*This essay contains spoilers.

For hundreds of years, pagan civilizations in Mesoamerica, most notably the Aztecs, practiced ritual human sacrifice. So did the ancient Chinese and medieval Celts. Today, we look back on these bloody rites with shocked incomprehension. Surely, if we had been there, we would have protested these grotesque ceremonies, or at least avoided them. We’d never have joined the delirious crowds cheering them on.

But what if, instead of being a modern observer, you could get an insider’s view of what these rituals looked and felt like? And what if, stepping away from your iPhone and Zoom chats, you discovered that such societies were, in some ways, more fulfilling than your own?

This question animates the 2019 horror film Midsommar, a literally disorienting work that left most critics baffled. In it, a group of college friends travel to Sweden to observe the picturesque summer rites of a small commune. Over the course of the nine-day festival, the mood darkens, and by the time they fully understand what’s happening, it’s too late.

Writer-director Ari Aster shot to fame with the 2018 arthouse-horror film Hereditary, a terrifying portrayal of demonic forces set loose in a modern American family. Though not religious, Aster has a brilliant artistic feel for primal horror, for evil as a metaphysical reality.

An upside-down fairy tale — its happy ending corresponding to one character’s embrace of evil — is the disturbing story Aster tells in Midsommar.

Two Kinds of Snow

The opening shot is a creepy-charming cartoon panel that depicts scenes from the story we’re about to see. The style evokes Disney classics such as Sleeping Beauty, in which an illustrated book of fairy tales frames the action.

In interviews, Aster has explained that the film’s plot conforms to the subgenre of scary movies known as “folk horror.” Within that structure, however, he aimed to tell the story of one woman’s liberating breakup; or, put another way, a fairy tale about a wronged heroine who claims her true destiny. Midsommar synthesizes these elements to stunning effect.

The cartoon panel parts to reveal a primeval forest covered in snow. We see a series of pristine images of nature: snow-laden fir trees, frozen rivers. Over these scenes, a woman’s voice intones an ancient song. Through her incantation she is participating in winter, sanctifying it, waiting with it for the spring. The effect is hauntingly beautiful, a glimpse of a sacred natural order.

A ringing phone rudely interrupts her song, and the scene cuts to present-day America, where a heavy snow is falling. A pretty young woman named Dani Ardor is alone in her college apartment. For reasons that soon become clear, she is upset. In her mounting anxiety, she reaches out to others by email and phone, her eyes brimming with tears as she paces the empty room.

As things worsen for Dani, the window behind her shows a blinding chaos of snow against a black sky. The camera takes us through the window into the blizzard, but there’s no mystical voice singing. As Dani sobs and shrieks, there is no one out there, only the wind.

Inversion

Traumatized and alone, Dani clings to her boyfriend Christian, who — unbeknownst to her — is itching to break up. Dani’s gentle, trusting qualities make her an easy mark in college hookup culture, and Christian and his male friends view her with something like contempt.

The young men are planning a senior trip to Sweden, where they’ve been invited to observe the summer festival — described as “pageantry, special ceremonies, dressing up” — of a close-knit village. Because he can’t bring himself to dump her after the trauma she’s suffered, Christian reluctantly invites Dani to join them.

Once in Sweden, the group drives to the remote village. As their car proceeds down a narrow road, past green fields that turn into forests, the scene turns upside down, so they are driving through an eerily inverted landscape.

Effectively, they are traveling back in time, out of flat, postmodern culture and into an ancient pagan world. Though they don’t know it yet, they are not in Kansas anymore.

The Silenced Feminine

As in Hereditary, the viewpoint character in Midsommar is female. Both stories are so steeped in mystery and dread, involving things that cannot be grasped logically but only apprehended through emotional recoil or an intuitive sixth sense, they must be filtered through what John Paul II called “the feminine genius.”

Thus, the protagonist of Hereditary is an artist and mother. And the protagonist of Midsommar is an ingenue with a loving heart (surname Ardor) who, as in a fairy tale, is under a curse: She can’t speak. From the first moment we see her, she is holding back how she feels, trying to sound casual on the phone to Christian even as tears spill down her face.

Dani knows that her pain and need for real love are too much for Christian. While she holds out the hope that he will propose marriage, he views their four years together as a disposable fling. Most of his friends are barely polite to her at this point.

So, in the airplane bathroom, Dani sobs silently, hands clamped over mouth. When she rejoins the boys in the cabin, her expression is bland. Playing the “cool girl” is all she can do, because speaking about how she feels will drive love — or what passes for it in her world — away.

Throughout the film, Dani is haunted by the image of a young woman with something taped over her mouth. Symbolically, she is Dani’s double, and what she embodies is dark: silence, despair, annihilation. Why go on living in a world where you can’t speak?

But in the pagan world, where flower-decked maidens dance around a maypole, no one expects young women to be cool. Fertility is venerated, and no girl is ever abandoned with her pain. They consider themselves a family, Dani learns, and all the women act as mothers, aunts, and sisters to each other.

There, finally, she is encouraged to express all that she feels.

