F.P. Sampino

On Thursday, August 26, 2004, U.S. District Court Judge Richard C. Casey issued a ruling striking down the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. Legally speaking, it was an unremarkable and entirely expected result. Four years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled in Stenberg v. Carhart that a similar Nebraska state ban was unconstitutional. But Judge Casey’s opinion attracted attention for different reasons – not least of which is that he is a devout Catholic. [Read more…]

Lately, I’ve been having panic attacks because of math. Only a single equation, really. Simple subtraction. The math in question is the number of years I’ve been alive subtracted from the number of years I might reasonably be expected to remain alive. Never having been all that good at math, it’s more than a little distressing to find my mind wandering along such a logical and shamefully direct interior path when falling into my morbid ruminations. It would be far more tasteful to mentally meander, flitting like a bird from branch to branch considering eternal fate like so many fruits to be plucked from the leaves. While the sun is in the sky warming my skin, this is possible – thoughts are fleeting and pleasant, doubling back, circling around, and generally making a pleasant mess of things before I shrug my shoulders and move on. At night, though, my frigid mind sweats and I find myself trapped in a logic tunnel. The lights dim offstage until only one, looming, practical concept consumes me. It’s a simple matter of math.

The attacks always come at night. Never during the day when I can marshal enough resources to contemplate my own demise with equanimity. Once the sun flickers out and my head is on the pillow, there is no defense. I stare at the darkened wall. I mutter to myself. I try to drown out the math with a podcast on Roman history and lull myself to sleep the way I used to fall asleep during lectures at college. No matter what I do, though, that ever decreasing number is superimposed against the inside of my eyelids, showing itself to me through closed lid like a ticking bomb.

What is it about life that is so delicate, that instead of happily living it, I insist on fretting it away? Like a butterfly grasped in clumsy fingers, the colors of the wing bleed out and cripple me. It’s greed, right? The desire to hold onto that which cannot be held. The insistence on logically defining that which must only be accepted as a gift. We clutch with all our might, injure ourselves in the process, and limp away helplessly in the breeze on broken wing.

It isn’t so much that life is too short. I can honestly say that the question of duration doesn’t bother me very much. I’m far more bothered by what has been left behind and the unknown of what lies ahead. In any case, externalizing the problem to such a shallow, quantifiable complaint like length of years would be a sign of weakness, an exercise in blame-shifting, to curse the heavens for my 80-odd years and pretend I’m somehow the unique victim of divine stinginess.

In fact, the angst is entirely of my own making. I waste the time that I do have. I throw it away in heaps and piles like some spendthrift dandy with zero sense of personal responsibility. Let me count the ways – staring at screens, replaying melodramatic scenes in my mind and ascribing negative outcomes to those who have wronged me, apathy, alcohol, gossip. I am a wasteful person all day but at night transform into a tight-fisted, miserly knave who clutches his pearls so tightly they turn to powder in my fists.

Now, look. I’m not part of some sort of productivity cult that believes the only real value in the world is in creating tangible outcomes that are measured in wealth or reputation. I am not driven. I have very few ambitions. We all waste time. That’s okay. In my mind, the problem isn’t that I’m not productive enough. Quite the opposite, the problem is that, when I waste time, I’m not wasting it well enough. I’m wasting it all wrong.

I have grand dreams of perfecting the art of wasting time. I would like to improve a bit every day. I want to get it right. Here is how I am disciplining myself to waste time – staring at the sky to see if the clouds move or a bird maybe will fly past, watching my children swim, helping my son start fires with his new flint, reading science fiction novels that have ridiculously fantastical plots, writing mediocre poetry while sitting by the lake, hugging my wife randomly, praying the Mass and the Daily Office every single day, and sitting in darkened churches watching the sanctuary lamp burn. This is my plan for becoming immortal, no matter what the wretched math says.

