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Read like the saints

Dappled Things

I had my fair share of deployments when I was in the Navy. For me, these deployments brought a sense of adventure, excitement, danger at times, but they also came with moments of stillness, solitude, quiet, and even loneliness. Life at sea can push one to the very depths of the interior life. So whenever I went on deployments, I packed in my green sea bag a companion saint to read. In fact, one book that got me started on this habit is Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Long deployments are perfect for this spiritual reading. It’s quite a long autobiography divided into 13 books all on the first 35 years of the life of Saint Augustine. Books like this helped me turn those long and lonely deployments into a personal spiritual journey.

Tolle Lege

When he heard a voice call out to him, “Tolle lege,” which means “take up and read.” Saint Augustine did just that. He picked up the book, opened the book which arbitrarily, albeit providentially, led him to the Epistle to the Romans, read it, reflected on it, and jump-started his spiritual journey. It is a moment that transformed him, and ultimately, led him to become one of the most influential spiritual figures.

My own spiritual journey can be traced back to my reading of Saint Augustine. I took this book with me but Saint Augustine, through his writings, took me with him on a very intimate personal journey of spiritual transformation. It is a book written centuries ago but his is a story that I found very relevant and relatable. It had the power to take even the modern reader like myself to the depths of the human soul and transform the mind and the heart. I’ve never been the same since reading that book.

Reading Makes Saints

Saint Josemaria Escriva says, “Reading has made saints.” The steps in between are long and arduous but that first step of spiritual reading is indeed one of the common denominators in the journey of the many saints we admire now. This period of quarantine gives us an extraordinary opportunity to once again call on the Saints to accompany us in this uniquely trying spiritual journey. Many of them make great companions particularly when it comes to filling moments of emptiness, darkness, and uncertainty with joy, light, and hope.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola, for instance, knows a lot about being quarantined. As a young soldier, he lived a life that was full of adventure, excitement, and promise. But when a cannonball struck him in the leg during battle, he was rendered incapacitated and confined for months. His injury was so serious that the doctors actually started preparing him for death. The year was 1521, long before the internet, TV, or even radio. Being the consummate soldier that he was, Saint Ignatius looked for books on chivalry and military valor but as providence would have it, the only books available to him then were on the life of Christ and the Saints. With nothing but time, he had the opportunity to immerse himself in reading books that would eventually transform him. Upon reading the lives of the Saints, he reasoned to himself: “Saint Dominic did this; therefore I must do it. Saint Francis did this; therefore I must do it.” It was a pivotal moment that in his life as well as the world. We have him to thank for some of these Jesuit hospitals, universities, and other influential Jesuits.

A Dark Night

In my Navy days, being stuck in the middle of the sea was when I would feel that sense of motionlessness, isolation, and darkness. However, hidden within moments like that are opportunities to be still and quiet the buzz of a busy life, to reflect, reevaluate, reconnect with my interior life, and reform. When we lose our sense of security and direction along with our material and psychological possessions, we are flung into darkness. And in that darkness is where we learn to listen to the voice of God speaking in the silence of our hearts, place our hands in His with complete trust, and just let go and let God.

Saint John of the Cross, author of some of the most influential writings in Christian spirituality, another perfect companion to revisit this period of quarantine, wrote: “It is best to learn to silence the faculties and to cause them to be still so that God may speak.” This pandemic has silenced the noise of our busy lives but it is perhaps the time to turn our ears to God so that we may hear Him speak to our hearts.

Transformative Reading

There are many life-changing books in the history of our Church. This moment of silence and stillness is a great time to, “Tolle Lege,” blow the dust off those books, and read how the saints found their way out of the darkness and to finding the light of Christ. Without the usual distractions and diversions of “normal” life, here lies an opportunity to read and read deeply. Deep reading is a process that enables us to tap the part of our brain that is otherwise not easy to get to unless we make the effort to really immerse ourselves deep in the story. Deep reading is when I get to analyze and reflect on the wisdom of the saints, the emotional and moral complexities of their lives, and explore how I can apply their examples in my life.

As French poet, Marcel Proust, says, “That which is the end of the book’s wisdom is the beginning of our own.” We could really now use the journey of the saints from darkness to light as the beginning of our spiritual ascent from this pandemic abyss.

BJ Gonzalvo reflects and writes from the beautiful Pacific Northwest, often with the sound of rain in the background, on matters of faith, psychology, and work. His writing has appeared in Mind & Spirit Magazine, Busted Halo, Positively Filipino, and Northwest Catholic.

Friday Links, May 29, 2020

Roseanne T. Sullivan

Indelibly Marked
This essay by Brian Volck at “Close Reading,” the Slant Books blog, looks at three poetry collections published in 2020 by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Paul Mariani, and Carolyn Forché.

