Heather King's Blog, page 50

DESIRE PATHS: A GUEST POEM

Every once in a while I receive a hand-written card or message that’s been sent snail mail to the Archdiocese of LA/Angelus News.

One such note came recently, in the form of a poem, written in response to my recent Desire Lines post.

As you can see, the verse is quite beautiful, and I think captures my zeitgeist perfectly. The author gave his permission to share, so here it is, with deep thanks.

DESIRE PATHS
For Heather King

They wait for us in noisy cities,
nudging us along lanes and alleyways;
they dally in our brains,
uncharted channels,
shortcuts to fresh expression,
unblazed, less taken ways
that just might become
roads reaching to infinity.
Instinct instructs our feet and legs;
urging words to take a journey
toward some lucky page,
seeking, daring to be born
into ink and onto paper.
Unsculpted city sidewalks,
unsketched pavement paths
blazed by sudden motivation
and the joy of going further on.
Poems constructed by discovery
out of freedom, fresh air, prayers
and the novelty of spending moments
in unlikely places where metro trains
roll by clattering and whistling
on tracks that wander wide.
All conspiring without a plan,
unmapped siren channels
through a city at your feet.

–Bob Doud//12/03/2020

O HOLY NIGHT

Advent, as always, has been packed with emotion.

I become over-excited, awaiting the birth of the Christ child so eagerly that my sleep is thrown off.

With Daylight Savings Time, my circadian rhythm naturally leans more toward both early nights and early mornings. I love waking in the dark, lighting the beeswax candles, opening the door of that day’s Advent calendar, pondering that day’s liturgy. The readings are to my mind the most beautiful of the year, both for Mass and the Divine Office, and then there are the hymns, the O antiphons, the prayers to Mary.

I took another week-long road trip to Tucson early in December–here in Pasadena, we’d at least been having outdoor Mass, but COVID this time around had closed the churches in Tucson. Only registered parishioners could attend. So I’d wake at 4 am in my cold airbnb (the space heater just didn’t cut it), pray the Office, and at 5:20 (7:20 Eastern) join the monks at Portsmouth (Rhode Island) Abbey for their livestream Mass.

It’s impossible to describe how moving and meaningful I found this.

Back home, we continued with our outdoor morning Mass, which was not horrible if you remembered to bundle up. The church had been closed for months and you’d see the fervent Latinas kneeling outside with their foreheads pressed against the door, longing to be close to the tabernacle, the altar. We all did the best we could and, as always, I pondered the mystery of who is drawn to Mass and why.

Older single women who trudge there each day; parents with two, three, four little children (how do they do it?); Millard, who is in his 90s; the homeless guys: Charles, Shadrach, and a few others who don’t care to share their names. People in scrubs: nurses, health care workers. Old men. The cold-faced lady with the black mantilla. The thirtyish woman who stopped me one morning to introduce herself and it turns out is a public defender in downtown LA who I gather ends up donating money to a fair share of her clients.

And then one morning last week, after months, the tall, wrought iron filigree doors of the church were miraculously thrown wide open. At last, we could approach! (Masked of course, way distanced (Catholics don’t like to be near each other at the best of times, as a friend and I laughed recently), and since the sanctuary holds 1200 and is probably five stories high, with minimal risk of contagion). The altar was decked with bunched cloth-of-gold, balsam wreaths, banks of poinsettias, the Advent candles, and a crèche complete with ox, ass, bales of real hay, Mary and Joseph kneeling, and a place on the burlap for the baby who will not appear till tonight–Christmas eve. O Holy Night.

I’m sometimes informed, “Church isn’t just at Mass,” as if attendance at Mass were emblematic of a provincial contracting, a close-minded rigidity, a narrowing of one’s world view, a clinging to empty ritual accompanied by a turning of one’s back on the “real world” and its people.

I always want to respond, “Duh. Mass consecrates all of reality.” You go to Mass to kneel before the Sinless Victim who took the whole frightful, ghastly crisis of the world–which is to say, of all of us–upon himself–all the darkness, all the hatred, the real narrowness, the ideology, the hostility to story, the sneering, the sophisticated, those who pride themselves on being “above” or “beyond” miracles, magic, fairy tales, the birth of a baby.