In his essay On the Shortness of Life, Seneca says, “Learning how to live takes a whole life.” He has no patience for us who complain that the span isn’t enough, saying, “It isn’t that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” Friends, he’s got our number. His idea is that we should immerse ourselves in study and philosophy, spend time with the literary masters of prior generations and learn from them. In so doing, we can expand our lifetimes significantly and make live-giving friendships with all sorts of diverse people who have lived in different cultures and eras.

I’m not sure I’m entirely on board with his self-improvement project as the key to immortality, but the man has a point. Reading deeply in the classics, both in literature and philosophy, is one way to broaden a life. We should do more of this. Seneca is still in the arena fighting, though, still working the math, and eventually the lion is going to tear him to pieces. He seeks knowledge, which is a kind of map that guides us to a more deeply held existential territory. Knowledge, though, is still an abstract idea about living. I read less for knowledge than for the friendship the author is offering. I’m seeking life itself, to fall hopelessly in love with each moment of time as it streams through my fingers.

The only way I can figure to live my life is to waste it – to prodigally, gratuitously, recklessly waste it. After all, isn’t this a description of love? Doesn’t the Sower toss his seed without care into the field? Doesn’t a musician send a finely crafted love note into the world where it instantly dissipates into the atmosphere and disappears forever? Doesn’t a mother release her child from her bosom and into the world as a free creature who may never return to the nest? I love this life, so I damn the math and make it a gift to be given away.

A child once asked Kurt Vonnegut how to be a better writer. His advice was to spend a day writing a poem and then tear it up without showing anyone. The poem is written for sheer love of the creative act. Sure, it would be great to share it with others, for them to appreciate it and form a friendship with you through your art. It would be a wonderful feeling to know that you have somehow helped someone along in their journey, but that may never happen. The art is beautiful nonetheless, and the universe is a better place for it having flickered into existence for a brief moment.

Beauty is the most gratuitous of all virtues. This is why it’s the most necessary of all virtues. If, like William Blake, I stare at an apple tree and see God, no one else saw him and no one will ever believe me when I say I did, that doesn’t mean it never happened. It doesn’t mean that the world didn’t shift on its axis. It doesn’t mean that a fruit didn’t fall to the ground and burrow into the earth like a little seed of eternity.

I still have nightly battles with despair. I’ve come to accept them. This, after all, is the curse of humanity, to have our lives reduced to toil and productivity, to count and tally up our days, and so to waste them in the wrong ways. This doesn’t deter me, though, knowing that, as WS Merwin would say, each year I pass the future anniversary of my death. All I’m concerned with is how to celebrate the special day with more joy.

Life is a strange garment, a constant surprise full of wastefully beautiful moments. A bumblebee wrapped in pollen. A child’s cheek smashed against mine. A novel that makes me pause to look out the window. A poem that rattles in my bones. It’s not my business to assign value to myself or my creations as a writer or a painter. My job is to write. My job is to paint. My job is to tie my bow-tie just right, and help my toddler smell a flower, and sing a Regina Coeli where no one can hear it. My task is to live.

Make art. Make beauty. Toss it away. Trace your name in water. Cast beauty in your wake, a seed that may be forgotten and buried forever or, perhaps, to be retrieved at some future date by hot, warm nervous hands. Either way, it makes no difference. It’s all love.

I grew Zinneas this summer. I say that with the offhanded confidence of a farmer who has just finished plowing the back forty; except I am not a farmer. I dwell deep in the heart of a city, and I have not grown one thing from seed in my entire life – until now – at the age of sixty-two. I didn’t expect to get so deeply invested in this project when I found a packet of seeds at the back of the utensil drawer in the kitchen – the remnant of a good intentioned impulse buy in ages past. “Why not?” I said and rummaged up two pots from the garage that were already filled with dirt. I sprinkled the seeds lavishly over the top and showered them with water. Then I put the pots on the upstairs porch in the direct sunlight – yes, I read the back of the seed packet – and that was that. Every day I watered the dirt, but in truth, deep down, I didn’t quite believe that anything would come of it. I mean, life from those miniscule bits of black lost in a mass of old mud? I think not.

