Leah Libresco's Blog, page 11

Care for the Dying is the Last Hospitality

In Sarah Ruhl’s For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, death is an idea we have to sneak up on. The play imagines that five children are gathering to help their father die well and to navigate the aftermath. […] As their father moans and moves, but does not speak, the siblings disagree, with patience and love, about how to care for him as his death approaches. Ann, the protagonist, opposes her brothers’ plan to keep upping his morphine—regardless of whether it is necessary to treat his pain—to help him avoid a protracted, difficult death. Groping for a way to explain her reluctance, she tells them that when she euthanized her dog she couldn’t shake the feeling she had killed her pet, and she doesn’t want to feel that way about her father. As I watched the play, I was struck by the fact that she had to turn to the example of an animal’s bad death to try to illustrate what a good one might be for a person.

[…]

Caring for the dying and the dead is an act of hospitality, the last one we get to offer someone. It is always difficult work, but we have made it harder (and rarer) than it should be by sheltering ourselves so carefully from any glimpse of death.

Read more at Commonweal…

And, for further reading, consider visiting or otherwise supporting the Dominican Sisters at Hawthorne, who care for the dying. And check out this NYT Magazine piece on prisoners working in hospice for their fellow inmates.

 

(Image at top, Burial of the dead on the Antietam battlefield, Wikimedia Commons).

Of Sin and Superhero RPGs

In the beginning of the God and Comics podcast where Alexi and I were discussing Avengers: Infinity War, Alexi got to make the recommendation for the listeners and shared the superhero RPG we’ve been enjoying: Masks.

The game is tremendous fun—it’s easy to pick up the mechanics, and everything in it is designed to serve storytelling. You don’t take damage by losing hit points, you mark conditions like Angry, Guilty, Insecure, etc. Mark too many conditions and you’ll have to leave the fight, but you can ameliorate them by lashing out, making a sacrifice, etc.

I play the “Bull” archetype, who was given her powers by a shadowy and sinister organization. In a recent adventure, one of her handlers caught up with Sonia, and, by using trigger phrases, made her blow up like a bomb (luckily, she ran for it and no one was hurt when she went off).

So, since Sonia is friends with a nun (we placed a motherhouse for the Dominican Sisters of St. Rose of Lima in our fictional city), she went to her for advice.

Here’s what Sr. Lucia Marie had to say about Sonia’s problems with mind control:

Sonia, it sounds to me like you made the best of a dangerous situation. Many of us—well, all of us—have certain scars on our souls we didn’t put there, thanks to original sin, but many of us have more specific ones, thanks to the sins of our own fathers and mothers. God doesn’t judge us for those, but we do have a responsibility to become the saints He wants us to be, despite all of that. I’m proud of you for protecting people, even from yourself, Sonia.

The game is a blast, and ours has more theological content than average, I’d guess.

That’s Sonia second from left in the art above, drawn by Alexi, our GM and my husband.

Thanos loses to “Riotous Fecundity”

My husband and I joined the clergymen of God and Comics to discuss the latest MCU movie: Avengers: Infinity War. The full episode is available to stream on the God and Comics site, but I thought I’d type up this teaser for you.

 

Alexi: So if Killmonger is the shadow self of Black Panther, who is Thanos the shadow of?

Me (Leah): I do see a resemblance between him and another Marvel villain: Iron Man. In that Iron Man and Thanos both present an inhumane solution to what they see as the problem of humanity.

Where Thanos’s answer is simply DEATH—that the only way people can flourish is if there’s fewer of them. Iron Man in Age of Ultron also struggles with “people have difficulty living with each other” so I’ll just build a BIG ROBOT so that people won’t have to be responsible for each other, and I won’t have to be responsible for them anymore. This robot will be able to keep everyone safe and contained.

And I think it’s that idea of containment that’s common both to Iron Man and Thanos. That their ways of dealing with the riotous fecundity that can spill over, that’s human nature/human life, is to in some way slow it down, box it in.

If you want the light side, the opposite to the shadow self of Thanos or Ultron, the opposite of all that is marital sex, which is always, when open to life, a pledge of faith in the goodness of creation.

Listen to the whole thing on God and Comics…

Interviewed on Illiberalism

All discussions of the dangers of too much emphasis on autonomy and self-sufficiency should take place with a backdrop of shrieking children scooting by on trikes, eating ice cream, and jumping off the platform they’ve built with the outdoor stacking blocks that the Bruderhof make in their community factory.

I had the pleasure of being part of a symposium of writers on post-liberalism/illiberalism at the Bruderhof community in upstate New York. Below, you can find a short interview I did about the weekend with Alina from the Bruderhof community.