I’m after accomplished poets who can’t stay away from those classic Catholic themes—suffering, death, sex, the pattern of sin and redemption—and habits—self-examination, ritual, memory, the honoring of community over self. Above all, there’s the centrality of the body as contested locus of power and punishment, pleasure and pain.”

Art for Extraordinary Circumstances: Henri Matisse’s “Jazz” and More
Jennifer Farrell, Associate Curator of Department of Drawings and Prints, writes at the Met Museum website about “a selection of artworks that have survived, been altered by, or were created under extraordinary circumstances. These include artifacts that have survived war and iconoclasm, as well as dramatic depictions of the struggles for abolition, suffrage, and equality. Jennifer Farrell . . . opens with the story of how Henri Matisse turned to a new technique in the middle of World War II.

G. K. Chesterton: The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton
Happy Birthday, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who began his autobiography in this way:

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.”

Spiritual Hedgehogs

Dappled Things

This is a guest post by Terence Sweeney. Terence is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at Villanova University and editor-at-large for the Genealogies of Modernity Project. He has written for Plough, Church Life Journal, America, and First Things. He is a sacristan and maintenance man at St. Francis de Sales parish in West Philly. He really enjoys ringing church bells.

The mountains are for stags; the rocks are a refuge for hedgehogs

.-Psalm 104:18

In the desert wilds of Egypt in the 4th Century, hermits gathered in the shelter of rocks to try to find Jesus. The spiritual elite of their time, they are also a source of guidance for ours. John Cassian chronicled the wisdom and sayings of these strange people, half-starving and half-enlightened under the burning Egyptian sun. He went out into the desert to listen to their stories and to share them with the broader world. There is something to be learned from the hermits in camel hair shirts, eating almost nothing, and praying constantly. What Cassian learned from these spiritual elites is that they weren’t really elites. They were spiritual hedgehogs, like the rest of us.

Under lock-down, I find myself thinking a lot about hedgehogs. Nestled in my comfortable hole (actually a third-floor apartment), I occasionally poke my head out. When I do, I have a mask on and my spines out. I see other people scamper by me spooked by my shadow. But I too am spooked. On the verdant sidewalks of West Philly, I find myself hiding in hedgerows as others pass by. My one ‘social’ outing is to an abandoned cemetery where toppled gravestones that would make good warrens for hedgehogs.

This odd little passage about hedgehogs and stags is to me a source of delighted bewilderment. What can we learn from creatures slightly larger than teacups? What is the spiritual lesson found in spiny rodents known for curling up in a ball when frightened, for snorting in hedgerows, and for spending much of their lives hidden in their burrows?

Well, we are not the powerful stag bounding up mountains. Cassian saw in the stag the great spiritual hero who crushes Satan underfoot and reaches the height of spiritual awareness. He reflects on this passage in the context of a reflection of one such stag, Serapion, who seemed to have “surpassed nearly all the monks by his commendable life.” And yet this great mystical master had fallen into heresy thinking that God had a body. These desert hermits were spiritual athletes rigorously training themselves in a life of pursuing God. They looked up to Serapion as one who reached the summit, like a stag. When they saw him fall, they too fell.

Not many of us think of ourselves as spiritual athletes or triumphant stags. Yet it is tempting for the religious to think we have got things figured out. While the world goes astray, we succeed in following Christ. We are bounding up the mountain leaving the unchurched behind. Cassian shows the tumbling of Serapion because he wants us to realize that the spiritual athletes in the desert were beginners. Really, we are all just novices in the Christian life.

Coronavirus has made beginners of us all. We should use this time of beginning to develop the spirituality of a hedgehog. For Cassian, to be a spiritual hedgehog is to realize that we cannot rely on ourselves. Cassian quotes scripture again “a feeble race are the hedgehogs, who have made their homes in the rocks” (Proverbs 30:26). Christians can be tempted to think that our religion is for the strong, the bootstrappers, the spiritual warriors. But Cassian, living amidst the most intense Christian the world has ever seen, teaches that there is no one “feebler than the Christian.” To be Christian is the opposite of being self-reliant. Our whole spiritual life is reliance on Another. We are hedgehogs hiding under the cross of Christ.

This reliance on Christ also reveals to us our reliance on others: the mail carrier, the grocery clerk, the ICU nurse, the monk from 400 AD. A spiritual hedgehog cannot just launch out into the world self-sufficient. We shelter amidst the rocks because we need support. Living in isolation is one of the quickest ways to learn that we need each other. The hermits of Egypt were surprisingly social. They met up because they required each other for spiritual advice, the stray loaf of bread, and for a little companionship. Even hermitical hedgehogs find each other in hedgerows.

