Heather King's Blog, page 49

THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL

This is an essay that appears in a collection of my selected Magnificat writings called Holy Days and Gospel Reflections.

“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” [Acts 9:4] Authentic conversion always comes from realizing that we have been “persecuting” Christ.

In the fall of 1986, I spent thirty days at an addiction treatment center in rural Minnesota. Hiking trails meandered through the woods. The trees were turning color. One morning I crept out for a walk just past dawn. Not another soul stirred. I came upon a pond and, through the mist, saw a blue heron, standing stock still, noble head erect. I saw the heron and the heron saw me.

It was a moment from the Song of Songs, a moment of liminal space and time, an instant of such heart-stopping beauty that in my memory it has attained the level of myth.

All those years while I’d been in the bars, this heron, or one like him, had been coming to the pond. All those years while I’d been drinking morning Sea Breezes at Boston’s Sullivan’s Tap, another parallel world had been breathing, suffering, praising God. Many years passed before I discovered Christ, and more years after that before I came into the Church. But in a way I can mark my conversion from that moment. In a way that heron was Christ, saying, “Heather, Heather, why are you persecuting me?”

St. Paul fell off his horse, but Christ comes in the form of a lamb, a dove, a heron. That’s not to say he’s always gentle. But he’s often gentlest when we’ve been doing terrible violence to ourselves and others. Christ never cuts us down with a gun or a sword. He looks at us with love. He says, Look at these blue-gray feathers. He says, Isn’t it lovely to be still and listen to the frogs? He looks us in the eye with love and says, “Why are you persecuting me?”

To be forgiven when we know we don’t “deserve” to be forgiven is radically transformative in a way violence can never be. To be forgiven does another kind of violence: to our whole tit-for-tat notion of crime and punishment. To be forgiven makes us realize that, unbelievable as it may seem, God needs us for something. We have a mission.   

My experience with the heron wasn’t a white-light experience. It was a door opening onto what has proved to be a long and very slow spiritual awakening of, as William James put it, “the educational variety.” How often I’ve forgotten the heron. How often I’ve been harsh, rageful, importunate, intolerant, unfaithful, unkind, and just plain wrong.

When that happens I’m struck blind for a few hours or days or even months. Often a long time passes before I see that once again, I’ve been persecuting Christ.

Our offense doesn’t lie in breaking a rule. It lies in offending against love, against truth,

against beauty. What’s remarkable about St. Paul isn’t that he had a white light experience. What’s remarkable is that he retained his fervor for all the remaining years of his life.   

HOBO FOR CHRIST

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

Meg Hunter-Kilmer, born in California in 1983, moved at six months to Arlington, Virginia. The family, nominally Catholic, attended Mass on Sundays and “that was kind of it.”

At her First Confession, she racked her brains for a misdeed and, finding none, panicked and lied to the priest. She made up that she’d broken a cup and blamed it in her sister—and was thus “in a state of mortal sin from the age of 7. By the time I was 11 I was an atheist and thought anyone who believed in God was an idiot.”

But at a two-night confirmation retreat in early adolescence, she made another Confession—and broke down sobbing.

“The tears may have started because of shame. But the spirit really led me to a spirit of profound forgiveness, of realizing my own brokenness and that God still loved me. I walked out of the confessional realizing, ‘This is real. And if it’s real, it’s worth living for.’”

She resolved to go to daily Mass, pray ten minutes a day, and listen to more Christian music, “very 1997. I’m extremely stubborn and intellectually driven. There was a lot of pride tied up in my conversion and there still is. But there’s only so long you can be going to daily Mass, and praying the Rosary and reading Scripture without some of it sinking in.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

CLOTHESLINES

My new favorite film is a 32-minute documentary short: Clotheslines.

My own mother hung out clothes even in New England winters (the dryer cost money). Here in LA. I hung my clothes for 18 years in the backyard of my Koreatown apartment, and we have a makeshift line I use in summer even now at my rental in Pasadena. Dryers in fact use huge amounts of electricity–so clotheslines are really a beautiful, thrifty, throwback. And as the film shows, doing laundry is a whole huge metaphysical/spiritual/social arena, especially for women.

You can watch the whole film HERE, on a well-worth-exploring site called Folkstreams (“Exploring the Stories of America”).

