Heather King's Blog, page 56

WHEN WE WERE THE KENNEDYS

Little excites me more than a good book and/or an author who’s new to me.

My reading is eclectic, so I’m not sure how I came across Monica Wood’s When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir From Mexico, Maine. But onto “my list” it went, then I put a hold on it at my local library, then last week the library opened for curbside pickup.

And last weekend, in two gulpish sittings, I inhaled this beautiful memoir.

It came out in 2012, so many of you may have come across it already. If not, here’s some praise:

“Every few years, a memoir comes along that revitalizes the form, that takes us by the hand and leads us into the dream world of our collective past from which we emerge more wholly ourselves. With generous, precise, and unsentimental prose, Monica Wood brilliantly achieves this, bringing back to life the rural paper mill town of not only her youth but America’s, too, its bumbling, hard-working, often violent, yet mostly good-hearted lurch forward into the 21st century. “When We Were the Kennedys” is a deeply moving gem!”–Andre Dubus III, author of “House of Sand and Fog” and “Townie”

“This is an extraordinarily moving book, so carefully and artfully realized, about loss and life and love.　Monica Wood displays all her superb novelistic skills in this breathtaking, evocative new memoir.　 Wow.”–Ken Burns, filmmaker

“Wood’s book…goes much beyond the story of her family’s grief. The book is a meditation on time… It’s also a record of a vanished way of life… it avoids sentimentalizing small-town life… By bringing such a town to life, with all its complexities and imperfections, it’s to Monica Wood’s great credit that she goes a long way to answering these questions.” The New Yorker online

“In her intimate but expansive memoir, Monica Wood explores not only her family’s grief but also the national end of innocence. Braiding her own story of mourning together with the heartbreak all around her, Wood has written a tender memoir of a very different time.” —Oprah Magazine

“On her own terms, wry and empathetic, Wood locates the melodies in the aftershock of sudden loss…That a memory piece as pacific and unassuming as When We Were the Kennedys should be allowed a seat in the hothouse society of tell-alls is a tribute to the welcoming sensibility of its author and the knowing faith of her publisher. ” —Boston Globe

“It’s a pleasure to linger with her elegant prose, keen eye, and grace of thought.” —Reader’s Digest “Best of America” issue

“Wood’s gorgeously wrought new book…is a sharp, stunning portrait of a family’s grief and healing, and it also offer a refreshing lens through which to view the JFK tragedy, as his family’s loss helps the Woods feel less adrift in their own sea of anguish.” —The Washingtonian “Best of Washington” issue

The time is the early 60s. Wood’s father, 57, works in the paper mill and one day on his way to work, “drops,” as the locals put it, leaving four daughters, a grown son, and his wife. Crushed by grief, they try to pick up the pieces. Their working-class, melting-pot Maine town is deeply Catholic and one of the pleasures of the book is seeing how faith permeates their lives, sustaining and connecting them with their neighbors.

All the girls attend Catholic school with the nuns, learning a combination of English and French. Mum, with the singing parakeet on her shoulder, irons their uniforms every morning and sends them off with a bologna sandwich, an apple, a cookie. Every night before going to bed the girls pray the Our Father, the Hail Mary, Angel of God, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Act of Contrition. They say the Rosary, attend Sunday Mass, and collectively adore Father Bob, Mum’s brother and the family priest, who smells of Aqua Velva, goes into the next room seven times a day to pray his breviary and when he leaves, touches the girls’ heads murmuring In nomine Patris…Of course he turns out to be an alcoholic.

One of the beloved sisters, Betty, is “retarded,” as Wood explains they said in those days.

Dad and Mum had shared “worry for their eternal second-grader who could knit but not purl, who could not add two and two or reliably spell cat. More than one well-meaning meddler had suggested a home for the ‘feeble-minded,’ a place to unburden us all of the bruised fruit of Mum’s womb. Mum and Dad had met these well-wishers with equal parts fire and ice: Betty would grow up with us, go to school with us, make her First Communion and Confirmation like any other Catholic child, be our big sister as long as she could, and our forever little sister after that. Mum and Dad had decided that, together.”

The Woods live in a third-floor apartment; the Norkuses–Jurgis, they call the husband–are the Lithuanian landlords who live on the first floor. The Norkuses spy, they yell, they go through the Woods’ garbage, they impose rules such as that the girls can’t have their friends over: “Too much stairs!”