St. John Cassian among the rocks

We are living in the strange experience of noise amidst the silence. Our streets are quiet. Stores and offices sit silently waiting for the return of clerks and managers. And yet this great muteness feels filled with clatter. The endless pings of social media and the chatter of Zoom meetings punctuates our days. We are glued to our devices and the stresses that come with them. When we worship together, we are encircled by the absence of our fellow congregants and distracted by the screen around which we gather to pray. What Cassian and the hedgehogs of Egypt invite us to do is to try to cut away that noise and get back to the basics of our spiritual lives. If we are all stuck being hedgehogs, we may as well learn something from it.

Being holed up gives us the chance to be still and know that God is our Master and we His novices. As Cassian reflects on being a spiritual hedgehog, he reminds us that we cannot just become mystical experts in one fell swoop. Cassian knew of too many monks who thought they were experts already, capable of going it alone. The wise beginner knows that “human frailty cannot endure without God’s assistance.” As we all curl up in our homes, we should be like the wise hermits who rely on prayer of a hedgehog: “God come to my assistance, lord make haste to help me.” Curled up under his rock, the hermit would repeat this prayer in temptation and physical strife. Curled up in our homes, we can repeat it when trying to homeschool while our webinar meeting crashes. Most of us aren’t faced directly by demons taunting us with scraps of bread, but we are wracked with anxiety about schools reopening and whether we’ll be employed for much longer. In each case, a hedgehog asks God to incline to our aid. Cassian’s prayer contains our the two sides of our faith: we are feeble and we need God. Weak, we need his strengthening. Sick, we need his healing. Anxious, we need his calm. The prayer of the hedgehog, “God come to my assistance.” And please God, make it quick.

In time, the hedgehog unfurls and leaves home. Slowly, we are starting to venture out into the hedgerows of our world. But social isolation is still likely to be the norm and may continue. Let’s use our physical isolation for spiritual growth. Now is the time to take up those long-neglected devotions and spiritual practices. Pray the words Cassian teaches us: God come to my assistance. Spiritual hedgehogs “should write this on the thresholds and doors of your mouth, place it on the wall of your house and in the recesses of your heart.” Spiritual hedgehogs know they are beginners, so let’s start beginning again. Fumble with your rosary, crack open the scripture, pray the psalms every day. If these become the words of our lips under lock-down, perhaps the words we speak when the world opens will be ones of peace and love. Let the silence of quarantine actually be silent. Turn off the screen, turn on your prayer life. We didn’t ask to become hermits, but our little retreats are teaching us to be spiritual hedgehogs again. That may be the good news of our dark times.

Submissions to the blog may sent here.

Quarantine Notebook – Part 15

Dappled Things

Guest series by James Matthew Wilson. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14)

Epilogue, May 17, 2020

My wife and I stopped, half a block away.
We stared up wondering what it was we saw,
That form alighted on the church’s cross.
Two months ago, I idled in the yard,
The spring just threatening to persist in cold,
And leaned upon my spade’s smooth, wooden handle,
Dark masses stretched before me on the ground.
Forever, in a book, Achilles stands
Among the ships that plough the shores of Troy,
Howling in anger at fierce Agamemnon,
For claiming her who is his rightful prize.
Meanwhile, around them, plague descends like rain.
Not far away, a couple is descending
The shaded trail that follows Ridley Creek.
They stop before a massive fallen trunk,
Which vaults the water like an ancient bridge.
Its sides are caked with moss; its root bowl spreads
Its splinters in a ruined crown; its length
Is bleached and rotted at the top from sunlight.
They climb and take it to the other shore,
Where all gives way to trackless wilderness.
And here, where shadows run from noontime light,
Three robins hop and pick about the grass
To feed on insects burrowed in the soil.
Our public life has been so far debased
That all we’ve left are mobs of partisans
Who shout suspicions of conspiracies
Across the clashing waters that divide them.
For, only secret plotting could explain
The sickness, tyranny, or idiocy
That runs through everything and topples all.
In this, at least, the public’s like the private,
Indeed, is one with it. The neighbors grousing
At kids who ride too close upon their bikes,
With face masks dangling; every moment, now,
Lies tense with shadows like the leaves of grass
Through which the robins dart their yellow beaks.
That is why Thales of Miletus cried,
All things are full of gods. We cannot help
But feel their meddling whims just out of sight,
That all appearances are by design,
As when a stagehand, couched behind the backcloth,
In momentary carelessness, will fumble
And drop a saber waiting for Act Two.
It shatters our absorption in the scene;
Or, rather, make us conscious of its form—
The accidental item, turn of phrase,
Or motion pitched above us in the sky,
All suddenly revealed as well-made pieces
Within a world that’s cracked, yet full and deep,
And trying to tell us what to think of it.
It’s been my pleasure to record such things,
My occupation, too, and honest study;
My wish: to open wide the welded doors
Of minutes, and to draw the mortal hours,
With all their mishmashed oddities and flukes,
Together as some whole—provisional,
No doubt, but also, in its vexing way,
Enduring. This I offer as a gift,
For it was always yours as much as mine;
What tracings I have made here with my hand
Are yours to look within, their deeps to sound,
To figure how the whole thing fits together.
I only ask you keep in mind that plots
May be malevolent, but most are not
And show themselves as sturdy in the end
To those who bring attention and good will.
Be as I was, when I was still a boy,
And turned up early at my grandma’s lake house.
She’d taped a note in blue ink on the door,
That squarish, trembling cursive of her hand,
To let me know she’d gone out to the store,
But left the door unlocked. I was to enter
The shady porch and make myself at home,
To wait within the quiet and the stillness
And pass the time by eying all its clutter—
The Corky skis, the lures, rods, and nets—
Those things acquired in a life of summers,
And kept not for their owner but her guests.

