Heather King's Blog, page 6

ONE PEOPLE, ONE LANGUAGE: PLEASE!!

Is not the below scenario as contemporary as can be?

“Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words. 2 It came about as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and [c]settled there. 3 They said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.” And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. 4 They said, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” 5 The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. 6 The Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. 9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.”

–Genesis 11:1-9

RICHARD FLANAGAN’S “QUESTION 7”

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

Richard Flanagan, Booker Prize-winning novelist, was raised and lives in Tasmania.

His new book, “Question 7” (Knopf, $28), takes its title from a metaphysical puzzle posed in a short story by Russian writer Anton Chekhov:

“Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave Station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach Station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach Station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?”

Chekhov’s point is that the writer’s job is to ask the deepest questions without purporting to answer them.

In a family memoir that weaves together the romance between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, the development of the atom bomb, and his father’s internment as a Japanese POW, some of the questions Flanagan asks include: Who owns the truth? Is there a final accounting? If there’s no one left to remember that a particular incident happened — the brutal torture inflicted by a group of camp guards; the incineration of a city and its people — does that mean the incident never happened?

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

VISION VERSUS VOCATION

Wow. I traveled so much last year, and now I’m leading an 8-week zoom Writing Workshop, that more than midway through February, I feel like I’m just catching up to 2025…

Am reading a book called Strangers in the City: Reflections on the Beliefs and Values of the Rule of Saint Benedict, by Michael Casey, monk of Tarrawara (Australia).

He writes: “There is very little mystery about perseverance–it simply involves making use of the means that monastic life offers, day by day and year by year, and having confidence in God. Perseverance is not a matter of gritting one’s teeth in difficult times or stretching oneself forward to cross the finish line. As Benedict notes, it begins on Day One. It is a matter of really committing oneself (as distinct from ‘making a commitment’) to give one’s best to the monastic process and to stay with it while it works its magic on us. Grace is working non us ot neutralize the natural fecklessness of the will; what we have to do is to avoid interfering with the process.”

“Stability is neither progressive nor conservative. Its strength lies in its attention to the present moment, like the peasant at his plow, concentrating on the job at hand and not much looking up from it. Yet the labor is sustainted by the hope of a harvest. It is not for nothing that he works. Salvation is a matter of hope; for the moment stability helps to ensure that the furrows run true.”

“Living mindfully involves limiting all forms of escapism, not only those that are frivolous, but more so the serious concerns that sometimes hijack our attention and concern…Constantly seeking to be entertained by the pursuit of novelties of one kind or another is a most effective way of blocking any progress toward contemplation. Carpe diem.“

I’ve been thinking of this a lot as I’ve discovered as I may have mentioned this satanic online game called Free Mahjong. A couple of months ago I vowed never to play it again but did so three times last week and each time stayed up too late as I literally can’t stop once I start and was then tired the next day, and altogether–please God, no. The game has a soothing effect on my nerves, for the first six or seven tries anyway, and then I just become like a gambler at the roulette wheel like in a 40s movie shot in the casinos of Monte Carlo. (Speaking of which, check out Jeanne Moreau in Bay of Angels if you want to see a terrific/horrifying gambling movie).

Anyway, also last week we had the story of the fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis. And I’ve been thinking how, ever since we ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (or however you want to think of it), there’s an intractable element in the human psyche that craves “getting away with something.” It’s a companion urge to the urge to hide from God. Like a child, I, for one, want to “sneak” in a little fun.

So I would play Mahjong, justifying my little escape on the grounds that I work so hard, and thinking all day, exercising my brain, is so hard, and give me a break for heaven’s sake I don’t drink, do drugs, shop, overeat, etc etc. We alll have our own list. Of course there is nothing wrong with rest and recreation and relaxation–in fact, we need those things! Especially maybe as we age. But this was something different. You don’t get addicted to “healthy” forms of rest and relaxation.

