Leah Libresco's Blog, page 13

The couple that writes Star Wars takes together…

My husband and I enjoyed seeing The Last Jedi, and we both wrote up appreciations of the film. At Aleteia, I wrote “Kylo Ren: The Star Wars not-quite-villain whose temptations are familiar”

The combination of great power and great irresponsibility would be enough to make for a challenging antagonist, but Kylo Ren is more than just a boss for our heroes to defeat. He’s a reminder of what temptations we have to resist to be heroes and saints. People doing evil more often look like Kylo Ren than they look like Darth Vader.

Evil isn’t glamorous. It isn’t underscored by John Williams or versified by John Milton. It doesn’t sweep down a hallway, cape rippling, basso profundo voice booming. Evil is a privation of good, a rejection of something, and it is always a little smaller, and a little more tenuous than the whole that it gave up. Kylo Ren is chasing something that doesn’t exist, that is willfully always diminishing itself.

Read more at Aleteia…

 

And Alexi wrote on how the new film handles hope and heroism, “Martydom in The Last Jedi“

It’s easy to see Holdo as a study in female leadership running up against boys’ club mentalities. It’s also easy to be reminded of great classical generals, like the canny Fabius Maximus, who outlasted Hannibal’s superior forces with delay tactics and guerilla maneuvers. In Livy’s history of Rome, he records Fabius advising a younger general: “Never mind if they call your caution timidity, your wisdom sloth, your generalship weakness; it is better that a wise enemy should fear you than that foolish friends should praise.” Holdo embodies this counsel because she’s unafraid to seem cowardly or overcautious if her actions can give the Resistance a fighting chance.

For me, though, Holdo’s storyline most vividly recalled St. Thomas More’s in A Man for All Seasons. The play (like the film based on it) is a meditation on what martyrdom is—and what it isn’t.

Read more at First Things…

 

Finally, Alexi has one more piece on Rogue One, specifically on the choice to resurrect Peter Cushing as a CGI-revenant. He argues against that choice at The New Atlantis, in what is my favorite piece of his writing of the year.

 

Mary McCarthy, Masks, and Identity

I read Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps, after reading B.D. McClay’s Commonweal essay in appreciation of her work. This novel of linked short stories what what Barbara recommended I begin with. (I had forgotten I’d read McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence). Here’s one passage I particularly enjoyed:

Perhaps at last she had found him, the one she kept looking for, the one who could tell her what she was really like. For this she had gone to palmists and graphologists, hoping not for a dark man or a boat trip, but for some quick blaze of gypsy insight that would show her her own lineaments. If she once knew, she had no doubt that she could behave perfectly; it was merely a question of finding out. How, she thought, can you act upon your feelings if you don’t know what they are? As a little girl whispering to a young priest in the confessional she had sometimes felt sure. The Church could classify it all for you. If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts, or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good. Protestants, like her father, were neutral; they lived in a gray world beyond good and evil. But when as a homely high-school girl, she had rejected the Church’s filing system, together with her aunt’s illiterate morality, she had given away her sense of herself. For a while she had believed that it wad a matter of waiting until you grew older and your character was formed; then you would be able to recognize it as easily as a photograph. But she was now twenty-four, and had heard other people say she had a strong personality; she herself however was still in the dark. This hearty stranger in the green shirt—perhaps he could really tell whether she was in love with her husband. It was like the puzzle about the men with marks on their foreheads: A couldn’t know whether his own forehead was marked, but B and C knew, of course, and he could, if he were bright, deduce it from their behavior.

As it happens, the next book I read after McCarthy was the rulebook for Masks, a superhero RPG (my husband is planning a campaign). The game’s mechanics aren’t so far from what Meg Sargent imagines in the passage quoted above.

Players create heroes whose statistics are based on their self-image (how do they feel like a savior, a danger, a freak, etc.) and other players (or non-player characters controlled by the storyteller) can alter you character’s capacities by based on how they perceive your character, just as Meg hoped.