Can the human mind ever, possibly, wrap itself around the stupendous miracle of God consenting to take on human flesh and come into the world as a baby? You couldn’t make this stuff up which, as C.S. Lewis observed, is why Christianity is in some weird way believable: It has just that “queer twist to it that real things have.”

Anyway, I have donned my Madonna-blue tank top, not that anyone will be able to see it beneath my layers of drab-green outerwear. I have shared some of the crazy generosity that’s been showered on me with my parish, the homeless guys, my Guatemalan sponsee Josue Gilberto, and some other people. I have opened all the Advent calendar doors.

I have ordered a rib-eye steak with the Cheesecake Factory gift card I received yesterday. That’s right. I rarely eat meat, and steak almost never (I don’t know how to cook it) but I have ordered myself a steak, medium rare, with mashed potatoes and green beans (the sole options), which I will pick up after the 6 pm Vigil Mass and eat, alone, with the candles lit and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio playing in the background.

Then I’m going to watch what looks like a fairly corny 1954 movie called The Holly and the Ivy, and play some carols on the piano, and pray Compline, and probably be in bed by 10.

Meanwhile I have heard from, received gifts from, exchanged emails with, and nattered on the phone and/or zoom with any number of blessed friends and acquaintances this week. While also guarding my energy, heart, and prayer time.

But tomorrow is Christmas Day. We have made it through these past months, somehow, limping a bit by now, but still: made it through a pandemic, civil unrest, a contentious Presidential election, wildfires for many of us, closed churches, uncertainty and angst on a scale new for us Westerners, the sickness and deaths of loved ones. Temptations to act out in various ways. Our own fevered psyches.

I, for one, would love to exchange the good tidings. To that end, I am going to open my PERSONAL ZOOM ROOM tomorrow at 7:30 am PST. If anyone wants to hop on to share greetings, stories, insights, jokes and good cheer, please feel free!

Wishing one and all peace, love and joy on this Holiest of Holy Nights, and a very Merry Christmas.

THE MIRACLE OF THE LOAVES AND FISHES

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

One of our Gospel readings during Advent was Matthew’s account of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Christ went up on the mountain, near the Sea of Galilee. He sat down. “Great crowds” came to him: the lame, the blind, the deformed, the mute. “They placed them at his feet and he cured them.”

You can picture the stage set: Christ, the Messiah, seated on top of the mountain: the crowds so far below they are literally at his feet. They have to crane their necks to see his face.

This would be the place where an earthly king would whip out his scepter, call for his   crown, and start issuing orders to his minions. But Christ is completely different than an earthly king.

Far from using his office to summon more power to himself, he lets his power go out to those who need healing, which is another way of saying those who need love. They’re thronging his place on the mountain, jostling, elbowing, handing forward the sickest one by one to the front. We can picture him bending down, cocking his head to hear, reaching out to tenderly touch heads, faces, hands.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A GARDEN VIDEO

My dear, insanely multi-talented friend Lisa Marr who, along with her life partner Paolo Davanzo, runs the Echo Park Film Center (EPFC), put this video together with footage I shot on my iphone and with a grant from the AARP.  I am actually NOT retired, thank you, though am thrilled to be part of this as I call it OLD PEOPLE’S project. 

Thank you so much, Lisa!

As you may or may not know, I wrote a book about the garden called  HARROWED. You can buy it HERE.  

WONDER AND ENCHANTMENT

“In 1957, the sociologist and philosopher Max Weber ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung) as the distinctive injury of modernity. He defined disenchantment as ‘the knowledge or belief that…there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.’ For Weber, disenchantment was a function of the rise of rationalism, which demanded the extirpation of dissenting knowledge-kinds in favour of a single master-principle. It found its expressions not just in human behavior and policy–including the general impulse to control nature–but also in emotional response. Weber noted the widespread reduction of ‘wonder’ (for him the hallmark of enchantment, and in which state we are comfortable with not-knowing) and the corresponding expansion of ‘will’ (for him the hallmark of disenchantment, and in which we are avid for authority). In modernity, mastery usurped mystery.

