ILLUSTRATION AND COMMENTARY BY JAMES TISSOT
FROM HIS LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

Acts of the Apostles, Chap. 1:9-12:

“And when he had said these things, while they looked on, he was raised up: and a cloud received him out of their sight. And while they were beholding him going up to heaven, behold two men stood by them in white garments.

“Who also said: Ye men of Galilee, why stand you looking up to heaven? This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, as you have seen him going into heaven. Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount that is called Olivet, which is nigh Jerusalem, within a sabbath day’s journey.”

Tissot’s Commentary: “The Ascension is not merely the personal glorification of Jesus, it is also an event of the last importance to the human race. It is the completion of the Creation, interrupted by the fall of the first man. The design of God in creating man was to make of him the conscious and free agent of his own salvation, the sharer in the divine bliss and glory. Man by his sin had hindered the realization of this plan, but he could not frustrate it. By the Resurrection of Christ we see man set free from death and restored to his first hopes of eternal life, but his salvation is not yet completed. By the Ascension God permits man, redeemed through Christ, to share with Him in the divine glory, and thus realizes in Him the original idea of the Creation. Only thus can that idea achieve completion.

“Not yet, however, is the end of all things. The Ascension not only complete the work of our redemption through Christ, it lays the foundation of its realization in every one of us who is of Christ. In this consists its importance for the Church. There remains now but two promises to be fulfilled the sending of the Holy Spirit, which shall continuously supply the Church on earth with the grace of the risen Saviour, and that last prophecy uttered in the Judgement Hall of Caiaphas “Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven”, a coming which will summon the elect to share the Ascension of the Master and to become partakers of His glory, even as Jesus prayed in the sublime petition offered up on the eve of His death, ”Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory which thou has given me; for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world”. It is not for us to dwell now on this last subject, these final chords of the divine symphony. We have been relating the life on earth of Jesus, that life ends for us in the apotheosis of the Ascension. The cloud which “received Christ from sight” is like the curtain which falls at the close of a drama. We will not attempt to raise it, but let us each and all withdraw to “ponder”, as the Virgin did, these things in our hearts.”

Image “The Ascension as seen from below” (1886-1894) by James Tissot. Illustration for The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, at the Brooklyn Museum.

I don’t like that word, “finish.” When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting—I just stop working on it for a while.
— Arshile Gorky

Over time, the couple had developed a fondness for this eccentric character, whose sad eyes and lanky frame appeared regularly in the doorway of their cafe, and for whom they generously provided nourishment. He was one of them, just not as lucky. So, they felt sympathy for him, accepting the strange images he scrawled on whatever was at hand as payment for his meals. Between themselves, they called him “Crazy Arshile” in Armenian, and politely accepted his drawings, tossing them away once he was out of sight. Years later, after the art establishment had proclaimed the importance of this man and his work had become famous, they were overcome by regret at having done this. Like Saul before the scales dropped from his eyes, they were unable to see the value of the gifts they had received. The drawings were lost to history.

Similarly lost are the details of the story. Passed around in Armenian families much like my own, this oral history has the shape of a myth. Those of us who have remembered and retold it have undoubtedly distorted it along the way. But I’ve always found the tale as intimate as it is incomplete, like the yellowing image of a distant relative in an old photograph. Its hazy features continue to have a hold over me.

Crazy Arshile was himself caught in the spell of such an image.

A Past Recollected

It was during the 1920s, and having recently arrived in America, Vosdanik Manoog Adoian was living with a father he barely knew. In the home they now shared, he discovered the photograph taken in the city of Van, before he and his sister had fled Armenia. It had been made a few years before the genocide, and sent to his father Sedrak Adoian, who had emigrated to the United States to avoid a military draft. It was hoped that the photo would help motivate him to provide financial support for his estranged wife and their four children. This image would eventually play a pivotal role in Vosdanik’s life, and after he had reinvented himself as the artist Arshile Gorky, it would serve as a vehicle of personal regeneration.