Then came the day I paused above my pots and was greeted by the tiniest of green leaves growing happily where the day before there had been none. I confess I spent an inordinate amount of time just staring at them in wonder, those tiny leaves of promise. “It’s all true! It works!” was all I could muster in my stupefied, city-dweller mind. From that day on, I was all in. I watched these delicate stems grow bigger leaves, and then larger stems that shot straight up to the sky. I was enchanted. I kept saying each day, “I grew that”, with a wonder and joy that didn’t seem quite warranted for two old pots of dirt on a city porch. But wonder I did. Then the buds came all folded up and green with a speck of color at their center. That day I had to sit down. I was madly in love with Zinnea buds. I began to take pictures of their progress. I started going upstairs just because I wanted to stare at them; to be there when the buds opened into blossoms. I was so proud. Why? I wasn’t the one doing the growing. I wasn’t struggling up out of the dirt or forming a bud that would suddenly burst into a fairy flower. I was proud because I had planted possibilities with that seed. I had watered it. I had wondered and cared and gazed and wondered some more. I stood enchanted. I had the growing conviction that every flower on earth deserves that look of enchantment, that look that wills it to grow, for the simple reason of wanting it to succeed in its beautiful quest – to applaud the final blossom.

Mary Delaney

While all this was going on out there on the back porch, I made another discovery. Scrolling through endless recipes for green beans and the latest entangled political strife on facebook one day, I chanced upon the face of a woman dressed in the finery of the late 18th century. She was an elderly woman, and the face looked like it was about to say something quite cheeky. I stopped scrolling and stared at her. I liked her instantly. Her name was Mary Delany. Her story was the subject of an article written for the British Museum’s website. It turns out she was an artist. She made exquisite, botanically accurate drawings of flowers with cut paper layered in delicious colors on a black washed background.

Someone had written a book about her: The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock. I bought it. Her drawings were stunning. More stunning was the discovery that she did not begin this, her life’s defining endeavor, until the age of 72. And like my zinneas, she too would come to know the love of someone who was completely enchanted by her and willed her to grow into the artist she became. One who would applaud her late but beautiful blooming.

Mary grew up in the landed Granville family, the daughter of the unfortunate third son in an aristocratic British line. He was at the mercy of older brothers for any financial inheritance. His eldest daughter’s only hope of landing a “beneficial marriage” one day was to send her to the royal court of the then Queen Anne of England to be trained as a lady in waiting. At court, she learned to mingle confidently with the rich and famous, being well on her way to catching the husband who would bring her the security longed for and expected by her family at home. Only, Queen Anne inconveniently died without an heir. There was a struggle as to who would ascend the throne. Unfortunately, Mary’s family backed the wrong horse, and the new reigning Monarchs made their displeasure known. Her family was disgraced and forced to disappear into the English countryside to hide away in poverty and humiliation.

Mary’s mother took to her bed with the proverbial vapours and stayed there in despair and denial for many years. Mary’s father, however, determined to make a home for his four children. He read to them constantly, he played games with them, he expected them to practice their music diligently, he put together schedules of work and play that gave his children a sense of purpose. It was here that Mary discovered the magic of scissors on paper. She began to cut paper in lovely designs and made silhouettes of her family playing and working and pasted them on a black background just for fun. She learned many things from her father about collecting and classifying flowers, shells, and leaves. He planted Mary in this good soil, and she had the courage to sprout in its encouraging atmosphere. It was said all through her life that, “whenever she mentioned her father, she flushed with affection”. Mary developed an attractive common sense and stability in an age rife with mindless butterflies. She had a deep faith and believed strongly in family honor and doing the right thing. She was not easily taken by vapours of any kind and approached problems with practical solutions. She was always busy. She had a delightful sense of humor, and she was going to need it.