Our language for nature is now such that the things around us do not talk back to us in ways that they might. As we have enhanced our power to determine nature, so we have rendered it less able to converse with us. We find it hard to imagine nature outside a use-value framework. We have become experts in analysing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to evoke what it can do to us. The former is important; the latter is vital. Martin Heidegger identified a version of this trend in 1954, observing that the rise of technology and the technological imagination had converted what he called ‘the whole universe of beings’ into an undifferentiated ‘standing reserve’ (Bestand) of energy, available for any use to which humans choose to put it. The rise of ‘standing reserve’ as a concept has bequeathed to us an inadequate and unsatisfying relationship with the natural world, and with ourselves, too, because we have to encounter ourselves and our thoughts as mysteries before we encounter them as service providers. We require things to have their own lives if they are to enrich ours. But allegory as a mode has settled inside us, and thrived: fungibility has replaced particularity.”

–Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks, p. 25

THE ONE ULTIMATELY IRRESISTIBLE PERSON

“Other religious, social, political organizations may arouse opposition, but the incurable disquiet of those who fear the Catholic Church is due to the fact that while all the others are systems, the Church is a Person, an incalculable Person, a Person with infinite power and a child’s values: the Person of Jesus Christ.

We know perfectly well that there are often scandals in the Church, that despite her pure heart, her children sometimes grow worldly and base and dress her up with tawdry golden garments which they have woven with black and cunning fingers; sometimes we see nothing but ugliness in her. Yes, even so, she is the refuge and hope of all sinners, the joy and hope of all saints, the life and hope of every living creature; and this is because, under this aspect the Church is still Christ, Christ in his Passion, Christ crowned with thorns, his face covered in blood and dirt and the dust of the road which flung him down. He still remains the one ultimately irresistible Person.”

–Caryll Houselander

I felt some of what my dear friend Caryll meant, perhaps, this morning at Mass. I don’t know what’s going on with COVID but after months of Mass outside, the doors of the church were open and oh the glory of the sanctuary, the gloom, the candles glowing in the dark, the tabernacle, the altar.

What with the Our Lady of Guadalupe (previous)post, and Advent, and all that I’ve been pondering in my heart, my own (unborn) kids Fern, Swallow and Warren felt especially close this morning as I knelt in my pew.

I think people who have not been huge desperate sinners perhaps don’t understand those of us who are drawn to Christ. Always I carry the wound of my sins. I have to believe, I do believe, I’ve been forgiven. It gives no glory to a Savior who came precisely to reconcile us to God, in spite of the blackness of our consciences, to hold ourselves to a higher standard than he does.

But that’s just it–to have squandered my inheritance in the mire and been welcomed back, like the Prodigal Son, no questions asked; to not be reproached, but instead to have a banquet thrown in my honor, is not something that I can ever, ever, stop being astonished by and giving thanks for and wanting to “live up to.”

I don’t want to sound creepy or sappy or woo-woo. I try to call things by their name, and the fact is I…killed them. I also absolutely believe that my kids accompany me, watch over me in a sense, along with our collective guardian angel. Everything I write in a sense is from them and for them.

Thus, the whole concept of woman as mother is something I feel deeply, deeply. Science is great and science is one thing but it is not the whole thing. The meeting of any given sperm–one among tens of millions–and any given egg, can be explained in scientific terms. But when we have lost the capacity to fall to our knees in wonder at the weirdness, the seeming randomness, the hush at the heart of the cosmos when the two meet–I just feel like we have lost our humanity.

When we lose our humanity, it is always women and children who bear the brunt. So I’ve been crying a lot lately. Partly because I’m so aware of the ways I have contributed to the wound at the heart of the world: the wound between men and women; the burdens carried by the children of this world, and of the other world; the sorrow of bereaved mothers, who would have given their own lives to keep their child, to have their child–when I let mine go.

At the same time, I’ve been saturated with a strange kind of energy and joy–and that makes my cry a different kind of tears.

I don’t know any deeper, better place to bring any of that than to the altar of Christ.

An old friend just sent me this recording of T.S. Eliot reading his “Journey of the Magi.”

On we journey with them, toward the winter solstice….Thank you for walking with me!

THE FEMININE GENIUS OF OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE

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

A few weeks ago, I attempted to make an appointment for an intake session with a therapist. My co-pay would be zero, I’ve never availed myself of such help, and especially after this past year of COVID, wildfires, political unrest, I thought—Why not?