Arshile Gorky

Taken in a photographer’s studio in 1912, the black-and-white image presents Gorky standing next to his seated mother, as if he were a diminutive husband. His mother’s name was Shushan der Marderosian, a peasant of noble lineage. The two are posed in a stiff, frontal manner, their faces filled with a mixture of desperation and hope. Though only eight, Gorky seems older in a long Chesterfield coat, as he holds a delicate sprig of flowers in his hand and gazes intently at us. His face is like that of a ghost, teetering on the edge of the visible, while his mother’s is in sharp contrast. Her stare seems both introspective and fearful. Her face is framed by a kerchief. She wears a jacket covered by a dress, cut like a smock. Her thick hands, evidence of a life of labor, rest on her thighs. Mother and child are posed before a meager, painted backdrop. This photo served as an icon for Gorky, an object of meditation that would occupy his creative imagination for many years.

In March of 1919, the young Vosdanik watched his mother starve to death in his arms. She had become one of countless victims of the Armenian genocide (1914-1923), during which the Ottoman Turks attempted to displace or exterminate the Armenians living within their empire. Years later, Gorky would return to the old photograph, and working from it, he would recreate the childhood, mother, and homeland he had lost. For the artist, love would conquer death through the transformative power of the creative act.

Rebirth in the New World

Gorky produced two versions of The Artist and His Mother (1926-1942), along with many preparatory sketches and studies on the theme. The one pictured here belongs to the Whitney Museum in New York. It is significant that he was occupied with the image for so long, considering that he only lived to his forties, committing suicide after a series of personal tragedies. He adhered closely to the photograph, and despite countless variations, each of his drawings and paintings maintained its primary elements. Gorky would deconstruct the image into constituent parts and explore it in depth. He would extensively rework both paintings over many years, never fully arriving at a conclusion. What was left was an evocation of personal and national tragedy in a visual language that was equally figurative and abstract.

The Artist and His Mother

Having studied and developed a sophisticated understanding of the European avant-garde, when Gorky painted loss and mourning it was through a modern sensibility. And by reprocessing and reordering the image in these melancholic double-portraits, he memorialized his past and rescued it from death. He did this by approaching portraiture in a new way, creating an image that was mutable. The process of change and continual reworking is visible on its surface, along with a sense of uncertainty and instability. The painting is replete with elements that refuse to cohere or to resolve themselves in a comfortable way. Through painting, Gorky’s suffering became a path to salvation, as woundedness and death were transformed into everlastingness.

Resurrection does not only apply to the body of Jesus. It is the cosmic pattern of life. In every death there is a transformation, and when suffering leads us to God we are born anew, just as it was with Jesus after his crucifixion. As an eternal process, there is no separation between incarnation, death, and renewal. Jesus’s resurrection as Christ is the model for the redemption of all things in the universal cycle, in which death is never the end. A part of Gorky died in the death marches, to be reborn as a great modern painter. The same pattern applies to the Armenian people, who, as a result of the atrocities, would become scattered throughout the world, forced to reinvent themselves and build new communities in adopted lands.

Western Christianity is focused on the individual resurrection of Jesus, but representations in the Eastern Church depict a universal outlook. Eastern icons, including those from Armenia, show Jesus pulling others out of death, so that resurrection is seen as apokatastasis: a restoration of all creation.

Gorky was born near the rugged shores of Lake Van, in the province of Vaspurakan. Armenians had lived here since Urartian times, but the region was seized by the Ottoman Turks during the genocide, part of their brutal confiscation of large parts of historical Armenia. Atop dry, stone-covered cliffs dotted by wildflowers, on the island of Aghtamar in Lake Van, sits the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. A silent witness to both lilting hymns and the tumult of invading armies, this Armenian Apostolic cathedral was completed in the early tenth century. It is renowned for the extensive array of bas-reliefs which adorn its external walls, featuring a variety of religious figures and motifs. The ambitious scale of its ornamentation makes the cathedral unique in the history of Armenian architecture. Gorky was raised in its shadow. Fully appreciating his achievement requires a knowledge of how such ancient sources from the East informed his modern approach to painting.

