Heather King's Blog, page 34

I LIVE NOW, NOT I

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

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You’re steeped in the sacraments. You pray more or less unceasingly. You devote yourself body, mind, spirit and soul to your vocation.

And right then, you begin to see the ways you are not good, your seeming inability to be useful in anyway you want to be, your seemingly utter failure to abandon yourself.

Or as St. Paul said, “The thing I want to do, I don’t do, and the thing I don’t want to do, I do.”

A book I’ve turned to again and again at such times is called I Live Now, Not I. The author is Fr. Patrick McNulty (1931-2015) who after serving for decades as a parish priest, hit a wall, endured a long dark night of the soul, and lived out the rest of his years at Madonna House in Combermere, Ontario, the lay community formed by Russian emigré and mystic Catherine de Hueck Doherty. (I got to meet Fr. McNulty once and he was delightful).

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

BACK TO WONDER: NOTES ON A MAGIC SHOW

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

“Back to Wonder” is an “immersive experience” from magician and storyteller Helder Guimarães. Limited to 15 people per performance, the show runs through June 18 in South Pasadena and purports to allow the viewer “a peek into his process and the world in which he lives.”

“Can You Keep a Secret?” runs the tagline.

You’re not given the address of the location—I hope this isn’t giving too much away—from which you’re ferried in a vehicle with frosted windows to an undisclosed location with blacked-out windows.

Supposedly we’re in the magician’s studio but everything seems way too ordered and neat for a studio. Everything exudes the air of having a trick door, or floor, or mirror. 

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

MARY HAS CHOSEN THE BETTER PART

“Too many anxious Christians today think that their efforts to preach and teach and enter into outward activities can do more to save the world than the surrender of their souls to God, to become Christ-bearers. They believe that they can do more than our Lady did, and they have not time to stop to consider the absurdity of this. They fear that if the world goes on hurling itself into disaster, as it seems to be doing now, Christ’s kindgom may be defeated. This is not so; Christ has given his word that he will be with and in his little flock until the end of the world.”

Some of you may have seen this Caryll Houselander reflection (the above being an excerpt) from today’s Magnificat.

Boy, did it speak to me.

I’ve not posted much lately, mostly because I’m knee-deep in a St. Therese of Lisieux study guide. And I give a lot of time, energy, and heart to the people who show up in my life in any given day. And my house and yard have become, as I knew they would, huge labors of love.

To that end, here’s a piece of good news: I have discovered OK Feed & Pet Supply here in Tucson, where I can buy bird seed in bulk, and for orders over 50 bucks they deliver locally for free! I ordered online Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon the order was delivered to my door: no eight emails and texts before saying, “Your order has shipped.” “Your order is coming early!” “Your order is en route!” “Your order is almost there!” “The guy’s pulling up!” “Your order has been delived–HOW WAS IT?” A delivery? How do you think it was?

Best of all, no being bothered after by asking me to rate them, leave a review, buy more stuff from them, et cetera. That is my kind of business. I wrote them an email thanking them and they didn’t answer of which I also approve.

But I digress. For some reason I mis-estimated my limits of time, energy, and writing focus when I signed on to do the study guide. Not that I regret it in the least, as I’m convinced that St. T “chose” me and I despeartely need a dose or a deeper dose of her spirituality. In fact, she has a line somewhere to the effect that the smallest act of obedience is of more value than any book, at which, when I read, I loudly guffawed.

It’s interesting however to see the deep anxiety that arises when I’m not able to “give” in a certain way, specifically in this little newsletter or blog or letter to the world that never wrote to me or whatever it is.

Interestingly, I’m always way more comfortable writing for free than for money. For whatever that’s worth, which is maybe nothing. But it’s also interesting to become more aware of how a lot of my free-floating anxiety is “performance anxiety,” for lack of a better term. But why? No-one’s even looking! Some holdover from childhood where I got straight A’s and won some trophies! Straight A’s equal love! Trophies equal security! We can see the error of my “old ideas” to our intellectual core–but sometimes it takes decades for our nervous system and subconscious to catch up.