Books I Plan to Read in 2018

This year, I read all but one of the books on my Books to Read in 2017 list. Spiritual Letters by Dom John Chapman is in progress (so it doesn’t have its checkmark yet), but I didn’t read The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods by A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. for the second year in a row, so it’s coming off the list for this year.

Overall, I read 167 books (just over 50k pages) over 2017, a pretty high share of which were from my local library, thanks to my Library Extension plug-in, that checks if any book I look at on Amazon is in the library system, so I can put it on hold.

I’m also amused to report that Goodreads told me both which book I read that was the most commonly read by other people (A Wrinkle in Time) and which book was read by only me, in all of Goodreads: The Oxford Movement in America: Or, Glimpses of Life in an Anglican Seminary. I found it in a used book store in Staunton, Virginia (during a trip to the American Shakespeare Center).

I like making a to-read list every year, not as a set of tasks to be accomplished, but as a way of giving myself permission to prioritize these books, that I might otherwise put off as I tackle other things. So, without further ado, here’s my 2018 list:

C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences — Various
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace — Tamar Adler
The Baron in the Trees — Italo Calvino
Grant — Ron Chernow
Middlemarch — George Eliot
Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined — Michael Frame and Amelia Urry
The Shadow of His Wings: The True Story of Fr. Gereon Goldmann, OFM — Gereon Goldmann
Athens, Arden, Jerusalem — Kate Havard & Paul T. Wilford
Notre Dame de Paris/The Hunchback of Notre Dame — Victor Hugo
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World — Steven Johnson
Thy Will Be Done: Letters to Persons in the World — St. Francis de Sales
Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential Writings — Maria Skobtsova
The Light of Christ — Fr. Thomas Joseph White
The Vision of the Soul — James Matthew Wilson
Disagreeing Virtuously — Olli-Pekka Vainio

This year, I’d like to try doing some daily spiritual reading (and there’s certainly enough here to fill a year), which leaves me with one small problem. I’m vegetarian, so I don’t fast from meat on Fridays (and other food-based practices haven’t worked well for me). I’ve taken on a special time of spiritual reading, but, if I’m doing it everyday, it doesn’t work so well as a Friday practice. Any suggestions for what I might take on instead?

Origen on “Lead Us Not Into Temptation”

The internet (and the Pope) are discussing the Lord’s Prayer plea that God “not lead us into temptation” which brings up the obvious question: why would God lead us into temptation—is it a trap?

It’s not a new question, and, when our monthly spiritual reading bookclub picked up Tertullian, Cyprian, And Origen On The Lord’s Prayer, Origen had some fascinating meditations on this request (translated as “Do not bring us into testing”).

The utility of testing is thus something like this: through testing the things which our souls have admitted, unknown to anyone except God, unknown even to ourselves, are made manifest, so that we should know longer be unaware of what kind of people we are, but may recognize this and, should we so wish, perceive our own evil and give thanks for the good things that have been made manifest to us through the testing. It is set forth by the Lord in Job, and is written in Deuteronomy, that testing comes upon us so that our true nature may be revealed to ourselves, and so that we may discern what is hidden in our hearts. The passages are as follow: “Do you think that I should have answered you except to reveal you as righteous” (Job 40:3) and, in Deuteronomy: “He afflicted you and starved you and fed you with manna, and he led you astray in the desert, where there were biting snakes and scorpions and drought, so that what was in your heart might be made known” (Deut. 8:3,15,2).