“Isola di Akdamar nel Lago Van: la chiesa della Santa Croce – Island of Akdamar in the lake Van: church of the Holy Cross” by mariurupe is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The outer walls of the cathedral are encircled by four sets of friezes, which feature a sequence of figures and creatures both religious and mythical. Christian saints are among the sixty-one specific individuals carved into the stone, many originally painted and with eyes of glass or semi-precious stone. These are thought to include John the Baptist, along with the two apostles, Thaddeus and Bartholomew, who are said to have brought Christianity to Armenia in the 1st century. Also featured are important figures from the Armenian church and ancestral members of the Artzruni dynasty, the patrons of the cathedral and the first Christian feudal family in Armenia. The stylistic resemblance between these reliefs and Gorky’s two paintings is telling.

Like much traditional Armenian art, including the frescoes within the cathedral, these reliefs are frontal and strangely proportioned. Faces are oval and eyes are large, set into deep sockets. The figures are flat, the volumes of their garments implied through line. They convey the holy in the expressive and symbolic language of Medieval portraiture. Gorky synthesized this vocabulary with the concerns of modern painting, infusing the deep religious faith of his people into The Artist and His Mother. Reinventing the tradition that sustained him in a contemporary language, Gorky redeemed his suffering in an image that bears the timeless quality found in the spiritual art of his ancestors.

Continuing the stylistic conventions of Aghtamar’s cathedral, Gorky’s figures are physically disconnected from one another. Unlike in the photograph, the boy stands behind his mother, feet turned away, while a gap separates them. They share colors, but their hands, smudged and obscured, suggest that they cannot grasp or hold one another. There is a certain violence in this gesture, particularly in the erasure of the mother’s hands. Gorky’s painting also conjures up the past in the abstract shapes that define the figures. While distinctly modern in style, the flat planes of color hark back to the ancient carvings and the period’s memorial portraiture more generally.

The references continue in the spatial organization of the painting. Echoing the arrangement of the reliefs, which float in open friezes, the space of the painting is ambiguous. The wall behind the figures is broken, and it’s position unclear. A dark brown square, framing the mother’s head, resembles a window but provides no view. Its stubborn opacity is like an erasure of the landscape from the lives of the Armenian people.

Both heads seem derived from Aghtamar. Greatly simplified, they feature deep-set eyes and elliptical faces that are more mask than flesh. The boy’s hair is as crisp and neat as that of Aghtamar’s sculpted saints. Though clearly defined, these heads seem separate from the loosely painted bodies to which they’ve been joined. Expressed in broad passages of warm, earthy color and devoid of line, the bodies possess a soft, ethereal quality. Their forms seem both assertive and dematerialized at the same time. But the heart of the painting beats through the image of the artist’s mother. A monumental influence on the young Gorky, she was the first to introduce him to art and the primary source of his national identity. Raising his mother from the dead through his art, Gorky gave her new life in the eternal form of an Armenian icon.

The mother’s image reflects the timeless quality she possessed for Gorky. Her distant gaze seems eternal, as though sculpted in stone, unlike her son, whose downcast eyes suggest emotion. Rigid and fixed in space, she is almost a ghost. White paint has washed her apron clean of the elaborate patterning found in the photograph. Her classical face is expressionless, and remote as an ancient statue. It was drawn meticulously and in phases during the period that Gorky was working on this theme, indicating its importance to the artist. Her dress, rendered with vigorous strokes of the brush, falls off the bottom of the picture. It pushes her forward, away from her son and into our space. Her headscarf is like a halo, and she appears like the inhabitant of some eternal realm. In the version owned by the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., her face is bloodless, having taken on an ivory smoothness through the continual scraping and polishing of many layers of paint. Her icy complexion contrasts in that painting with her son’s, whose darkened flesh tones Gorky has built up through a continuous layering of color.

Uprising

My people are deeply rooted in faith. In 301 AD Armenia became the first nation to adopt Christianity as a state religion. Surrounded by powerful neighbors, our rich history in every era has been characterized by the cycles of death and rebirth. But the twentieth century brought unthinkable atrocities as more than 1.5 million Armenians perished at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Driven into the desert to perish, they managed not only to survive, but to thrive. They resurrected themselves and passed on a national consciousness to their offspring, who like me, were born far from the ancestral homeland. Wherever they went they would build their churches, safeguarding tradition to the current day.

