A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith
Dappled Things is once again accepting poetry submissions! Send us your verses bursting with awe and grandeur, or just make us laugh. Send us your sonnets, your haikus, your odes, your limericks, your free verse, but don’t forget to dip your imagination in the baptismal font first. As always, we are committed to publishing the very best Catholic literature of our times, and we look forward to reading more of your brilliant work.
This is not a post about Catholic literature, but I want to use that topic, which is so frequently discussed on this blog, as a point of departure. It’s almost impossible to talk about Catholic art and literature without someone bringing up the concept of the “sacramental imagination,” the idea that deeply embedded within the Catholic worldview is the sense that the material creation always points beyond itself. Commentators often observe that Catholic artists–even lapsed Catholic artists–don’t merely invent symbols to stuff into their books, but experience the natural world as place where symbols are discovered, a universe “groaning in labor pains” that “awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God.” There is much truth in that observation, but it also seems to me that many serious Catholics from younger generations, especially in rich countries, could just as well be described as lapsed secularists. Catholics in this group are people who have reached the conclusion that the Faith is true and try to shape their lives in accordance with those convictions, but they do it against a default pull toward a disenchanted worldview. They know that the world is suffused with God’s presence, but they have trouble feeling it. In many ways, I include myself in this group. We are believers who are quite ready to recognize the presence of grace in literature, to delight in its action in the works of Flannery O’Connor or Graham Greene–but when it comes to daily life? Well. We’ll assent intellectually to the action of Providence in the abstract, to the possibility of miracles in general, but it’s almost as if we can’t quite believe that such Divine action could ever really touch us, that the supernatural could manifest itself in any extraordinary way within the supreme ordinariness of our own planned, controlled, and insured lives.
Even as I have grown in my intellectual assent to Catholicism and (I hope) the practice of the faith, the longer I’ve lived in the United States, the more this secular sense of disenchantment has become for me an easy attitude to drift into. Note that it’s not a belief or a conviction, merely a posture or disposition, yet precisely for that reason it’s something that can wreak havoc on the spiritual life. The Latin American Catholicism in which I grew up is not without serious deficiencies–it is intellectually weak and liturgically barren, to begin with–but our culture is not yet entirely disenchanted, and that can count for a lot. Miracles or interventions of Providence are not events one only expects to happen to other, distant people (if at all), but rather realities that, while always surprising, are certainly expected as part of the experience of one’s life. I know these things also happen in the developed world (they have to my family, and why should they not?), but somehow they never become a part of our family histories, our personal histories, and thus fail to influence they way we see the world. Consequently, in an effort to fight against this posture of disenchantment, both for my own sake and for the benefit of anyone who reads this blog, I’ve decided to record my family’s own stories about moments of extraordinary grace. Some of the stories involve events that I would consider outright Miracles, while others could perhaps be interpreted simply as bizarre or beautiful coincidences, but they are all moments when it was hard for us not to see God’s hand at work. I want to save some of the good stuff for later since this post is already getting quite long, so I’ll begin with a fairly simply story that always brings a smile to my face.
*
During the fall of my sophomore year in college, my parents couldn’t afford to bring me home for Thanksgiving. My parents had moved to South Florida from Colombia around the time I finished high school, and they were in a very difficult financial situation. I had received a very generous financial aid package to attend Penn, but still the portion of tuition my parents were liable for was a huge strain on the family. Since I was going to school in Philadelphia, there was not even the option of driving, but I didn’t really mind staying for a quiet week on campus. It had been the same thing the year before. Since I had not celebrated Thanksgiving growing up, I didn’t really feel that I was missing anything. For my mom, however, it was a different story. With only one Thanksgiving under her belt as a US resident, she already felt a depressing lack at not being about to fly me home for the week. Unbeknownst to me, as the holiday approached she became truly heartbroken about it, and would spend futile hours looking online at tickets that were way too expensive to even consider.
Then one day, just a few weeks before the break, an astonishingly cheap ticket popped up on her screen. It was $135 round trip; nothing else she had looked at came even close. She was sure that the offer would be gone at any moment. Such was the family’s situation at that time, however, that we simply didn’t have those $135. The money wasn’t there, but the find seemed like such a godsend that she called my father to discuss whether there was any way they could afford the ticket.
“Get it,” my dad said at once.
“But how are we going to pay for it?” my mom replied, ever the practical and responsible one.
But if anyone in the family is good at abandoning himself to the will of Providence, it’s my dad.
“Get it,” he insisted. “Put it on the credit card. If God put that opportunity before us, he’ll give us what we need to pay it off.”
Usually, my mom would have argued back and reminded him of everything that could go wrong, that he had no way to know if that was really God’s will, but in this instance her desire to have the family together for Thanksgiving was so strong that she gave in and bought the ticket at once. My parents called me that night and announced I would be joining them for the break after all, that they had found a flight at a great price. They never said anything about my mom’s tears or the seemingly reckless decision to buy the ticket. I was pleased with the news and took it as a sign that their finances must be stabilizing at last.
During the weeks that followed, with the credit card bill looming, my mom continued to fret, but my dad remained calm (likely to my mom’s great annoyance and distress) in his conviction that God would figure it out. Yet as the morning of my flight arrived, my mom’s joy in knowing she would see me later that day was still marred by worry about the coming bill.