Killing Tyranny with Kindness in The Winter’s Tale

No villain ruins Leontes but himself—no wicked daughters deceive him with flattery, no Iago drips poison in his ear. In an instant he becomes convinced, despite the lack of evidence, that his wife Hermione has become the lover of King Polixenes of Bohemia, his dear friend. As he spirals into self-sustaining despair, Leontes becomes a tyrant to himself, before he acts tyrannically toward others. In Riccardo Hernandez’s scenic design, the stage is expansive, open, even to the heavens (snow falls intermittently). But Anatol Yusef (Leontes) contorts himself as if penned in as he falls victim to his fear. Shorter than most of the cast, he makes himself even smaller; he is his own jailer.

Leontes’s friends, followers, and family rebuke him at every turn, wishing he would allow them to do him good. If there were an external threat to refute or defeat, they might be able to do so, but they can’t find a way to cajole him into opening the door he has barred shut. As Leontes’s madness threatens them, each manages to do what he cannot: hold onto their interior freedom and trust they will find a way out, even if they cannot see it yet. More than that, they trust that the moral choice will lead them to this escape—or will lead others to take up the burden when they can go no further.

I had a wonderful time seeing Theater for a New Audience’s The Winter’s Tale, and you can read my whole review at The American Interest.

Talking BenOp in Pittsburgh

I’m headed to Pittsburgh this weekend to give two talks. On Friday, April 27th, I’ll be a guest at SENT, a young adult gathering with live music, free food and drinks. I’ll be speaking about my upcoming book, Building the Benedict Option: A Guide to Gathering Two or Three Together in His Name and leading a workshop on how to open your home.

The SENT facebook event is here, and my husband helped me shoot some footage of me talking about the book for the archdiocese’s promotional video. It can’t be embedded here, but you can check it out on Facebook. (And, if you want to see the silly outtakes, I’ll be sending that to my book announcement email list soon).

On Sunday, April 29th, I’ll head over to the parish of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, where I’ll speak after Mass at 12:45p. At this event, I’ll be talking about my first book, Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer. I’ll be telling the story of my conversion and how I learned to pray as a foreign language. The parish has full details at their Facebook event.

And remember to get in touch if you’d like me to speak in your town!

 

A mix of poetry and prurience in Priestdaddy

I can’t figure out whether I want to recommend Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy. Lockwood’s memoir reminds me of David Sedaris: she tells stories about her surreal family with writing that’s so good (she’s a poet) but sometimes so bodily specific that you can’t decide whether to read it aloud or not.

Lockwood’s father is a Catholic priest (converted after being ordained in another Christian tradition, and was permitted to become a priest), but she is not religious and he’s a ludicrously boorish man. (Lockwood tends to see him either in vestments or lounging in only boxers, nothing in between).

Lockwood herself is no longer religious, so her writing on faith is a mix of insidious irreverence and Christ-haunted beauty. I just plain can’t decide how I feel about passing it on to others (I would not send it to a high schooler, certainly).

One of the parts I can comfortably excerpt is her writing on her singing lessons.

I thought a voice had to be about what you could do. It wasn’t until I heard Billie Holiday that I realized a voice could be a collection of compensations for things you couldn’t do. It could be an ingenuity—in the same way some writers wrote books that coursed between the boulders of what they couldn’t do, and went faster, tumbled over, fell in rills and rushed breathingly over the stones.

Lockwood’s poetical gifts are perfect for this topic. She captures what always struck me during my singing lessons: unlike practicing cello, where the teacher can reposition your fingers on the neck, can show you what she is doing on her own instrument; singing is taught by incantation. Nothing (or at least very little) can be seen or felt directly, since you are the instrument. The teacher must say something that produces an interior change indirectly.

She taught us the interior smile, since you couldn’t actually smile when you were singing. You had to arrange your face as if you were smiling except completely subtract the smile. It was impossible, singing was full of things like that. Singing was worse than Buddhism. It was no wonder so much of it was done in churches.

Here’s another one: “Open up the barn door in the back of your head.” This is what I’m talking about! It meant nothing but you knew exactly what it meant, same as poetry.

[…]

My teachers taught me to abandon the final consonant, so that certain songs never ended, so that you walked out of the room and into the sunlight with the song still continuing behind you.

This is part of the delight of Lockwood’s book. She makes her observations in these conjuring ways, painting a picture that reveals more than any direct instruction. It’s just that I don’t know about hearing her rougher views.