In 2019, after many failed attempts over the decades, Congress officially recognized the Armenian genocide in a landmark resolution, making the United States one of twenty-nine other countries around the world that have officially condemned Turkey’s acts. I was jubilant to hear the news, which came suddenly, as though dropped from the sky. Yet the national trauma remains unresolved, since the Turkish government continues to deny the genocide. Turkey’s attempts at an erasure of the historical record are yet another form of violence directed against the Armenian people.

The recent eruption of conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh resulted in the ceding of the region to Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey. A part of historical Armenia since the 2nd century BC, Nagorno-Karabakh was reclaimed from Azerbaijan after the fall of the Soviet Union. Overrun by Azeri forces who were supported by mercenaries in late 2020, its mostly Armenian population suffered another tragic loss.

Born of the suffering produced by war, torture, hunger and loss, The Artist and His Mother is a work that represents the indomitable spirit of the Armenian people, but also redemption. In affirming ongoing life, it destroys death, as Christ does in his resurrection. Art can give material form to the universal pattern where everything is transformed through love: family, home, and homeland. And just as Jesus appeared before the disciples bearing signs of his crucifixion, Gorky’s painting resurrected a deeply wounded past. It’s expressive form, imbued with longing and anchored in a vision of resurrection, makes it a modern icon in the Eastern tradition of universal restoration.

Every year on April 24th, Armenians and their supporters around the world commemorate the Armenian genocide. But as we collectively mourn our family history, we must also resurrect the spirit of those lost. We do this through the actions we take today that support nationhood, in the Republic of Armenia and in all the other Armenia’s we have created. Resurrection is always and everywhere available.

In a well-known passage, the renowned Armenian-American playwright William Saroyan spoke about resurrection in the context of our people’s historical struggle:

I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.

We must also stand in solidarity with oppressed nations today to cry out against man’s inhumanity to man. Following the Armenian genocide, attempts at erasure of a people have continued in countries around the world, from the Holocaust to the Middle East and Africa. Every call for justice, including the Armenian demand for recognition and reparations from Turkey, can be modeled on Christ’s work. The Holy Spirit inspires us through our collective memory to actively engage in the co-creation of a more just world. Just as Arshile Gorky restored his mother and gave her everlasting life on canvas, so must we actively work to keep our hearts open to God’s message. In the season of Lent, the temptation of Jesus in the Judaean desert, and the death marches of Armenians in the Syrian desert are linked. In the face of great suffering, it is the mind of Christ that transforms death into life.

Arthur Aghajanian holds an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. He is a writer and educator from Los Angeles, California.

Without salt the feast is spoiled.
-Polish proverb

The salt arrives in the usual brown corrugated shipping box with the Amazon logo emblazoned on the side. The red 3-pound box of Diamond kosher salt and a smaller, somewhat mangled box of flaky Malden sea salt are wedged between, two $10 3-inch bamboo salt wells, a bulk package of cards for the nursing home residents I visit and two pairs of black “squat proof” workout capris.

Sea salt

My son wanders through the kitchen. He twists the lids on the salt wells and asks why I need salt from Amazon. We already have salt, he says (always logical, always hungry, dinner consumes the mind of my 18-year-old). My husband passes through and is halted by the collection too. He asks the same question. Salt?

I cook a lot. They can’t digest why I would have any need to order salt from Amazon.

Our pantry has iodized table salt to sprinkle on vegetables, stovetop popcorn, baked potatoes, and a dark blue box of Morton’s grainy Kosher salt that I dump into pasta water, rub into thick cuts of raw meat, and measure into hearty soups.

We live in a small town. The few times I have been to Whole Foods have been more like field trips than routine shopping. Trader Joe’s is on my bucket list. I have found a few variations of salt close to home – pink Himalayan salt, rock sea salt for a grinder.