It was my dad who came to pick me up at Fort Lauderdale Airport that morning. I met him on the curb in the Arrivals section, where he greeted me with a kiss on the cheek and took my suitcase to place in the trunk. As he did so, I saw off the corner of my eye something fluttering on the ground. My dad saw it too and we instinctively looked down for a better look.
There were a few dollar bills on the ground.
As we looked for another second, however, we realized there were more than a few. There was a whole trail of them strewn along the curb and sidewalk right by our car. Looking around, we saw there was no one around whom we could identify as a potential owner. At that point we rushed to pick them up before they fluttered away. I handed my bundle to my dad, and a knowing smile started spreading across his face as he began to count them.
“One hundred and thirty five dollars,” he said, as if the number had some special meaning.
“And the Lord said to Abram: Go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and out of thy father’s house, and come into the land which I shall show thee.”
Tonight’s Easter Vigil marks my fifteenth year as a Catholic, and approximately my seventeenth as a properly baptized Christian. On that night in 2003 I received the chrism of Confirmation and the consecrated Body of Christ for the first time in a church dedicated to St. Clement of Rome. After Mass, we celebrated in the rectory with a six-pack of local brew and I wondered greatly at what the future would have in store.
I have been thinking for some time about how to describe the change of Catholic conversion. The particulars of the change are different for every convert and catechumen, but it always involves a kind of quantum leap from a lower to a higher state. It is a movement from the outer darkness to the light of hospitality, from ignorance to knowledge, from the wasteland to the land flowing with milk and honey, from death to life.
But it does not always appear to be so. The unending stream of scandals of all sorts is enough to focus the mind on the so-called human element of the Church to the detriment of the divine. There is enough sin and stupidity among Catholics both cleric and lay to fill a library of unhappy memoirs. If there is one thing a cradle Catholic cannot bear it is a convert pointing out the emperor’s public nudity. A large part of the spiritual life is learning how to tolerate the imperfections of others while still retaining the capacity for righteous indignation when it is appropriate. It might be appropriate less often than we sometimes think.
With apologies to Mr. Plato: The kingdom of Heaven is likened unto a cave, where the inhabitants are prisoners chained to a rock and made watch an endless play of shadows on the wall which they mistake for reality; some are freed from their chains and make their way into the upper sunlit world, which they come to understand is The Real. The allegory of the cave is misappropriated by the “brights” and “wokes” of the world, and perhaps also by myself to describe entry into the Church, but to my mind it stands close to the parables of Christ in its vivacity and depth. For most Protestants, the bread and wine are a mere shadow-play of symbols; for the Catholic it is really and truly the Body and Blood. For the ancient pagans, goodness and truth were invisible abstractions; for us they are the incarnate God-Man. For the atheist, familial community is an existential choice of companions; for us it is the Mystical Body of Christ, bound together as a fellowship of adopted sons.
It is also likened unto a homeless man brought to live in a great mansion, or a child raised by beasts brought into human society, or a man born blind given his sight. The allegorical representations of la vita nuova are as endless as creation itself. (The medieval allegorists were fond of animal symbolism in their theology of the sacraments and spiritual life, but I will not torment our readers with those at the moment.)
Or consider the symbol of a dead man returned to life. The dead haunts the land of the living like a ghost, and indeed in the final analysis he is the shadow-play on the wall that believes it is real. This shade pretends to be alive and thinks it knows many things, but it is not until it is restored to its body with all its senses, and its powers of memory and will, that it understands how insubstantial it had been. The downside of being alive is that one can smell unpleasant things and feel pain, but that is a small price to pay for the benefits of bodily life. He has transformed from a shadow-play to the Real Thing that the shadow-play faintly mimicked. He may or may not be ultimately worthy of this transformation, but only time will tell.
The words of Holy Writ in the book long known as the Liber Ecclesiasticus are appropriate for this night when we repeat our baptismal promises: “Never come to him with a heart that hesitates…. Submissive be thy heart, and ready to bear all…. Firm let thy feet be set on the path the Lord has chosen for thee.” The path of the Catholic Faith is the path of life, and though the Church here on earth be fickle, freckled, its pied beauty still points irresistibly to the unspotted Beauty Celestial and Eternal.
“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you.”
A happy Easter to all.
There were tiny flower gardens and vegetable patches in the yards. Often there were rows of corn, stunted but still recognizable, a few tomato plants, and always the vegetables were bordered by flowers, often grateful marigolds, all sizes and shades with tier pungent odor. I collected odors in my memory, the one beauty in those drab streets. The odors of geranium leaves, tomato plants, marigolds; the smell of lumber, of tar, of roasting coffee; the smell of good bread and rolls and coffee cake coming from the small German bakeries. Here was enough beauty to satisfy me.
This is how Dorothy Day describes her childhood in her autobiography The Long Loneliness. I’ve been a fan of Day as a human being and a thinker for a while now, but have only recently found time to read her closely in her own words. Right away, I’m impressed by how good a writer she is. Read that quote above again. It crackles with energy. It’s descriptive but not turgid, the language original but not pretentious, and the memory clearly nostalgic but not sentimental. Her talent as a writer is unfairly overshadowed by her personal reputation, which I suppose is a good problem to have, but still, I wish I’d read her work sooner.