Don’t miss the interview with director Roberta Cantow in which she discusses the making of the movie. This is fascinating:

There’s one woman at the end who says “It’s just something we gotta’ do. There’s nobody else to do it.” And that’s over a shot of a Taiwanese community of women washing clothes in the river. The woman anthropologist that I was working with told me about a study that had been done where washing machines were introduced to a certain community that didn’t have them, and the whole social fabric fell apart as a result -when women were no longer going to the creek to do their laundry and exchange information.

ROBERT MACFARLANE’S LOST WORDS

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

Robert Macfarlane (b. 1976) is an award-winning British writer on landscape, place, people, language, memory, and meaning. He’s also a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Mountains of the Mind (2003) explores the history of mountaineering and our sometimes fatal fascination with the metaphysical dimension of precipitous, perilous terrain on which we long to be the first to place our feet or flag.

The Wild Places (2007) charts a series of journeys made in search of the ever-shrinking wildness remaining in Britain and Ireland.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012) is a kind of elegy to one of Macfarlane’s heroes, the poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917), who was a lover of nature, a depressive, and a passionate lifelong walker, especially in and around the South Downs. The “old ways” include holloways, pilgrimage routes, cliff paths, animal passages, and ancient byways, rights-of-way, and foraging grounds in England, Scotland, Palestine, Sichuan and Palestine.

Together, the three from a loose trilogy about the “landscape and the human heart”—a subject upon which Macfarlane speaks eloquently in a 2012 IQ2 talk of that name available on YouTube.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

ÉLISABETH LESEUR ON GIVING LESS THAN WE EXPECT

I’ve been going through my files and the other day came across this quote from Élisabeth Leseur–a couple of weeks late but ever timely.

“The last day of the year has been filled with deprivation. God filled the year with suffering, renunciation, sadness of every kind, and, spiritually, with dryness, with the destitution of the manger, without the loving joys that make the divine dawning in us so radiant. But God taught me a stronger, deeper love, stripped of conscious happiness, and I offer the year that is over and the one to come with a grateful heart. I consecrate myself to God and accept in advance all that he wants of me, through me, or for me: joy or sorrow, health or illness, poverty or riches, and life or death, according to what will be for the greatest good of others and the Church. For myself I ask one thing: let me love you, without joy or comfort if need be, and use me for the spreading of your Kingdom, Jesus my Savior.

It is a source of pain and difficult sacrifice to have to divine one’s life so much and always to give to each one less than he or she expects.. This sometimes leads others to feel not enough is being done for them, and they perhaps experience some sadness or regret, which becomes painful to her who is the involuntary cause of it. And then one’s self-love dislikes the loss of esteem and appreciation as well as the felling of being not up to the task. That perhaps is the hidden fruit of this trial: a little useful humiliation, less dangerous than empathy and admiration, interior pain that does not elicit any praise. To fulfill my obligations generously; to give to each one my energy, time, affection, a warm and hospitable embrace, even at the price of sacrifice and renunciation. To offer God my incapacity, and joyfully to endure being misunderstood a little, or rather, to endure being truly understood with my weaknesses, my laziness, my many imperfections. Without this drop of bitterness, the tenderness of the affection surrounding me might make me slide into laziness and complacency.

My God, I accept my dissipated life, so often not what I want–this sometimes fatiguing mixture of activities, tedious acquaintances, cares. Help me to fulfill all the obligations of life and yet preserve my spiritual life. Let the warmth of my hospitality, the serenity of my bearing, the friendliness of my words always hide from everyone my physical suffering and my spiritual efforts and sacrifices. Teach me to be all things to all people, to be more strict with myself. To practice greater mortification, especially in a spirit of reparation.”

Here’s the “Credible Witness” Magnificat essay I wrote on Leseur several years ago:

Élisabeth Leseur (1866-1914), a French mystic, is known for the spiritual diaries she wrote while married to a doctor who scorned her devotion to Christ. Her husband Félix lost his Catholic faith shortly before their 1889 wedding and became a publicly vocal atheist.

The Leseurs frequently entertained. Elisabeth, a gracious and lively hostess, came to see that enduring the anti-Catholic jibes of her husband—whom she loved deeply—and his friends could be a hidden form of mortification.