But, the new “cookbook” I got for Christmas, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat, opens my mind to the possibilities of salt. She explains how Diamond sticks to food better than Morton’s, how the Malden adds just the right crunch and a “taste of the sea” atop salad greens. “Get used to the way the salt falls from your hands; experience the illicit thrill of using so much of something we’ve all been taught to fear,” says Nosrat. I am baffled that this information about different types of salt has been hidden from me for so long.

Two days after the salt arrives, the readings of the Catholic Mass are about salt. “You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” (Matthew 5:13 NAB translation). I hear the readings four times at three different churches where I play the organ. I go home and read the inscription on the top of one of the new salt wells, “take life with a grain of salt.” I start to say to my husband, “can you believe the readings were about…” He finishes, “salt.”
I think of the metaphors related to salt, the way it is used in the Bible to signify permanence, purification and preservation. In the Old Testament, God directs Elisha to put salt in contaminated water to purify it (II Kings 2:20-21). In the New Testament we are told “Salt is good, but if salt becomes insipid, with what will you restore its flavor? Keep salt in yourselves and you will have peace with one another” (Mark 9:50) and “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you know how you should respond to each one.” (Col. 4:6) Salt is mentioned more than 30 times in the Bible (number varies on translation)

Himalayan salt

The ionic compound made of sodium and chloride has been in use long before recorded history. The earliest known treatise on the pharmacology of salt dates to 2700 BC in China. This writing discusses 40 types of salt. The City of Rome was founded on the banks of the Tiber River, near the Via Salaria or Salt Highway. Salt from the Adriatic Sea was mined, traded and transported throughout the Empire. Roman Soldiers were even paid in “salt.” The Latin root of salt is sal from the Roman god of health, Salus, and is the basis of many words beginning with sal, including salad, salary and salvation.

Since ancient times, people have used salt to season, preserve, disinfect, clean and enhance flavor. The body uses salt to balance fluids, maintain healthy blood pressure and muscle function. Of its many uses and meanings, preservation is primary. Before refrigeration, salt kept food from spoiling. In an article in Catholic Answers, Daniel Mattson says, the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus told his disciples they were the “salt of the Earth,” took place near the city of Magdala. “The salted fish from Magdala became so famous throughout the Roman Empire that the Romans called the city Tarichea, which means place of the salted fish.”

I dip my fingers into the salt wells, enjoying the way the salt moves through my fingers. Sprinkling it onto braising meat connects me to the cooking. Pinching a few coarse flakes of sea salt onto a salad of greens, slivered red pepper, Honey Crisp apples, pickled homemade beets, pecans and goat cheese satisfies me in ways the salt shaker cannot. But none of this preserves the food, it only flavors. I consider how this mineral can make such a difference in the taste of the food and how I must come up with my own metaphor, my own way to add salt. If the point of what Jesus is telling us through the metaphor of salt is that we are to preserve the faith, then what is my role in that? I have flavored my four children’s lives with stories of the saints, daily prayer, Catholic Mass and Catholic school; but have I preserved the faith for them? Have I handed them a salt shaker when I should have gifted them a salt well, something deeper that they could dip into when doubts, suffering and disappointment make them question their faith?

Mattson argues that many interpretations of this Bible verse are inaccurate. “Our Lord’s proclamation has little to do with just being decent citizens and everything to do with spreading and preserving the faith,” he says. A quick google of “salt of the earth” brings up several common definitions. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, under the entry “salt of the earth,” states: “Basic, fundamental goodness: the phrase can be used to describe any simple, good person.” The “noblest of society,” says dictionary.com. And Merriam Webster says: “A very good and honest person or group of people,” adding the sentence “These folks are salt of the Earth.”