One of the themes she builds throughout the book is that of existential loneliness. For instance, she records how she wept at night after moving out of the family house to attend college, and how she felt desolation at not holding her baby brother in her arms each night. Outside of this communion of familial love, she experienced the world as an ugly place and began to use profanity to express her rupture with the world. This last detail, which she is careful to elucidate, shows her sensitivity to the way in which her words and her inner spiritual state are intimately connected. If her life overshadows her art, perhaps we ought not be so hasty to separate the two in the good or the bad.
Later, as a young, eager social activist looking to make a mark on the world and overcome her existential angst, she manages to get arrested. While on a hunger strike in prison, she writes,
I had no sense of being a radical, making protest against a government, carrying on a nonviolent revolution. I could only feel darkness and desolation all around me. The bar of gold which the sun left on the ceiling every morning for a short hour taunted me; and late in the afternoon when the cells were dim and the lights in the corridor were not yet lit, a heartbreaking conviction of the ugliness, the futility of life came over me so that I could not weep but lie there in blank misery.
She speaks of never being free again, knowing the metaphysical prison of ugliness that sin causes. Most interestingly, the experience prompts her to question the very meaning of good and evil. She speaks of it like a wound, an experience that affected her far more deeply than any theoretical pondering about injustice. It was the direct, sensory
experience of evil. And then, the Bible she has asked for finally arrives at her cell. She reads the Psalms, written by a man who knows sorrow and yet expects joy. In the scriptures, she finds, the ugliness of suffering meets beauty. In the meeting, beauty proves to be the stronger of the two, such that it makes even suffering beautiful if it is accepted out of love.
The key to overcoming the long loneliness is not to escape it but to embrace it. To lose your life for love of the beauty all around, particularly the human souls with whom we make our pilgrimage. In this way, even ugliness is redeemed and transformed. In that encounter, which is the very nexus of human existence, is built a true community of persons. The ugliness of a Catholic Worker house with its random alcoholic tenants, its over-eager and under-educated poor, its maniacal would-be street-corner preachers, its smudged off-white curtains in the living room, its simmering pot of mashed potatoes covered in canned mushroom sauce meant to feed army, the willingness of those within to mingle with criminals and vagrants, to write for their simple newspaper simple articles to be sold at street corners for a penny apiece – This is beautiful. The long loneliness is only overcome by a beauty which is truly communal, whose beating heart is pierced for love. Anything else is whistling in the wind.
T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath were two poets who helped me fall in love with poetry when I was a teenager. I’m not alone in my early reverence for these two poets, who on the surface are quite dissimilar.
In addition to being a poet, Plath was an ambitious young woman, cheery in photographs, who went on to be an expert homemaker and mother before her famous suicide. By contrast, Eliot’s public persona was dour and fastidious, and he spent his time in London taking meals with famous writers like Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound. Whereas Plath railed against God along with her dead father in poems, Eliot underwent a religious conversion that inspired his later poems.
And yet these two poets have much in common. They both made the move from America to England, from vocational pursuits to lives of writing. Eliot worked his way from St. Louis to London, from bank clerk to preeminent poet and intellectual. Plath was a pretty, intellectually-gifted young woman who worked for fashion magazines and then became a Fulbright scholar and a serious poet.
Both spent time in mental institutions. Both found troubled British spouses who were likely unfaithful to them, and both obtained divorces. Both wrote verse passionate enough to move teenagers, a trait they share with Dylan and Springsteen.
I loved them both for their powerful words, for expressing painful emotions in kaleidoscopic free verse, for their attempts to exorcise the demons of mental illness with their pens.
Furthermore, they both introduced me to an incredibly beautiful poem (sung as a taunt by a sea spirit) from The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
No spoilers for The Tempest, but this verse is sung to someone who believes his father has drowned. Plath alludes to the poem in “Full Fathom Five” as she struggles to come to terms with her father’s death. Eliot includes the line “[t]hose are pearls that were his eyes” twice in “The Waste Land.” This is a beautiful and frightful image—of impermanent eyes replaced in their sockets by strong, lovely pearls, and of bones with decaying flesh replaced by gorgeous coral.
One reason people write poetry (or attempt any endeavor) is in hopes of achieving a kind of immortality. At their best, poets take mundane details of life and turn them into permanent decorations. Another quality Eliot and Plath both share is that they’re both dead, and yet we remember them.
Poems, pearls, and coral do not last forever, but they can last longer than a human life. Shakespeare, Eliot, and Plath (and Dylan and Springsteen) perhaps hoped to achieve immortality through verse. We do not have these poets with us in the flesh, but we have words they wrote long ago. I’m grateful for the survival of the poems I’ve loved, and yet their existence benefits us and not the ones who wrote them.
Our hope is in more than memories. We hope in one who came not only to suffer with us as the poets do, but to end our suffering. As we remember the Resurrection this season, we hope for a sea-change—an exchange of mortality for immortality. We hope for a new world that will be stronger than pearl, more beautiful than coral, and stranger than poetry.