Goodbye, Cruel World

The film shows Dani trading one cruel society (her own) for another, in some ways more cruel, society that meets her emotional needs much better. Physically — and later, fully — she goes from a nihilistic culture (filled with the psychic violence of meaninglessness and isolation) to an old-school pagan culture. There, ritualized acts of cruelty have deep meaning and serve to bind the community to their history and each other.

Though the commune’s deadly traditions horrify Dani at first, she gradually realizes its members are never lonely and feel no existential angst. Rather, the nature-worshipping Swedes see themselves as part of something ancient, powerful, and noble.

The commune embraces Dani and severs her ties to her faithless boyfriend, so her “happy ending” is a fresh start in a new family, a new world. Christian (note the name) failed to meet her real and desperate needs, so her girl-power solution is to go full pre-Christian, anti-Christian. The film ends on a rapturous note of extreme violence.

Seconds before the credits roll, the viewer realizes this is not a “happy” ending, but a nice American girl’s descent into barbarism. It’s Conrad’s Heart of Darkness retooled for the Frozen generation. Though genuinely frightening, it walks the line between a horror film and a black comedy in which the joke’s on you.

So, what should Catholics make of Midsommar?

We, too, believe in a sacred order, but we don’t worship nature, red in tooth and claw. We love our rituals — pageantry! special ceremonies! dressing up! — but the rite of sacrifice enacted in the Mass does not involve luring in victims or disemboweling a bear (I’ll say no more). The Church has always borrowed liberally from pagan cultures, not to make the crops grow, but to point toward a transcendent reality in which the highest truth is love.

But are we (largely secular) postmoderns forgetting all that? If our fractured, confused society can’t meet the human needs of its members, a darker world may take its place, and even good people like Dani may succumb. As R. R. Reno writes and Midsommar shocks us by depicting, one way or another, the strong gods will return.

Maya Sinha writes about pop culture and family life. She was a finalist in the 2020 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction and writes a humor column, Wit’s End, for The Saturday Evening Post.

C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, the first part of his acclaimed Space Trilogy, has captivated my imagination since my first reading as a high school student. Now, as a teacher, each time I return to this story with my students I continue to be struck by new imaginative insights into the nature and meaning of the Christian reality. On its surface, the novel is an interplanetary adventure of a kidnapped professor and his captors, but Lewis’s science fiction goes beyond mere fantasy. Out of the Silent Planet creates a world steeped in the Christian imagination, one in which all the drama of the natural and supernatural creation finds its place. Such a work of fiction is more necessary now than ever.

After we finish reading the novel, I often ask my students whether what we just read was a true story. They are always quick to give me an incredulous look and exclaim, “No Mr. Shay, of course not!” Now, of course they’re right – the events in this science fiction novel never actually took place – but I reply with a provocative, “Are you sure?”

In a particularly poignant passage, Lewis recounts the very beginning of our hero’s journey in space and his first realization that the universe might be a very different place than he’d imagined:

A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it had affected him till now- now the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean in which they swam… No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens…

The way we imagine the world has profound and far-reaching effects on the way we experience our lives. An imagination once formed is often difficult to change. Even after the novel’s hero, Dr. Ransom, experiences the surprising vitality of heavenly travel, he couldn’t help but remain trapped in his former ways of imagining. During his travels to the mysterious planet, Malacandra, Ransom overhears his captors ominously discussing its inhabitants. Ransom’s imagination immediately goes to some very dark places, imagining all manner of monstrously shaped creatures with naught but malice in their hearts. And, when he finally arrived on Malacandra, Ransom was shocked to discover that it was beautiful. The possibility that a word other than our own could be beautiful, and therefore good, had no place in Ransom’s darkened imagination.

I think the situation of Out of the Silent Planet’s hero is the situation many of us find ourselves in. We have long been steeped in the world’s ways of thinking. They form us unconsciously and make it difficult to imagine, much less experience, the reality of a higher world, especially a higher world of goodness and beauty. We cannot love what we do not know, the old Thomistic adage goes, but we cannot know what we cannot imagine. Since the modern imagination – fed constantly and unconsciously by a steady diet of worldly media – rejects the idea of a real supernatural order, we risk losing the ability to really believe in the God of Christian revelation. I have found, sadly, that the very idea of God is not simply puzzling, but inaccessible to the minds of many of my students. Even well argued defenses of Christian doctrine are met, more often than not, with some mix of bland apathy and plain incomprehension. It is not their fault, and they are not alone.

The world around us has unconsciously formed our imaginations to be skeptical and even dismissive of the claims of religion. The world’s thinking is in the cultural air we breathe and so it affects us all – even those of us who do our best to live as Christians. It is this harsh reality that brings me back to the question with which I challenge my students upon our completion of the novel: “Is it a true story?” As we begin to discuss this question, my students begin to give me examples of the many true spiritual realities conveyed quite beautifully in the novel. Truths like the meaning of human dignity, the damage wrought upon both society and the individual by sin, and a universe animated by the providential care of a good God. They discover that, while not a factually true story, Out of the Silent Planet is a true story in a much deeper and richer sense. This discovery brings to light the answer to their frequent question as to why we spent so much time reading a science fiction story in religion class. It is exciting to watch as they begin to imagine, some for the first time, a reality that has a place for God. They become like Out of the Silent Planet’s Dr. Ransom as they experience the beginnings of liberation from the modern materialist imagination so long unconsciously held.