People are often described as, “down to Earth.” I wonder what this means. Are some people not, “down to Earth” or, “salt of the Earth”? Am I considered, “salt of the Earth”? As a believer, is this what I want, to be considered, “down to Earth,” a basically good, kind, honest person, or do I want to be the “salt of the Earth” that is used to preserve. This is a strong distinction.

smoked salt

A stoneware crock with a baggie of blessed salt sits on my antique oak dresser in my bedroom. I’ve had it for at least five years, a gift from a priest, a friend who had the gift of healing. He used it to bless our home when I was worried about the infiltration of evil. After a dinner of steak and Cabernet, and lots of laughter, he blessed us, placed the baggie of salt in my hands and told me to use it to bless my family, to have faith in its ability to be an instrument of grace that could help to preserve one from corruption and evil. When he died not long after that, from a vicious battle with cancer, I quit using the salt. It sits as a remembrance, some part of me afraid that if I use it all, I will forget everything this holy priest taught me about trust.

Since the beginning of the Catholic Church, blessed salt has been used as a sacramental. St. Augustine spoke of how salt was placed on the tongues of new catechumens. “You have put salt in our mouths that we may thirst for you,” said Augustine.

Blessed salt may be used on its own or mixed with holy water. As is the case with all sacramentals, the power of the blessed salt comes from the “power flowing from the redemptive act of Jesus, elicited by the Church’s intercession to be directed through those external signs and elements.”

How can I dig deep enough into my own faith to know that I am using the blessed salt out of a deep belief in the power of Jesus to heal? Maybe that is the real reason the blessed salt sits on the dresser, unused – doubt. Do I have enough trust, faith, belief that healing will take place and faith will be preserved? “I believe in One Holy God, the Father almighty….” slips easily off of my tongue during Mass, but, when suffering seeps through the cracks of my faith, I go through the motions – blessing myself with holy water, crossing myself, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I cling to the notion of miracles but I’m old enough to know that redemption often comes through suffering and sorrow, not perfect endings.

I sift this white gold, sprinkle the blessed salt on my carpets and kosher salt on my food, and I consider my role in the preservation of the faith. I hang onto a line from Catholic Daily Reflections posted online on Feb. 9, 2020, the week the salt wells appeared on the kitchen counter and the readings focused on Mathew 5:13: “When our presence in the lives of others has little or no effect upon them for the good, then our actions are like tasteless salt that is only good to be thrown away and trampled underfoot.”

I pray that I am helping to preserve the faith through my work as an organist, a writer, a volunteer to the elderly and the poor, but, mostly I think about my kids and my granddaughter, and whether they will one day say, “she was the salt of the Earth.”

Beth Casteel is a mom, grandmother, community volunteer and Catholic Church organist who writes from rural southwestern Pennsylvania.

Dappled Things honors the three best essays published in the journal in a year through the Jacques Maritain Prize for Nonfiction. Maritain was an influential 20th century Thomist philosopher and Catholic convert whose work covered a wide range of topics, including metaphysics and epistemology, ethics and politics, and—significantly for us—literature and art. His book Art and Scholasticism has been a major influence on Dappled Things’ own approach to aesthetics.

As publisher, I am delighted to share with you the editors’ selections from among the nonfiction pieces we published in 2020. The winners are:

1st Place
$500 prize

“’A Fast That Is Pleasing to the Eyes:’ In Search of the End of Art, Part II” by Brian Prugh

2nd Place
$300 prize

“Burning My Education: Rediscovering the Basics of Story” by Andrew Graff

3rd Place
$200 prize

“The Lyrical Liturgy: How Romanticism Recovered the Christian Aesthetic” by Michael De Sapio [essay available only in print or ebook format]

Last year’s crop of nonfiction was particularly strong and it was very hard settle on a final three, so while our congratulations go especially to the winners, our deepest thanks go to all writers whose essays we had the honor of publishing. This is a truly exciting time for Catholic literature and art, and critical work of the kind undertaken by this year’s awardees plays a crucial role in nurturing, refining, explicating, and drawing attention to this budding movement. It was particularly delightful that this year’s winner, A Fast That Is Pleasing to the Eyes, not only engages directly with our prize’s namesake and attempts to further his insights, but takes as its starting point a life-changing aesthetic experience that all the prize judges immediately recognized, and which the essay fruitfully contemplates.

Whether you had a chance to read these pieces when they were originally published or not, I invite you to spend some time with them and let expand your vision, whet your appetite for beauty, and perhaps even inspire you to send us some of your own work this year.