Mary’s conniving Uncle was hatching a plan to get back his honor at court. Since his younger brother was completely beholden to him for financial support and conveniently had a daughter of marrying age without a penny in her dowry, he brokered a marriage to a rich and politically powerful man, Lord Pendarves, a man who was sixty years old; a gout ridden, drunken beast of a man with jealous tendencies. Sweet Mary, all of seventeen, was sold like a slave to the highest bidder. She did not complain. She did not cry injustice. She simply did it for her family, and her father, for she knew there would be dire consequences for them if she refused. Off to Cornwall she went with this nightmare of a man and dwelled in his castle, which was crumbling into ruins. She ruefully nicknamed the house, “Averno” the “Roman lake that was thought to be the entrance to Hades”. She endured life with this man for seven years; years filled with hidden tears, inner anger, deep sadness, and a constant anxiety at her husband’s moods and drunken fits. She determined to grow, however, even in this rocky soil. She began to fix the castle and to work on the gardens. She spent many hours by the sea collecting and categorizing shells. She read, she practiced more diligently on the harpsichord. She ordered her life as her father had shown her, and this helped her not to wither under the strain. Her husband came to appreciate her steadiness and even succeeded in remaining sober for periods of time for her sake. Yet, quite suddenly, he up and died one night without having yet changed over his will. Mary did not receive one penny of his inheritance. All had been for naught, but she was free at last. She returned to her Aunt and Uncle’s house and promptly fell ill after the long strain of anxiety produced by her marriage. She recovered slowly and discovered in wonder that she had survived.

She spent many years living with friends and relatives. She attended balls, found she had a knack for designing her own gowns, embroidered, learned to paint, danced until dawn. She avoided any and all proposals of marriage on principle and was never pressed by relatives on this point as they knew that she had paid her dues to the family. Her bud began to open.

During this flurry of busy years, she found herself invited by a friend to Ireland. She slowly fell in love with this wild and wonderful land. It was so far from the intrigues and machinations of court life that she could finally breathe and find some real peace. In this lovely land she would encounter the hospitality of a most pleasant clergyman, one Patrick Delany. She was very attracted by his manner, his friendly and self-effacing desire that all should be happy in his home. He had a great and loving heart for God and she was able to talk to him freely. There was a definite lodestone between them one for the other. Yet, he was engaged to be married and she honored it. She moved back to England, and that was that for eleven more years.

Mary began to tire of her aristocratic butterfly life. She needed an income and a settled place to place her roots. She began to apply without success for a lady in waiting job. She was at a crossroads. She had remained a bud that had not fully blown. “Her life at this time” Molly Peacock observes, “resembled a kind of permanent waiting room, with all the attendant boredom and anxiety a waiting room breeds”. She was forty-three.

Enter on cue Reverend Patrick Delany, newly widowed and longing to see her again. All those years he had remembered and loved her. He had been a dutiful and loving husband to his first wife. Now he was free. He went to Mary straight away and proposed a life together. He said the tenderest things she had ever heard from any man:

I have long been persuaded that perfect friendship is nowhere to be found but in marriage..I know that it is late in life to think of us engaging anew in that state…I am old, and I appear older than I am; but thank God I am still in health. As you have seen the vanities of the world to satiety, I allowed myself to indulge a hope that you would accept a retirement at this time of life with a man who knows your worth, and honors you as much as he is capable of honoring anything mortal.