She developed a rich interior life. She wrote down her insights and reflections in journals that are now considered spiritual classics.  She carried on a wide-ranging  correspondence– mostly unbeknownst to her husband—for the duration of her marriage.

“Look around oneself for proud sufferers in need,” Élisabeth counseled, “find them, and give them the alms of our heart, of our time, and of our tender respect.”

By July, 1913 she was bedridden by breast cancer. She offered up her sufferings for the conversion of Félix’s soul.

Shortly after her death, he found a letter she had written to him praying that he would turn to Christ.

Félix was ordained a Dominican priest in 1923. He spent much of his last twenty-seven years promulgating the writings, and advancing the cause for beatification, of his wife.

“We must never reject anyone who seeks to approach us spiritually; perhaps that person, consciously or unconsciously, is in quest of the “unknown God” (Acts 17: 23) and has sensed in us something that reveals his presence; perhaps he or she thirsts for truth and feels that we live by this truth.”

“Look around oneself for proud sufferers in need, find them, and give them the alms of our heart, of our time, and of our tender respect.”

“Suffering is the highest form of action, the highest expression of the wonderful Communion of Saints, and that in suffering one is sure not to make mistakes (as in action, sometimes) — sure to be useful to others and to the great causes that one longs to serve.”

She developed a rich and hidden interior life: her collected journals are now widely considered a spiritual classic. Her entry for May 3, 1904, is typical: “Has my life known any unhappier time than this?…And yet through all these trials and in spite of the lack of interior joy, there is a deep place that all these waves of sorrow cannot touch….[T]here I can feel how completely one with God I am, and I regain strength and serenity in the heart of Christ. My God, give health and happiness to those I love and give us all true light and charity.”

“Silence is sometimes an act of energy, and smiling, too.”

ORDINARY TIME–BUT IS IT?

Every once in a while I start writing a blog post, and on and on it goes, and I’m not straining but having a bit of fun and I’m just about to post when I realize: “Hey, this is an Angelus column!” Which I agonize about each week and is a source of constant anxiety.

That just happened. Sorry! But I’ll share it here in a couple of weeks.

I wanted to poke my head in anyway, dependent as I am on connecting with my few, and precious, dedicated readers, fellow wonderers and wanderers. (I don’t think I mentioned that I put out the call on Christmas Eve for a little Christmas Day zoom gathering for all who were so moved. One person showed up, our own Bill Potts, and then my friends Tensie and Dennis from Santa Maria signed on I think out of pity. It was PERFECT. THANK YOU).

So let’s see. I was struck this year in a way I never have been before by the fact that the infant Christ is born, the Magi visit, and next week fast-forward 30 years, and John the Baptist is anointing him for his public ministry.

What a strange religion/story, in which Christ’s entire childhood, adolescence and young adulthood are basically shrouded in…not secrecy, exactly. But they’re hidden, shielded from view. I guess no-one but maybe Mary knew he was the Messiah so why document anything or pay particular attention?

“I am not fit to untie the thong of his sandal”…a foot reference…water…the Baptism is a kind of reverse mirror image of the Last Supper, I’m thinking this year, when Christ warps a towel around his waist and washes the feet of his disciples.

In the first instance, John, the best man, who readily accepts and embraces his servanthood position (“He must increase; I must decrease”) vis-a-vis the bridegroom, anoints Christ for his public ministry. As with Peter at the Last Supper, he sees that it should be the other way around; that by all rights their positions should be reversed. “But so that Scripture may be fulfilled,” says Christ, as he accepts, insists really, that John baptize him. It’s only fitting that Christ, the humblest of men, the Savior who constantly upends every power structure known to man, should be anointed by his “inferior.”

At the Last Supper, he brings things full circle, anointing Peter for his public ministry, by washing the feet of his disciple. Peter is being “baptized”/anointed into martyrdom: he will suffer the same fate John did (if by different means).

“No, Master!” cries Peter, appalled: if anything, he feels, Christ should be asking Peter to wash his feet. But Christ insists: “I no longer call you servants, for a servant does not know his master’s business; I call you friends. Even knowing he is to be tortured and killed that very day, in his extravagant generosity of spirit, he outpours his service and love.