As Origen discusses it, testing and temptation are a little like apocalypse: in the sense that they are an unveiling, with all the disruption that may accompany exposure. Earlier in the text, Origin gives a much more vivid example of this sort of revelatory testing (the story referenced is from Numbers 11):

Having desires and longings, the mixed throng among the children of Israel, and the children of Israel with them, wept. It is clear that as long as they did not possess what they desired they would have no satisfaction, and their passions would not cease. But the merciful and good God, in granting their desire, did not wish to grant it in such a way that their desire might continue in them. Therefore he says that they should eat meat not for one day only, for should they have partaken of the meat for a short while their passion would remain and the soul be kindled and inflamed by it. Nor does he grant them what they desired for two days. Since he willed that they should be surfeited with it, he utters what, to anyone who understands, is actually a threat, though it seems gratifying to them: “You shall not spend five days only eating meat, nor twice that, nor even twice that, but you shall spend a whole month eating meat, until what you though so good is coming out your nostrils, together with your loathsome passion, and your culpable and base desire. In this way I will release you from desires in your lives, so that when you emerge you may be pure from all desires, and remember the suffering that you underwent in order to be released from it.

In Origen’s writing, testing and temptation seems a little like an earthly form of Purgatory, where the faults were have kept secret even from ourselves become gross and obvious, so we can no longer avoid an explicit choice between our love of our sins and our love of God. To ask to be spared this is to ask to see and mend these errors sooner, so that God does not need to lead us into grotesqueries (meat coming out our nostrils!) to show us what we ought to be already.

My Favorite Books of 2017

Nonfiction about prisoners and dead bodies, just one work of fiction (alas!) about tiny dragons, lunar tipplers, and attack oragami.

These were my favorite books I read for the first time this year, or, technicallyDec 2016-Nov 2017. I like to put the list together a little early each year, in the hopes of getting some of favorites placed under other people’s Christmas trees soon.

And speaking of which, you can always get my book, Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer, for any Catholic friends or folks curious about Catholicism. Plus, if you’d like to get a preview of my second book, which will be out in the fall of 2018, you can sign up here to get an email, just as soon as I’m allowed to give details (it’s in copyedits).

 

Without further ado, in roughly chronological order, is what I most loved:

From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East by William Dalrymple

[image error]An unfortunately timely book to read. Dalrymple’s book was published in 1999, and many of the Christian communities he visited in the Middle East were already under threat. Reading it now, I got to catch glimpses of peoples who had tenuously held on and been shaped by hardship, but who, now, had been expelled or killed. I was very grateful for his reporting.

Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities by Diana Leafe Christian

[image error]Delightfully detailed. I’ve picked up other books on New Monasticism or other community-focused books, and I’ve found many of them too vague. While other books talk in terms of general themes, Creating a Life Together has case studies, land-use laws, etc. I’m not planning to create or join an intentional community in the next year or so, but this was a fascinating tour through successful (and failed!) communities and expanded my sense of what is possible.

He Leadeth Me by Walter J. Ciszek, SJ

[image error]Fr. Ciszek snuck into the Soviet Union in 1940 to offer the sacraments to Catholics whose faith was suppressed. He was caught and imprisoned for 20 years (15 of them in a gulag). He wrote two books after he was freed, and He Leadeth Me is the shorter and more meditative of the two (I haven’t read With God in Russia). All the Soviet tortures are the backdrop to his relationship with God, and his struggles to choose God in the face of both external pressure and internal weaknesses. He treats his own pride as more grave a threat than imprisonment. It was a moving and shattering book.

The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill

[image error]I loved all the books by Kelly Barnhill I read this year (Iron Hearted Violet, The Witch’s Boy, The Mostly True Story of Jack). Each of the books were so joyfully original (none of what I experienced with some other genre books I read this year, including those for adults, where I could see the tropes start falling into place). Each of the worlds she creates is distinct, and feels real enough to have room for many more stories than the one she shared with us. They were simple a delight to read (and brought me some peace at times I was also reading the next book on the list).

Miscarriage: Women Sharing from the Heart by Marie Allen and Shelly Marks

[image error]A book that’s on my list for unhappy reasons. After losing my first child, this was the book that helped me the most. It’s an oral history of miscarriages, collected by Allen and Marks, who noticed how much women’s voices were being left out of women’s care. They interviewed a number of women, and present some of their stories in full and also group fragments together under themes (support (or not) of husbands, depression, naming children, etc). It was a big gift to have such a wide range of experiences collected together, giving me the chance for my experience to not be measured against the narrow range of “average=normal.” There are even moments of humor (e.g. when one husband, at a loss for how to be supportive, buys and installs a better dishwasher).