Looking for something to spark a love for Latin? Try these Baroque Anagrams on for size. “On the last page of a collection of his anagrams, the author rearranges his own name to ask serione haec laudas? (‘You actually like this stuff?’). He then puts that question to his anticipated critic and urges him to criticize the collection, not praise it, because critics and poets don’t like each other anyway. That’s the kind of irony the Baroque period has in common with Hellenistic Greek.”
Do philosophers make bad husbands? The awkward relationship of Regine Olsen and Søren Kierkegaard would seem to argue yes. “Kierkegaard wanted it both ways, to be Regine’s spiritual husband or comrade while Fritz handled day-to-day duties, which never, it turned out, included children. He wrote that he and Fritz would walk arm in arm with Regine in heaven. Fritz said No, I don’t think so.”
The Easter Bunny is coming soon, but beware his medieval kin.
In my parish, every year we read the “Optional for use with the RCIA” readings for the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Sundays of Lent, which means that this past Sunday, we heard the story of the raising of Lazarus. Lazarus as presented in the scriptures is a bit of an enigma. He might be the titular character, but his sisters Mary and Martha get most of the screen time, so to speak. Lazarus only appears long enough to stagger out of the tomb “bound hand and foot”—a feat of amazing dexterity, especially for a guy who’s been dead for four days. Lazarus never responds to his miraculous comeback. The scriptures do not record his gratitude to Jesus, nor perhaps his criticism—because who is to say that Lazarus wanted to come back? St. John did not record the answers to the questions Lazarus must have gotten tired of hearing. Where were you? What was it like? How did it feel to come back? Why don’t you write your memoirs and solve this whole question of the afterlife once and for all?
Of course, St. John knew his business, which was to bring his readers to know and love Jesus Christ, not Lazarus. He may not have satisfied his readers’ curiosity, but neither did he distract us from the central character with wild subplots. He left that up to less important writers like me.
Of all the characters in the story of Lazarus, Lazarus himself is the one with whom I most easily identify. I have had my opportunities to play Martha and Mary, weeping over the death of a loved one, “Lord, if you had been here, he would not have died.” But I also have entirely too much experience being Lazarus. I have not spent four days rotting in a tomb, but I have come a good deal closer to death than most living people—twice.
During my first semester of college, at age eighteen, my appendix ruptured, but I did not realize what had happened. I spent two weeks in my dorm burning up with fever, too weak to walk across campus to the infirmary. I thought I had the flu. Finally, I asked my parents to take me home and then said, “Mom, you’d better call a priest.” Yes, I asked for a priest before I asked for a doctor. A doctor could not have helped me at that moment. There comes a point when only Jesus can say, “This illness is not to end in death,” because the body has no resources left with which to fight. I knew instinctively that I had reached that point. Our parish priest anointed me that afternoon, a Sunday. On Monday, my father took me to the doctor, who sent me to the hospital, where I had surgery on Tuesday.
By the time I actually went under the knife, I had already recovered. The fever had broken, all of my other symptoms had disappeared, and the doctor remarked how silly he felt wheeling what appeared to be a perfectly healthy eighteen-year-old into the O.R. What he actually removed was not my appendix but the hard shell my body had formed to contain the pieces after it ruptured. There was no infection at all. “There are no recorded cases of anyone surviving a ruptured appendix without surgery,” my doctor said, “And there still aren’t because I operated on you. But you would have lived regardless.” I have never seen the expression my doctor wore that day on any other person’s face before or since. I don’t think he used the word “miracle,” but those were the eyes of someone who has beheld an event that he cannot explain.
You wouldn’t believe me if I told you how nonchalantly I received his news. Nor did the doctor, who kept trying in vain to elicit some kind of reaction from me beyond a shrug. What he said wasn’t news to me, except in the medical details. I already knew when and by Whom I had been healed. True grace comes very much as a matter of course. Miracles are inevitable in the light of God’s true love.
The second time I almost died was just a year ago, in March of 2017. I had surgery that was supposed to be minimally invasive, usually done as an outpatient procedure. It did not go as planned. I lost a great deal more blood than I should have, but no one told me that when I woke up. All I could find the strength to say was, “It hurts to breathe.” This prompted my nurse to pump me full of painkillers. All through the night after my surgery, I woke up every four hours or so to say, “I can’t breathe. It hurts to breathe.” Then I was given narcotics to put me back to sleep. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I knew the drugs were making it worse, even though I was too weak to say so. There came a moment when I received the latest dose and as I drifted off, I knew: I’m probably not going to wake up.
It was a moment of pure peace.
As in my other brush with death, the worst had passed before the doctors did what was necessary to save me. I was conscious and breathing without pain by the time the morning nurse came in, looked at my chart, and called the doctor to say, “Have you seen her numbers? I really think you should give her a transfusion.”
I did not experience cardiac arrest or brain death on either occasion, although I know I was very close. I did not have the “near death experience” of walking through a tunnel of light toward the open arms of Christ or my loved ones. I never saw any visions or heard any voices. But in my moments of greatest weakness, I learned that the veil between this world and the next is imperceptibly thin and easier to slip across—from both directions—than we care to admit when we’re healthy. I do not know if everyone experiences death the same way, but I know that I experienced near-death the same way twice. I shall be terribly surprised, the last time I go, if it is different.