With all that–that’s the way it is. That’s the way I am. And more and more I see–it is all right. There are a whole bunch of things that never get healed in this life–or maybe they don’t need to be healed. Maybe everything, just the way it is, is guiding me closer to Christ.

I do know this: my tiny acts of obedience are worth infinitely more than any book, any essay, any post.

And here’s some truly exciting news: The yucca in my front yard–Hesperoyucca whipplei syn. Yucca whipplei), the chaparral yucca, our Lord’s candle, Spanish bayonet, Quixote yucca or foothill yucca–has burst into two towering, lavish, ivory-colored blooms!

OPICA: AN INNOVATIVE PROGRAM FOR THOSE WITH MEMORY LOSS

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

OPICA (Optimistic People in a Caring Atmosphere) is an adult day program and counseling center for people with dementia.

Their programs include music and art, a rich variety of cognitive and physical exercise, and breakout groups centered on culture, storytelling, and peer support. 

Located in Stoner Park in West Los Angeles, OPICA has no religious affiliation but has received generous leadership and fundraising support from local Catholic individuals and organizations.  Mary Bomba’s mother attended OPICA three days a week for the last eight years of her life.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

HALLOW: A PRAYER APP(!)

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

Prior to March, 2020, the phrase “prayer app” would have made me wretch.

Forever resistant to technology, I was in turn anti-answering machine (a device from prehistoric times), anti-ipod (remember those?), anti-cell phone, and anti-smart phone.  Every so-called advancement seemed to bring us farther away from the face-to-face encounter, serendipity, the tactile, the real.  

Needless to say, Facetime, Skype and WhatsApp were never high on my list, either. Then COVID hit, and almost overnight, and along with much of the rest of the world, I became a huge devotee of Zoom.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

PHOTOGRAPHER JOSEF SUDEK, THE POET OF PRAGUE

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

Josef Sudek (1896-1976), known as “The Poet of Prague,” lost his right arm in WWI and in the course of a 65-year vocation, wandered the streets of his beloved hometown, taking evocative photographs of cathedrals, deserted squares, and his own gloriously cluttered studio apartment.

Poet of Prague: A Photographer’s Life (1990), by Anna Fárová, tells much of the story. Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Sudek began experimenting with a simple box camera in his late teens.  

Of the incident that marked his life, he wrote: “I lost my arm during the eleventh offensive…as we charged our own artillery started shelling us from the back…I felt as if a rock hit me in the right shoulder. I started looking around but all the guys who had been standing were now dead. I crawled back to our own lines, and as I was getting into a dugout, I slipped and it started to hurt. Then I lost consciousness.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE SAINT WITH THE ASH BLOND WIG

This is an old piece I did for NPR’s “All Things Considered” way back when, and that made its way into my “cancer memoir,” Stripped. In fact, I dedicated the book to its subject. This is the perfect time of year to re-run it.

Back in 2000, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I had one overriding emotion: self-centered, panic-tinged fear. I didn’t know that 12 years later I’d be fine, that the scar would be barely visible, that months would go by where the word “cancer” never entered my thoughts. Back then I still thought about it every waking and sleeping moment. So before I even had surgery, I signed up for a second opinion clinic at UCLA.

The day of my appointment, I found a seat and looked around at the ten or so others, perched stiffly on the edges of their chairs. They know what it’s like to lie staring at the ceiling all night; I thought; they could die, too.

“What a bunch of crap,” a voice muttered, and I turned to see a petite blonde gal, about my age, in a Dolce & Gabbana jersey and black leather pants. With one diamond-beringed hand she was filling out a clipboard of forms. With the other, she was chowing  down a Whopper.

“This your first time?” she asked, wiping a smear of mayo from the corner of her mouth.

“My first time? Well…yeah.”

“First time’s the worst,” she reported, as if I could look forward to several more such visits. “It’s my third.”

“Your…third?” I faltered. That was when I took a good look at her hair–bangs and a shoulder-length flip–and saw it was way too shiny to be real: she was wearing an ash blond wig.