Here was a man who had loved her not for fortune, not for the bloom of her youth, not for any political alliance. He loved who she was. Simply that. He was the sun her bud had been waiting for. She left British aristocracy behind and traveled to her beloved Ireland. She and Patrick were wed and remained so for 25 years. In that time, he encouraged her artwork. They drank tea in the garden, they grew flowers together, he showed her how to feed robins out of her hand. She painted the walls of his chapel at his request. She helped him in his work as a Pastor. She loved listening to his sermons. He loved making her laugh and watching her draw. She took up her magical scissors at odd moments and began to create her paper silhouettes once again under his loving eye. She grew into the Mary she was meant to be because he was enchanted by her and wanted to see what that Mary would become. He was waiting simply to see her fully opened in happiness. She did not disappoint. She bloomed. At the end of those blissful twenty-five years, Patrick became sick and eventually died. She was left utterly bereft. All her old anxieties and depressions of girlhood surfaced like bitter winds that almost blighted her bloom.

Mary was taken in by her long-time friend the Duchess of Portland, a woman “generous, and considerate and eccentric and a widow herself. She no doubt understood the vigor unique to mourning…she understood that her interests were providing her friend a feeling of safety, as very, very slowly, Mary woke from her stupor of grief…”

Then one day it happened. One afternoon Mary noticed “how a piece of colored paper matched the dropped petal of a geranium. After making that vital connection between paper and petal, she lifted her familiar pair of filigree-handled scissors…with the instrument alive in her still rather smooth-skinned hand, she began to maneuver, carefully cutting the exact geranium petal shape from the scarlet paper. Then she snipped out another. And another, and another, with the trance like efficiency of repetition – commencing the most remarkable work of her life”. She then took all her cut paper petals and carefully arranged them in the exact likeness of the live geranium in the vase before her. She then pasted them carefully on a black painted background. Her friend the Duchess strolled in to see what her friend was up to and was astounded to find that she could not tell the paper flower from the real one, so accurate was it. This was the first of over 1000 flowers she was to create in the next ten years. She simply said to a friend, “I have invented a new way of imitating flowers”. Indeed she had. With every snip of her scissors, every miniscule paper stamen, petal, and leaf she cut out, her joy and confidence grew. On the black background of her sorrow and grief she had placed the image of her life in full bloom. She and her paper flowers were to always to be a witness that the late blossoms are sometimes the most beautiful.

She was always to remember Patrick’s enchantment with her, his tender and admiring love. It was a light to her in all the dark places of her mind. Peacock expresses it so beautifully when she says, “By the time she was widowed at sixty-eight, she had been loved candidly and clear-sightedly, not in a blur of romance but in clarity of observation, with true acceptance. It was not a sweeping love but a lucid love, or, as Dean Delany would write in a poem to her, twelve whole years after their wedding, ‘my pride, my life, my bliss, my care!”

How apt that I read about Mary Delany on my back porch near my Zinneas. She and they became quite intimately connected in my mind. I too am at an age where I wonder about my art, my great contribution. Is it over? Am I too old for such dreams, even though I still have them? I think of my husband, my grown children, my dear friend who encouraged me to write after a thirty-year hiatus. They don’t think it’s over. They are still waiting for more blossoms to appear. They are still watching and reading over my shoulder as I write at my computer with a genuine interest. They are still asking questions, wondering what I am thinking. In this loving atmosphere, how can I not find another late but beautiful bloom or two within myself? I know Mary would certainly agree with that cheeky smile of hers and an encouraging flourish of her magical scissors.

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.

Dante’s Divine Comedy shows readers the redeeming power of beauty. This is conveyed through Beatrice, who serves as Dante’s guide through the heavens. As the woman who Dante loved in real life, her goodness and purity helped the poet glimpse the heavenly world. And so, in the Divine Comedy, a poem written in her memory, Beatrice serves as Dante’s guide to God and as a symbol of beauty.