The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise by Robert Cardinal Sarah

[image error]My husband and I are almost done with Cardinal Sarah’s God or Nothing (about his own life, we’ve been reading parts of it aloud to each other every Sunday), but this one I read on my own. It was particularly excellent for me, since I tend to identify very strongly with Diane Duane’s description of wizards: “Wizards love words. Most of them read a great deal, and indeed one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to sleep without reading something first.” I bring books everywhere I go, and I’m usually either talking, reading, or both—always swept up in words, words, words.

Cardinal Sarah’s book helped me glimpse what it might be like to find peace in, well, peace, rather than motion. I’m a long way from desiring it, but I’m trying to make a little space for silence, so that I might know it better and learn to desire it. So far, this is mostly taking the form of fasting from speech on the walk to Mass.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat

[image error]An excellent cookbook, because it’s goal is to give you a sense of how to mess around in the kitchen. By temperament, I prefer baking to cooking, where the rules are clear and there isn’t that much tasting and adjustment as you go, but this book made me feel a little better armed to taste my food as I make it and see about making it better. (We’ve added a little white wine vinegar to a lot more things after reading!).

The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde

[image error]I adored Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art, and this was also pretty great. I quoted from Hyde’s passages on usury on the blog already. The most refreshing thing about Hyde’s book is how seriously he takes the power of property (for good or ill) rather than treating as a quotidian reality.

War’s Unwomanly Face by Svetlana Alexievich

[image error]Quite similar in format to Allen and Marks’s oral histories on miscarriage earlier on this list. Alexievich also groups fragments of interviews by theme and lets some stories spool out in their entirety. Like all of her books, this one made me cry (sometimes loudly, on public transportation). It’s the combination of the horrors of what people endured and the persistence of small moments of personality and grace. One woman brought a pair of earrings to the WWII front, so she could have one womanly, beautiful thing in a war that asked her to cut off her hair and relinquish her femininity. She slept wearing them.

Night’s Bright Darkness: A Modern Conversion Story by Sally Read

[image error]I really enjoyed reading a conversion story so different from my own. Read is a poet (and has been a nurse). She wasn’t argued into Catholicism in the same way I was, but seemed to have a susceptibility to it that in some way is the same sensitivity to beauty that guides her writing. It was a pleasure to read (in her lovely prose) how grace reshaped her life.

The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains by Thomas W. Laqueur

[image error]The sole book to make both the “Best of 2017” list and the “Books to read in 2017” list! It’s a book written by a man who seemed to be just so darn curious about his topic that he kept researching (and worried about how to justify his investigations later). Packed with fascinating stories about how our understanding of how to do right by the dead has changed. And includes some sectarian conflicts in which other sects forced Anglican ministers to allow dissenters bodies to be buried in their churchyards. Unfortunately, I read much of this on planes, which robbed me of an audience for reading bits aloud.

 

And if you’d like even more books, here’s my favorites from last year.

Consent isn’t the Opposite of Louis C.K.

Consent, as the primary criterion for sexual ethics, thinks too small. The careful, consent-seeking lover seeks to use his own strength correctly and responsibly. If a lover of this type finds that his strength is a little too daunting, a little too hard to wield cautiously, the solution is to find ways to limit his own power.

So we flense away the intimacy that sex serves, promising not to “catch feelings.” We take drugs or interpose rubber walls to prevent sex from bearing its natural fruits. The resident ethicist at the New York Times even offers a guide to fully eunuchizing sex, advising a man who hopes to open his marriage without endangering it: “This may be an argument for the sin of Onan, where there’s only yourself to fall in love with.”

In each of these cases, there is no abuse of another’s power, as when predators trample on consent. But there is an abuse of the power of sex itself, as we try to make sex small enough for two people to use it separately, safely.