“Oh, chemo’s nothing compared to all I’ve been through,” she laughed, following my eyes. Double mastectomy, reconstructive surgery. Thought I was home-free after the bone marrow transplant”–she paused to scrape the pickles off her hamburger–“but now the damn stuff’s metastasized to my liver.”  

Except for the wig, she looked normal, if a little ethereal: translucent skin, a blue vein tendrilling across her temple.

“I have three teenagers at home in Newport Beach, that’s what keeps me going, that, plus my friends, and shopping. Money means zipola to me, which isn’t exactly great for the old marriage”–she jerked a thumb to her left, where a long-suffering businessman type sat shuffling papers on top of his briefcase–“but at this point I could give a rat’s ass. The only reason I’m here is to see if they have any drugs that might give me an extra month or two.”

I couldn’t get my mind around it: this middle-aged Orange County mall rat, with her manicure and Prada pants, nonchalantly telling me that she was going to die.

“You’ll be fine, though,” she added, giving my knee a friendly slap. “The fear of the unknown is the worst. Actually going through it is no big deal.”        

All afternoon I waited in a white room while doctors filed in with their stethoscopes and charts. I prayed my breast wouldn’t have to be mutilated, I prayed they wouldn’t tell me I had some mutant strain that was reproducing at an outlandishishly unheard-of rate, I prayed if I had to die of cancer, it wouldn’t be for a long, long time and they’d give me lots of drugs first. Around 5, the “team”—the social worker, the radiologist—came in to report their findings. The surgical oncologist summed it up. “For patients like you–Stage 1 with a tumor under a centimeter and assuming there’s no lymph node involvement, the risk of recurrence is about nine percent.”

Nine percent ran through my mind like a mantra as I got dressed and gathered up my things. If only it’s not in my lymph nodes, nine percent’s not bad. It could be a lot worse than nine percent. I can live with nine percent. Outside the elevator, I ran into the woman with the ash blond wig.

“How did you do?” she cried. “Good news?”

“Not bad, I guess,” I admitted.

“Oh hon, that’s great!” she said, leaning over to give me a big hug. “I told you you’d do fine!” She stepped onto the elevator and the doors closed behind her.

How can you describe such goodness, such bravery?—this woman who was dying, who had been through hell, asking “Good news?”—hoping someone else would make it.

I think of her often, this woman from Newport Beach who wore a huge diamond, whose hobby was shopping, who could have treated her husband a little better. And each time I remember how, when Christ walked among his disciples after the Resurrection–nobody had recognized him.

ST. KATERI HABITATS AND PARKS

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

“The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not exploitable ground but living mother.”

–James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922

I first learned of Bill Jacobs, founder of the Saint Kateri Conservation Center, through a 2021 NYT article entitled “Meet an Ecologist Who Works for God (and Against Lawns).”

Jacobs lives on a third of an acre in Wading River, N.Y., on Long Island, and his home is surrounded by “a thicket of flowers, bushes and brambles” that his neighbors have come to see as the bane of their existence.  

He’s purposefully planted his yard with flowers, shrubs and trees, mostly (though not exclusively) native, and allowed them to erupt into a “riot of flora” that provides habitat for migrating birds butterflies, and bees. His neighbors prefer water-guzzling lawns mowed to military precision and landscaped by Home Depot.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

MY VERSION OF THE PULITZER

Dear Ms. King,

I hope this e-mail finds you well and that you had a nice Easter. My name is Aisling Redican, I am Communications and Fundraising Manager for Xavier Society for the Blind in New York City. Since 1900, XSB has been providing free braille and audio books to blind and visually impaired people worldwide in order for them to learn about, develop, and practice their Catholic faith.

I wanted to let you know that Holy Desperation: Praying as if Your Life Depends on It is available in our audio library in digital talking book format. This format is compatible with the talking book machines provided by the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (part of the Library of Congress). These machines are used by around 500,000 blind, visually impaired, or print disabled persons across the United States. We shared a clip of the audiobook on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter feed, and YouTube Channel; please feel free to do so as well. 