This is the true power of the novel. It is, in a real and deep sense a true story. It challenges our modern imaginations, which often leave no room for the supernatural, to see the world anew. Once our imagination encounters such a world, even a fictional one, we, like Ransom, are given a choice. Will we remain attached to our old way of thinking, or will we step into the light and beauty of the heavens?

Justin Shay is a life-long Catholic from Minnesota who teaches humanities & religion to middle schoolers. He is particularly inspired by the beauty of words and their ability to move the heart to love the true and the good.

I wrote this essay so I could stop thinking about death for five minutes. If I stop writing, I may – yet again – contemplate my future demise and it’s really high time to stop. It’s just too much. So I decided to start writing, and now I’m not thinking of death anymore. I’m thinking about writing. Or, at least, I’m thinking about writing about death.

Somehow, this distinction is comforting. In fact, the more I think about thinking about writing about death, the more I realize that I am quite comfortable with art that deals directly with the concept of my eventual demise. I haven’t gotten to the point of placing paintings of skulls on my walls or asking people to text me a daily memento mori, but I actually seek out art that confronts mortality and find it uplifting. It pulls something authentically human out of me, connecting ruminations of dust and ashes to a far greater concept that contextualizes beginnings and endings within a grand, universal, and limitless existence.

I was listening to a podcast with Zadie Smith the other day about her new book. The interviewer asked her what her motivations were for working so hard at her craft. What keeps her dedicated, day after day, to the discipline of writing. Is it a desire to make something great? The ambition to be remembered as a great contributor to the artistic canon? No, she said. Writing gives her something to do and helps her stop thinking about her own death for five minutes.

So, I’m not alone in this. We’re all thinking about it. We’re all engaged in one, long distraction. For those of us who are writers and artists, the distraction in question is creative. We desire to create art, to leave a lasting mark on the world by a contribution of beauty.

It seems to me it’s more than a distraction.

The creation of art is intimately linked with the inevitability of death.

Could we go so far as to claim that mortality is the basis of all art? Do we exercise our creative faculties because we have the insatiable desire to push our hot, nervous fingertips through the veil into the realm of some unnamable and terrible infinity? After all, in the mythic tradition of Christendom, art was more or less invented when Cain murdered Abel. Blood sacrifice, the Biblical writer is disturbingly confident, is the seed of culture. Rome, too, traces its founding back to the murder of Remus – again it’s a brother – by Remus. The rivalry is the basis of the empire, all of it traced back to a single death.

Our time on earth is tightly circumscribed, but art mediates something so much more grand than we can ever hope to be. Somehow, it helps us break free. Or at the very least, it gives us something to do, provides an object of meditation, a way to exercise some form of feeble control over our fragile existence, as if writing about a thing declaws it and subverts it.

Art is a type of mourning. We memorialize a moment in time, the face of a friend, a particular golden landscape, a vase of flowers. When I say that art subverts death, what I mean is that it is bonded to it in a relationship that is both loyal and disloyal.

Jacques Derrida explains this concept in the context of friendship. We probably all take this for granted, but in a friendship, one or the other is going to die first. Losing a friend is to lose a part of yourself. Derrida describes this inevitable moment as a rip in the fabric of the universe, “Reflecting disappearance itself: the world, the whole world, the world itself, for death takes from us not only some particular life within the world, some moment that belongs to us, but, each time, without limit, someone through whom the world, and first of all our own world, will have opened up….”

So, when I mourn the death of a friend, I also mourn for myself. It’s an inescapable conflict, and we see it played out day after day at funerals as families struggle to prioritize sadness and celebration. This conflict of loyalty is known to us, in some way, from the very beginning of the friendship. Each friendship formed is an embrace of death, which lies at the very heart of the relationship.

Derrida makes a fascinating point when he claims this is even why we have names. A name is a monument that outlasts physical presence. It’s the same with creating art. He says, “The power of the image [is] the power of death.”

I wrote this essay to stop thinking about death for five minutes, but it turns out that I’ve immersed myself entirely into the subject. In fact, any time I write about anything, create anything, call another person by name, express friendship, or really make an attempt in any way to live my life, I am in the presence of death. When we try to pick up life and live it well, we pick up death, too.

Art is hope and it is love. It is friendship. It is the incarnation of the inner mystery of life. Art is an angel ascending and descending Jacob’s Ladder. It points out the bounds of our world and wages war against them, struggling to break free in an act both loyal to who we are as transcendent souls and also disloyal to the act of sacrificial mourning present at the very heart of culture.

Keep making beauty, friends. Never stop. Not even for a moment.