So I would play Mahjong and wake earlly the next morning, exhausted, and as always, however, immediately sit down to pray, feeling vaguely or not-so-vaguely guilty, and ashamed, and mad at myself. Was God mad at me, too?

But the other morning I realized, No, God’s not mad at you. He’s not mad. Take that out of the equation. You don’t have to try to “get away with anything” because there’s nothing to get away with. He’d love you even if you played some stupid tile-matching game every hour of the day for the rest of your life. So take that little clandestine thrill, if that’s what it is, out of the equation. No need to hide. No need to sneak. And when I remove the “thrill,” what’s left is the freedom to ask myself, one more time, What do I really want?

Temporary anesthesia aside (also, the pathetic thrill, not to be minimized, of winning, which is accompanied by flame coming out of the top of a volcano and an extremelly satisifying victorious bot sound), what I really want is to love and serve God with all my heart, part of which is to be INTERESTED and ENGAGLED and CURIOUS and GROWING and LEARNING. In the end, with the tile game, I’m bored, empty, flatlined, and too tired wholeheartedly to pursue the things I love the next day.

“The sustainability of our commitment demands that we are proactive in ordering our life. In particular it means nipping in the bund any tendency to lead a double life by blurring the boundaries between good and evil so that large areas are accepted as morally neutral. We cannot afford to be vague. Behavior inconsistent with the commitement we have made usually begins at the level of thought”…

“When Malcolm Muggeridge was making a TV documentary about the Cistercian monks in Scotland he elicited from one of the senior monks a reply that delighted him. In response to his question about monastic austerity the reply came, “It’s a hard bed to lie on, but a soft bed to die on.”

VISIONARIES

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

I’ve developed a soft spot for those people we hear of from time to time who see Christ in a tortilla, Mary’s face in the trunk of a sycamore, the baby Jesus in the condensation of a hospital window.

In Protestant New England, where I come from, we had little regard for such phenomena. “Malarkey,” the grownups might have snickered, then doggedly continued chopping wood, hauling lobster traps, or canning peaches.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

“The Kingdom of Heaven,” said the Lord Christ, “is among you.” But what, precisely, is the Kingdom of Heaven? You cannot point to existing specimens, saying, “Lo, here!” or “Lo, there!” You can only experience it. But what is it like, so that when we experience it we may recognize it? Well, it is a change, like being born again and relearning everything from the start. It is secret, living power—like yeast. It is something that grows, like seed. It is precious like buried treasure, like a rich pearl, and you have to pay for it. It is a sharp cleavage through the rich jumble of things which life presents: like fish and rubbish in a draw-net, like wheat and tares; like wisdom and folly; and it carries with it a kind of menacing finality; it is new, yet in a sense it was always there—like turning out a cupboard and finding there your own childhood as well as your present self; it makes demands, it is like an invitation to a royal banquet—gratifying, but not to be disregarded, and you have to live up to it; where it is equal, it seems unjust; where it is just it is clearly not equal—as with the single pound, the diverse talents, the labourers in the vineyard, you have what you bargained for; it knows no compromise between an uncalculating mercy and a terrible justice—like the unmerciful servant, you get what you give; it is helpless in your hands like the King’s Son, but if you slay it, it will judge you; it was from the foundations of the world; it is to come; it is here and now; it is within you. It is recorded that the multitudes sometimes failed to understand.

–Dorothy L Sayers, from The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement

Things have been pretty quiet around my little hermit hut, and that is just the way I like them.

One of my greastest joys consists in the birds and birdsong with which I’m surrounded.

My ideal day equals morning prayer, a little house and yard work, a little admin, a little writing, a little reading and puttering, maybe an afternoon nap, coffee at 3 pm, then set out on foot for the Newman Center by 4 for time in the Blessed Sacrament chapel before Evening Prayer and Mass. No errands, no driving, very little talking.

Of course our “ideal” days are few and far between. “As the Master desires,” said St. Josephine Bakhita.

Also of course it’s pretty easy to say, “As the Master desires” when our lives aren’t too hard.