-James Matthew Wilson

Friday Links, May 22, 2020

Roseanne T. Sullivan

Questions! Questions! What makes a good person? What is beauty? What is a nun? What to say at a commencement when nobody’s there? Plus poems.

Read John Paul II’s tender poem for his deceased mother
First, Rev. Michael Rennier, DT Associate Editor, and then Katy Carl, Editor-in-Chief, suggested this link—which uncovered a previously hidden slight competitive streak.
MR: Too late lol. I GET ALL THE CREDIT IF WE USE THIS LINK
KC: Oops, saw this in my feed and didn’t realize it was already in the group! 😅

The Nuns Who Wrote Poems
Another recommendation from Katy Carl. “In the mid-20th century, several women religious were writing and publishing ambitious poetry. . . . Although literary nuns tend to be overshadowed by poetic priests like Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., and Robert Southwell, S.J., these women deserve attention.”

I, for one, never heard of these well-received religious women before.

BTW, this excellent article by Nick Ripatrazone at America Magazine rightly notes that the term nun is inaccurately applied to all but one of these poets. The rest were sisters. “Nuns are typically cloistered; sisters profess simple vows and live apostolic lives out in the world.”

What is Beauty? A Six Week Intensive with Katerina Kern
KC: Of interest to our readers.

This course is offered by CIRCE (Center for Independent Research on Classical Education) on Thursdays, May 21 – June 25 4-5:30pm ET. The recording of the first class will be emailed to those who enroll before registration closes Thursday, May 28 at 1pm EST.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on How to Live with Our Human Fragility

From Josh Nadeau, DT Associate Editor.

JN: On philosopher Martha Nussbaum, Greek tragedy and the ways suffering/vulnerability can humanize us if we’re open to it.

KC: She raises a lot of really interesting issues here; I think I see what she is saying but am not sure to what extent her concept of tragedy aligns with the classical view, in which tragedy is the result of hubris, or the attempt to “wrest from the world what you want” against the limitations of reality itself. She seems to be talking more about another and more contemporary species of tragedy, in which sorrow and painful events result when two legitimate goods come into conflict.

JN: Yeah, I think she’s less going for “this is how the Greek writers saw and structured tragedy” than “this is one really important thing that ancient tragedy can teach us about being alive.” Definitely more of a philosopher angle than that of a literary historian.

RTS: Because it starts by raving about and then quotes rampant atheist Bill Moyers, this article by Maria Popova at Brain Pickings set my teeth on edge from the beginning. Besides, Martha Nussbaum may be as the author claim “remarkable and luminous,” but—from a purely Catholic perspective—merely to allow yourself to be vulnerable does not make you good, methinks. (From your friendly neighborhood dissenter).

CLASS OF 2020: A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person
“I couldn’t say these things during a traditional ceremony, but these aren’t traditional times,” wrote David Brooks at The Atlantic.

Recommended by Katy Carl with this pull quote. “I’m worried about the future of your maximum taste. People in my and earlier generations, at least those lucky enough to get a college education, got some exposure to the classics, which lit a fire that gets rekindled every time we sit down to read something really excellent. I worry that it’s possible to grow up now not even aware that those upper registers of human feeling and thought exist.”

Welcoming James Matthew Wilson, the Benedict XVI Institute’s New Poet-in-Residence

James Matthew Wilson has been named the Poet in Residence for the Benedict XVI Institute. The institute has recently re-published Wilson’s poem cycle The River of the Immaculate Conception at their online magazine Catholic Arts Today after the work’s initial publication in a chapbook by Wiseblood Books. Scroll down for links to the individual poems.