Also, I’m not sure if you’re aware but in addition to audio, Holy Desperation was transcribed in braille in 2018! It is available in three braille volumes – braille takes up a lot more space than print.

If you need any more information, or know of anyone in need of our services, please do not hesitate to reach out. We have hundreds of books available in braille and audio and serve clients of all ages and faiths worldwide, from North Macedonia to South Africa. We are trying to serve more people in new and innovative ways during these challenging times. Although XSB has been around for 122 years, we often hear we are a best kept secret and that is something we are trying to change.
Thank you!
—

Aisling Redican
Xavier Society For the Blind
248 West 35th Street Suite 1502 New York, NY 10001
xaviersocietyfortheblind.org
212-502-7607

YOU WHO ARE THIRSTY, COME TO THE WATER

“You have kept an account of my wanderings;
you have kept a record of my tears;
are they not written in your book?
Then my foes will be put to flight
On the day that I call to you.”
–Psalm 56

“Where are you from?
Jesus did not answer him.
–John 19:9, Christ before Pilate

I took a road trip to White Sands National Monument Tuesday through Thursday, reflecting en route that I’ve often been away from home during Holy Week: Taos, New Mexico: Joshua Tree, California, St. David, Arizona…. Some pilgrim urge unconsciously comes upon me, it seems.

Travel, at least the way I do it, is always in large part penance.

I travel alone and that means a certain amount of anxiety. Anyone who’s done a lot of road trips has had car trouble, for example. Then there’s fact that there is no real food readily available to interstate travelers, only the chemical calories in food0sh substances to be purchased from corporate franchises. So I bring my own food–nothing fancy; sardines, crackers, nuts, dried fruit–but there’s that, and the cooler, and the ice, and the phone charger, change of clothes, reading material. No-one to run a decision by, no-one to spell me on driving, no navigator, no-one to talk to.

For the most part, I like all this, and the car is one of the few places (church being another) where people can’t “get” to you. They can leave voicemails and send emails and text–but you can choose not to look or not to respond. So freeway driving, especially through the desert, can actually be pretty restful.

What also makes my travel penitential is that I don’t go hoping to “take it easy” or be waited upon (God forbid) or even hardly to “see the sights.” I go to mingle my body and blood with the people, the air, the flowers, the trees, the landscape, and to be nourished in return. So there’s always a lot of walking involved, once I get there. Walking is one of the most Eucharistic activities I know. Doesn’t even have to be pretty, especially, where I walk. I just need to get out on the road, or the sidewalk, or the park, or the trail.

For some reason, I’ve been wanting to visit White Sands National Monument. I’d seen the photos. I’d read the essays. Typically, I hadn’t realized it was surrounded on all sides by the White Sands Missile Range, a military testing range for the U.S. Army which is the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. The world’s first explosion of an atomic bomb (in a ghastly, unholy act of hubris, code-named Trinity) took place here in 1945.

All of which, as it turned out, was a perfect backdrop for Holy Week. The Monument is very easy to navigate, an 8-mile or so loop, with five or six “trails” depending off of it. A couple are on hard-packed ground and clearly marked. But the Alkali Flat Trail and I think the Back Country Camping Trail are up and oown sugar-white sand dunes that are mesmerizingly beautiful and go on and on and on and quickly disorient as to time and space. People have died out there. There are metal markers stuck in the sand every so often but in a windstorm when visibility can quickly become very low, or in blinding sunlight, and if you started to get heat stroke or run out of water…

“Isn’t it beautiful here, Lord?” I asked my trusty Companion at one point. Then I realized, “Oh, you’ve already been here. You made the place!” But then I realized: “Yeah, but you haven’t been here with me.”

Every so often, I get a definite, very clear feeling that Jesus likes having me around. He likes going places with me. He likes the way we travel together.

I came across a Psalm the other day, which I of course now can’t locate, that encapsulated the human condition perfectly. First, it lamented all the “ruthless men who are seeking our lives” at any given moment. People to whom we’ve bent over backwards trying to do good and who have responded with smearing, slander, spying. Then it mentions in passsing–on the other hand, we’ve kind of brought some of this on ourselves. (I extrapolated whether by unwise choices in friends, or failing to stand our ground or whatever). Then the Psalm goes on to beg mercy for the times we’ve “sought the lives” of others: the times we’ve betrayed, manipulated, smeared.

