Heather King's Blog, page 60

OUR POOR DISTRACTED HEARTS

“God alone knows what is in man. No one knows what really to make of himself in his poor distracted heart; whether his real self lives in his longing for a greater love of God, or in his unacknowledged and unrepentant grumbling at the immeasurable demands of his love.”

–Father Karl Rahner

FINDING SOLACE FOR MY POOR DISTRACTED HEART
AT THE HUNTINGTON DESERT GARDEN

BREAD FOR THE ALWAYS UNCERTAIN JOURNEY

I was supposed to be out in the desert today, ostensibly attending the women’s qualifying matches at the annual Indian Wells Tennis Tournament. The two-week tournament, just one step down from a Grand Slam, is a very big deal in the tennis world, and always begins the second week of March.

Many years ago I bought a seat for a semifinal (those seats are not cheap, trust me) with Victoria Azarenka , and she backed out before the match, and we ticketholders were left high and dry. Ever since, I have opted to attend the first one or two days of the tournament, which are free, and in which the lower-ranked players vie for a place in the main draw.

The stadiums are way smaller, you can wander about and watch any number of matches or parts of matches, and even the most mediocre of the lower-ranked players perform at a level that, if you have ever played tennis yourself, is of an entirely different, infinitely higher order of being and doing in the world than you could have possibly imagined.

Also you can hang around the practice courts and possibly catch glimpses of your heroines (or heroes as the case may be–the ATP is here as well) in action.

Almost always when I travel, it’s for work or another obligation of some kind. So Indian Wells is the one event to which for the last few years I’ve treated myself to a couple of days off and a couple of nights at a halfway decent airbnb. You have to plan months in advance as half the world descends upon the place this time of year and reserves a place to stay accordingly.

The Coachella Valley is world-famous for its year-round stellar weather. I got a pedi in anticipation, thinking I could get a head start on the spring tanning of shins, ankles and feet that makes for optimal sandal-wearing.

Saturday, I discovered it’s supposed to rain most of the week.

And last night around 9 PST I learned that a single person had tested positive for the coronavirus in Riverside County, where Indian Wells is located, and that therefore the entire tournament had been cancelled!

My heart really goes out to the players, many of whom had already flown in, plus this is their livelihood, career, and playing season.

I got a 30% or so refund on the airbnb, which I cancelled at 3 am. And this is the bright side of the fact that my “retirement” savings (on which I hoped to live if necessary in my fast-encroaching dotage, then leave to various charities), are bleeding out as the stock market crashes, and that we’re all apparently going to die momentarily from coronavirus anyway.

It’s kind of like, Whatever! Not in a resigned, weary way, but in a kind of energized, curious way, as in we really DON’T know anything, ever, about how the world is going to go.

It’s interesting that with all our insanely “powerful” military, nuclear weapons, Supreme Court rulings, closed borders, lightning-fast technology, surveillance cameras, data gathering, TSA, et cetera et cetera, a tiny virus, invisible to the naked eye, can in the space of a couple of weeks practically take down the whole world.

Interesting, too, how as the world, as the world must, fails us, everything gets sharpened and honed down to the essential. Keep doing what I already do every day. Try to be kind, try to participate, try to keep my garden weeded, my bed made, my apartment clean, my bags, literal and metaphorical, packed.

And most interesting how the things I have done every day for years ever more assume their true importance: The Office. The Magnificat. The prayer I say, back at my pew, each time after receiving the Eucharist: “Oh my Jesus, accept this Holy Communion as my viaticum–as if I were this day to die”…

THE TEMPTATION IN THE DESERT: MAN ON WIRE AND FREE SOLO

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

“Then the devil took him to the holy city, and made him
stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of
God, throw yourself down. For it is written:

He
will command his angels concerning you/and with their hands they will support
you,/ lest you dash your foot against a stone. Jesus answered him, “Again
it is written, You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.”

–Matthew 4:5-7

I have an almost morbid fear of heights.

So I’m fascinated by Philippe Petit (b. 1949), the French
high-wire artist, and more recently, by Alex Honnold, the only person on earth
to have climbed the face of Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes.