It was one of the great honors of my life to be commissioned to write a poem for Frank LaRocca’s Mass of the Americas. ‘The River of the Immaculate Conception,’ the seven-part sequence that resulted, and which takes us from the early days of the Spanish conquest through this very hour of the Church’s life, continues to strike me as the best thing I’ll ever do, in no small part because it was not me doing it. It came as a gift, an inspiration to be sure, but also as a gift from the Church that I return wholly to the Church.”—James Matthew Wilson

Quarantine Notebook Updates

The “Quarantine Notebook” poetry cycle by Wilson is being published serially here at Dappled Things blog. For convenience, here are links to all the posts so far in one place, including new links to the two latest poems in the series: Parts 13 and 14: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, and Part 14.

Too many suggested links to post them all this week. More to come next Friday.

Quarantine Notebook – Part 14

Dappled Things

May 14, 2020

My brother calls, the virus long since passed,
And he back at his desk, as if it never
Had knocked him out or shaken him within.
“Do you just write about whatever happens
Around your house or in the yard?” he asks.
“I worked my shed into a poem last week,”
I say, “So, yeah, I guess.” Outside my window,
The songbirds raise a fugue of rapid twitters,
And crows erupt with loud, shrill interjections.
But, deeper, on the lower frequencies,
I hear the hum of digger and of crane,
A couple blocks away, their steady signal
That, all at once, construction has resumed.
The houses left unfinished, their garages
Like gaping mouths that bare the plywood darkness,
And lumber stacked before them like a tongue,
To these the crews return and take up hammers.
This working up quotidian life to poems
Just seems absurd to him, who for his living
Will turn a dollar into something useful,
Produce a thing that someone else will buy.
His way of life depends upon his seeing
How value can be skimmed from what was worthless,
Or, from crude stuff, some good that others want.
Just writing down what was already there
Does not seem right.
Of course, that misses what
Is actually occurring, when one takes
The settled details of the ordinary
And sets them rhyming one against the other.
Or, when one takes the plain prose of the hour,
The news report, the anecdote, the thought
That passes through the mind while one’s out walking,
The odd thing that one’s daughter said at breakfast,
And straitens it until it fits in meter
And runs in coded columns down the page.
It’s no less striking than what came of Daphne,
Her body hardened into ancient wood,
Or to those sisters who took up their perch
Within the mazed coiffure made of her boughs
To sing each other’s sorrows in the dusk.
Like other business, this not only finds,
But enters in, refines, and raises up
Until we see the mystery that was there
Persisting, yet transformed, as something new.
Von Hildebrand writes somewhere, what we call
“Prosaic” is man’s taking of the normal
And ruining it by mere routine, until
It seems mechanical or bureaucratic.
The adze the carpenter runs down a plank
Transformed to whirring blades and smoking engines;
The great bazaar, where carpets hang for sale,
Reduced to rented office suites whose clerks
Sit sighing with their fingers bent on keys.
We know just what he meant. As Percy said,
The whole world sometimes seems deep-sunk in sameness,
In sameness carries on, of sameness dies.
We yearn to be shocked out of what may kill us.
But Livia claimed this morning that I’ve said
Otherwise: art affirms the ordinary.
And, yes, I probably have. For, do we not
Turn back upon what’s plain and most familiar,
Such things as we know well yet do not see,
And suddenly discover what they are?
So, Plato noticed that, because we think,
And thinking is an immaterial act,
We must have souls; and, since our souls cause motion,
They are its origin and, thus, immortal.
But he’s not through. If our souls are immortal,
They must in their vast motions have seen all,
Including that great pageant of the gods,
Who circle far above us, savoring beauty
As it shines forth from that which truly is,
The whole world ordered by their whirling thought.
Just staring inward on those things we know,
Our vision passes through and lights upon
What we would never otherwise have guessed.
And that is just what happens when our prose
Is sounded for its measured syllables
And forms itself to numbers we call verse.
Some doubt that it is possible to find
A god concealed within a homely man
Inclined to argue with himself in doorways,
Or that those seated at a dinner table
Could learn within the breaking of their bread
All that there is to know of truth or grace.
And so, they go in search of strange sensations,
They check the headlines for celebrities
Who’ve been tattooed, divorced, or wound up dead
With some mysterious substance in the stomach.
The virus numbers growing stale, they read
About a slaughter in a hospital,
And tally up the children carted out,
Or watch in wonder—once, and then again—
A man get shot and crumple on the pavement.
Still anxious for some change, they even dream
Of death as a disease that will be cured
By some new gadget we can wear, or pill
That hasn’t been invented yet, but will.
But, turn away from this. Yes, turn away.
Our immortality is here, already.
It comes in even through the open window
That brings the rhythms of the daily round;
That looks down on the children in the yard,
And sees their play with sticks and grass and toys
Build new worlds at the center of the old;
And lets us lift our vision far beyond,
To find, between the oaks grown still at last,
The centering spire of St. Monica,
Which draws the eye up to its ringing height,
Which stands impassive to the fearful hour,
And lends the side arm of its iron cross
As eyrie to a preening red-tailed hawk.