It’s three in the afternoon, and nothing notable has happened in my hometown of Ada, Oklahoma, where I’ve been staying for my winter break. It is cloudy, rainy, quiet. I’m working online, which includes posting articles to Facebook and Twitter. The war zone of bite-backs and hot takes is suddenly rampant, overwhelming the senses. And suddenly the stories are gushing forth in digital torrent – chaos at the Capitol.

It is easy, natural even, during times of social and political unrest to try and pinpoint who to blame for it all. Nothing comes more easily to fallen humanity than the dynamic of scapegoating. Yet the violence and chaos from extremists of all stripes unwittingly points to a deeper, biblical reality that, in our tribal passions, we tend to miss – human beings are not the enemy.

A deep dive into New Testament cosmology shows us that the only way to adequately make sense of human evil is to identify its origins in spiritual principalities and powers. Just as the swirling waters at the foot of Niagara must be traced back to the torrents of the waterfall itself, so we must follow this social agitation and division to its demonic source. The “prince of the air” which the Apostle Paul speaks of in his epistle, and who Jesus calls the “ruler of this world,” is the ultimate perpetrator of all the chaos and division we are seeing unfold today and throughout world history. Evil started with an envy for divine prerogatives and power and morphed into a naked couple eating the fruit of omniscience, (Genesis 3) to the first murder (Genesis 4), the erection of Babel, (Genesis 11), the dispersion of nations, and finally to a competitive world system that seeks violence, power, and coercion in a desperate attempt to harness the control that only God, in His goodness, can rightly wield. It is fascinating to look back over time and see how the “world systems” of empires, nations, and dominions have always involved these self-destructive campaigns. They have risen and fallen, and we keep putting our trust in them. We live as though our lives and souls depended on the success of the nation, or the survival of the party, or the champion of the NBA finals, or the rise and fall of the stock market, or even the outcome of our children’s pee-wee ball games. But why?

I recently finished a book by philosopher Peter Kreeft on the worldview behind J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In it, Kreeft discusses how the evil ruler, Sauron, “poured himself” into the Ring of Power, identifying with it to the degree that his very fate depended on this little piece of metal. Gollum, a creature who was cursed with the Ring for centuries, became so obsessed with the object of power and deception that he could no longer understand himself apart from it. He “loved and hated the Ring, as he loved and hated himself.” In investing his very life into the Ring, he lost the ability to discern his own person apart from its malicious sway. His fate became “bound up with it.” Kreeft likens Gollum to the typical addict. The addicted person can’t imagine a life without the substance, or the romantic partner, or the political party. He is “hooked” on a feeling, particularly the feeling of being in control.

Likewise, people “pour themselves into” anything they idolize, losing themselves and their relationships with each other in the process. Political idolatry happens when I identify fanatically with a certain political party to the extent that my “life” either goes down with its ship in defeat or inflates over an election victory. The idol either gets trampled or exalted, and my fate seems to be implicated.

Spiritual director David Torkington writes of something similar in his book The Hermit. He discusses the various salvation schemes society has adopted over the years, including “continental theology,” the “social gospel,” psychotherapy and self-discovery, progressive visions of “Utopia” and “education.” These may be worthy goals to work towards, but none of them is big enough to save. Torkington writes,

The only drink that can slake our burning inner thirst is the living water of uncreated love. It is only under the influence of this intoxicating draft, that we will be able to see ourselves, not only as the psychiatrist sees us as we are, but as are meant to be.

Seeking to satiate that “inner thirst” with anything besides the unconditional love of Jesus will only leave us beached and dry, wondering where we went wrong. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he told his disciples that if we wanted to follow Him, we must lose our lives for the sake of the Kingdom of God.

It also seems likely that He was not commanding his followers to lose themselves, but describing a basic, unescapable reality – we all lose our lives to something. It could be cocaine, or it could be a “righteous cause.” As David Foster Wallace wrote in Infinite Jest, addictions vary from hard drugs to yoga. Douglas Johnson of Touchstone magazine spells out a corollary to this: “[Satan] only means to separate us from our Lord, and he doesn’t give a whit which distractions we indulge in to bring that about.” So, whether we become rioters or hermit gardeners, if we are distracted away from God, we are all awash on the same desolate beaches. Only when we lose our lives to Jesus do our souls resurface, like ships made to sail, no longer ruined and unmoored. No longer enslaved. We need the Church to herald this reality and to model another way of life for the world to see. Submitting to the real King does have massive political effects – which, as they begin in our personal lives, may look more like surrender than like insurrection.

I am praying that God would continue to free me from the things I’m possessed by – reputation, lust, power, comfort, legalism, self-righteousness, and fear of the “other.” The world’s systems are damaged by the influence of a crafty serpent set on separating us from God and each other. Any control we can rightly exercise in this life begins in every act of the will by which we make clear who we will serve. Let us not permit evil any authority in our lives, but abide in Jesus, remember His victory over the principalities and powers through the Cross, and delight in the encouragement of His teaching: “In this life you will have trouble, but fear not, for I have overcome the world.”