Read more at First Things

The Friedmans’ Crypto Dinner Parties

Several years ago, I read William and Elizebeth Friedman’s The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined and had a blast. Two crypto experts, in their spare time from beating the Nazis, wrote a witty, elegant guide to why most conspiracy theories about Shakespeare’s true identity are wrong (and they teach you a lot of the logic of crypto along the way). Two highlights from that book:

To an ordinary person the resultant message would be enough to prove there is no cipher being used. The difference between the ordinary person and the Baconian is, shall we say, one of degrees of persistence and ingenuity…

Other variations of differing degrees of ingenuity by other writers have appeared from time to time. Some anagrams are in English; for example. one version (Baconiana, April 1902) runs: ‘But thus I told Franciiiiii Bacon’. The last word but one, it is explained, is Fran followed by iiiiii, or 6 in Roman numerals: adopting the French pronunciation, Fran-6 yields Francis, and voilà!

It was a pleasure to read a biography of Elizebeth (The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone) and to discover much more about her work in the World Wars and her strange history with Baconist believers. And here’s one particularly delightful story:

Some of these “cipher parties” were scavenger hunts that sent guests winging through the city. Elizebeth handing you a small white envelope. You tore it open to find a cryptogram. The solution was the address of a restaurant. When you arrived, you ate the salad course, then solved a second cryptogram to discover the location of the entrée. Other parties were hosted at the Friedmans’ home with food cooked by Elizebeth. A shy arm wife arrived at 3932 Military Road one evening with her husband and panicked when the Friedmans handed her a menu in code. “The first item was a series of dots done with a blue pen,” she later recalled. “The ‘brains’ at the party worked over the number of dots in a group when it occurred to me it had to be ‘blue points’—oysters—and it was!”

The Dangers of Keeping Sorrow Secret

Douthat’s column suggest that it’s a mistake to assume that misery is always an imposition, something that can’t be “anything but terrifying.” If nothing else, he writes, sharing misery is a kind of truth-telling. The more pressure we feel to keep it private, the more warped our view of the world becomes.

[…]

Sharing sorrow can be a way of welcoming others, not just as they are now, but as they may be, if something goes wrong. […] In the absence of the witness my friends offered me, the witness Douthat encourages people to offer or to welcome, the world can feel thin. It’s like entering a Protestant church full of sterile crosses with no crucified Christ in sight. If the Cross is treated as an aberration, something only flamboyantly suffering saints are called to, then Christ is not fully present to any of the rest of us.

Read more at Aleteia

Destroying Marriage, a Diptych

From the New York Times, a feature on the new Argentine trend of throwing fake weddings to enjoy the spectacle and the celebration.

In case there was any doubt, as the couple (hired actors) left the stage, colored lights flashed, the disc jockey started the music pumping, and the announcement was made to the paying guests: “The wedding is fake, but the party is real.”

“The purpose of the ‘falsa boda’ is to convey joy and fun and live the happy moments related to love, without having to fall into the traditional ritual of what a marriage is,” explained Nacho Bottinelli, 30, one of the organizers.

The article notes that marriage has been declining as more couples cohabitate indefinitely, so the falsa boda are meant to fill the gap. And as they replicate everything but the heart of the ceremony, the party becomes more and more grotesque:

The ritual of placing a garter on the bride also gets a twist, with 10 single women and 10 single men from the crowd invited to also give it a try.

The whole piece reminded me of nothing so much as this warning from C.S. Lewis:

You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act—that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?

Speaking in St Paul on my conversion and better fights

I’m in St. Paul, Minnesota this weekend, to speak to the Cathedral of St. Paul’s class of RCIA students, and to give two talks open to the public as part of the First Saturdays program.

The Cathedral offers the First Saturday gatherings as “mini-retreats in accord with Our Lady’s instruction at Fatima, designed to foster greater devotion, understanding, and living out of the Gospel of Christ in the world.”

I’ll be giving two short talks, one on my conversion, and one on “Fights in Good Faith,” my strategies for approaching disagreements as an opportunity to seek truth and offer and receive love.