“The Norkuses came to America with rags on their feet. That’s how Mum and Dad had always told it, an oft-repeated detail from which I assembled a larger drama: disembarkment in a cold rain, the words Mexico, Maine pinned to a rotting sleeve, the thronged and misty vista of New York Harbor. They’d stumbled stiff-kneed down a gangway, impossibly young and yearning to breathe free, a sepia-toned couple impossible to connect with the Technicolor czars who swivel their joint gaze toward me as I come up with driveway with my grocery bag.

‘Hi,’ I say. I bend to pat Tootsie, tightening the grip on my bag.

‘Lazy poodie!’ Jurgis yells. He means the cat, a white tumbleweed with gum-pink ears. ‘Lazy poodie!’ he yells again, then a downpour of Lithuanian accompanied by laughter–or something–and a slashing gesture with his open palm.

Translation one: I am happy my cat pleases you. Is she not exquisite?

Translation two: I intend to chop off your head. Wait here while I prepare the cleaver

‘Uh…’ I say. ‘Okay.’ ”

When JFK gets killed, Mum identifies completely with Jackie: “We share a bond,” she explains. At one point, the whole crew piles into Aunt Rose’s car and, picking up “Fath” (Fr. Bob) along the way at the Baltimore sanitarium where he’s been drying out, head to Washington DC…

But you’ll want to discover the rest on your own. A big In nomine Patris blessing to Monica Wood for reminding the world of the beauty of family, small-town NE life, and Moxie.

AN OPERA SINGER’S JOURNEY

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

Julia Rolwing is a singer and Adjunct Professor of Voice at Montclair State University and Kean University, both in New Jersey. She’s head of the NJ Vocal Arts Collaborative, which will host a virtual online summit, open to all interested singers, this summer.

Last year she staged and starred in her own production of Tristan und Isolde, the Wagner opera about forbidden love that can run upward of four hours.

She lives in North Bergen, just across the Hudson from Manhattan.

How she got there is a story of vocation, faith, and passion.

Julia was born and raised Catholic in the Columbus, Ohio area. “My father blessed us each night with holy water; my parents prayed. They gave me the sacrament-loving  faith that has sustained me all my life.”

As an 11-year-old, she was in the band room with 60 or so other kids. One day her middle school teacher, Marion Canter, exhorted the choir: “Sing it like Julie!” (the nickname by which she was then known). The moment was seminal. “I didn’t know I was good at anything. I grabbed hold of that and chased it till, decades later, I got my doctorate.” In high school, she had another mentor. “Mr. Joe Thrower was a black gentleman who dressed in elegant three-piece suits and held us to the highest standards. Everyone else was afraid of him but we choir students adored him. He gave us sacred music—the Psalms, Mozart, Beethoven.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

OUR NATION’S SACRED PROMISE

As the Rev. Martin Luther King said, “The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

On a related note, I received the following news update Monday. You can read it and much more on the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 website. The author of this eloquent piece is Bill Ofenloch and I pray it’s okay to present it here in full:

“Liz McAlister, the eldest of the King Bay Plowshares 7, was sentenced today via video to time served, three years supervised release and for a portion of the restitution for the seven of just over $30,000. She was the first of the defendants to be sentenced. The remaining six are scheduled to appear in the Brunswick court, June 29 and 30. Thirty-seven years ago Liz first stood before a Syracuse federal judge to hear the court render a sentence for her Griffiss Plowshares direct action protesting nuclear weapons. Today, with her attorney Bill Quigley in New Orleans and her family beside her in Connecticut, Liz appeared via video before Judge Lisa Godbey Wood who sat in Georgia’s Southern District Federal Court in Brunswick, to hear today’s sentence, maybe the last in the long career of indefatigable hope and courage and unrelenting opposition to nuclear weapons.

Last October, Liz, and the six others were found guilty of trespass, conspiracy and destruction of federal property, three felonies, and a misdemeanor in all, at the Kings Bay Naval Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia, where they had the audacity, in the middle of the night, to symbolically disarm a shrine celebrating US nuclear weapons and to protest the preparations for omnicide—the death of everything. Kings Bay is home to 6 Trident submarines that deploy one-quarter of the US nuclear arsenal.

The world has changed since October 2019 when activists gathered for the trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 in Brunswick, Georgia. We heard testimony and watched a video describing their incursion into the naval base. We heard the defendants explain why they chose April 4—the anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination—to carry out their act of faithful obedience. They described hanging banners, the first, a quote from the Rev. Dr. King that read, “The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” and another that said “The ultimate logic of Trident is Omnicide.” [bold mine] They also painted messages of peace and prayerfully poured baby bottles of blood at the naval base.