Peter Biles is an editorial assistant for Touchstone and Salvo Magazines. In addition, he is pursuing a master’s degree in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University. He’s interested in literature, philosophy, and theology.

I never expected to meet Mike Finnegan again. That name belonged to a character from the annals of my long-ago childhood, dim and yet vaguely pleasant. Mike was part of my brother’s posse; that nameless rabble of 8th grade boys who move as one through life, jostling and scuffling as they go. They would rumble through our living room every once in a while on their way to forage in the kitchen before soccer practice. Mike and his brother Pat always slightly emerged from the pack because they were identical, square bodied, copper-headed twins from a large Irish family. They were loud, with tremendous laughs, and you held on to the cherished knick-knacks on your table when they crashed past. I do remember it was Mike who took upon himself the personal vocation of perfecting the patience and perseverance of Sister Rosella, the 8th grade teacher. It was an established fact that Mike would get her to heaven one day all by himself and he became quite creative at the art of testing her like gold is tested in fire – he considered it a kind of hobby. He would sing loudly off key – on purpose – at the school Mass in the morning (God forgive me, it made me laugh. And, truth be told, if Sister Rosella was here now she would admit the same). He never had his school tie, his shirt was always pulled out and his sweater unraveling. His hair was a curly mass of tangled orange, and whether he would have matching socks each morning was a matter of debate among the faculty. His shoes lived on a prayer. His homework actually DID look like the dog had gotten to it; his green eyes always looked as if they were plotting mischief. That’s what I remember about Mike Finnegan.

So, I was a bit flummoxed to be sitting down at a table talking to this white-haired, jolly man, who was just as flummoxed as me. He was the director of the cemetery grounds where my Dad and Mom were to be buried. My sisters and I were there to make arrangements and we all felt a bit raw-hearted, awkward and out of our depth. We had never done this before. But here, in the flesh, was good old Mike Finnegan from the old neighborhood, and he was genuinely overjoyed to see us again. It brought a sense of the familiar to my heart, and I felt suddenly less out to sea, because Mike Finnegan knew us and he knew my Mom and Dad in their prime. That made all the difference.

Mike was to give me a real jewel of a memory that day. One I would never have suspected coming from him. It was about my mom. Turns out he just loved her, and for the smallest, seemingly insignificant reason. The way she cut sandwiches. My mother was the consummate Victorian. She was polite, always looked neat and tidy, she always had matching socks, and spoke in a lilting French Canadian accent. She always made you sit down for meals. There was always a place mat, cloth napkin, and china plate, with a tall glass of milk standing sentinel. Well, Mike was to experience my mother this way one afternoon. He had wandered into the kitchen with my brother, and this petite Victorian lady all of five feet made big, square, tossled Mike Finnegan sit down at the table and she poured him a glass of milk and fixed him a bologna sandwich with cheese, cut it into little triangles as was her wont, arranged chips all around the triangles and placed it before his surprised eyes.

My mom, as prim and proper as she was, always had an affinity for the Mike Finnegans of this world. Maybe because she had a wicked little sense of humor under that proper Victorian exterior and had herself perfected the art of the practical joke. (My father would quite happily attest to this fact). But Mike Finnegan? He was overwhelmed by those triangles. He waxed poetic about it for ten minutes. “Your Mom! What a gal! No one would have ever trusted me with a china plate in my life back then! And a napkin, in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. It blew me away how great she was. And the sandwich was cut in triangles…for ME”. There were actual tears in this sentimental Irishman’s eyes. My mom didn’t see him as a crashing, messy boy but as someone to feed and love and please with the joy of little bologna triangles entrusted to him on her china plate. It was second nature to her. She lived to notice people like Mike and to think of ways to give them particular and personal joy. She gave Mike Finnegan, who perhaps found himself sometimes unseen in a pack of Finnegans, the pleasant feeling of his own individual worth. He soaked it in like dew; and let it be recorded that he never once broke one of her plates.

My mom was a lover. She bore the sign of a lover’s authenticity. She watched. Any true lover worth their salt is a watcher. They spend their lives looking at people – hearing what they say, watching what they do, remembering what makes them laugh, their favorite color, their favorite flavor of marmalade, a book they hold dear, a song that makes them dance in place, when they need company, when they do not. It is a subtle and seemingly effortless gazing – hardly noticed by anyone around them. But rest assured, the lovers watch and hear everything. And the magical thing about being a watcher is that their eyes are always busy looking outward and not inward at themselves. It is a full-time job getting to know another human being, and the lovers of this world happily work overtime. They find great joy in the gazing, which eventually expresses itself in personalized gifts that seal the love. The beloved always leaves their presence knowing he has been seen and delighted in for his very self. Can there be anything more God-like than this kind of love?

I have spent the last several weeks traveling through the Rocky Mountains with a lover of this sort as I devoured a delightful biography of Father Peter De Smet, S.J. written by a fellow Jesuit, Fr. E. Laveille. Oddly enough, I thought of my mom when reading about him. And just as she had this deep and mysterious affinity to the unlikely Mike Finnegan, Father De Smet, a learned, disciplined Belgian Jesuit was to find his own best beloved in the American Indians – and one might say with all confidence he was born for such an affinity as this.