The documentary “Man On Wire,” (2008) tells Petit’s story.
In 1971, he evaded the authorities and walked between the towers of Notre Dame
Cathedral.

Next he somehow managed to string a clandestine cable
between NYC’s Twin Towers. On the morning of August 7, 1974, he set forth and in
the course of 45 minutes, crossed between them eight times. At one point, he stopped
in the middle with his balancing pole to sit down, take a bit of a breather,
and survey his realm. He was 24 years old.

When asked by the police why he’d done it, he allegedly
replied, “If I see three oranges, I have to juggle. And if see two towers, I
have to walk.”

Honnold similarly feels that free soloing (that is, climbing without ropes, harness, or a safety net of any kind) is his vocation and his destiny. The activity is so dangerous that less than 1% of people who climb attempt it.

Of course he was scared: the face of “El Cap” is almost a vertical wall: “3200 feet of sheer granite.” Still, “I’ll never be content, until I at least put in the effort.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

ALEX HONNOLD FREE-SOLO CLIMBING HEAVEN, YOSEMITE PARK, 2014

THE FACE OF LOVE CAN BE UGLY AS WELL AS BEAUTIFUL

Roslyn Barnes was a Catholic convert. She dedicated her 1962 Masters’ thesis, a comparison of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Teilhard de Chardin, to her friend, Flannery O’Connor.

In Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends, Barnes writes from Chile in August, 1964, to Fr. James McCown:

“I am a ‘me-tooer’ too in what you say about love. But I think that love on earth must have elements of ugliness, as the Passion of Christ itself did. In this world both saints & lovers look grotesque and repulsive. And the world of loving is so much more chaotic than the world of hate. To commit oneself to love is to ask for destruction–Christ’s experience is the proof of it. If only we were all so capable of taking up destruction as He! I know that a woman loves in a very different way than a man. Her love approaches closer to the way God loves. It has an element of Divinity even when it looks extreme and grotesque, ugliness you say. The face of love can be ugly as well as beautiful…”

After converting, Barnes trained with Msgr. Ivan Illich in Mexico for the missionary work she undertook in Chile. She disappeared there, her body never to be found, after O’Connor’s death in 1964.

” See, my servant shall prosper, he shall be raised high and greatly exalted.
Even as many were amazed at him –  so marred was his look beyond that of man, and his appearance beyond that of mortals.”

–Isaiah 53: 13-14, in a passage often used to highlight Christ as the Suffering Servant  

VAN NUYS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ORATORIO TO OUR DYING HOME

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

“Requiem: This Earth, Our Home” is a new oratorio, written in conjunction with the LA Master Chorale’s Voices Within Oratorio Project.

The piece will premiere, for fellow students, the evening of
Friday, February 28th  at the
Van Nuys High School Auditorium.

A performance the following day, Saturday, February 29th
at 1 pm, will be a free community concert and open to the public.

The school chose the theme and the requiem format. But the
students themselves wrote and composed the oratorio, which explores the subject
of, and the students’ concerns about, climate change.

Doug Cooney, an award-winning writer, is one of the creators
of this program and of Voices Within, which originally was geared toward
fifth-graders.

Says Lesili Beard, Director of Education for the Master
Chorale, “We learned there could be an opportunity for students who were more
mature emotionally, psychologically, and in terms of what their music skills
might be. That’s how the Oratorio Project began.”

Past Oratorio Projects have focused on the East Los Angeles
High School Walkouts of 1968, the #metoo movement, and the U.S .incarceration
of Japanese citizens during World War II.

Van Nuys is a public LAUSD high school, known for its focus
on performing arts.

This year’s program employed three principal teaching
artists: Alice Kirwan Murray, lead teaching artist and singer, Doug Cooney,
lyricist, and Saunder Choi, composer. Van Nuys High School choir teacher
Brianne Arevalo led the vocal program of 9th through 12th grade students.

 “We ponder the subject matter for months, researching, asking the students from the previous year or years. The goal is to find an enormous, epic story. It can be historic; it can be mythic.” Climate change is one of the subjects the students themselves brought up. 