So it seems the two events are bookends of a sort: I’m sure many smarter and more articulate than me have plumbed the connection more deeply. Suffice it to say this is yet another example of the inexhaustible riches and depth of the Gospels.

On another note, I have re-subscribed to the Criterion Channel, a second kind of treasure trove. I thought I’d seen the major classics from the 40s, 50s, and 60s: my favorite era. But a friend last week turned me on to Holiday (1938) with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.

I watched it Sunday morning, in bed, after a horrible night’s sleep and having risen early for 8 am Mass. And it is just stupendous. The little, working man with a dream versus Big Capital; the family member exiled for exhibiting too much spark and joy; a snapshot of New York High Society. Superb dialogue, wonderful acting, sumptuous sets, Edward Everett Horton, and a story line that brought tears to my eyes.

Which isn’t hard these days.

 

 

RELIGION AROUND BILLIE HOLIDAY

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

Jazz singer Billie Holiday (1915-1959) continues to fascinate. Her life and work—the way she moved through the world—embodied myriad contradictions

The outlines of her story are well-known: born in Philadelphia to an absent father, shuttled off first to relatives Baltimore, then to Harlem and a mother who ran a “good-time” house. The victim of attempted rape at 11, turning tricks by 14. The fame, the adulation, the boozing, the men, the heroin addiction, the arrests, prison time, and FBI profile. The death in a hospital from cirrhosis, chained to a bed.

A new documentary, Billie, directed by James Erskine, is based on the voluminous notes, transcripts and recorded interviews left behind by journalist and fan Linda Kuehl. After spending upwards of eight years in the 1970s talking to Holiday’s childhood friends, fellow musicians, business managers, and lovers, Kuehl died in 1978, an apparent suicide.

The best part of the film, to my mind, consists in Holiday’s performances: The regal bearing, even when singing of the men who abuse her. The heart-stopping phrasing, the slightly tilted head, the between-the-beat silences, the eyes that challenge and plead, mourn and defy, all at once. Her incredible sense of self, a kind of contained built-on-solid rock integrity that no outside force—no man, no Jim Crow law, no trauma even—could touch or defile.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

EPIPHANY: FROM MY BEDSIDE TABLE

I send out Christmas cards myself, and each year they seem to be returned tenfold. I received so many beautiful images, reflections, verses, family photos, newsletters, and poems during the month of December and they are still coming…

The wonderful Fr. Sam Fontana of the Lafayette, Louisiana, area, hand-wrote out “Veni Creator,” by Czeslaw Milosz, just to cite one example.

I’ve also had a huge stack of books by my bed–biographies of Townes, van Zandt, Billie Holiday, and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky; a book of worst-trip-ever travel essays, Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks; Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.

Here’s a teeny smattering.

From Morning Light: The Spiritual Journal of Jean Sulivan:

“Is Virtue Deadly?”

Like the storm-clouds of the exodus, the Church’s face is more luminous today than when it seemed to rule. It has found glory in its humiliation.

Many people have believed in God through the agency of the Church. It now appears that, because of the Church, they no longer can. Undoubtedlly that’s because they have not encountered its submerged reality. Some of them, who have abandoned the second-rate faith they were taught, have become bold. Perhaps they are living the faith more authentically, as if they needed above all to get rid of borrowed ideas and feeings.

But someone who has been truly wounded by the Gospel, and has personally verified that the Church preaches the Word and makes the death and resurrection of Jesus present through the paradox of agony and contempt, can never find a pretext to desert. The one who leaves the Church proves he has never entered. Or, rather, he drags the Church along with him.”

From The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp:

“And the inner freedom can only be attained if we have discovered the means of widening our own horizons. We must progress and grow, we must mount above our own limitations. It can be done; the driving force is the inner urge to conquer whose very existence shows that man’s nature is fundamentally designed for this expansion. A rebel, after all, can be trained to be a decent citizen, but an idler and a dreamer is a hopeless proposition.

Man’s freedom is born in the moment of his contact with God. It is really unimportant whether God forces man out of his limits by the sheer distress of much suffering, coaxes him with visions of beauty and truth, or pricks him into action by the endless hunger and thirst for righteousness that possesses his soul. What really matters is the fact that man is called and he must be sufficiently awake to hear the call.