-James Matthew Wilson

Frank La Rocca’s Top Ten Influential Albums

Roseanne T. Sullivan

Ten albums whose music influenced this modern composer of sacred music.

If you are a Facebook user, you’ve probably seen “ten-day challenges.” For example, one FB friend of mine is halfway through a “Life is Good Challenge,” so she’s posted a different photo from an unforgettable moment in her life every day for five days so far, and she has five more to go. Some people don’t like those sort of things, but I do—because, as it probably goes without saying, you learn things about your friends that you might never have otherwise known.

So I was happy that I chanced across ten album covers posted by sacred music composer Frank La Rocca in response to a challenge from his daughter.

La Rocca is the Composer in Residence for the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship. I interviewed him here about his Mass of the Americas (MOTA). MOTA premiered on the West Coast at the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco at an ordinary form Mass and was then was adapted for a traditional Latin pontifical Mass that premiered on the East Coast, at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, in Washington, D.C. Amazingly, at both Masses, the cathedrals were packed. The Mass of the Americas is only one of La Rocca’s many well-received secular and sacred music compositions. As Dappled Things editor Bernardo Aparicio noted in an email when I pitched this idea, La Rocca is also the composer of “A Rose in Winter,” an Oratorio about Saint Rita of Cascia, for whom DT friend Matthew Lickona was the librettist. You can read a perceptive review of MOTA by a fellow composer here. You can listen to the prologue to A Rose in Winter here. And you can find more about La Rocca and his other works here.

Following are Frank La Rocca’s ten-day challenge posts in his own words. Album covers are clickable video clips of samples from the albums, when available. I think you’ll agree there is at least one surprise in this list.

Frank La Rocca: My daughter Genevieve La Rocca challenged me to post 10 albums that have influenced my musical taste—one record a day for 10 days. Working on a roughly chronological series, here they are in the order in which I encountered these albums as I grew up.

Day #1: Arthur Rubinstein: The Chopin Collection

This extract is Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” Op. 64 No. 1 in D Flat

FLR: This album is the first classical music I ever heard, and even at age 7, I was captivated.

Day #2: Dave Brubeck Quartet: Time Out

FLR: I heard this when I was 9 or 10. Thus began a lifelong love of walking bass and drum solos.

Day #3: Count Basie Orchestra: E= MC2

This extract is the tune, After Supper

FLR: My father played trumpet in the Big Bands of the 40’s and 50’s and hearing him play live set me on a course to become a musician from an early age. He loved Count Basie, and so do I.

Day #4: Beatles: Rubber Soul

FLR: Well, I guess it’s time to get to the Beatles.

Day #5: Switched-On Bach, Walter Carlos on the MOOG Synthesizer

FLR: Go ahead and laugh, but this is what first made me love the music of J.S. Bach. I was so obsessed with this album that my freshman college roommates hid it from me so they didn’t have to listen to it every day.

Day #6: Schubert: Der Winterreise. Dietrich Fischer Dieskau, Baritone; Gerald Moore, Piano

FLR: At the halfway point, I’m going to have to choose very carefully, because there are simply too many. This one definitely makes the cut. Linguistically, musically, vocally, affectively this opened new worlds to me.

Day #7: Stravinsky: Le Sacre Du Printemps. Minnesota Orchestra Conducted by Antal Dorati

FLR: I was blessed to have a freshman roommate who had gone through the Juilliard Prep program, and he introduced me to a lot of great music, including this, the ‘Eroica’ of the 20th C. This was my gateway to (good) modern music.

Day #8: Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde. Berlin Philharmonica Conducted by Herbert von Karajan

FLR: I hated Mahler the first time I heard his work. Then I heard this and he became a central influence in my creative life. This album and the next final two are like musical icebergs — they are representative of massive bodies of work by the composers in question.

Day #9: Arvo Pärt: Arbos. The Hilliard Ensemble

FLR: I first heard Pärt’s music in 1989. I loved it but found it profoundly confusing at the time. There was simply no way such apparently simple means could produce such profound effects – until I understood that it was the (apparent) simplicity itself that was so profound. Through his CDs, Arvo Pärt became my teacher and I his student.

