Have I loved my whole life wrong?

–Why did you pick me, Lord?

–When agitated: Now friend, we have made a misstep. Le us proceed more carefully.

A PATH IN THE WOODS

I don’t trust the truth of memories

because what leaves us

departs forever

There’s only one current of this sacred river

but I still want to remain faithful

to my first astonishments

to recognize as wisdom the child’s wonder

and to carry in myself until the end a path

in the woods of my childhood

dappled with patches of sunlight

to search for it everywhere

in museums in the shade of churches

this path on which I ran unaware

a six-year-old

toward my primary mysterious aloneness

—ANNA KAMIENSKA

THE CAPACITY FOR LITURGY

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

The online Catholic journal One Peter Five recently ran a 1966 essay by Catholic writer Ida Friederike Görres (1901-1971), translated and with an introduction by Jennifer S. Bryson.

When does a person have a capacity for liturgy? Görres asked: a question at least as relevant today as it was 60 years ago.

She responded, in part:

When he considers the worship of God to be an essential, necessary, irreplaceable, and central component of his faith and his religious existence: at least as important as serving others.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION

Oh Lord, the beauty, the solace, the gratitude, the birds.

What is that bird with the loud, two-note liquid trill who sings just at dawn?

I have ordered a standing bird feeder with four arms and mean to set it up outside my front patio. So here I will have an increasingly plant-bedecked private little space where I can sit on the glider, muse and give thanks.

I returned home to Tucson to a house that had been re-painted, which was nice, but all my hummingbird feeders had been taken down, my plants, many in heavy, hard-to-move pots had been moved, and a good third of them had died for lack of water.

All this seemed hideous and egregious at the time, and it’s also all been remedied.

I did a bunch of work on the yards, front, back, and side ramada, which helped—but I also needed just to putter, to case the joint, to re-ground, to re-integrate. To suffer a flurry of puncture wounds, to get stuck with thorns and spines, to re-fill my bird bath and bird feeders. To re-stock my larder, to bask in the light, to be bathed in birdsong.

That is one thing I missed beyond belief—constant birdsong. The dawn and vesper choruses.  

A friend’s wife is going to give me a bunch of cuttings, and I’ll divide the Santa Rita cactus—the bottom of it has never been right, and is now cracked, and brown—the soil’s not quite right—so I can make three or four plants out of it, and it grows fairly quickly.

Meanwhile–what is God’s will for me?

I am praying for the grace to grow in love, bit by bit, day by day.

A priest friend reports that he’s made an addendum to the Litany of Humility: “From the desire to know whether and how I’m being transformed–deliver me, Jesus.”

I think that is brilliant.

SIR ALEC GUINNESS: CATHOLIC CONVERT

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

Sir Alec Guinness (1914-2000), renowned British actor, converted to Catholicism after playing a priest in the 1954 film “The Detective,” aka Father Brown.

Perhaps best known for his role as the bearded sage Obi-Wan Kenobi in the “Star Wars” films, Guinness was born into a broken family. His mother, Agnes Cuffe, was unmarried. He never knew his father. Abused by a brutal stepfather, as an adolescent Guinness discovered the solace of the theater. Confirmed into the Anglican church at 16, as a youth he dabbled in various religions while secretly considering himself an atheist.

Religion, he believed, was “so much rubbish, a wicked scheme of the Establishment to keep the working man in his place.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

PARTING SHOTS

NATIONAL BOTANIC GARDENS, DUBLIN

Welp I am home at long last and with huge gratitude/relief.

I wanted to share these photos I took on my last day in Ireland. I had visited the Botanic Gardens last year and it was the one main place I wanted to see again in Dublin this year. I don’t know the city well but surely this is a highlight.

Adjacent to the Botanic Garden is the massive Glasnevin Cemetery. In it, I happened to know, is the burial site of Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ (1844-1889). Other notable people have been laid to rest here and as you enter, there’s a little map that shows you where they are.

So large does Hopkins loom in my heart that it took me forever to find his grave because I assumed he would have a giant oh say winged statue or maye even a mausoleum all to himself. Instead, I finally figured out, he’s thrown in with a bunch of his brethren which I’m sure is exactly the way he would have wanted it.

I was a bit wrung out, to put it mildly, by the end of my trip. It was raining and gloomy that day. As I stood before Hopkins’ grave, I felt a little shaky and a little alone.

Looking to my right, I saw that a fresh burial was taking place a few plots down. A small group, dressed in black and carrying umbrellas, was gathered around the lowered coffin murmuring prayers.

Suddenly I picked out the phrase, “Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiae”–the “Hail Holy Queen” that, thanks to Sing the Hours, I had just managed (after 27 years as a convert) to memorize in Latin.

Instantly I felt at home, part of something greater than myself, a member in good standing of the Mystical Body. So from Hopkins’ grave I stood at attention and prayed along with the strangers down the way and for the repose of the soul of their friend.

Then I knelt before Fr. Hopkins’ grave, and thanked him, and from my phone read back to him his poem, “Thou art indeed just, Lord.”

I know to the marrow of my bones that he heard me.

And all the rest of that day I prayed, Send my roots rain.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS’ GRAVE, GLASNEVIN CEMETERY, DUBLIN, DIED JUNE 8, 1889

GEORGE SAUNDERS’ A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN

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

To me, George Saunders is one of our best, and most brilliant, “Catholic” writers (without calling himself, or for all I know, even being a Catholic).

One of the rare literary writers who has achieved mainstream success, his stories often chart a hero’s journey undertaken by a comically conflicted, clueless, culturally indoctrinated, downtrodden, middle-America protagonist, and often culminate in a life-or-death sacrifice.

He satirizes consumer culture, mass media, Orwellian doublespeak, and the Disneyfication of the sacred. 

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE ITALIAN-AMERICAN MUSEUM OF LOS ANGELES

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

The Italian American Museum of Los Angeles (IAMLA) is located in downtown’s Italian Hall at 644 North Main.

Built in 1908 as a community center, the hall is one of the oldest remaining structures in historic Little Italy and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

I can only speak for myself, but I didn’t even know we had a Little Italy.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.