Heather King's Blog, page 26

WELL-READ

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

“Well-Read Mom” is the brainchild of Marcie Stokman, a mother of seven and an RN with a master’s in psychology.

It’s a site committed to helping women take care of their hearts by reclaiming time for books and friendship, preferably in a group setting.

“Read More. Read Well” runs the site’s tagline. The intro text reads: “It can be a challenge to make time to read in a world that never stops. Developing and maintaining the ability for deep reading isn’t something we can take for granted. Millions of Americans won’t read a single book this year. You won’t be one of them.

It all started around 1986 when Marcie was a new mother.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

SPRING FEVER

Christ is risen and I am about to be on the road…

Monday I’m taking off in my Fiat for four nights at the Holy Spirit Retreat House in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I have of course rented The Hermitage–cause it’s not enough that I live alone and work alone. I need solitude! I am going ON RETREAT! Apparently there is no wifi or maybe even cell coverage(?) I’m more concerned with what food I’m gonna bring as the place doesn’t serve meals. Piles, naturally, of books. I just want to go to Mass, pray, read, write, and walk.

And prepare for the two mornings on prayer I will give in late May to a group of Maryknoll missioners in Los Altos, California who will be there for an interlude of spiritual renewal. Will stay on for a few extra days to avail myself, again, of quiet (I hope) and the adjacent preserve which is apparently full of walking trails. Will fly in and out of San Francisco and am determined to parlay the day of my flight back to Tucson into a visit to the Gardens at Alcatraz Prison–a foray I’ve had in the back of my mind for years.

The next weekend, June 2-4, I’ll be giving a zoom Writing Workshop–“Writing from Silence”–that’ll be sponsored by and based in New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. It’s a bargain I must say at 150 bucks–so sign up if you haven’t already and the spirit moves.

I’ll introduce the work of some of my favorite writers, reflect upon the craft, process, and mystery of writing, and invite discussion–we’ll have INTERESTING prompts, lots of time obviously to write on our own, break-out groups for those who want to participate…should be fun, and you never know who you’re going to meet or what idea you’re going to hear…

Then, in late June, I’ll be a week in Detroit! That’s right. The Motown Museum, the Piet Oudolf Garden, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Riverwalk or Riverfront or whatever it’s called. And most of all, time with my friends Stefany Anne and Morgan, who have their own garden (and museum, and sort of drop-in coffeeshop/free books/sit-down-and-chat-for-awhile CLUB about whom more I’m sure later).

That is not even talking yet about Ireland, which is July 10 through October 3. One trip at a time.

Wishing you all a blessed Third Week of Easter.

SING THE HOURS

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

“Sing the Hours” (singthehours.org), a platform designed to help people sing the Divine Office, is the brainchild of Paul Rose, a young convert from the Boston area.

The Office, musical by nature, follows a “Psalter,” a methodical, universally observed cycle. Priests, monks, and nuns are pledged to pray the Office at several set “hours” of the day. The Second Vatican Council emphasized that it should be the prayer of laypeople as well.

Each day “Sing the Hours” offers lauds and vespers, the “hinge” Offices.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT

It’s been an especially rich Lent for me. Possibly because of that, I haven’t felt moved much to talk or “share.”

Somehow this week’s arts and culture column has everything to do with the Easter Vigil.

Here’s how it begins:

Last week an old friend called, a woman I’ll call “Sylvie” who I met decades ago in recovery.

We’d see each other in meetings at 3rd and Oxford in Koreatown, or at 6th and Bronson on the edge of Hancock Park.

Sylvie has a deep spirituality and a grounded belief in God. She’s also not able to work much and every so often will have a mental break and have to be treated at a hospital or psych ward.

As of a year or so ago, she’s been in a nursing home out of state. The first time she called me from there, I asked, “Do you have a roommate?” — a roommate in my mind being synonymous with extreme torture.

“I have three,” she chuckled.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE DAY BEFORE THE LAST SUPPER

Reading one of the Passion narratives this week, a detail around Mark 14:12-18 caught my eye.

It’s when, on the first day of Unleavened Bread, his disciples ask, “Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?” He sends two of them into the city, telling them to find a householder who will have an upper room furnished and ready and there “to prepare for us.”

And next thing is “When it was evening he came with the twelve. And as they were at table eating,” etc.

So my question is: What was Jesus doing between day and evening? What was he doing on the day before the Last Supper?

He could have been hanging out with the other ten so that when the two who’d been sent into the city returned, all twelve could enter the city (or meet there) and go to the upper room together.

On the other hand, he might have wanted a couple of hours to himself. In particular, he might have wanted to visit with his mother. He might have wanted just to be among the people, the jostle and banter of daily life, maybe buying a piece of pita bread and some goat cheese for a snack. He might have wanted to take one last walk, knowing he was so soon to leave the earth he’d inhabited for 33 years.

He might have even wanted to visit the Garden at Gethsemane in the daytime, and to marvel at the olive trees, and to thank the Father for the beauty of the world for which, along with its people, he was about to lay down his life.