In the intervening months, while federal marshals prepared presentencing reports for the Kings Bay 7, the COVID-19 pandemic rose up to take more than 400,000 lives globally—reminding us all, if we have ears to hear, of the peril of complacency in the face of low-probability/high-risk events. It is no exaggeration, and not meant to diminish the suffering of those who have been ravaged by or lost loved ones to the novel corona virus, to say that a nuclear war would make the current struggles look like a paper cut by comparison.

In quiet, quintessential southern, Brunswick, Georgia, the spotlight that shone briefly on nuclear weapons during the trial in October shifted abruptly in May when the pandemic of racism re-entered the public’s line of sight and the world learned that Ahmaud Arbery, a young African-American man was hunted down by three armed white men. Arbery, out for a morning jog in February, the men in pickup trucks, shot and killed him. Going into May, none of the men had been indicted or faced any charges. They had, literally, gotten away with murder. Now the three men sit in the Glynn County jail where Fr. Steve Kelly has been for more than two years.

Because of COVID, Instead of gathering in the Brunswick court with activists and supporters, complete with a festival of hope, we gathered in spirit to listen to the court proceedings on a conference call line. The night before, friends, family, and supporters had gathered for a virtual blessing and liturgy via a Zoom/ Facebook event that will be available on our website later this week.

Martin Gugino, the elderly man who was knocked down to the sidewalk by Buffalo police and lay bleeding from his head is a long-time peace activist. He recently made a series of video statements in support of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 activists. He knows them from drone protests at The Hancock AFB in Syracuse, NY and Witness Against Torture actions in Washington, DC. Martin primarily works through the Western New York Peace Center. He texted today to let us know he is alive and in recovery.

Frida Berrigan’s Statement

Frida Berrigan, Liz’s daughter, gave a spirited statement of support for her mother attesting to her lifelong commitment to peace. “…as a 46 year-old white citizen in a nation that is going to spend $720 plus billion on the military this year, even in the face of an economy smashing pandemic that has killed 100,000 people and laid bare the stark inequity and fundamental brokenness of every fiber of the social safety net, I am grateful that people like my mother are willing to stand up and say: “Trident is a crime.”

As a 46 year-old white citizen in a country where white supremacy and militarized policing are so emboldened that Derek Chavin can crush George Floyd’s life out of him in front of a crowd, in front of cameras, where the McMichaels father and son can gun down Ahmaud Arbery in broad daylight as he jogged through the streets of a quiet Georgia town, I draw hope and inspiration from white people who continue to invoke Dr. King’s framework of the giant triplets of racism, militarism and materialism… these weights that cripple our collective humanity. I draw hope and inspiration from my mom and her friends who declare that “Black Lives Matter” who wed their anti-nuclear analysis with an anti-racist ethos, and declare that the ultimate logic of trident is omnicide.

So, I am here as a daughter who doesn’t want her 80 year-old mother sent back to jail and a human being who wonders how anything ever changes if people like my mom aren’t willing to take that risk.

I’m hoping you agree with the government that Liz McAlister has served enough time in jail already and you’ll help our family close this long and challenging episode of our lives today by sentencing her to time served. I also hope that you will recognize that as a person who owns nothing but the clothes on her back and the water colors she uses to paint with her grandchildren, you will waive all fines and restitution. “
(Frida’s full statement is on the website: Sentencing Statement.)

Liz’s Statement

Finally Liz spoke about what motivated her to join this action and take such risks. She quoted the biblical exhortation to “Beat swords into plowshares” from Isaiah and said, “All my life I’ve tried to follow the prophet, Isaiah, to stop learning war… All my life I have spoken and written against nuclear weapons and I believe these are contrary to life, destructive of life on every single level.”

The sentencing hearing began with technical glitches and was adjourned for more than a half hour at the beginning while these were worked out. There were 270 people listening to the audio feed when adjourned and due to some confusion about getting back on only 230 were on for the actual hearing which went on for another hour. Judge Wood said that she had read several hundred letters which had come to her from plowshares supporters and considered each of them. However, the judge then ruled against all the defense arguments for mitigation.

The defendants are considering doing another webinar before the end of June. Stay tuned.”

