Leah Libresco's Blog, page 10
May 8, 2019
Fear and the Benedict Option
Any sort of retreat will also attract people who are tempted to hate the part of the world they are withdrawing from. Any group gathering in a BenOp spirit should expect to attract people at varying levels of weariness, anger, fear, and despair. Even a legitimate righteous anger can curdle into contempt or despair. To truly mend nets requires us to be aware of these temptations in ourselves and in our friends, and to seek to sin no more.
Feeling excluded or alone can lead Christians to adopt as fellow travelers provocateurs who may scandalize the secular world, but not because they preach the faith that is “foolishness to the gentiles.” Such grifting agitators are not seeking space to speak the truth, but to revel in division. They may lead people moved by real political concerns to view their opponents as permanent enemies, not our divided brothers whom we are called to pray for and convert into allies. They may lead people who already feel isolated to seek consolation by grounding their identity in race, not Christ. Conveniently, they forget that the most vicious and violent suppression of Christians falls on non-white Christians in China, Southeast Asia, and outside the West. A Benedict Option strengthening persecuted Christians shouldn’t be primarily white or Western.
May 7, 2019
Hope of Heaven in Hadestown
I reviewed Hadestown, the 2019 Best Musical, for The American Interest.
Hermes, the messenger-god who serves as narrator, warns us that “When the gods are having a fight, everybody else better hold on tight.” The world that Orpheus and Eurydice inhabit is wounded and weakened by the faltering love between Hades and Persephone. (This production does not frame Hades’s initial courtship as an abduction or rape, as many versions of the myth do.) The further away from each other they draw, the more the seasons are disordered: summers hot and scorching, winters freezing and famished. Like Oberon and Titania, Hades and Persephone can say, “This same progeny of evils comes from our debate, from our dissension. We are their parents and original.”
The gods themselves are distorted by their division. Hades is the obvious villain—the antagonist to Orpheus, the instigator of Eurydice’s death—but Amber Gray is galvanizing as an embittered Persephone. She has a furious energy to her dancing that convincingly conveys the power of a Greek god—attracting their attention, even favorably, is perilous. While her sepulchral husband turns to cold machinery and automation, she is riotous growth gone to rot, the stickiness of over-ripened grapes.
April 25, 2019
Pro-Life Outreach to Pro-Choice Workers
I travelled to Texas to interview Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood Clinic director who founded And Then There Were None, a ministry to help abortion workers leave their jobs.
“Unplanned,” the recently released film adapted from Abby Johnson’s memoir of leaving Planned Parenthood and becoming a pro-life activist, is really just a prequel.
When Johnson quit her job in 2009, she could have lived off the notoriety of being a clinic manager who changed sides, telling her conversion story to pro-life audiences. Instead, she founded And Then There Were None (ATTWN) in 2011, a nonprofit that helps other abortion workers leave their jobs.
Johnson originally joined Planned Parenthood to help care for women and knows that clinics are full of workers just like her. At the time, she saved up stories of the unambiguous good she was doing (detecting uterine cancer, aiding women with postpartum depression), to defend her job to her pro-life family and husband.
Her view of abortion changed in the fall of 2009, when she was asked to assist in an ultrasound-guided abortion just on the cusp of the second trimester. When the doctor positioned the thin tube called a cannula and turned on the vacuum, she saw the baby’s spine twist and crumple as it was sucked into the tube and out of sight.
Seeing the baby clearly as a baby made Johnson decide she had to leave her job. Remembering how she saw her co-workers made her pick her new one.
March 28, 2019
Reaching Out to Atheists with Bishop Barron
I joined Bishop Robert Barron in Santa Barbara to talk about strategies for having productive disagreements about hard topics. (My part of the video below starts at 15:30).
After my talk, I joined Bishop Barron for a discussion that was taped for Word on Fire Institute members.
January 3, 2019
Books I Plan to Read in 2019
Last year was not a very good year for my “Books to Read in 2018” list, with five of my fifteen books unread. On the other hand, I got to read Middlemarch (for the first time) and Kristin Lavransdatter (second time) with online book groups. And those big, shared books made it hard to find the right time to pick up something like Grant.
In other reading news, I read 190 books total (just over 57k pages) over 2018, and, much to my amusement, the book I read that Goodreads told me was read by the most other Goodreads users was Middlemarch! The book with the earliest publication date was The Cloud of Unknowing.
I’m still interested in the books I didn’t get to, but I think I’ll not transfer them over to this year’s list. The way I think about this list is that it helps me give myself permission to make time for these books, when they’re competing with work, hobbies, or my ever growing stack of library holds. The list is my reminder that these books can take priority.