In my experience, the approach leading up to the veil is a terrifying darkness filled with pain, but there is a kind of event horizon beyond which fear and suffering have no meaning. They simply don’t exist. There might be a medical reason for this, that the brain is too weak to produce the necessary chemicals to perceive those emotions, but on both occasions when I realized I was much more likely to die than to live, every care I had ever known dissolved in pure surrender. There was no danger on the other side of the veil. The toil and heartache are all here, in this world, in the months of excruciating recovery and the trials of life yet to come. It is not exactly true to say I didn’t want to come back. But it is true that the only answer I could give—the only answer I would ever want to give—to the peace of that surrender is, “Yes.”
Writing those words frightens me. I do not want to die. I have a husband and children who depend on me, family and friends who would grieve, books I still want to write, places I still want to visit, things I still want to accomplish in this life. I’m only thirty-eight. I’m too young to die—a ridiculous fallacy, but one I cannot shake despite all evidence to the contrary. It does no good to admit, either silently or aloud, that I know I really will be better off when I’m dead. It sounds like lunacy, even to me. But this is nothing compared to the lunacy of believing that a passage through the veil is The End. The veil is only the threshold of something unequivocally beautiful. That, over there—that is life. What we call life here is not even its shadow. It is the shadow of a shadow of a shadow.
Coming back from that state where I could “see” (for lack of a better verb) beyond this life, I am changed, but perhaps not in the ways one might expect. Death is not magic. I’m the same person now that I was before, with all the same strengths and weaknesses and failings I cannot seem to overcome. I am grateful to be here again, but the primary imprint the experiences left on my soul is not gratitude. It is mission. I did not get up and walk out of my metaphorical tomb by myself. I had no power to do so. Like Lazarus, I was called so that others “will see the glory of God.” It’s a far less dramatic mission than it sounds. My assignment is still the same as it ever was: to love the Lord my God with all my heart and to love my neighbor as myself. If it is marginally less difficult to do that now, it is only because I have less doubt about the outcome. I do not claim to have no doubt. My experiences are, after all, unverifiable, and for the second one, I was heavily drugged. Nevertheless, the testimony of my senses asserts that the hope of salvation is not hoped in vain.
For me, the knowledge of death is irrevocably linked to the knowledge of God’s eternal love. I have known that love here on earth in many ways: through the love of others, through the sacraments, through prayer, but it was in dying that I knew Him best. Rising back into this world is, by comparison, a tepid anticlimax. Perhaps that is why Lazarus never wrote his memoirs. Perhaps, like me, he could only shrug at the miracle. I AM is, and His words are true. Beside that knowledge, no miracle could ever be astonishing.
Spring is officially here, and so are some of our picks for what to read this season. Check out our recommendations below and tell us in the comments what you’ve been reading!
Katy Carl:
The Confessions of X, Suzanne Wolfe (2016)
The novel is narrated by St. Augustine’s eponymous concubine, whose historical name remains unknown. Wolfe approaches her source material—Augustine’s own sparing account in his Confessions—with a generous and optimistic eye. She imagines X as a gifted, competent, and insightful woman, instrumental in Augustine’s development: an equal for the great saint-to-be, despite their radical differences in class, education, and upbringing.
This depiction, like any worthwhile art, raises questions: Can we believe that history could have ended as well for X as the novel does? Would we have found the characters as recognizable, their motivations as lucid, as we find Wolfe’s well-drawn and surprisingly contemporary men and women? In such an experience as that portrayed, where does X find the strength to practice the agency she displays? Wolfe’s responses—implicit in the text—persuaded me, but you’ll want to make up your own mind: and the winsome, rich prose will make the endeavor a pleasure.
Christopher Petter:
Saint Dominic, Georges Bernanos (1939, trans. Anthony Giambrone, O.P.)
Georges Bernanos once tried his hand at the difficult art of hagiography, an art lost to his time as it is to ours, and in his short vita of St. Dominic one can see him wrestling with the task. How does one capture a life of sanctity? It is not in our powers to cast a pure and simple glance upon the works of God, Bernanos claims, and the deterministic logic of our modern historical methods “have not finished disappointing us.” The author describes a unique blossoming of grace in a prose almost as energetic and moving as the mendicant life of its subject, occasionally distinguishing the founder of the Order of Preachers from the man of genius or the man of action (even from other great saints), all to help fix our sight on the exact character of his sanctity. Fr. Anthony Giambrone, himself a son of Dominic, captures that artful energy in his translation. Though this isn’t historical fiction, I can’t help but put this on my shelf next to Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock and Evelyn Waugh’s Helena, other perceptive, if unordinary attempts, by mid-twentieth century novelists to capture the historical realities of holy lives.
Bernardo Aparicio García:
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (1985)
If you haven’t read Ender’s Game, it’s about time. “But I’m not a fan of science fiction!” you say. Read it anyway. My wife has never cared for the genre and loved it, and kept coming to me after reading it with different thoughts the novel provoked in her mind. Not only is it a truly gripping read with a fantastic climax, but a very imaginative book that explores interesting questions.
Yes, it rests on a basic premise of humans vs. aliens, but that’s just the excuse for the story, characters, and ideas that Card brings to life in the book. In particular, I loved the way the aliens are imagined; not, for once, as a superior intelligence against which humanity is desperately outmatched, but as a different kind of intelligence, a different kind of personal being, with its own strengths and weaknesses. I found that concept fascinating.