The law of freedom is an appropriate theme for today. When those worshippers knelt in homage on the floor of the humble stable with everything else put behind them–their homes, the wilderness, the guiding star, the agony of the silent star, the palace of the king and the grandeur of the city–when all these had lost their value and their impressiveness and the worshippers’ whole being was concentrated in the single act of adoration, the symbolic gesture of laying gifts before the manger signified the achievement of liberty. Then they were free.”

“[Holiday’s] art transcends the usual categorizations of style, content and technique. Much of her singing goes beyond itself and becomes a humanistic document; it passed often into a realm that is not only beyond criticism but in the deepest sense inexplicable. We can, of course, describe and analyze the surface mechanics of her art: her style, her technique, her personal vocal attributes; and I suppose a poet could express the essence of her art or at least give us, by poetic analogy, his particular insight into it. But, as with all truly profound art, that which operates from above, below, and all around its outer manifestations is what most touches us, and also remains ultimately mysterious.”

—Gunther Schuller, jazz composer and historian

A PERPETUAL STIMULUS TO CHARACTER-CREATION

I found this quote in a book called C.S. Lewis’s List: The Ten Books That Influenced Him Most. It’s from the chapter on Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson. I instantly recognized myself and realized Oh, maybe that’s why I find human contact draining!

“The older I grow, the more clearly I see that this is one of the ways in which the human race can be divided up. Some people give the impression of being exactly the same in company as they are when alone. The same raw, untreated personality which serves them for solitary meditation, country walks, cleaning their teeth, casting their accounts, has to do duty in public too. They respond to other people, but they do so artlessly, much as animals might. Such people are often likeable, but my lifelong preference happens to have been for the opposite type, those for whom the presence of even one other person is a perpetual stimulus to character-creation. They are always giving a performance in the role for which they have cast themselves, making up the play as they go along, and tacitly inviting others to collaborate. That, indeed, is one reason why such people seek one another out; they enjoy being together because they very zest with which A plays his role puts B on his mettle to excel in his…By the mere fact of our birth, we have been cast for certain parts in the great play that is always going on, and we must act those parts with energy and imagination, making the most of every line…

If any reader still thinks I am referring to empty self-dramatizing and Narcissism, I must leave him at this point. Ultimately, the matter cannot be explained to those who do not understand it already. I doubt if even great literature can help much. Such a person could probably read […and here I pause for dramatic effect….] Boswell’s Life of Johnson and take it simply as a compendium of anecdote and aphorism, not noticing that what gives the book its vitality is exactly this delight taken by the principal characters in the fine performances they give as themselves. Johson had a heightened appreciation of the possibilities of being Johnson because Boswell was so delightfully Boswell.

Such people are in fact instinctively fulfilling a moral duty. The Creator…has equipped them with a certain identity, and they are all the time delightedly aware of this identity and out to get, and to give, as much fun as possible with it.”

–John Wain, Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography

HAPPY NEW YEAR: BIRDS, SPIRITUAL COMPANIONS, NEW LIFE

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

A few weeks ago I drove up the coast to the Coal Oil Point Reserve, a sublime area, lush with sea life and birds, on the edge of the UCSB campus. The reason for the trip was to meet a dear friend—a spiritual companion, a guide, a mentor, though she is 15 years my junior.

Part of the University of California Natural Reserve System, and one of the premiere coastal-strand environments in Southern California, the area comprises a mixture of dune vegetation and rare wildlife. The protection of these natural habitats aims to support research, education, outreach, and stewardship.  

My friend and I stood on the bluffs overlooking the water and marveled at the ocean, the incoming waves so smooth their surface had the sheen of syrup. We took our picnic lunch down by the pond (technically Devereux Slough, a seasonally flooded tidal lagoon), spread out a blanket and feasted.

A snowy egret, perched on slender branch, fixed us with an impassive stare. We spotted a Black-Bellied Plover and a Northern Flicker. The Reserve is part of Audubon’s Important Bird Area (IBA), and boasts, among other species, pelicans loons, teal, osprey, larks, grebes.  

But mostly we talked: about our families, our hearts, the state of the world. A good spiritual companion doesn’t invite you to condemn the world. A good spiritual companion makes your heart burn within you to offer yourself to the world, in whatever way has been given.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.