It’s probably a matter of age more than anything else, but as the world seems to get ever louder, my impulse–at the moment, anyway, is to get every quieter. One thing age brings is a keen cognizance of timed–how precious it is; how easy it is to squander.

In a chapter entitled “Priests: A Need for Interior Conversion,” Fr. Donald Haggerty notes in his book Conversion: “For prayer requires sacrificial choices and a sacrificial life-style. Only a man truly seeking God and the good of souls will treat this commitment with a sacred sense. More appealing activities can be pursued in work, and then of course there are recreations.”

Oh, aren’t there, though! Mine might be more along the lines of word games, reading newspapers and magazines, and watching Werner Hergoz movies and film noir–but still, those are recreations. And those are some of the more high-toned ones: there are others, less redeeming.

Either you believe Christ is who he said he was, or you don’t. Either you believe prayer helps all the world, or you don’t. If you do, either you set aside the time, energy, and effort to prayer, or you don’t. Why do I do the thing I don’t want to do, and don’t do the thing I want to do?

I know I mention Fr. Haggery a lot and it’s mainly because his voice and thought strike me as authentic in a sea of celebrity priests who seem so profoundly enamored of seeing their faces on camera and hearing their voices deliver more trendy “messages.” They have huge followings, these priests which, rightly or wrongly, makes me immediately distrustful. Fr. Haggery you can barely find. He has no social media presence whatever, nor even any contact info on the St. Patrick’s Cathedral website where he’s assigned and I assume lives. He’s ministering to the people of his archdiocese. He’s writing incredibly profound, useful and challenging books (which you easily can find). And guaranteed, he’s praying.

Anyway, the sun is shining (it has been in the 70s here in Arizona), the birds are singing, I just received a book I ordered, Cold Kitchen A Year of Culinary Travels, by Caroline Eden, and there have been all kinds of exciting upsets at the WTA Qatar Open in Doha.

“Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”

—Naguib Mahfouz, Egyptian writer

FINDING THE BEAUTY IN A MAN AND HIS “CLUTTER”

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

Rosamond Purcell (b. 1942) is a Boston-based photographer and writer whose domains are the palimpsest melding of past, present, and future; the natural and the man-made; the wonder and mystery of decay.

Raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts — her father was a professor of Byzantine history and Victorian literature — she’s spent much of her life in the dim back rooms of natural history museums.

In “Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals” (Mariner Books, $16.68), she writes: 

“As a sojourner, I relish the random search: wandering through miles of corridors, opening hundreds of heavy doors, and choking through fumes, dust, and dark to find the holy grail.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

A huge thank you to all the many readers who responded to my call for Credible Witnesses: I so appreciate each and every one of you. I tried to respond to each person individually, but if I somehow missed you, my apologies.

CALL FOR CREDIBLE WITNESSES

Hello people. As you may know, I write a monthly column for Magnificat Magazine called Credible Witnesses. The witness in question has to be a notable Catholic, dead, and uncanonized. His or her cause may have been opened, but the person can’t yet (and may never be) a canonized saint.

I have to submit my proposed list for the following year by June or so and am thinking to canvass you devoted readers for ideas! The range is wide: it can be an artist, a member of a religous order, a layperson, a member of the military, a priest, martyr, stigmatist, factory worker, housewife…but the person has to have done something noteworthy enough so that they’ve been somewhat in the public eye, however small the public. So it can’t be your late Aunt Agnes or your high school chemistry teacher, for example, no matter how worthy those members of your Personal Communion of Saints may have been.

Feel free to reply via comment, or to email me at hdking719@gmail.com. Thank you!

I gave a luncheon talk over the weekend to a lovely group of Catholic women in Denver, Colorado.

I’d never been to Denver, and had only stopped in Colorado once before, when on a cross-country mid-life-crisis road trip, I washed up at Benet Hill Monastery in Colorado Springs for a few nights. It was on the return leg of the journey and I was so wiped out I looked and felt like a member of the Donner Party.