Also, without giving too much away, the way the ending brings new light into the countless, seemingly arbitrary, hardships that the main character, Ender, had endured throughout the book, is extremely satisfying. I won’t go so far as to say that it is an allegory for human life and the roles we play in God’s plan, as I think the strict analogy breaks down when one considers how flawed (even cruel and manipulative) Ender’s superiors are, but let’s say (to steal from Tolkien) that there’s a good deal of applicability. I’ll add that if, by chance, you were unfortunate enough to watch the 2013 film based on the novel, please forget what you saw and give the original a chance.
Jonathan McDonald:
Dymer, C.S. Lewis (1926)
From a young age the future Professor Lewis was writing narrative verse based on a variety of fantastic subjects. The eponymous hero of Dymer might have stepped out of the later Brave New World or even Logan’s Run, but the main thrust of this utopian escapee’s story is his tumultuous love affair with nature and romanticism. The poem is often strange and dreamlike, and offers criticisms of many then-modern philosophical and literary movements. It can be found collected in Harcourt’s edition of Narrative Poems by Lewis.
Natalie Morrill:
Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson (1992)
I recommended Jesus’ Son to a friend recently and, though I think of it as this universally-recommended short story collection, it’s probably not as well-known as I imagine (at least not in all circles). I first encountered it during my MFA. My fiction prof, in a one-on-one meeting, suggested it based on the writing I’d been attempting in her workshop. The title did initially sketch me out a bit. (It’s a Lou Reed lyric, for the record.) That these were short stories about drug addicts narrated by a character only ever ID’d as “F*ckhead” left me concerned about my prof’s impression of me. Still, I read it.
“Transcendent” is likely a threadbare blurb word at this point. But it’s no exaggeration to say Jesus’ Son is the most magnificent short story collection I can remember reading. It’s both the language (electric) and the treatment of the subject (brutal, tender) that keep me coming back to it. They’re by no means the same on all counts, but I’d shelve Johnson alongside David Foster Wallace in terms of clear-eyed, compassionate literary treatment of addiction and of those bottoming out in American society generally – while also capturing, in some oblique sense, the ways a soul can reach towards the divine in the midst of that. It’s also a helpful comparison in the sense that I know this isn’t a book for all readers (or even for all readers of Dappled Things). That being said, in every case of someone I know who’s read it, we’ve only ever connected over it with expressions like I still can’t believe how good it is.
Michael Rennier:
Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett (2006)
I’m actually in the midst of a Pratchett reading frenzy and I’m only singling out Wintersmith because it’s one of the most recent I’ve read. His work is remarkably consistent and Pratchett is a vastly under-rated comic genius whose writings loosely surround a shared world called Discworld, meaning once you start reading them you can’t stop. This one has it all – witches, relentless satire of teenagers, relentless satire of intellectuals, relentless satire of Scotland, a nod to Orpheus, and ultimately, a happy ending. Read any and all Pratchett, and if you get to Wintersmith he’ll melt the god of winter away.
Roseanne Sullivan:
Master of Hestvikin, Sigrid Undset (1926)
I became a Sigrid Undset fan at 72, at a far older age than most of her admirers. First I read the Master of Hestvikin. I’d read she published it in 1926 after she converted to Catholicism and its Catholic characters are portrayed positively. Then I read Kristin Lavransdatter, which was published starting in 1920.
Undset actually wrote that researching the beliefs of her characters in medieval times exposed her to the saints, and the saints led to her conversion to Catholicism, which occurred between the publication of Kristin Lavransdatter and Master of Hestvikin. In both, Catholics characters are complex and real. But her novels are never “about” Catholicism.
Undset is a master storyteller, I’ve never read anyone with her deep understanding of how people love each other. I also relish the way she lavishes us with the fascinating details of people’s lives.
Josh Nadeau:
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
This’s been a classic I’ve been meaning to get around to for quite a while now, not to mention the latest recipient of Nobel laurels, and being able to sit with it has mostly been a dream. If I were limited to a single word to describe it, I’d probably have to say layered. On the surface it’s the story of an aging butler driving off for a few days into the English countryside, but the narrative takes a few nosedives into a past that, instead of presenting a protagonist coming to terms with what his life has meant, reveal a man whose desires hopelessly, yet always humanely, remain a mystery to himself.
Ishiguro takes the lives of English servants, shot through with the tension of being consummate (perhaps obsessive) professionals in possession of somewhat-inconvenient heartbeats, and opens them wide to his readers with a quality that can only be described as generosity. Then he weaves in the changing nature of England, the passage of time, the legacy of fathers, the shock of the wars, the embrace of and running from the past, the yearning and resignation of affection, as well as what it means to grow into a life of dignity.
To say much more would be missing the point – this’s a book to be sat with, listened to with delicacy and a patience drawn out of you like a decoy. A perfect spring book for me as it, more than anything else, feels like an intimate sign of a thaw you haven’t known you’ve been waiting for.
Guest post by John Emmet Clarke.