Peter De Smet was, as his older brother says, “endowed with a strong and vigorous constitution; he was hardy, adventurous, and indifferent to danger.” He loved games, the more violent and dangerous the better. He would hop from one moving boat to the other in the canals by his home in Dendermonde, Belgium. He fell in the water once and was almost killed, but the next day he did it again! His father would exclaim, “God preserve him! He will either be a soldier or a great traveler; he will never remain at home.” Peter would be that traveler sent on mission by the God he loved deeply and longed to serve. He joined the Jesuit order and began to tame the wilder side of his heart with his innate determination. He learned to pray and listen for the voice of God. He learned the faith and how to teach it to others; he treasured and found strength in the customs and traditions of the Church. In short, he grew up. But the restless wanderer with the adventurous spirit was to always be there underneath. Perhaps it was this spirit that stirred when he first learned about the Indians over in North America. He felt an immediate and mysterious urge to go to them and signed on as a missionary. Little did he know that he was about to meet his own people – those who would understand his heart in every way and who would be completely understood by him in return.

The minute he met his first tribe of Indians, he was smitten. He began to reveal himself as a “watcher” in his delightful letters home to his family. Of course, being quite selfless, he didn’t mention the hardships and the initial culture shock he encountered. The sweltering summers, the plague of mosquitoes, the long travels through dense forests and on dangerous rivers, the overwhelming homesickness for his family. The Indians were initially so ‘other’ as to be a shock to the system of this cultured Belgian. One particular story he relates to his brother is a delightful account of how his enchantment with the Indians overcame this initial physical shock. He had just landed in an Indian village and was escorted to the tent of the Chief and his princess, she being quite proud of her cooking and able to honor the Black Robe with it. He wished to honor her in return:

She then presented me with a roughly cut wooden plate which had a thin film of old grease on it…and served me on it a dish that was disgusting in appearance, cooked by herself. I was hungry I admit; but my stomach revolted at the sight of the mysterious stew. I said to myself, ‘No airs now, you are not in Belgium, begin your apprenticeship. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’ I took a spoonful of the mess and found it delicious. It was a fricassee of buffalo tongue, mixed with bear’s grease and the flour of wild sweet potatoes. I evinced my appreciation of the princess’s hospitality by rubbing my stomach as a sign of satisfaction and returned the plate to her much cleaner than when she gave it to me!

Father De Smet with his new friends

Though Father De Smet began his missionary journey in Missouri and Kansas, he was soon to meet the tribe that was to be his best beloved: the Flathead Indians. A delegation of three arrived at the St. Louis mission, having traveled thousands of miles with one goal in mind: to find the Black Robes and convince them to return to their home in the Northwest. Father De Smet, admiring their persistent courage, immediately got permission to go back with the Flatheads. He journeyed over the plains, through the Badlands, across the Rockies, and after nine, long months was at last surrounded by the joyous exuberance of the Flathead tribe. They soon revealed themselves as “honest, obedient to their chiefs, cleanly in their huts and personal habits, and held lying in abhorrence. Polygamy was almost unknown among them. The women were excellent wives and mothers, and so celebrated for their fidelity that the contrary failing was a rare exception.” Fr. De Smet was amazed to find a people so ready to receive the Gospel. They were eager for anything he could tell them about the Great Spirit Jesus of whom they had heard. He longed to feed their receptive hearts immediately, so deeply moved was he that these people had such a longing for his faith and its rituals and were willing to open their hearts to him in trust. A deep bond of mutual love was forged in those first months. In his own moving words he wrote:

I drew up a set of rules for the religious exercises. One of the chiefs immediately brought me a bell, and that first evening it called the Indians to assemble around my tent. After a short instruction, night prayers were said. Before retiring they sang in admirable harmony three hymns in praise of the Great Spirit of their own composition. No words can express how deeply I was touched. The great chief was up every morning at daybreak. He would mount his horse and make the tour of the camp, crying to his people: ‘Come, courage, my children! Tell Him you love Him and ask Him to make you charitable! Courage, the sun is rising. Come, bathe in the river. Be at our Father’s tent at the sound of the bell. Be still, open your ears to hear, and your hearts to retain the words he will speak to you.

Fr. De Smet eventually realized that he needed help to set up a mission worthy of his new friends. So, amid embraces and tearful farewells, he took leave of the Flatheads promising over and over to return, and with a heavy heart he traveled back to Missouri, and then on to Belgium to find more young priests who might join him in his work. He chose wisely – watchers like himself. One Jesuit priest named Nicolas Point, who was born in Ardenne, France, signed on eagerly. Fr. Point was an architect and an artist. He took to these Indian men and women instantly. He often followed them around just to enjoy their company as they navigated ordinary life. He went on Buffalo hunts with Fr. De Smet and the men and drew them riding and hunting in action; he watched the women cook and learned the recipes, he drew the children playing and joined them in their games. He would show them the drawings and they would be happily surprised at what he had seen and captured.