 

 

Summer in the Forest: “The Weak Lead Us To Reality”

Summer in the Forest, Randall Wright’s documentary on Jean Vanier and his L’Arche communities for the disabled, contains a number of indelible moments. In one, an elderly man sits, docilely, for a haircut. As a younger worker clips his hair, he holds out his knobbled hand and receives the milkweed-silk trimmings in his palm.

The elderly man is not one of the disabled L’Arche residents, but Jean Vanier himself. Wright’s documentary is timed perfectly. By following Vanier as an old man, the film allows Vanier’s body to offer the witness of his words and actions: We are all fragile, and we must love one another.

Read more at First Things

Here is the film’s trailer:

Victoria Sweet on Servant Leadership

I’ve loved both of Victoria Sweet’s books so much, that I ordered a copy to keep while the library book was still in my house. (I had to transfer all my dog-ears). I read God’s Hotel first, and I’ve just finished Slow Medicine. One of her stories about being a temporary doctor (filling a gap in a relatively isolated practice) seemed perfect for today’s Solemnity of St. Joseph.

I was sitting cross-legged with my shoes off at the dining room table, reading Harrison’s, when the phone rang. It was the answering service putting a patient’s wife through. I began to put on my shoes. That’s one of the things I’d learned to do that year. The natural instinct is to try to dissolve worry over the phone. to find a reason not to have to leave home and go out into the cold, adversarial universe. But this instinct leads to mistakes, I’d discovered, to misjudgments. So I put my shoes on when I took a call. That way I’d have to be convinced not to go.

(Slow Medicine, page 161)

I wrote a little about cultivating a willingness to be moved when wrote about my experience learning to pray the rosary, in my conversion memoir, Arriving at Amen. I saw the rosary through the lens of my ballroom dance classes, which had me practice the basic rhythms and steps again and again.

The goal was to be able to slip into any of those rhythms as easily as I could my normal gait. If I am following a dance partner with a decent lead, maintaining the basic is my only responsibility. As long as I keep my feet moving in the proper sequence and stay responsive to my partner, I can move through combinations I haven’t learned, steered by my partner into the right place while my feet keep the right time. In fact, as my basic improved, it was sometimes easier to dance sequences I hadn’t learned than to dance the ones that had been broken down and taught to me piece by piece. When I didn’t know what I was doing, I could keep my focus on the basic. When I had a clue, I often tried to anticipate the next move and wound up botching it.

I tried to approach the Rosary with the same spirit I’d brought to my summer of basics. When I picked up my rosary, it wasn’t to rehearse a solo, something depending solely on my own efforts. I was supposed to be God’s partner, and He was to be the lead. […] The Rosary lets me practice cooperation with God who, like my dance partner, asks for only one small, disciplined act on my end.

Sweet putting on her shoes or me picking up my beads are both an effort to say “yes” before quite knowing what we’ll be asked. The hope is to be able to be swept into the kinds of service we wouldn’t seek out—to be invited to go beyond our own ideas of how we can be channels of grace.

Mother Maria, On Startling Glimpses of God in Others

I’m just a few essays into The Essential Writings of Mother Maria Skobtsova, and I already heartily recommend it. It’s on my reading list for 2018, because everything I’d heard about the life of Mother Maria from friends was terrifying and wonderful (one of my friends was chrismated in the Orthodox church with Maria as her patron). But it turns out my friends hadn’t exhausted the catalog of her incredible acts (I made my husband read one part of the biographical summary aloud).

But it’s most wonderful to read her in her own words. This is my favorite passage (so far):

In turning his spiritual world toward the spiritual world of another, a man encounters the terrible, inspiring mystery of the authentic knowledge of God, because what he encounters is not flesh and blood, not feelings and moods, but the authentic image of God in man, the very incarnate icon of God in the world, a glimmer of the mystery of the Incarnation and Godmanhood. And man must unconditionally and unreservedly accept this terrible Revelation of God, must bow down before the image of God in his brother. And only when he feels it, sees it, and understands it, will yet another mystery be revealed to him, which demands his most strenuous struggle, his greatest ascetic ascent. He will see how this image of God is obscured, distorted by an evil power. He will see the human heart, where the devil wages a ceaseless struggle with God. And in the name of the image of God, darkened by the devil, in the name of love for this image of God that pierces his heart, he will want to begin a struggle with the devil, to become an instrument of God in this terrible and scorching work. He will be able to do it if all his hope is in God and not in himself; he will be able to do it if he has not a single subtle or mercenary desire; if he lays down his armor like David, and with nothing but the name of God rushes to do battle with Goliath.