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

GOOD THINGS OUT OF NAZARETH

The stock market is melting down, coronavirus is spreading its tentacles, we have in our day “no prince, prophet, or leader, no burnt offering, sacrifice, oblation, or incense, no place to offer first fruits, to find favor with you”…(Daniel 3:38).

Yesterday morning on my way to Mass I pulled over to the curb in front of the Pasadena Public Library to mail my rent. There on the sidewalk with his cart was the library guy with a bum leg, cheerfully extracting books from the return bin.

The fortyish guy with neatly-combed hair who always wears a short-sleeved shirt and hitches his pants up with a belt and when you see him inside often delivers a beatific smile and a bright, loudish “Good morning!” Maneuvering about on the sidewalk with his lame leg that probably hurt: head down, efficiently, faithfully, doing his job.

I thought, Now see that is why the world keeps going, moving, working as smoothly as it does–because of him and the legions of people like him who will never have their names in the paper, receive an award, demand validation, attention or approval.

He gave me such hope, this guy, a shining example of humanity’s inexhaustible life force, resiliency, inherent goodness, and ability to keep going no matter the chaos or pain through which we may be plowing.

We are made to come out of our caves each morning, say hello to our neighbor, pitch in.   These are the people upon whom the world really depends, not the headline-grabbers “in charge”…

Speaking of which, I’m reading Good Things Out of Nazareth, The Uncollected Letter of Flannery O’Connor and Friends.

She writes, “As to the devil, I not only believe he is but believe he has a family which in the extent + scope of its activities is a power to be reckoned with as stronger than all the dead and unborn put together.” 

A LAUNCH INTO LENT

For the last three weeks, I’ve been holding a creative writing workshop in my apartment. This represents a new frontier–I’ve taught writing before, but not in my own home. Feelings of vulnerability, anxiety, awkwardness, fear arise as they do for me, and probably for many of us, when we foray into fresh territory.

These are all alleviated, as they always are (if at all), by the actual people–there are three of them, and they have all in this short amount of time become dear to me.

Last night, to kick off the class, I gave the following writing prompt: “Write your life story in five sentences.” I decided to participate, too.

So I hit the timer for ten minutes and these are the five sentences that immediately sprang to mind and heart: “Suffering. Suffering. Suffering. Suffering, Suffering.”

Suffering of course is not the WHOLE story. I managed to come up with a little narrative that included the suffering but also the joy, light, resurrection. And the students’ stories were each, in their way, killer.

Still, this morning in prayer I reflected upon that wellstream of pain that clearly lies deep within–or maybe not as deep as I’d thought, but rather just below the surface.

Then as I do every morning I read a page from Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost For His Highest.

Oswald (1874-1917) was a Protestant Holiness Movement evangelical minister and he is always scolding about, among other things, how God doesn’t want our “service,” he wants us! All of us. He’ll figure out what to do with our talents and gifts. We allow God to “help himself” to us–as if we were a meal, or a pile of clothing, or a flower!

Which is actually sound spirituality and sound theology. So while ordinarily I would give someone of his description a wide berth, I have come to view Oswald as a dear Friend.

Anyway, his entry for February 27 reads in part:

“Have you been limiting, or impoverishing, the ministry of Jesus to the point that He is unable to work in your life? Suppose that you have a deep “well” of hurt and trouble inside your heart, and Jesus comes to you and says to you, “Let not your heart be troubled…” (John 14:1). Would your response be to shrug your shoulders and say, “But, Lord, the well is too deep, and even You can’t draw up quietness and comfort out of it.”…The thing that approaches the very limits of His power is the very thing we as disciples of Jesus ought to believe He will do.”

I thought of the initial five-sentence life story that had sprung immediately to mind the night before. I thought: Have I ever TRULY invited Christ in to the deepest well of my being to heal me? Do I believe he COULD heal that huge and hemorrhaging a wound?