You can receive updates on the Kings Bay 7 Plowshares action as follows:

EMAIL: Media: kbp7media@gmail.com
General: kingsbayplowshares@gmail.com
WEBSITE: www.kingsbayplowshares7.org
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/Kingsbayplow...
TWITTER: https://www.twitter.com/kingsbayplow7
INSTAGRAM: https://instagram.com/kingsbayplowsha...

I am off to Mass, where everything is centered; where everything coalesces.

CHEKHOV ON CULTURED PEOPLE

I’ve been on a Janet Malcolm reading kick. Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey is shaping up to be my favorite of the bunch.

At one point she quotes a monk from the 1886 short story “On Easter Eve” who says in a discussion of the poetics of certain hymns of praise in the Russian Orthodox liturgy called akathistoi: “You can do nothing by wisdom and holiness if God has not given you the gift. Everything must be harmonious, brief and complete…Every line must be beautified in every way; there must be flowers and lightning and wind and sun and all the objects of the visible world.”

Adds Malcolm, “Chekhov’s own literary enterprise could hardly be better described. His stories and plays–even the darkest among them–are hymns of praise. Flowers and lighting and wind and sun and all the objects of the visible world appear in them as they appear in the work of no other writer. In almost every Chekhov work there is a moment when we suddenly feel as Ryabovitch felt when the young woman entered the room and kissed him.”

Chekhov is of course universally recognized as a master of the short story and play. He was also delicate, sensitive, funny, hard-working and kind. He undertook the care of his entire family, made little money as a doctor–he mostly treated peasants for free–and in 1890, undertook an arduous journey to the penal colony on Sakhalin Island, later writing movingly of the degradation and suffering he had witnessed there. He died of TB at 44.

In this 1886 letter, he’s taking his brother Nikolai to task for his dissolute drinking habits and generally lax character. His description of the “cultured person” is as sound today as it was 130 years ago.

“You have often complained to me that people “don’t understand you”! Goethe and Newton did not complain of that…. Only Christ complained of it, but He was speaking of His doctrine and not of Himself…. People understand you perfectly well. And if you do not understand yourself, it is not their fault….

Cultured people must, in my opinion, satisfy the following conditions:

They respect human personality, and therefore they are always kind, gentle, polite, and ready to give in to others. They do not make a row because of a hammer or a lost piece of india-rubber; [Author’s Note: this really struck home as “someone”in my back yard just walked off with my precious yellow-handled shovel/spade] if they live with anyone they do not regard it as a favour and, going away, they do not say “nobody can live with you.” They forgive noise and cold and dried-up meat and witticisms and the presence of strangers in their homes.
They have sympathy not for beggars and cats alone. Their heart aches for what the eye does not see….
They respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts.
They are sincere, and dread lying like fire. They don’t lie even in small things. A lie is insulting to the listener and puts him in a lower position in the eyes of the speaker. They do not pose, they behave in the street as they do at home, they do not show off before their humbler comrades. They are not given to babbling and forcing their uninvited confidences on others. Out of respect for other people’s ears they more often keep silent than talk.
They do not disparage themselves to rouse compassion. They do not play on the strings of other people’s hearts so that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say “I am misunderstood,” or “I have become second-rate,” because all this is striving after cheap effect, is vulgar, stale, false….
They have no shallow vanity. They do not care for such false diamonds as knowing celebrities…If they do a pennyworth they do not strut about as though they had done a hundred roubles’ worth, and do not brag of having the entry where others are not admitted…. The truly talented always keep in obscurity among the crowd, as far as possible from advertisement….
If they have a talent they respect it. They sacrifice to it rest, women, wine, vanity…. They are proud of their talent…. Besides, they are fastidious.
They develop the aesthetic feeling in themselves. They cannot go to sleep in their clothes, see cracks full of bugs on the walls, breathe bad air, walk on a floor that has been spat upon, cook their meals over an oil stove. They seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct… What they want in a woman is not a bed-fellow… They do not ask for the cleverness which shows itself in continual lying. They want especially, if they are artists, freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for motherhood…. They do not swill vodka at all hours of the day and night…For they want mens sana in corpore sano [a healthy mind in a healthy body].

And so on. This is what cultured people are like. In order to be cultured and not to stand below the level of your surroundings it is not enough to have read ‘The Pickwick Papers’ and learnt a monologue from ‘Faust.’ …

What is needed is constant work, day and night, constant reading, study, will…. Every hour is precious for it…. Come to us, smash the vodka bottle, lie down and read…

You must drop your vanity, you are not a child … you will soon be thirty.
It is time!