As Dante ascends through the heavens, he sees the light of God reflected in the eyes of Beatrice. “Beatrice looks at God, Dante looks at Beatrice and sees in her, as in a clear mirror, the sign from God,” writes Hans Urs von Balthasar. “The beloved does not imprison the poet within herself; on the contrary, she opens up for him the perception of all reality.” (1) Dante might be tempted to enclose himself in the eyes of Beatrice, but as a symbol of true beauty she does not let him. Instead she reminds him that the beauty in her eyes is only a reflection of God’s splendor. It is not in her eyes that paradise is found. Beatrice says:

I can recall just this about that moment:
as I was gazing at her there, I know
my heart was freed of every other longing,

for the Eternal joy was shining straight
into my Beatrice’s face, and back
came its reflection filling me with joy;

then, with a smile whose radiance dazzled me,
she said: “Now turn around and listen well,
not in my eyes alone is Paradise.” (2)

As Dante sees beauty in Beatrice’s eyes, he finds himself ascending higher into Heaven. “Then, to the eyes of beauty my eyes turned,” says Dante in Canto XXII of the Paradiso. And as often happens after staring into her eyes, Dante ascends further upward (3). Indeed, Beatrice gives Dante the strength to complete his journey. When the pilgrim is tired, she encourages him to go on. When he is unable to see the light of God directly, her eyes give him an indirect vision. Beatrice as a symbol of beauty encourages, directs, and points the pilgrim to God.

Only the Blessed Virgin Mary has eyes that are more beautiful. As the highest created masterpiece, the Virgin Mary is the most beautiful and her eyes reflect most clearly the eternal light of God. When Dante encounters Mary in Heaven, the reader sees the same pattern of vision as was with Beatrice. The Virgin Mary looks at God, and Dante looks at the Virgin Mary. After seeing the light of God reflected in the Virgin Mary’s eyes, his vision is then clear enough for the Beatific Vision. Ad Jesum per Mariam. Dante recalls:

Those eyes so loved and reverenced God,
now fixed on him who prayed, made clear to us
how precious true devotion is to her;

then she looked into the Eternal Light,
into whose being, we must believe, no eyes
of other creatures pierce with such insight.”

for now my vision as it grew more clear
was penetrating more and more the Ray
of that exalted Light of Truth Itself (4)

Dante conveys that holiness and beauty go hand-in-hand. As Dante gets closer to God, what he experiences is more beautiful. The Virgin Mary is closer to God than any created being and therefore she is the most beautiful. On the other hand, the further Dante wanders from God in the Inferno, the uglier things are.

For this reason, Satan dwells in the dark and cold pit of Hell and embodies brute ugliness. Without the light of truth to illumine him and his surroundings, Satan does not see Dante and Virgil as they pass by him. Narcissism is the fixation on one’s own self, and Satan is the biggest narcissist of all. As a result, he fixates only on himself and his own misery, thereby inverting the pattern of sight seen with Beatrice and the Virgin Mary. Dante looks at Satan, and Satan looks at the ground weeping. His vision is not focused upward toward God, but is instead focused downward to the immediate, superficial, and passing — to anything but what is beautiful.

Dante’s Divine Comedy conveys the objectivity and redeeming power of beauty. That is, he conveys that beauty is clearly more than a pleasure as judged by the senses and that it is more than a subjective taste. Instead, beauty is a transcendental, an attribute of being insofar as it reveals the splendor of the good and true that permeate reality. As Catholics, we believe that the beauty of the Word Incarnate is seen in the beauty of created things, and especially in the Church, the continuing of the incarnation.

For whatever it’s worth, I recommend Dante’s Divine Comedy to all who love beauty. It is clear that Dante believes in the power of beauty, and this is conveyed in no clearer way than Beatrice’s role in the poem.

Darrell Falconburg teaches great books seminars for a classical Catholic high school in Denver, Colorado. He received a master’s degree in philosophy from Mount Angel Abbey and Seminary and a bachelor’s degree in history from the College of Idaho.

1 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 3: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles (California: Ignatius Press, 1986), 63-64.

2 Dante, Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Paradiso., trans. Mark Musa (repr. New York: Penguin Books, 1971), XVIII 13-21.

3 Ibid, XXII 154.

4 Ibid, XXXIII 40-42.