Drawing by Nicholas Point

They felt his delight. They in turn eagerly came to his tent each morning fascinated by the rituals he performed at the Mass. The highlight of the hunts were the evenings by his tent singing night prayers together with beautiful hymns he and his fellow missionaries had written specifically for the Flathead’s voices. These hymns would also be sung at Eucharistic processions, which were the delight of the Indians, especially during their favorite feast of Christmas. I was able to see some of Fr. Point’s drawings in an exhibit once, and they are filled with detail and humor and vitality – drawn by a man completely in love with his subject matter.

Fr. De Smet and his fellow Jesuits were lovers and watchers. And just as my own mother connected so wonderfully with Mike Finnegan, he knew his Indians and they knew him in such an intimate way. He delighted them with his wit, humor, strength, and loyalty. They fell in love with the beauty of his faith and wanted it as their own. He understood their love of the hunt, their wandering, their restless energy, for he was one like them. His love for them was alive with delighted gazing. Reading his life, I hear one word: watch! Watch more carefully the people around you, the ones God has chosen for you to see by His providence. They might not be anything like you on the outside, but you will know them as surely as my mom and Peter De Smet knew Mike Finnegan and the Flathead Indians. See them, hear them, delight in them as individuals. Give them the beautiful gift of experiencing your personal love for them – even if it is as small as triangle sandwiches on a china plate. If we each did this for even one person, how well we would know the joy of loving as Jesus loves, and transform the world into, “Something beautiful for God.”

Denise Trull lives in St. Louis, MO with her husband Tony. She is the artistic director of a small but mighty theater company and loves the written word in all its forms.

A little over a hundred years ago, in October of 1918, my great-grandfather walked into a clerk’s office in West Virginia and received his citizenship, reflected in a certificate signed by court clerks A.J. Harrison and S.G. Barrett. In my mind’s eye, it is a warm October day. The clerk’s office in Clarksburg, West Virginia, has no fan, and it being 1918, no air-conditioning either. Barrett and Harrison sit behind a desk, neatly if not well dressed, maybe with hats hung on a rack behind them, wearing those skinny short ties of the era. They look a little tired, a little bored, and maybe a little frustrated with another family of non-English speaking immigrants who have come to get their citizenship.

The citizenship certificate, which now hangs on my office wall, notes James Bosso was then forty, with seven children, ranging in age from Sarah, the oldest at twenty, to Mary, then age one. James had been in the United States for almost twenty years by that point. His wife Angelina came over later, in 1903, with those of the children then born. The certificate notes the new citizen was a “subject” of Italy, with the word “citizen” crossed out. I had to check to make sure Italy was still a kingdom in October 1918, a remnant of a world about to change forever just a few weeks after James put his signature to the certificate, with the Armistice of the Great War. Appalachia was not like the southern parts of Italy the Bossos had come from. Neither James nor his wife spoke English well, until later in life, so I can imagine how strange it all must have seemed. I sometimes wonder if he even understood the oath he must have had to take. His faded signature is still visible on the certificate, surprisingly firm. 

But on that October day, the older ones probably were not there, but James and Angelina had brought the smaller children with them. Mary was my grandmother, though through a process lost to memory but one familiar to many immigrants, that was not the name anyone called her at home and was not on any other official documents we have ever seen (including both her birth certificates, which were a year apart). She was Petruzella, “Roxanne,” or Priscilla, for most of her life. In between her and Sarah were the brothers. These were my great-uncles: Andy, who worked for Capone in Chicago and was in and out of prison; Victor, who abandoned the coal-mining future he thought was waiting for him and moved down to Los Angeles, and then Las Vegas, who was strangely identified as “Ventar” on the certificate; Parmy, who changed his last name from Bosso to Boso to conceal his ethnicity, and who married a Protestant girl. We all heard the story of how the KKK came calling while they were courting and burned a cross in front of the house. Parmy himself almost died in a mining accident before he left mining for good. The fourth was James, about whom little is known other than that he married a sister of Parmy’s wife and that he died at thirty-two. 

Finally, there was “Agosto,” or Ogden, the only one other than my grandmother whom I got to know at all well. He served in the Army, ran a bar, caroused, and had a Jackie Gleason–type mustache. He was always impeccably dressed when I saw him as a boy and kind to his great-nephew from the big city. He visited my grandmother almost every day of his life after Priscilla’s husband, my grandfather Russell, died. Although he was not a religious man, this always stuck with me as a model of sibling charity. I was glad my wife got to meet him; by the time we were engaged most of James’ children had died. 

Clarksburg, which dates from the 1780s, is the Harrison County seat and in 1918 was a thriving town built on the revenue from natural resources. The certificate records that James and all his children lived in Shinnston, a small town about ten miles from Clarksburg that now has a population of about 2,200 people and is about two hours south of Pittsburgh. No street address is given, and that is likely because the Bossos actually lived in an even smaller town nearby. That town was called Willard and no longer exists. It was basically owned by the mining company; my family, so far as we can tell, lived on Mudlick Road at the mines themselves. My grandmother used to tell us stories about walking to the company store, which was the only store in town, where they got whatever they needed with company money. Later in law school, I came across cases involving West Virginia mining towns, where the company owned everything and issued company scrip for money. Until 1946 it was unclear under federal law whether the residents even had any constitutional rights in such towns, such as free speech to lobby for better conditions, since the mining company was not, technically, the government. 