I was reading Brideshead Revisited every Lent before it was cool to do so. I was quoting entire passages and explaining allusions long before every Catholic Bright Young Thing was surreptitiously searching how to pronounce “Tiresias” prior to stammering out a few lines of Eliot at a particularly boozy post-Mass brunch. But then the day came where I realized that the mere placing of Brideshead at the top of one’s list made one, well, one of them. Asked at some informal get-together what my favorite book was, I demurely replied, “Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.” At which my interlocutor groaned and bewailed the limited imagination of today’s Catholic Younger Set in their literary choices and I beat a hasty retreat to the exits and have been trying since to dislodge the phantasms from my memory.
However, I still read Brideshead once a year, albeit with much less fanfare; it retains its place on my list of must-reads for everyone with a soul, but my readiness to promote that list has receded. Until now, that is. This Lent, rather than read Brideshead again, I began to reflect on why the book holds such a basic appeal. And almost immediately I was struck by the novel’s immensely powerful aesthetic appeal. As a beautiful book about beautiful people and places it responds powerfully to the innate desire for what is visually pleasing.
At first blush, this is a remarkably superficial reason, denigrating a story of the conversion of the human heart to faith in almighty God to the level of a lavishly produced, compellingly performed period drama like Downton Abbey. However, that the aesthetic of reality can (does?) deeply affect our response to truth is immediately obvious from Sebastian’s apologia for his Catholic faith:
“I suppose they try to make you believe an awful lot of nonsense.”
“Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.”
“But, my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.”
“Can’t I?”
“I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.”
“Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.”
But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.”
“But I do,” Sebastian replies. “That’s how I believe.”
“And in prayers?…”
“Oh yes….”
“Well,” I said, “if you can believe all that and you don’t want to be good, where’s the difficulty about your religion?”
“If you can’t see, you can’t.”
Here Sebastian is simply describing how he responds to the truth of something on account of its appearance being pleasing to him. In this, he is quite in accord with nature (St. Thomas says beauty is what gives pleasure on sight) and grace (St. Paul says to think about “whatever is lovely”). Maritain writes that the delight which flows from beholding beauty is the result of knowing the truth about the thing that is beautiful:
The beautiful is what gives joy, not all joy, but joy in knowledge; not the joy peculiar to the act of knowing, but a joy superabounding and overflowing from such an act because of the object known.
But of course the loveliness of faith fades fairly fast for Sebastian: “It’s very difficult being a Catholic,” he says—to which we could add, “when you mistake the delight of knowing elements of faith for the having of faith itself.” Brideshead, through Sebastian as much as through Charles and Julia, illustrates the particular tension that Catholicism introduces to human life: The faith’s ever-ancient, ever-new beauty calls to us, but no sooner have we arrived at its embrace than it calls us on to something difficult and seemingly defeating, something ugly and bloody—to the Cross.
Lent reminds us to beware of beauty that presents itself to us at a be-all-end-all. In these forty days, we see our Savior go from the most handsome of men to utterly bereft of beauty. In the portrait of faith, where does beauty belong in such days? Should we chase it from the picture altogether, lest it distract from the desolation of Calvary? Should we cover it momentarily, and when the stone is rolled away, make it the focal point once more? The words of then-Cardinal Ratzinger describing Christian art are applicable to what we do with beauty vis-à-vis our faith. Christian art is:
caught between two fires (as perhaps it always has been): it must oppose the cult of the ugly, which says that everything beautiful is a deception and only the representation of what is crude, low and vulgar is the truth, the true illumination of knowledge. Or it has to counter the deceptive beauty that makes the human being seem diminished instead of making him great, and for this reason is false.
These two fires—deceit and conceit—rage in the same furnace. The illusory nature of beauty can deceive us into thinking that true beauty is nonsense and that ugliness, emptiness, sadness are the really real. Beauty can also deceive us into seeing beauty as a place to dwell happily ever after. Barbour writes that “the danger” of beauty is its “self-sufficiency”: beholding beauty, we may “rest content with the beautiful object qua object, making of it an idol.” Sebastian Flyte is not alone in believing because he delights in the loveliness of what is believed—every human heart is bared to that danger. We can mistake what seems beautiful for the fullness of the thing. And yet the fear of falling prey to that danger is what can produce the overreaction that affirms the lie that the ugly is what is real. Bernanos’s “saint of Lumbres” aims to “uproot that joy” which beauty brings, convinced that “grace has no such sensual attraction.” Greene’s Bendrix damns human happiness and even hates the beauty of his beloved, not seeing them for what they are—hints and symbols of the divine love which brings healing and true happiness. Chandler’s Marlowe sees a naked woman and sees only a dope.
When beauty is diminished to a conceit, it becomes a base, skin-deep self-aggrandizement. Such beauty is what Rodin called true ugliness—“the fake, whatever grins at you without cause, senseless affectations, pirouettes and capers, mere travesties of beauty and grace, whatever tells a lie.” The only nice thing Rex Mottram can say about the Catholic Church is that it knows how to put on a good show. Putting on a show, going through the glorious motions, satisfying ourselves with the hints and symbols—this is the lie on which Lent can shine a discomfiting light.