I had to speak to three people first, repeatedly assuring them I did not own a gun, did not intend to harm myself or anyone else, and did not have suicidal ideation. Each employee was civil and also without an iota of warmth, humanity, vitality or sense of humor.

Finally I got to the person who would directly connect me with the available therapist. We went through the same questions again. And then the person on the other end asked, “Do you identify as female?”

My being screeched to a halt. The very question was absurd, an affront. The sky is blue. I don’t identify the sky as blue. I live in a world in which the sky is blue. The essence of a created thing is not in my hands. I don’t change facts; I don’t have the power. I don’t bend reality to my will. I’m not God.

Do I IDENTIFY as female? I have a female name, voice, affect, and body. I have the chromosomes, heart, and psyche of a woman. If ever there were a loaded question, “Do you identify as female?” must be in the first tier. I almost screamed, “I AM female. I’m a woman. I’m 100 percent a woman.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

FR. ALFRED DELP’S ADVENT MEDITATIONS

“Unless a man has been shocked to the depths at himself and the things he is capable of, as well as at the failings of humanity as a whole, he cannot possibly understand the full import of Advent.

If the whole message of the coming of God, of the day of salvation, of approaching redemption, is to seem more than a divinely-inspired legend or a bit of poetic fiction, two things must first be accepted unreservedly.

First, that his life is both powerless and futile in so far as by itself it has neither purpose nor fulfillment…

Secondly, it must be recognized that it is God’s alliance with man, his being on our side, ranging himself with us, that corrects this state of meaningless futility…

Advent, even when things are going wrong, is a period from which a message can be drawn. May the time never come when men forget about the good tidings and promises, when, so immured within the four walls of their prison that their very eyes are dimmed, they seen nothing but grey days through barred windows placed too high to see out of. May the time never come when mankind no longer hears the soft footsteps of the herald angel, or his cheering words that penetrate the soul. Should such a time come all will be lost. Then indeed we shall be living in bankruptcy and hope will die in our hearts. For the first thing a man must do if he wants to raise himself out of this sterile life is to open his heart to the golden seed which God’s angels are waiting to sow in it. And one other thing; he must himself throughout these grey days go forth as a bringer of glad tidings. There is so much despair that cries out for comfort; there is so much faint courage that needs to be reinforced; there is so much perplexity that yearns for reasons and meanings. God’s messengers, who have themselves reaped the fruits of divine seeds sown even in the darkest hours, know how to wait for the fulness of harvest. Patience and faith are needed, not because we believe in the earth, or in our stars, or our temperament or our good disposition, but because we have received the message of God’s herald angel and have ourselves encountered him.”

–From The Prison Meditations of Alfred Delp

Fr. Alfred Delp (1907-1945), a Germanconvert and a priest, fell into the hands of the Nazis during WWII.  His crime, as he observed, consisted simply in being a Jesuit.

He was relegated to a solitary cell with both hands shackled. While awaiting trial, he managed to work one hand free and to write, among other things, a stunning series of Advent Meditations.

One incident speaks volumes about his humility and his capacity for mercy. The Nazis were beating him and calling him ‘Liar!’ because he wouldn’t. give up the names of his friends. He wrote, “I prayed hard, asking God why he permitted me to be so brutally handled, and then I saw that there was in my nature a tendency to pretend and deceive.”

Sentenced to death, awaiting execution, Fr. Delp didn’t waste his time hating. He hoped, he wrestled with his conscience, he asked forgiveness, he apologized to all those to whom he had been unkind, unfair, and prideful. He wrote, “I will honestly and patiently await God’s will I will trust him till they come to fetch me. I will do my best to ensure that this blessing, too, shall not find me broken and in despair.”

Fr. Delp was executed by hanging on February 2, 1945. The Nazis scattered his ashes over a manure field.

TURN OVER A NEW LEAF WITH MY JAN-FEB 2021 WRITING WORKSHOP!

Come on, you know you’ve been dying to!!

HERE’S THE VENMO LINK!

NOT GRITTING MY TEETH!

I have been working, thinking, walking, praying, reading, cooking, cleaning, preparing, and planning REALLY HARD.