I expect you…. We all expect you.”

i’m a hell of a lot older than 30. But I’d like to expect all that of myself, too.

BACK TO THE BUSINESS OF LIFE: RESURRECTION CEMETERY

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

Death has been much on everyone’s minds lately. Our own, possibly. The deaths of those who have fallen to COVID-19. Death in general.

Cemeteries were one of the first public places upon which restrictions were lifted. As of mid-May, the Archdiocese’s eleven Catholic cemeteries were open for visitation Monday through Saturday from 4 to 6, and Sundays from 8 to 6.

Meaning that you can now die, have a funeral and get buried in somewhat the same way as always.

That’s a comfort to many. And since the Communion of Saints—the spiritual union of the members of the Christian Church, living and the dead—is about as close to Mass as we can get now, last week I thought to visit Resurrection Cemetery in Rosemead.

I don’t know anyone who’s buried there, but that didn’t matter.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

G.K. CHESTERTON ON THE COLOR WHITE

“[W]hite is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel, or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours; but he never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.”

–G.K. Chesterton, from an article published for Daily News in 1905, “A Piece of Chalk”

Curfew here in LA County is 10 pm tonight instead of 6, as it has been for the previous four nights. Staying close to home hasn’t been a hardship for me.

Yesterday, the Gospel reading was “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Father Joe at Holy Family in South Pasadena gave a simple, beautiful homily at the 8:15 am Mass. He pointed out that Christ lived under a harsh and oppressive government and was thus between a rock and a hard place–counsel people not to pay their taxes and be labeled an insurgent; counsel people to pay their taxes and be labeled a traitor to his own kind.

He was in much the same position we find ourselves today in other words, I added to myself.  He, Father Joe, went on to  point out that Christ was not a member of a bipartisan political system and thus did not live out his convictions by voting a certain way. Instead, he always tried to do what was right.

Of course he was killed for it.  But that was the code he lived by: He always tried to do what was right. 

That’s an effort that for each individual leads into a thousand other questions, dilemmas, choices, decisions. 

But I’ve thought often in recent days of the Sermon on the Mount: in particular–Blessed are the peacemakers. 

We’re urged by certain voices to believe that our civic–and more disturbingly, increasingly our religious–“duty” consists in joining up with this side or that side so that we can then present a united front of hate against the other side. 

This is a form of groupthink that, like all groupthink, is prima facie anti-Gospel, and that strikes me as abhorrent.

The peacemaker is not a milquetoast, a coward, a non-participant. The peacemaker feels the sorrow, the anger, the heartbreak, the injustice of “the system,” down to his her her bones–then consents to hold the tension without returning violence for violence.  

This is no simple matter–anyone who’s tried it knows you flounder and teeter and fail, and that in many ways you ARE a coward. But I have never seen any form of violence in my own life-whether personal or political–accomplish one single enduring thing except to bring about more violence.  

I’ve also been moved, in light of current events,  to read up on the one unforgivable sin: blasphemy, which consists in attributing the works of Christ to the devil. 

Equally blasphemous, it seems to me, would be the attempt to attribute the works of the devil to Christ. 

LET’S BE SOMETHING FLAMING AND GAUDY–PURE OF HEART!

MOVIES GALORE: QUARANTINE TIMES FUN

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

Like most of us, I love movies.

My taste is a mixture of high-brow and low-brow that tends toward classic dramas, film noir, and documentary. 

I revere Robert Bresson: Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket(1959). I’ve written here of Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew(1964), named by the Vatican as “the best film about Jesus ever made in the history of cinema.”

That doesn’t mean I always worship at the feet of the greats. Last year, for example, I finally forced myself to sit through Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), routinely hailed in critics’ circles as one of the greatest ten films of all time. It was torture. The whole thing, an allegory about death set in medieval times, was such a giant bore I was actually indignant by the end. I loved A Winter Light and The Silence. But The Seventh Seal?—come on.

Also worth pondering is the mystery of how the same director could make a masterpiece like The Gospel According to Matthew, and then devolve into the moral obscenity of, say Salò.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

DARK WOOD TO WHITE ROSE

Every so often I revisit a book I’m not sure when, where or why came into my possession. (Is that even a sentence? I’ve been visited by insomnia and am currently semi-hallucinating with fatigue).

It’s by the late Oxford-educated Dante scholar Helen M. Luke (1904-1985). It’s called Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante’s Divine Comedy. And it’s well worth a read.