Suddenly I thought of Lazarus, dead for three days in the tomb, wrapped in bandages, his wounds festering, his body already decomposing. His sisters Mary and Martha had asked Christ to come and for three days had been waiting for him, wringing their hands: Please, Jesus, come into even these wounds, the wounds of death and putrefaction. [John 11:1-44].

Lazarus is a metaphor for all of us: our humanity, the death sentence that’s imposed on us simply by virtue of being born, the hurts and twistings of our psyches that for many of us date back to childhood and that seem so impervious to change and healing.

I bowed my head and for a second, from the depths of my being, truly prayed: “Lord, please heal this wellspring of hurt”–that dates back before memory; that is in large part generational; that has in many ways ruled my life.

“Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief.”

As often happens with sincere prayer, I wept.

And immediately, I felt, along with Mary and Martha: “Why didn’t you come sooner, Lord? Why did you wait so long?”

CHESTERTON AND VON BALTHASAR

“The Church is the one thing that saves a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his time.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“Love alone is credible.”

― Hans Urs von Balthasar

ICONICITY: ART IN THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA DESERT

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

Director/producer Leo Zahn has made documentaries about mid-century
architect William F. Cody and Frank Sinatra in Palm Springs.

Now he brings us “Iconicity.”
The core theme: “Why are artists attracted to the [Southern California] desert?
There is something here, call it a mystical energy or what have you, but it’s
also very practical as to why certain art gets created only in the desert.”

I caught a screening in January at the Palm Springs Film
Festival.

Shot over a period of ten months in 2019, the cinematography
is all saturated colors, sweeping aerial vistas, turquoise skies, shimmering
mountains, landscapes that by day tend toward burned-out lunar, and velvet
nights.

The music, courtesy of Spirit Production, lends the perfect out-of-time, slightly
woo-woo touch.  

In Niland, Leonard Knight spent decades painting Salvation
Mountain. Slab City, a former Marine base, is now one of the largest vehicle
squats in the country. East Jesus, another Salton Sea community, has likewise
sprouted masses of sculpture, installations and art made from desert-scavenged
detritus.  

Yucca Valley’s Christ Desert Park was the ten-year labor of Antoine Martin (1887-1961). In Borrego Springs, the shipping-label magnate Dennis Avery commissioned artist Ricardo Breceda to create a menagerie of giant metal sculptures: mammoths, dragons, insects.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

This just in: the film is an official selection at the NoHo Cine Fest And will screen on Easter Sunday, April 12 at the North Hollywood Laemmle Theater.

© PICTURE PALACE, INC.

CELEBRATE MARDI GRAS WITH MY TALK AT HOLY FAMILY IN SOUTH PAS

That’s right–the night before Ash Wednesday I’ll be giving a talk at Holy Family’s St. Joseph’s Center in South Pas. Here’s the flyer:

LENT WITH SAINTS AND ARTISTS:

Selling All We Have to Follow Our Passion

Heather King came from a blue-collar New England family, excelled in school, imagined God as a cold, distant, high-school principal, and started on the road to alcoholism at the age of thirteen. This difficult personal journey eventually led to blackouts, sexual promiscuity, a law degree, personal dreams not pursued, marriage and then divorce. Then a dramatic turnaround because she quit her job as an attorney, found her way to the Church, and embraced her vocation.

“After finding Christ, I saw that the biggest sin of all—and with my track record, that’s saying something—would be to refuse the life-long call of my heart: to become a writer.”

Holy Family is proud to announce that Ms. Heather King, author, weekly arts and culture columnist for Angelus News, Magnificat columnist, and former commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered will be the speaker at our February 25, 2020 lecture series. The event will begin at 6:30 pm. Light refreshments will be provided.

“The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint,” observed 19th-century Catholic writer Léon Bloy. Heather King, an eloquent, charming and funny raconteuse, will share her journey and challenge us to enter into Lent by heeding that voice inside us that calls us, too, to be saints.

Heather King lives in Pasadena and will be signing her latest book: FOOLS FOR CHRIST: Fifty Divine Eccentric Artists, Martyrs, Stigmatists, and Unsung Saints. Visit her website at www.heather-king.com.