Advent is here: my absolute favorite liturgical season. A secret, hallowed, magical time. I have many candles, Christmas bulbs, and string lights: all must be lit each morning in the dark, along with a stick of incense, for the opening of that day’s “door” on the TWO Advent calendars.

The dark blue Advent breviary has taken its place beside the December Magnficat, Al-Anon’s Courage to Change, Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest, Robert Ellsberg’s All Saints (a new addition), and the Rule of St. Benedict.

Is that too much for morning prayer? Then I like to do 10 or so minutes of lectio, write in my journal, and then just sit quietly, BASKING IN WONDER AND GRATITUDE.

After that I get my lunch together, shower, haul the two buckets of graywater I save each morning out to the garden, along with the compost, make my bed, wash the dishes, pack up my work, books, laptop (for at 9 I’ll go to my writing studio), make sure I have my mask, phone, keys, lipstick, sunglasses, and credit card, and drive down the street to Mass.

We’re having it outdoors and boy, am I grateful that we are having it anywhere. Yesterday during his homily, Father bashed the lukewarm laggards who have fallen by the wayside, who have stopped attending Mass just because it’s COLD OUT, a little harangue that thereby encouraged us, among other things, to spy on, rat out, and judge our neighbors.

WE are the members of the faithful. WE will be admitted to heaven when we say “Lord, Lord.”

Behind my mask, I snorted. No disrespect to Father (who has stalwartly brought us Mass throughout COVID and is freezing his own tail off up there, and also knows tons of hymns by heart, and sings beautifully, and generally prepares a solid, sometimes thought-provoking homily, and is always on time, and runs, basically to our benefit, a very tight ship), but I wanted to say, Are you kidding me? Personally, I’ve never been able to believe the Church lets the likes of me in.

I keep thinking of Fr. Walter Ciszek, who said clandestine Masses in the woods, under penalty of death, as a prisoner in Siberia. “[T]hese men would actually fast all day long and do exhausting physical labor without a bite to eat since dinner the evening before, just to be able to receive the Holy Eucharist—that was how much the Sacrament meant to them in this otherwise God-forsaken place.”

I ponder the mystery of why the poor seem to complain so little while we, who live like pashas, bitch and moan over every tiny thing. This morning at Mass this old homeless guy in no hat and a thin overcoat was sitting beside me. I’d seen him shuffling laboriously down the street, dragging his dingy frayed suitcase, the day before. After the dismissal, Father launched into “How Great Thou Art” and the guy chimed in, singing harmony in the richest, most beatific voice.

That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing
He bled and died to take away my sin.
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art…

Indeed. This guy with broken-down shoes and a flimsy coat who can barely walk singing like an angel, that I should be present, counted worthy to be in his presence. NO need to congratulate me for coming to Mass.

“Basically the mystery of the cross isn’t a mystery of strength but a mystery of helplessness. It is a victory to be sure, but a victory hidden even form the eyes of the victor, a victory having every appearance and all the taste of defeat, and experienced as a defeat.

The cross isn’t the mystery of bravery but a mystery of love. It doesn’t consist in suffering courageously, nor merely in suffering, full stop, but in being afraid of suffering; it doesn’t consist in overcoming an obstacle but in being crushed by it; not in being strong and noble hearted but in being small and absurd in one’s own eyes; not in deploying virtue but in seeing all one’s virtues routed and pulverised; and in accepting all this lovingly. And in accepting lovingly to be strengthless; strength is no use, love is what’s needed.

So we shan’t reach the goal by gritting our teeth since, if we are capable of gritting our teeth, this means that we are strong, and all the while we are strong- with this kind of strength- we still don’t know what the cross is all about. Christ didn’t grit his teeth to go to his Passion, he didn’t pluck up his courage, he knew very well that he couldn’t. He merely said: Father, your will be done, not mine, which is something of a different order, of a different world, the world of love. And not merely the love of the human sort, but a love commensurate with God, of God’s sort, that is to say, love of a sort we can never produce of ourselves. This sort of love isn’t ours to give. God has to breathe it into us, he has to come into us to love himself.”

–Father Bernard Bro, OP, from The Little Way: The Spirituality of Thérèse of Lisieux, trans. Alan Neume, Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd, London

BLESSED ADVENT!!