The original copyright in 1975, though the version I have, published by Parabola Books, was issued in 1989.

As Luke notes in the Introduction, the path toward consciousness and wholeness is impossible “without a continual dying–without repeated death of old attitudes, of superficial desires, and finally of every claim of ego dominance.” So get out of my way while I transform!

A couple of passages:

“In religious terminology, the phrases ‘contemplative life’ and ‘active life’ have a specific meaning, defining the emphasis on prayer or work in the various monastic orders. But contemplation is in fact an attitude to life, a way of relation to all phenomena, whether of the world outside or of the world within. To contemplate is to look at–and at the same time to reflect upon that which we see, with feeling as well as thought.”

DETAIL OF A MINIATURE OF BEATRICE EXPLAINING SOME SCIENTIFIC THEORIES TO DANTE, INCLUDING THE APPEARANCE OF THE MOON 
Italy, N. (Tuscany, Siena?).
Attribution: GIOVANNI DI PAOLO 

Luke has lots to say about womanhood and our particular journey. I especially like the following, which is both astute and, considering it was written almost 50 years ago, prescient:

“In order to find her freedom and release her own positive masculine creative spirit, she has a double task: she must discover what it really means to be a woman at the same time as she brings up and relates to the masculine in her unconscious. The equivalent for her of the lure of the Siren in a man’s unconscious is therefore the glittering image of power through identification with a masculine type of activity which swallows up her womanhood; she is dazzled by second-hand concepts and by the spell of words. This is not to say that she cannot work on equal terms with man in fields which have been considered specifically his; on the contrary, every conscious woman needs to do some so-called masculine work. But f she works in imitation of man instead of our of her own nature, she will be identified with an inferior kind of masculinity, inevitably sterile because it is based on a rejection at the core of her being. She too, then, is in the grip of the incubus, is devoured by an image, as man is by the Siren, until ‘the personality rots away into illusion.’ Many women today, reacting violently against the age-long degradation of the feminine, proclaim quite rightly the equality of woman with man on the level of value and ability, and her need to be freed from the contempt which has sought to confine her to conventional roles; but too often they try to achieve their goals by an attempt to obliterate all difference in the human nature of man and woman. The result is, of course, a far worse kind of contempt–the rejection of one half of reality itself and the submergence of the individual woman into the meaninglessness of imitation. Thus all the true freedom and creativeness of the spirit is lost.

At the other end of the scale, of course, this kind of imitation produces the very thing it rejects, and unconsciously the woman caught in it becomes a mere prostitute inwardly, if not outwardly, since her instinctual life is separated from her true creative task of nourishing responsible relationship.”

HEY, LET’S BE FRIENDS!
DIVINE COMEDY PAGE OVERVIEW,
FOL. 53v, BET. 1380 AND 1400,
BIBLIOTECA NAZIONALE MARCIANA

POPE JOHN XXIII’S DAILY DECALOGUE

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

Pope John XXIII served as Pope from 1958 to1963 and was canonized on April 27, 2014.)

He is most noted for convoking the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, which was inaugurated on October 11, 1962, at St Peter’s Basilica.

But I best remember him for his promulgation of The Daily Decalogue.

Only for today, I will seek to live the livelong day positively without wishing to solve the problems of my life all at once.Only for today, I will take the greatest care of my appearance: I will dress modestly; I will not raise my voice; I will be courteous in my behaviour; I will not criticize anyone; I will not claim to improve or to discipline anyone except myself.Only for today, I will be happy in the certainty that I was created to be happy, not only in the other world but also in this one.Only for today, I will adapt to circumstances, without requiring all circumstances to be adapted to my own wishes.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

PILGRIMAGE AND THE PORTSMOUTH INSTITUTE’S SUMMER CONFERENCE

Back in 2007, lost in a dark wood at the mid-point of my life, I drove my ’96 Celica convertible from LA to the coast of NH–where I was raised–and back.

I was in mental, emotional, and spiritual anguish, to the point where I began suffering from gnarly skin ailments. The only thing I knew was to stay close to Christ. So I stayed in Motel 6s and Super 8s, and convents and monasteries, and I went to Mass every day.

I made it to the East Coast and back. I was eventually (though not right away) transformed. Here’s the thumbnail version the story.

For more, join a live Q and A at the Portsmouth Institute’s 2020 Virtual Summer Conference on Saturday, June 20, from 10-10:45 a.m. EST. I’ll be discussing my pilgrimage, and you can share yours!