At the time my great grandfather became a citizen, West Virginia was rent by anti-immigrant feeling, economic anxiety, and real poverty. October 1918 was after the mining riots of the early teens and the explosion of 1907 in nearby Monangah, the largest mine disaster in American history, but before the riots and shootouts in Matewan, West Virginia, in 1920. Protections for miners like James Bosso were slim; I do not know if he tried to join a union, but I suspect he tried to stay close with the other Italians who shared living accommodations and a common cook stove with the Bossos. FDR and the National Industrial Recovery Act and more favorable conditions for workers were still years away.

The one picture I have of my great-grandfather shows him just outside of the mines, his clothes deeply dirty but his eyes bright in contrast. He is holding a lunch pail and has a pipe between his teeth, a detail that always gets me, since he probably spent the day breathing in enough carcinogens. He is standing next to a man my grandmother referred to only as the Big Swede. He towers over my great-grandfather, in equally dirty clothes. He may have been big, but then again that might also only have been by contrast. My grandfather was officially reported as 5’5”, and his wife was apparently even smaller. 

James and Angelina are gone, their children are all gone, and their grandchildren are mostly past retirement age. The last memories of those West Virginia experiences cross over, just barely, to the beginning of my own. Childhood visits to Niagara Falls, where James had moved his family in 1929 or so, for better opportunities in the factories rather than in the mines, and to Pennsylvania where the oldest, Sarah, had settled with her husband Sam (who had also run with the mob when a young man), gave me a glimpse of that life. I remember what I can of the stories they told. (Trying to give a further shape to these memories, I once read A.J. Cronin’s once-famous 1937 novel The Citadel, though I like to believe my family’s experiences were a little better than those of the hapless Welsh coal miners Cronin depicts.)  

My memories are largely scraps, of course, and inevitably softened by my own more comfortable circumstances and the vagaries of what children remember of what their grandparents tell them in the impossibly far-off time of their own youth. Nevertheless, those scraps gave me an insight into their wider world. My grandmother was full of aphorisms (“make haste slowly” was one of her favorites, never having heard of Suetonius, who recorded that from Augustus) that she had picked up. It was not until later I learned these sayings came from classical writers or Shakespeare. Her religiosity was primal and central, what I later came to call “peasant Catholicism,” which is mine too. Her house was covered in Catholic objects and imagery, both devotional and pop-cultural (“footprints in the sand,” crocheted plaques reading “seven days without prayer make one weak,”) and she had a rosary circle for decades, fielding prayer requests lifelong. At the same time, she also taught us the Sicilian “overlook” prayer to avoid the evil eye. My sister and I remember the story to this day: us calling from Brooklyn at midnight on Christmas Eve, which was the only day the prayer (more like a charm, really) could be transmitted, while my grandmother slowly sang words in an Italian dialect we could barely understand. This combination of kitsch and art, prayer and magic, cured me of later pretensions as a Catholic intellectual—that kind of approach to the faith, I felt, could never reach the coal-mine depths of hers. When I later learned arguments that Catholicism is a “tactile” religion, that it is attuned to the physical as much as to the intellectual, I already knew what that meant. Every time I touch the rosaries that belonged to her or my grandfather, or look at the candle stand saved from her parish church before all the objects were sold off, I remember. She taught me faith was power, even for the powerless, and that it was also (or the same as) love.

I took from this history not only a deep Americanness, but also an estrangement. In one sense, what could be more American than growing up in Appalachia, as my grandmother and her siblings did? Talk in recent years about Appalachia and the forgotten America have reminded me just how typical was the experience of James and his fellow miners in that era of American history. By their going both east to New York and west to Nevada and California, I felt in some sense that my family had laid claim to the entire country. No part of it should be strange to me. In fact, next to that citizenship certificate I have some postcards one of the brothers sent home of his travels out West. Growing up in a different type of ethnic enclave in Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s, I found some interest and, later, comfort in the sense that the wider country should not be strange to me. 

But that mental picture of the clerk’s office stays with me. Among the moonshiners, farmers, and KKK members were thousands of families like the Bossos, trying to figure out what was going on and to stay out of the way. They had brought with them a foreign language and a still-strange religion. One hundred years on, I hold fairly typical views on immigration for a conservative Catholic kid who grew up in the Reagan years in New York. I do think borders mean something and that nations have a right to determine generally who gets to live within them. Two things hold me back. The first is that the teachings of my Church require me to welcome the stranger. The other is that we were the stranger: that image of that room in Shinnston, when an undocumented coal miner and his wife entered a new world. 

Gerald Russello writes from New York. This article is printed from the Candlemas 2020 Dappled Things Magazine