So, without further ado, the books I’d like to read in 2019:
The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Clarissa W. Atkinson)
The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin)
Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (Hasok Chang)
Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (James Chappel)
When the Well Runs Dry: Prayer Beyond the Beginnings (Thomas Green, S.J.)
Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries (edited by Jeffrey Hamburger and Susan Marti)
Shakespeare’s Binding Language (John Kerrigan)
Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts (Alexander Langlands)
The Death of Christian Culture (John Senior)
The Life of Christian Culture (John Senior)
The Child in the City (Colin Ward)
I’d definitely like to include one more old-enough-to-be-public-domain doorstopper, but I have the feeling my Middlemarch-Kristin group will settle on another book to share and fill that gap for me.
Update, we’re reading (or, in my case, rereading) The Brothers Karamazov.
October 4, 2018
Kristin Lavransdatter, Motorcycles, and Docility to Reality
I’ve been reading Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter in concert with a group of folks who have all committed to “Kristin by Christmas!” One passage I particularly loved comes when Kristin goes to stay and be schooled at a convent. Abbess Groa welcomes Kristin with these words:
I have heard good things of you, and you seem to be clever and well brought up, so I do not think you will give us any reason for displeasure. I have heard that you are promised to that noble and good man, Simon Andressøn, whom I see before me. We think it wise of your father and your betrothed to send you here to the Virgin Mary’s house for a time, so you can learn to obey and serve before you are charged with giving orders and commands. I want to impress on you now that you should learn to find joy in prayer and the divine services, so that in all your actions you will be in the habit of remembering your Creator, the Lord’s gentle Mother, and all the saints who have given us the best examples of strength, rectitude, fidelity, and all the virtues that you ought to demonstrate if you are to manage property and servants and raise children.
I love the connection Abbess Groa makes that those who are entrusted with command must be able to learn to obey and serve. In modern, secular contexts, it’s very seldom that I hear obedience and docility cited as prerequisites to leadership or management of others. Kindness, yes, but yieldingness, not often.
The non-specifically religious context where I’ve seen it most beautifully praised is Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft. Becoming a maker of things, he argues, means being mastered by reality, “The tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.” Or, as he puts it in a longer passage:
In any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian, one submits to things that have their own intractable ways. Such hardness is at odds with the ontology of consumerism, which seems to demand a different conception of reality. The philosopher Albert Borgmann offers a distinction that clarifies this: he distinguishes between commanding reality and disposable reality, which corresponds to “things” versus “devices.” The former convey meaning through their own inherent qualities, while the latter answer to our shifting psychic needs.”
Kristin’s time at the convent, Crawford’s time with motorcycles both offer the chance to see the limits of our own wills. We are truthful when we are docile to reality, be it physical or moral reality. For her sake and for the sake of those she will command, Kristin must be able to yield to what (and Who) is true, rather than let her will create an alternate reality.
September 25, 2018
The Cruel Warning Signs of Abuse
I’ve written an essay for the Catholic News Agency, on abuse inside and outside the Catholic Church.
McCarrick, Han, and Ronnell all carried out parts of their abuse in the open. Their campaigns of control and cruelty may not have always created the trail of evidence needed to convict them of a crime, but there was enough for those around them to see that they were failing their respective callings of stewardship. The more they were left to act abusively, the more everyone around them signaled that abuse was acceptable. Why would someone come forward with an allegation of further, private predation when there had been no consequences for public wickedness?
For U.S.A. Gymnastics and NYU, the impulse to curb these abuses is meant to come from a fear of liability. They ought to have curbed these dishonest mentors, and fired them if necessary in order to avoid culpability. But the Church should be swifter to act than any other institution, because it fears more than civil penalties.
Bad employees can be fired, and the supervising organization can wash their hands of them. A bad priest or cardinal must be contained for the sake of his potential victims, but when it seems like his vices are constrained by his age or enfeeblement, the Church cannot say that there is no harm left in him. Unrepentant, he is still a danger to himself and his own soul.
September 6, 2018
Pope Gregory the Great, on the temptations of administrators
The Office of Readings offered a homily by St. Gregory the Great for his feast day on September 3rd. I was grateful to read it, especially because it was a good prompting to pray for priests and bishops who find themselves torn between their worldly, administrative duties and the radical promise they have made to lay down their life for the church.
I do not deny that I am guilty, for I see my torpor and my negligence. Perhaps my very recognition of failure will win me pardon from a sympathetic judge. When I lived in a monastic community I was able to keep my tongue from idle topics and to devote my mind almost continually to the discipline of prayer. Since taking on my shoulders the burden of pastoral care, I have been unable to keep steadily recollected because my mind is distracted by many responsibilities.