I was in somewhat better shape this time and after flying in from Tucson Friday morning and visiting with the gals, checked into my hotel and set out on an exploratory walk in what appeared to be a miles-long-and-wide corporate office park. The weather was gorgeous–clear, sunny, and though there was snow on the ground, pleasantly warm.

I picked my way across a couple of surface streets that were more like freeways and that I gathered few people navigate on foot, and came upon a Sprouts where I purchased blueberries and sushi for that night’s dinner, and continued on toward an open space I’d found on the map called Bluffs Regional Park. By the time I reached the trailhead, however, the sun was already starting to disappear behind the mountains, and I’d already walked pretty far, so I turned back.

En route, I walked through a vast swath of cookie-cutter houses that had obviously been designed from templates: template Prairie Home, template Craftsman bungalow, template Cape Cod, template 1920s Grover’s Corner house with a porch across the front. They were all attached, I think, or had very little space between them, and thus appeared like pieces you could pick up and move around like on a game board.

Between two rows of these homes that went on and on was open space with the occasional playground or shaded picnic table, obviously engineered to foster community and neighborhood. Which was nice if, again, slightly…programmed somehow.

The idea worked on me. I think a lot about how no matter how immune I think I might be to the relentless cacophony of noise, voices, vitriol, and the attempts to market and commodify every single aspect of our lives from conception to death, the fact is that you can’t really live in the world, and remain completely uninfluenced. All of that rubs off, to some extent, whether we want it to or not, and why would I be any different?

Also I’m so old now that, even though those days are long-gone, part of me is forever back in North Hampton New Hampshire, in the house my father built for us, with my mother sewing my dresses for school, and supper with home-made bread and vegetables from the garden.

They’ve wrecked our food, our clothing, and now our shelter, I thought. Suddenly, in a gully of marshland reeds and grasses, I spotted a flock of red-winged blackbirds, perching and chatting and sending up their sweet, sweet song.

The Kindgom of Heaven is like yeast, all through the loaf.

From a recent substack by Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, called “How the Gender Fever Finally Broke”:

“Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.”

I have no particular desire to be a oontrarian, nor an oddball. It does stike me that as Catholics, though, our conviction should have steered us way, way clear from the gender ideology–an unspeakable violation of truth, beauty, and the human person–from Day One.

The Catholic ladies of Denver, as I said, were lovely. I spoke for a women’s group called Magnificat, and to a person, those present were warm, welcoming, and hospitable. My hostess drove me back to the Denver airport afterwards. Because of the timing of the talk, I hadn’t dared book a flight on the 4 pm back to Tucson (which though I put myself on standby was full), so I had a five-hour layover.

The Denver airport I must say is tip-top. It’s huge, so you can have any number of lengthy walks. (In fact, I researched whether you can walk between terminals, as you can at Dallas- Fort Worth instead of taking the train, but in Denver they won’t let you. Still, you can walk one end of any given terminal to the other which, as my gate changed three times, I had ample opportunity to do).

There were huge windows all around giving on to view of the Rocky Mountains and, eventually, the sunset. I walked for quite a while, and said the Rosary, and later Evening Prayer, watching the faces of the many, many people passing through, and thought about my strange little life which consists in large part, especially while traveling, of putting my own interests, desires, schedule, food preferences, writing, convenience and comfort aside and entering into, being as present as I can possibly be, for and to other people’s lives.

I had no-one with whom to process my trip and my talk, nor did I feel a particular need to process. The Lord was with me, I had poured myself out, given all I had, and done my best. I used to agonize more about whether my talk was “good,” and whether I’d reached anyone, and had my work and pouring out borne fruit? That’s always a fool’s errand. If you break it down, the whole effort would seem senseless and absurd–which is kind of true of most of our efforts. Think how a priest feels! Or a mother….

At the end of the day, if we’re drained, all the better: what else would we do? What else had any of those incredible women done, but been pouring themselves out for weeks, if not months, to put on their luncheon? We all just do our little part, and how grateful I am to be part of it, however small.