Day #10. Victoria: The Tenebrae Responsories. The Sixteen, Conducted by Harry Christophers

FLR: I taught a class in “Renaissance-style” counterpoint over 20 times, and as a result—without quite realizing it—had developed pretty solid technique. When I became interested in composing sacred choral music, I used the technique I had subconsciously acquired, plus the insights from Pärt’s music, to forge my own neo-Renaissance synthesis of contrapuntal part writing with an extended harmonic palette. This CD is a huge iceberg of influence and inspiration: Victoria, Byrd, Palestrina, Josquin, Lassus—on and on.

Quarantine Notebook – Part 13

Dappled Things

Guest series by James Matthew Wilson. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12)

May 9, 2020

The spade, fetched off its nail within the shed,
Swings with a heft beside me as I go
To pay the garden bed out back a visit.
The frosts have passed. The time has come for planting.
Grey, hardened clods slice cleanly off the blade.
Dead leaves that cluster in the rough, and stems
From pepper plants pulled out and left to dry
With last November’s swift and hardening freeze,
Go down into the darkness, while the earth
Gets raised and turned to show its loamy black.
I glide the spade to level out the soil,
Then point its edge and tally rows of troughs.
These guide my work: to sift each pepper seed,
Minute and ivory, off the palm and down,
Then tamp the soft dirt over, gently patting
Just as you might a dog’s deep flank of scruff.
And now, I pull a sleeve from my back pocket.
The air is cool, the sky a marbled brightness,
The kind that makes you raise your head in hope.
And so, I tear the paper seam, and tap
A chunky clutch of mammoth sunflower seeds
Into my palm. Then, stretched on hands and knees,
I drill a row of deep holes with my finger,
And nest each seed beneath a layer of soil.
They’ll measure out the season with their growth
Until the children can return to school.
I know that, far from here, the farmers run
Their tractors into fields grown ripe of beans,
With glabrous, greeny heads of cabbages,
And plow what they’ve raised back into the soil.
Onions lie piled in newly opened trenches,
The backhoe sifting dirt on their white skins.
And others steer their pregnant dairy trucks
Right to the edge of stinking compost pits
And flush a thousand gallons of fresh milk.
No one to pick it all, no one to buy it,
So back and back into the ground it goes;
The fields of Florida and Idaho,
Great wastes of idle, rotting fruitfulness
On which their stewards stare at loss for speech.
How much is being buried now, that stood,
Just days ago, among us, full of life.
I hear from friends up north, the Boston Globe
Runs on for pages with obituaries,
And watched, last night, in silence, as my wife
Sat on the couch and spread the local broadsheet.
Her fingers traced a bow beneath the lamplight
With such a dancing, tranquil elegance
That suddenly stopped short to find them there,
Lined up in columns running on for miles:
The grainy, ink stamped faces of the dead.
I hear, as well, a story from Virginia.
A friend of ours, expecting her first child,
Has gone out walking in the countryside,
The red clay faintly glowing in the fields
Beneath alfalfa. Tall pines arched above.
She stops to pick some clover, while a woman
Glides past her on the narrow walk and smiles.
She sits down in the long and shaded grass
That lines the trail, then smooths her dress, and spreads,
Upon the shrinking parcel of her lap,
The little bunch of clover that she’s gathered,
To note the variegations on the leaves.
But then, she senses someone standing by;
The woman who had passed has now returned.
I don’t know why it was she thought to do so—
Made curious, maybe, by such idle study.
But, seeing the little pile of trefoil leaves,
And, seeing the rounded fullness of her dress,
The woman says, “It looks like you’re expecting.”
There, in the pleasant silence that descends,
She raises up a flattened palm and prays,
Our friend’s eyes softly closed and her head bowed
To take whatever blessing here was given.
Oh, let them grow, these flowers of the sun,
And let those buried crops beget anew;
And let what has been lost not be forgotten;
And let the world know seasons once again,
Where we can stare in joy unmixed with grief
On all that grows and spreads upon the earth.

-James Matthew Wilson

Friday Links, May 15, 2020

Roseanne T. Sullivan

Links to all sorts of interesting and amusing things: a fine new book of short stories by Wiseblood’s Editor-in-Chief, Joshua Hren; a poem about a tot who greets each new thing in her world with unalloyed excitement; a reflection by a parent slowed down by the pandemic and surprisingly glad of it; and more.

Three Links from Katy Carl, DT Editor-in-Chief

In the Wine Press, by Joshua Hren, Editor-in-Chief of Wiseblood Books

KC: Top of the to-read list.

In high-intensity, densely allusive and urgently anguished prose, Hren bears witness to suffering implicitly pulsing with the mystery of God’s presence. Though he leads readers past horrors difficult to contemplate, there is yet hope in his Dantean sense of commedia: wandering far from home and safety, this journey through deep darkness is one that leads towards the light.”—Natalie Morrill, DT Fiction Editor

My Eighteen-Month-Old Daughter Talks to the Rain as the Amazon Burns by Dante Di Stefano

KC: Another big feature for a poet we’ve published and admired!