I am forced to consider questions affecting churches and monasteries and often I must judge the lives and actions of individuals; at one moment I am forced to take part in certain civil affairs, next I must worry over the incursions of barbarians and fear the wolves who menace the flock entrusted to my care; now I must accept political responsibility in order to give support to those who preserve the rule of law; now I must bear patiently the villainies of brigands, and then I must confront them, yet in all charity.
My mind is sundered and torn to pieces by the many and serious things I have to think about. When I try to concentrate and gather all my intellectual resources for preaching, how can I do justice to the sacred ministry of the word? I am often compelled by the nature of my position to associate with men of the world and sometimes I relax the discipline of my speech. If I preserved the rigorously inflexible mode of utterance that my conscience dictates, I know that the weaker sort of men would recoil from me and that I could never attract them to the goal I desire for them. So I must frequently listen patiently to their aimless chatter. Because I am weak myself I am drawn gradually into idle talk and I find myself saying the kind of thing that I didn’t even care to listen to before. I enjoy lying back where I once was loath to stumble.
Who am I — what kind of watchman am I? I do not stand on the pinnacle of achievement, I languish rather in the depths of my weakness. And yet the creator and redeemer of mankind can give me, unworthy though I be, the grace to see life whole and power to speak effectively of it. It is for love of him that I do not spare myself in preaching him.
In further reading, my husband, Alexi Sargeant, has an excellent essay in The American Interest on lay responses to clerical silence, abuse, and sacrilege.
August 28, 2018
Living as Foreigners in the Kingdom of Truth
I’ve been reading* Henri Nouwen’s The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey through Anguish to Freedom, one to two meditations a day. Today’s meditation, on death to self, struck me with a doubled meaning—one relevant to the apocalypse-as-unveiling that the Church is going through at present.
You have an idea of what the new country looks like. Still, you are very much at home, though not truly at peace, in the old country. […] Now you have come to realize that you must leave it and enter the new country, where your Beloved dwells. You know that what helped and guided you in the old country no longer works, but what else do you have to go by. […]
Trust is so hard, since you have nothing to fall back on. Still, trust is what is essential. The new country is where you are called to go, and the only way to go there is naked and vulnerable.
It seems that you keep crossing and recrossing the border. For a while you experience a real joy in the new country. But then you feel afraid and start longing again for all you left behind, so you go back to the old country. To your dismay, you discover that the old country has lost its charm. Risk a few more steps into the new country, trusting that each time you enter it, you will feel more comfortable and be able to stay longer.
To long for the new country of the Kingdom of God is to long for truth. To say “Amen” to Christ’s words in Luke 8:17.
For nothing is hid that shall not be made manifest, nor anything secret that shall not be known and come to light.
When we have choked ourselves with incuriosity and cover-ups, living in truth feels like living in a foreign land. But we must allow ourselves to be grafted on to live. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides for ever. (1 John 2:16-17).
*Look, I don’t really care how silly this is: I’ve found it helpful to do this short spiritual reading right before I shower, so I can meditate on the reading without distractions. A better woman than I would find it easier to avoid reading something else right after, but I know my limits and want to make space for Nouwen’s words.
August 23, 2018
The Dominican Nun who Shaped the Sound of Music
I greatly enjoyed reading Todd S. Purdum’s Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution. I bought a copy for my mom for her birthday, I read (and sung) chunks of it to my husband, and I was particularly charmed by the story of the real nun who consulted on The Sound of Music.
Sister Gregory was a Dominican nun who led the drama department at Rosary College. She met Mary Martin when she saw her in South Pacific, and the two became pen pals. Martin described her thus, “She didn’t act like a nun, or at least the way we poor ignorant souls thought nuns acted. She was bouncy, enthusiastic, with an ambling walk like a good baseball player.”
(This certainly matches my experience of nuns. Particularly the sisters I met when I attended a Jesu Caritas retreat with the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecelia and played kickball with the novices. I strongly recommend the retreat to any unmarried woman.)
Purdum includes an excerpt from one of Sr. Gregory’s letters, offering advice on how to write the nuns in the musical:
“The whole purpose of life, it seems to me,” she wrote, “is pin-pointed in Maria’s struggle to choose between two vocations. Like every adult human being, she must find the answer to the question: ‘What does God want me to do with my life? How does He wish me to spend my love?” She took some pains to explain that, in her view, nuns (and priests) are neither afraid of love, nor incapable of sharing it, but were drawn to their vocation “because they keenly appreciate the gift of life, and have a tremendous capacity to love.
“A religious is neither afraid of sex nor disgusted with it,” she added, “but rather recognizes it as one of God’s greatest gifts, and therefore, in consecrating it to His service, one reflects the measure of one’s love.”
Purdum, Something Wonderful, p 272.