Who can sort it all out? I thought, lying flat on my back on an isolated bank of sand and gazing up at the sky.

Also, nothing like a road trip to drive home the point of what a mess we’ve made of the world. No matter how much you try to focus upon gratitude, no matter how hard you try to be cheerful–just seeing what people drive, eat, buy, watch, listen to, build, destroy…yikes.

Holy Week is always a big, big deal. Maybe especially for those of us who are not first in anyone’s heart except for Christ’s (whose heart is so big EVERYONE can be first in it if they want that). If we have been following along all year, we really do experience something of what Mary must have experienced, and the disciples, and Christ himself as the Crucifixion drew near.

As always, Mass is what makes everything bearable. Wednesday morning before heading out to the dunes I caught the 9 am and the Basilica of San Albino in Mesilla, a small historic town just outside Las Cruces. WONDERFUL Mass. Wonderful priest. Spoke of Dante’s Inferno. Reverently said each word of the Eucharistic prayer and consecration–not in a showy, peformative way but in a way that made you hear.

Thursday night, back in Tucson, I attended the Holy Thursday Mass at the U of Arizona’s Newman Center. Parking was nonexistent due to a women’s softball game at the nearby stadium so had to circle back across Campbell, park on a darkened side street, and pick my way across a crazy busy 3-lanes each side commuting corridor and stagger in late. No matter. He makes my feet swift as those of hinds, as another Psalm, or maybe canticle, runs. The conclusion of the Holy Thursday Mass, where most everyone leaves and the few who remain sit in darkened silence before the altar of repose, is possibly the “best” interlude of the whole liturgical year.

Good Friday I walked to Sts. Peter and Paul at noon in the blazing sun, resolutely refusing to be annoyed by the many things during the service that were not as I would have wished them (besides, who asked?) Veneration of the Cross: I take it back. Maybe kneeling and kissing the wood upon which Our Savior was crucified is actually the best moment (besides the Eucharist itself, of course) in the whole liturgical year.

This morning, I attended an 8 am Tenebrae service, again at the Newman Center and mostly put on by the students, that was deeply moving. Afterwards, over a DONUT (dying from Lenten lack of sugar) in the courtyard, I met one of the seven young people who will be baptized, confirmed and come into the Church tonight. At the endless Easter Vigil. Which, being exhausted and emotionally wrung out, I feel too overwrought and weakened to attend.

But will anyway.

Because how could I possibly miss being at the tomb when the stone is rolled away?

I’ve thought a lot these last few days about how Christ must have felt Friday morning–the emotion of the Last Super, the Agony in the Garden, the betrayal of Judas, the cops, the swords, the clubs. The interrogation. The total lack of sleep. The anxiety unto death. Peter’s desertion. The mocking, the spitting, the striking across the face. The scourging. The Crown of Thorns. Not at his best, Jesus, as he was forced to carry the cross to Mt. Calvary.

It was as if a whole human life were packed into that few hours. Because that’s how we are, almost all the time. Not at our best. Exhausted and thus cranky and short. Feeling betrayed and bewildered and thus unable and mostly unwilling to formulate a snappy retort. Ugly before the people we want to attract. Weakened in the sight of those who we wish would love us. Not up to the task before us. And profoundly, intensely, afraid.

Still, deep inside, a human heart. Always a human heart. Always, the desperate, mad hope in the Resurrection: that we’re capable of loving others; that we’re loved ourselves.

In the midle of a missile base the size of two states, a pinpoint with sunglasses, lying alone on a dune. Isn’t it pretty, Lord? Here I am, Lord, send me. Help us to stop killing each other, Lord. Yeah, I know you’ve been here before.

But you’ve never been here with me.

Wishing you all a wonderous Vigil and a glorious Easter season.

THE RESURRECTION