Being a Parent Has Made My Pandemic Life Simpler, If You Can Believe It: Hear Me Out by Tom McTague

KC: Unexpectedly lovely.

The crisis has prompted many to ask big existential questions about their life’s purpose. The irony for me is that it has taken losing choice to clarify what I want to choose. . . . Part of me will miss this sad, strange interlude when it’s gone—not the death and destruction, but the quiet reflection and new routines. For many of us, it might serve to reveal what we really care about. I will try not to be quick to forget it.”—Tom McTague.

Three Links from Roseanne T. Sullivan, DT Blogger and Contributor

Bestselling Author Turns to Our Blessed Mother, a review of Anthony DeStefano’s Our Lady’s Wardrobe by Patti Armstrong

RTS: Initially, I didn’t like the idea of focusing on Our Lady’s wardrobe, but the book is actually a beautifully illustrated, rhyming introduction to many of Our Lady’s apparitions. (See Friday Links, May 8 for a link to an essay that is persuasive about the need to give children books that enrich them with realistic images of God’s creation.)

Publishing Bingo Board by Meg Eden

RTS: Meg Eden’s work has been published in several magazines but, as she writes in this article, “Rejection never fully goes away from the submitting process.”

7 Benefits of Being a Senior-Citizen Writer by Carolyn Geduld

RTS: At 74 years of age, I can relate to some but not all of this piece.

Latest Poems in the Quarantine Notebook

The “Quarantine Notebook” guest series of poems by James Matthew Wilson is being updated frequently. For convenience, here are links to all the posts so far, including a new link to the latest poem in the series, Part 12: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, and Part 12.

Quarantine Notebook – Part 12

Dappled Things

Guest series by James Matthew Wilson. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11)

May 1, 2020

On Saturdays, I go to help with Mass,
To lector and recite the intercessions.
On Sundays, in the kitchen, all the children
Will watch the video broadcast of me there,
Which plays, while I fry pancakes on the griddle.
You wonder why one curious miracle
In many of the saints’ lives is the act
Of bilocation (Why, of all things, that?),
Until a day like this when it is mimicked.
And then, you realize that we all want
To be both fully present in the flesh
And yet give some clue that our spirits can
Stretch out beyond themselves, can penetrate
The lives of others in a real communion.
We see it in those lots overgrown with weeds,
Ringed by a span of rusted cyclone fencing,
That not so long ago were drive-in theaters.
They are once more. Their hulking, weathered screens
Kindled with light, the cars drawn slowly in,
Their tires following half-hidden ruts,
The long grass stroking their warm underbellies,
Until each comes to rest and windows lower,
The inward darkness opened to night air.
And now, all stare, perhaps alone together,
Or, maybe, joined, their interwoven gaze
Converging on the smirk of Jimmy Stewart
As only celluloid can bring him to us.
Our souls indeed slip freely through the world
And touch on everything with their attentions,
As nothing that has being is a stranger,
But rather gives itself to sense or mind.
So, Livia, when we take our walks together,
Wrenches the stroller from my grip and runs,
Her body almost floating down that sweep
Of hillside road unwinding like a ribbon,
Her legs a flash of energy and spirit
That sprint as swiftly back to where I follow.
I catch the baby cheering out his “wee,”
Which floats right up to me upon the wind.
It was supposed to be track season, now,
And I, supposed to watch her from the stands;
But this is better for us both, I think.
What we most often call the need for freedom,
To manifest one’s self without constraint,
Is rather this, it seems; the need to enter
By means of our ungated, bashful spirits
Into some kind of commerce or communion.
We share by nature in the life of things,
And meet the world as face encounters face.
But, how that need, misunderstood, miscarries.
The tour guide in Antalya, freed from lockdown,
Who scaled a cliff to view the Düden Falls,
And stretched out from the ledge to snap a picture
For sending to her mother and her friends.
She clicked, her smile haloed by the mist
That rose from plunging torrents toward the sun.
A family saw her, out, beyond the guardrails.
The crash of water being what it is,
It took three days to find her body, where
It lay, indifferent, pinned against the rocks.
Now, May Day comes, memorial of the march
And bomb that shook the market in Chicago,
Where uniformed police and strikers met.
It takes its place in every calendar,
As if all union were by force and violence,
Achieved against the grain of our own growth,
And fated for our sad commemoration.
We do so poorly what is natural
That we suspect that nature is a liar;
Feel rattled by such names as love and justice;
Fear we shall be destroyed by what we need;
We, who know well we’re called to be together.

-James Matthew Wilson