Thus, the Kingdom moves forward, incrementally.

LET NOT OUR HOPE BE PUT TO SHAME: THE 2025 WILDFIRES

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

Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of the spiritual classic “Man’s Search for Meaning,” wrote:

“Dostoevsky said once, ‘There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.’ These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom — which cannot be taken away — that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”

Catholicism is tailor-made to make us worthy of our suffering: past, present, and future. Whether our transmission just went out, or our house just burned down, we’ve been welcomed into and united with the suffering of Christ, which is to say the suffering at the heart of all mankind: the lame, the blind, the leper, the poor in spirit.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE SMARTEST MAN ALIVE

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

One of the people culture maven and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell profiled in his 2008 blockbuster “Outliers: The Story of Success” (Back Bay Books, $11.64) is a man named Chris Langan, who supposedly has the highest IQ in the world.

This record has since been disputed but at the very least, we can agree that the man is very, very smart.

Langan grew up poor, had an abusive stepfather, and even after educating himself to the skies in philosophy, physics, mathematics, and linguistics, had been unable to achieve mainstream success. Here was a man “with a one-in-a-million mind, and he had yet to have any impact on the world,” noted Gladwell.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

DESIGN AND ULTIMATE REASON

“We might ask whether there were impulsive, random acts by Jesus, acts without purpose. Healing one person, but not another? A turn down one road rather than another? Cursing this fig tree and ont that one? Did every event involving Our Lord have some design and ultimate reason? If we answer yes, as no doubt we should, we are acknowledging as well that even the smallest hours in our life can be part of the divine plan for our souls…A God who descended to a crib and the obscurity of a carpenter’s shop may want alertness to his presence even in the smallest choices. he wants all in in a life to be offered to him. If we do not attend to that thought daily, we miss many opportunities for an offering to him that otherwise could be thought simply the endurance of a day’s difficulties.”

–Fr. Donald Haggery, from Conversion: Spiritual Insights Into an Essential Encounter with God

“I wonder if contentment is really a virtue? Like balance, it can so easily slip over into indifference or fence straddling….One clear example for me is that I am called at this moment both to love the monastic life and to be an active layperson in the world. At first, it seemed to me that the tension was unbearable, and that I should ‘fish or cut bait’ I ought to choose between one or the other, and give up the longing/desire for the unchosen one. Yet was unable to choose and gradually I began to see that, right now, God calls me to have a foot on both sides. It may look like fence straddling to some, but to me it feels like a bridge, a conduit through which communication becomes possible in a way it would not without someone like me, someone content with being ‘mixed.’ The tension continues, but the contentment predominates.”

–Norvene Vest, from Preferring Christ: A Devotional Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict

These quotes help get at what I was reaching for in two recent vidoes, both in some way about the concept of “order.”

I have a foot in a few different worlds: this world, which is not of His Kingdom the world of 12-step recovery which has some overlap but far from perfectly or completely dovetails with my convictions as a follower of Christ; the world of a visible, active, participating member of the Mysticl Body of the Church; my interior, “real life…where I live not now, but Christ lives in me…

Or something like that! It is often a lot of tension to bear as there are different groups of people who I love and in some rudimentary sense want to serve, people in the various worlds with very different approaches to and convictions about life; people who want, need, approve or disapprove of my own beliefs and approach to life…So how to stand my ground and, be true to my own beliefs, while simultaneously trying to be a peacemaker. How to refuse to allow my beliefs, convictions and speech to be compelled by others, while living out my beliefs without trying to impose them on others….

I’m a writer so to simply state and try to articulate my beliefs is not to try to impose them, it’s to try and share them, for those who are interested. .

Also my time and energy are limited. So how to make boundaries but not barricades? How to honor my very real limitations while also stretching as far as I can…knowing that I am going to and do often fail and falter? Knowing that in the stretching I can become impatient, rigid, and judgmental…

Talking to a friend the other day, I laughed, “I feel like a slave. A slave who doesn’t do a very good job.”