Sebastian identifies an idea’s loveliness as how he believes in the idea. This is what we do, when we stake the truth of something on whether we are pleased when we see it. And there, now, Lent hits us. What Thomas saw and believed, we see, too, albeit darkly. And now we see it bruised, beaten down, trodden in the dust, stripped of all loveliness. When we see it again, “burning anew among old stones,” we will see “the beauty of Truth, of the Truth that redeems.”
John Emmet Clarke is editor-in-chief at Cluny Media. He currently resides in Washington, DC.
March is a strange month in Oregon. It is appropriately Lenten: overrun with tedious rain, dismally gray—but also a prelude to Easter, a doorway to spring. Daffodils break through first, while the grass is still crusty with morning frost, and now that the days have turned balmy, cherry blossoms are popping. The trees are suddenly pink, and when I bike underneath them on my daily commute, I am thrust momentarily into an intoxicating, invisible cloud. Ah! I think, as my baseline March malaise is disrupted for an instant—how delicious!
This mood—melancholia mingling with the sensual blooms of spring—mirrors the mood of Kālidāsa’s 4th century Sanskrit drama, The Recognition of Śakuntalā, which I just finished reading.
In many ways, Śakuntalā unfolds like a typical Western romance. There’s a dashing royal hero with a trusty bow—okay, so he has multiple wives back at his palace, but let’s not dwell on that—who stumbles upon a beautiful young woman in a lush, Edenic hermitage, and they are consumed with passion for one another as soon as they meet.
Enter various minor obstacles: they are from a different class! She’s super shy! She needs her foster father’s blessing! But these are quickly overcome: wait, they are actually from the same class! Passion wins! And they can contract a secret but legally binding love marriage through consensual sex!
Then the real obstacle comes along, in the form of a curse; because of a grave lapse in hospitality on the part of love-addled and now-pregnant Śakuntalā, her bridegroom has lost all memory of her and their secret marriage. She can only break this curse by revealing a magical ring to him, which of course is inconveniently lost.
After a series of mishaps, revealed in both delightfully comic and tragically poignant scenes, by the end of the play, the evil spell is broken and the couple is whisked into a happy ending. So far, with some cultural tweaking and historical updates—Śakuntalā is now a successful cosmopolitan career woman in NYC; Duṣyanta is lonely rich guy—this could be the plot of a contemporary rom-com.
But what makes this play intriguing, what keeps me mulling over it days after I’ve finished the last page, are its stark reversals from the typical romance—namely, the portrayal of passionate erotic desire as an illusory, fickle thing, a fire to be quenched before a deeper, calmer bond can take hold.
When the hero and heroine first meet in the ascetic hermitage in Act I, the reader is inundated with evocative, sensual natural imagery, which playfully mirrors the lovers’ attraction:
KING. […] Her lower lip’s as red as a fresh young bud,
Her arms are tender shoots, supple yet trim,
And like a longed-for blossom, gathering strength,
Youth pushes up through all her limbs.ANASUYĀ. Dear Śakuntalā, here’s that jasmine you call Light of the Forest. She’s chosen the frangrant mango as her bridegroom. You’ve forgotten her.
ŚAKUNTALĀ. Only when I forget myself. [Approaches the jasmine and gazes at it] My dear friend, the union of this tree and this jasmine has taken place at the most wonderful time—the jasmine is a young plant, covered in fresh blossoms, the mango has soft buds, and is ready for enjoyment…
Their mutual passion leads both into conflict with dharma, their respective sacred duties. The King, who is supposed to be “the guardian of the sacred and social orders,” sends a buffoon to run his palace and lets his elephants run amok in the ascetic’s grove. Śakuntalā is distracted in her prayers and offerings, neglecting her obligations of hospitality to a powerful sage.
This distraction from duty is what leads to the sage’s curse in the first place, and after a hasty, secret marriage, the King returns to the city and promptly forgets about Śakuntalā, kicking her to the proverbial curb when she shows up pregnant in his court months later.
After years of long-suffering separation, with no promise of reconciliation—Śakuntalā has been secreted away by her nymph mother—a divine messenger appears to summon the King out of his grief and into a cosmic battle with some demons. His subsequent victory ushers him into a higher, holier realm—courtesy of a flying chariot!—where his “body, mind, and soul are calm” at last. In contrast to the first hermitage, where he was overcome with feverish passion, in this heavenly hermitage, the King feels as though he’s “floating in a pool of nectar.”
Here, in this tranquil, celestial realm, Duṣyanta finds his long-lost love and meets, for the first time, their son. After many pages marked by motifs of absence, illusion, and mirage, we arrive at the play’s climax, a moment of quiet anagnorisis:
KING. Beautiful lady,
Choked by tears, you couldn’t say it,
But the victory is mine—
For in looking on your pale
Unpainted lips, I have at last
Recalled your face.
Victory? But what has been conquered? The King’s demons and his inner turmoil, that consuming passion that both propelled him toward Śakuntalā and obscured his vision of her. This is a Lenten love story, a plot that progresses from pleasure into penance, culminating finally in fruitful communion.
The passion of Duṣyanta and Śakuntalā may have caught fire at first sight—but that glimpse was not able to produce recognition. Such recognition—that soul-deep seeing as knowing—is made possible not through fiery desire, but through a steady, quiet love that has been tempered by suffering, which provides the wedding bower under which desire and duty can meet.