Anyway, it might be a nice reflection for Holy Week: to imagine Jesus taking one last walk. It might be rich, and a comfort and a consolation, to imagine walking with him.

KATHERINE BOO’S BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS

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

“Immersion journalist” Katherine Boo is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her series about group homes for the intellectually disabled won the Washington Post the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. She has been awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant.

She has also suffered from rheumatoid arthritis since childhood. Her health is frail. Still, she felt moved to spend four years quietly walking among, standing besde, and observing the people of Annawadi, a Mumbai slum hard by an international airport and a sewage lake.

Her 2012 book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity” (Random House, $23.02), won the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and many others. A decade after publication, it’s still the best account I know of an author evincing true solidarity with the poor, love for our neighbor, and “activism” without a scintilla of politics or ideology.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE

CROWNED WITH THORNS

The readings and reflections for my Ignatian Exercises happen to coincide exactly with these last weeks of Lent.

This morning I read Matthew 27:26-31, writing afterward, “Horrible, horrible, horrible.” Scourged, clothed in a scarlet robe, mocked, spat upon, a staff thrust into his hand, “Hail, King of the Jews,” ha ha ha. “After they had mocked him, they took of the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.”

In reflecting on the passage, what came to me was that the appropriate response, for me, at this stage of my life, is not to wring my hands, emote, try to imagine his pain–I can’t–and then to feel guilty because I can’t, or because I’m not willing to suffer as he did, or because I’m not suffering as he did.

Rather, it’s to stay with him, to be with him, in spite of my complete inadequacy and cowardliness. Those are givens, and they don’t give me a pass to look away, to refuse to acknowledge the suffering that the world (which as always includes me) imposed and continues to impose on him.

It’s to realize that he is always suffering in this way in and for and with and as the poor–the real poor, and the poor in all of us–and to act, by living our lives in a way that is cognizant of, reverent toward, and eternally grounded in the fact that the Crucifixion is what it took to set us right with God, the world, and ourselves.

And it’s to act, based on the above. When Jesus saw people in pain or in the grip of compulsions and obsessions, he didn’t just cry (though he did cry, as with Lazarus). He cast out demons, he healed, he raised from the dead. And before that, he spent thirty years marked by discipline, attention, prayer and inner work, in order, guided by the Father, to form the spirit that would be capable of performing such healings.

For me, that means a lot of work that at first glance doesn’t have anything to do with forming my spirit. Asking for what I’m worth when I get a writing job, for example. Making sure the contract for, say, a speaking gig, is in writing. Being open and available, insofar as possible, to whoever comes my way, but also having boundaries. As in if you bail withot warning, I don’t reschedule; as in if you’re late, I’ve set aside an hour and when the hour is up, we’re done. Trying to train myself to be gracious whether the other person is gracious or not. Taking a certain amount of trips when it would be easier and cheaper and way less angst-producing to stay home, because travel–if you do it a certain way–is a labor of love.

Refusing to become ideologically-obsessed (to be distinguished from being deeply, appropriately alarmed at the current cultural movement against goodness, beauty and truth, and toward the almost complete disintegration of the human person). Refraining from trying to gain followers or establish a brand (gag) based on an organizing principle of hatred, contempt, snitching, or snark (no matter how insufferable the potential target).

I’m not always successful, but what’s great is the world consequently pretty much leaves me alone to anonymously “wander with purpose.” I may not look like I’m doing much, but believe me, the wheels are turning! My spirit is forming and firming up by the minute. And to top it all off, from walking around for hours every day in the blazing sun, I’m getting a tan!

From what I could dig up online, there is only one English-speaking Mass per week in the entire city of San Miguel de Allende, supposedly: 10:30 a.m. Sunday at San Juan de Dios. So I showed up this morning and of course no-one was there besides one other aging (like me) couple, desperate for the Fifth Sunday of Lent liturgy. The lady who was sweeping around the pews assured us vociferously that the English Mass would be at 11:30. The couple had to leave but I stayed and had a nice Holy Hour, and then the 11:30 Mass was of course in Spanish. The good news there was I had no complaints about the homily!

Behind the altar was an astonishing display of various saints in spotlit compartments. At the bottom of the central column was Jesus, bloody and bowed on the Cross. Above him was a statue of the Blessed Virgin, standing on a cloud-like “carpet” of aquamarine sequins that looked like something a trapeze artist–or a burlesque queen–might wear. And above her, way up high, was what looked like a papier-mache Christ with a scarlet robe and a cockeyed golden crown on his Head: “Cristo Rey” read the legend.

Damn straight. Restored to his rightful glory: Christ Our King.

THOSE ARE EGRETS! WATCHED OVER BY OUR LADY
ABOVE BENITO JUAREZ PARK, SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE

THE ORCHARDS OF PERSEVERANCE

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

David D. Perata first started visiting the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux Monastery in 1967. Located in the Sacramento Valley town of Vina, at the time 35 monks dwelt among 450 acres of prune and walnut orchards. He found dirt roads, old board and batten guesthouses, and the magical smell of freshly cut alfalfa.

