Leah Libresco's Blog, page 12

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.

 

I Was A Nine Year Old Stoic…

I reviewed several books of New Stoicism for Fare Forward, and discussed my own Stoic-influenced childhood. Here’s an excerpt:

I loved Stoicism for two reasons, one petty and one profound. I liked that Stoicism seemed to make me stronger (and, thus, to my thinking then, better) than other people. While the other kids were upset, I was able to endure, and be unmastered by misfortune. (Stoicism was a pretty good way to get through the social cruelties of middle and high schools). But the other reason I liked Stoicism was because it was true. Hunger was basically a warning light, prompting me to eat. But, once the message had been received, there was no reason to leave the klaxon blaring when I couldn’t do anything about it. Leaning into hunger wasn’t just a recipe for frustration, it felt like buying into an untruth.

No matter how much I wanted it, I couldn’t summon food on the boat. Wallowing in my feelings seemed to imply that they were really hooked up to the causal nature of the world.  But being upset about my inability to resolve such situations was as silly as feeling upset because I couldn’t walk through walls. Stoicism was a way of realigning my model of the world and my agency within it with the world as it truly is.

Read more at Fare Forward

I joined Fare Forward‘s editor, Peter Blair, and one of the other contributors, Susannah Black, who had written on New Urbanism and the New Jerusalem for the issue for a panel discussion hosted by NYU.

We both spoke on our articles, and then had a lively time fielding questions from Peter and from the audience. You can listen to the full event below:

Death and Dappled Hope: Meditations on Biden’s Memoir

Sustained by his family’s love and his love for them, Biden can carry the weight of tragedy and offer it as a gift to others. At the beginning of the book, he describes visiting the family of Wenjian Liu, a police officer murdered on duty, and offering the widow his personal phone number. He tells her that there will come a time when she feels that all her friends have returned to normal life, and she doesn’t know whether she can or should reach out to them from the depths of her grief. If she feels that way, Biden tells her, she should call him.

[…]

Near the end of the book, after his son’s death, Biden barely needs words in order to be a comfort to others. He chooses to visit Emanuel AME Church (privately, without the press) after members of the parish were shot by a white supremacist. Biden writes, “This congregation was hurting and in need, and I knew my showing up so soon after my son’s death could be some source of strength for the Emanuel family.” He has learned that the public’s knowledge of his losses allows others to open up to him, free from the burden to be silent, stoic, or polite. He is a walking icon of Our Lady of Sorrows, offering the gift of tears.

But the heartbreaking thing about the book is that—for all Biden’s generosity to others in their mourning—his own family’s generosity and love seem to be somewhat thwarted, as they rally together to care for [his son] Beau.

Read more at First Things

Fr. Thomas Joseph White on Substitutionary Atonement

I’ve finished the first book on my list of intended reading for 2018! The honor goes to Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P.’s The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism. I’ve also made a start on Middlemarch, but I’m reading it with friends, and we’re not scheduled to finish till May. The next one I finish will probably be Thy Will Be Done: Letters to Persons in the World by St. Francis de Sales (I’ve organized a book club for March).

One of the particularly lovely passages in White’s book came in his discussion of atonement and the Passion:

The passion is not a mystery of divine wrath and vengeance but of divine justice, mercy, and reparation. There is no problem with the use of the language of “substitutionary atonement,” but there is a question of what this language connotes. Jesus’s substitutionary atonement for our sins is above all something positive, not something negative. He substitutes his love, his justice, and his obedience there where the human race has lacked love, justice, and obedience.

I met Fr. White through the Dominican House of Studies, and for anyone in D.C., I’d definitely recommend praying with the friars (and getting to meet them) by joining them for Evening Prayer. For those outside D.C., you can check to see if the Thomistic Institute is planning any events near you!

Speaking on my Conversion in Chicago

On February 8th, I’ll have the pleasure of visiting Loyola University Chicago to deliver their annual Newman Lecture. The Lecture, presented by the Joan And Bill Hank Center For The Catholic Intellectual Heritage.

The Cardinal Newman Lecture Series is named after the great 19th century English prelate who wrote very movingly about his intellectual journey toward Roman Catholicism in his spiritual autobiography, Apologia pro vita sua (1864). Newman’s work helped later generations of Catholics and Catholic converts map out ways to understand the datum of religious faith in light of the contemporary issues facing modern life.

Honoring this engagement with the Catholic tradition, CCIH will invite scholars each spring to recount their own discovery (or rediscovery) of the Catholic intellectual heritage in light of their ongoing scholarship.

 My talk will be on my conversion, and is titled “From Javert to Jesus: An Atheist’s Conversion.”

I’m looking forward to meeting the students and to trying to stay completely swathed in scarves any moment I’m outside and at the mercy of Chicago’s February weather.

Aziz Ansari’s hookup was a game of Russian roulette

If Aziz Ansari is reading all the thinkpieces about him, he must feel most ill-served by his allies. “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader” wrote Bari Weiss for the New York Times, exonerating Ansari in a singularly insulting way.

It’s unreasonable, Weiss and others write, to expect Ansari and other men to be able to know if they’re scaring or upsetting their one-night-stands. The solution isn’t for men to pay attention to women’s non-verbal cues, she writes, but for women to be much more aggressive in fending off men who make them feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

For all the worry about women defining themselves as snowflakes or victims, the defense offered to Ansari sounds much more cossetting than comforting.

What virtuous man would feel relieved to be told he is powerless to avoid harming the women he takes to bed?

Read more at Catholic News Agency

Asking Catholic Women About Vocations, Prayer, Confession, and NFP

I partnered with America to do a series of sidebars, looking through the data in the survey of 1500 Catholic women in America that the magazine produced in partnership with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Here are links to my four short pieces:

 

The Prayer Lives of Catholic Women

We asked women about the circumstances in which they regularly prayed. A third (33 percent) of the women in our sample did not engage in any of the three practices of regular prayer that we asked about: prayer when waking up, prayer when going to bed and prayer before meals. A little over a quarter (28 percent) participated in at least one of these practices, and a fifth (19 percent) relied on all three.

Sustaining prayer practices of this type were correlated with age and Mass attendance. Millennials (44 percent) were twice as likely as pre-Vatican II Catholics (23 percent) to have none of these regular prayer practices.

 

How many Catholic women have considered religious vocations?

We asked the women who had never considered a vocation to the consecrated life what factors had influenced their thinking—what were the barriers between them and this way of life? The most frequently cited reason was the desire for a different vocation: to be a mother. Over half (56 percent) of the women who had never considered being a woman religious said that the longing for children was “very much” related to their choices.

What Catholic women believe about Mass attendance, confession and God’s existence

Participation in the sacrament of reconciliation (confession) is also infrequent. A quarter of respondents (27 percent) went to confession at least once a year. A higher share (38 percent) reported that they had “never” been to confession. This is higher than might be expected, as confession in most dioceses is required prior to making one’s first Communion.

What Catholic women actually believe about Natural Family Planning

We asked the women who used N.F.P. about what factors were most important to them when they decided how to space births. Financial concerns were some of the most commonly cited: 38 percent of women said it was very important to them. The next most frequently cited reasons were not wanting more children (34 percent) and a woman’s relationship with her husband (33 percent).