He’d come with his best pal Joe and Joe’s father. The two boys, both from strong Catholic families, “had rarely had a chance to see a priest or a nun in secular clothes, or sipping a beer, or working on a tractor.”

He fell in love with this Trappist monastery, an offshoot of Gethsemani (of Thomas Merton fame) in Kentucky. He came back again and again as he grew into adulthood.

In 1991, he approached then Abbot Thomas Davis to broach the possibility of photographing and interviewing the monks about their lives. Permission was granted

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE VASE BY BROTHER ANTHONY

GREETINGS FROM SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE

For years I’ve heard of the charm and beauty of San Miguel de Allende, a small Spanish Colonial city and World Heritage site. With a thriving art scene and tons of American expats, with all the pros and cons I imagined of the latter.

At long last, partly at the urging of certain people in my circle that I should “take a vacation,” I am here. Staying at by far the loveliest hotel (in my admittedly limited experience of lovely hotels) of my traveling life!

HUGE CENTRAL COURTYARD OVERGROWN WITH COPA DE ORO AND BOUGAINVILLEAOUTSIDE MY ROOMROOFTOP TERRACEPARTIAL VIEW FROM ROOFTOP TERRACEPARROQUIA DE SAN MIGUEL ARCÁNGEL TO THE NORTH

No doubt about it, the place drips with charm. The weather, reminicent of Southern California at its best, is perfect: 80 or so, sunny, with a breeze. The streets in the central Colonial part of town are cobblestoned, there are no traffict lights, the buildings are weathered stone or adobe painted old rose, deep gold, brick red. Doorways are surrounded by dried flower garlands, balconies stream colored ribbons, and ledges are topped by rows of aged terra cotta pots of geraniums, agaves and succulents.

EPIDENDRUM AKA BAMBOO ORCHIDSOF COURSE I FOUND IT. THE WHOLE PLACE LOOKS LIKE THIS!

So the walking is fantastic. Window shopping, people watching, gorgeous cornices, tilework, gardens, public squares, fountains. There is the usual love-hate contempt for tourists, so as always you just try to be grateful and polite

But the best part of the whole town for me is the churches. They’re all over the place, cavernous and cool, festooned with folk art, flowers, gaudy chandeliers, and gruesome statues. Everything looks jerryrigged, unplumbed, held together with paste, dabs of spacking compound and glue, and as if, say, the scallop-and-angel-bedecked stone arches and overhangs might crumble or collapse any minute.

St. Vincent Ferrer in Manhattan is my favorite let’s say white people’s church, but I feel more at home in churches like this than just about anywhere on earth.

The main thing is they do not stint on the major fact of human suffering. Everwhere Jesus is lacerated, scourged, bound, crawling, bloody, in agony, dying, dead. Glass coffins hold effigies of his wounded corpse.

The people around him suffer, too: Mary, John, the disciples, the two guys who were crucified with him on Mount Calvary.

DEDICATED, UNSURPRISINGLY, BY PADRE PIO.

The wages of sin also take center stage, the fires of hell being another central motif.

With all that, Jesus’s love and tenderness are everywhere in evidence, as well as the love of the faithful for him.

THIS IS APPARENTLY THE GUARDIAN ANGEL OF CHILDREN WHO HAVE DIED

So much care, thought, and ongoing labor have gone into these blessed sanctuaries. They’re often empty, save for some sainted soul with a bucket quietly mopping the floors, and a stray pray-er or two, and maybe a tourist couple taking selfies. And the overall effect is of…I guess you could say heaven. Heaven as envisioned by a child which I, for one, hope to be at heart perpetually. Like all those scoffers who are always saying, Ha, I don’t believe God is some old man in the sky! And I always think, Well how do YOU know? Maybe He IS an old man in the sky…and by the way hell is not just a “concept!”

Just as, in the desert, within a couple of days you begin to feel an uncontrollable urge to collect and sort small stones, in Mexico, before long you feel an urge to find a bench, sit down, and stare idly into space.

I love this, and really do “need” it. All around, other people are doing the same. I ponder my visit in light of Jesus, headed to his Passion on Mount Calvary. In the midst of it all, I am sitting with him, walking with him, conversing with him, abiding in silence with him.

The gimcrack sounvenirs are adding to the landfill, the churches will one day crumble to dust, I am forver part of the darkness of the world–but also, I hope, of its light.

Joining my heart and prayers to yours from this beautiful spot.

THE FEAST OF ST. JOSEPH

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

To those who complain that the Church gives short shrift to women, I always want to say — Excuse me. 

Mary: the “Magnificat,” prayed by every priest and nun in the world each evening at Vespers; Joseph: silence. Mary: the rosary; Joseph: an old-timey cough syrup. Mary: crowned queen of heaven and earth; Joseph: gets his statue buried in the backyard so people can sell — or buy — a house. 

With St. Joseph’s feast day coming up on March 19, enter art historian Elizabeth Lev’s “The Silent Knight: A History of St. Joseph as Depicted in Art” (Sophia Institute Press, $18.95). 

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.