Hello friends!

We have arrived yet again at precipice of a new year – assuming you didn’t already turn the page when Advent started – and once again the editors at Dappled Things are sharing the highlights from this past year’s reading. Some of these are newish works, some are quite old, some are not yet even published. We love it all.

Here’s to another year of full of the delight of living our best lives and the delight of reading the best books.

Bernardo Aparicio – Founder and Publisher

Earth and Water (tentative title), the forthcoming debut novel by Dappled Things editor-in-chief Katy Carl, was by far the best book I read this year. I’m sorry to say you won’t be able to purchase a copy from Wiseblood Books for a few months yet, but you can start counting the days (as you should). It’s not just that, as a writer, I found her prose good to the point of being almost intimidating. Or that she achieves a depth of understanding of her characters that’s rarely seen. Or that through the story of two artists and lovers she takes us on an exhilarating, heart-wrenching emotional tour through the longings of the human heart. No, it’s more than that. It’s that by the end of the book, I was convinced I had just read not only a masterfully executed novel, but actually one of the best novels I have ever read. Katy’s a good friend and I’m worried I’m going to make her uncomfortable with this kind of praise, or worry her that I’m hyping up the book too much. I worry also that readers might figure I’m being biased in my assessment, since I can’t be exactly a disinterested party when it comes to a book by a close friend and collaborator. Fair enough. All I can say is this: I have long known Katy was an excellent writer through our more than a decade of working together and was more than prepared to like the book when I got my advanced copy, but I wasn’t prepared for what it actually was. My wife can attest that when I started reading it, I kept interrupting her with expressions of disbelief at how good it was. After a while, I began to worry that she couldn’t possibly sustain such a level, that like many other books, it would set off some neat fireworks at the beginning that would eventually peter out. There was no way she could pull it off. Well, she did. If, like me, you’ve been rooting for a Catholic literary renaissance, get yourself a copy of Earth and Water the day it comes out, because however far this renaissance goes, it’s not going to get much better than this.

Katy Carl – Editor in Chief

This year much of my reading has revolved around preparing to participate in the pilot year of the Wiseblood Books writer-in-residence program: studying classic novels like Henry James’ Roderick Hudson, Balzac’s Lost Illusions, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, among others. We also covered the new edition of James Wood’s How Fiction Works, Caroline Gordon’s How To Read A Novel, Douglas Bauer’s The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft, and several titles from Greywolf Press’s “The Art Of” series. In new books this year I especially appreciated Christopher Beha’s novel The Index of Self-Destructive Acts and Nick Ripatrazone’s study of Catholic influence in contemporary fiction, Longing for an Absent God. And since I’ve been invited to write an Advent-themed devotional for 2021, my spiritual reading recently has tended in that direction, including Caryll Houselander’s The Reed of God, Oliver Treanor’s Seven Bells to Bethlehem, and poet Jacob Riyeff’s fascinating team translation, with co-author and spouse Mamie Riyeff, of Middle English meditations on the O Antiphons. The book, called O Shining Light, includes illustration work by liturgical artist (and friend of Dappled Things!) Daniel Mitsui–definitely seek out a copy of this beautiful Gracewing Press edition, if you can. Also under the heading of liturgical living, I highly recommend Jay W. Richards’ Eat, Fast, Feast: A Christian Guide to Fasting, which has helped me–as someone decidedly not naturally good at self-denial–to frame and understand this traditional practice in a way that has placed it more within reach for the ordinary person.

Natalie Morrill – Fiction Editor

The best book I read this year (so far) was a re-read: Middlemarch by George Eliot. It’s books like this that make you recognize the difference between “having something to read” & “having your days & mindset shaped by the marvelous thing you’re reading (& which you can’t wait to get back to).” What is there to say about Middlemarch that hasn’t already been said? Perhaps one thing I realized any time I had this in my hands was that I had trouble answering friends when they asked, “What is it about?” My attempts to sum up the subject matter always fell flat or sounded hopelessly vague: a town; bad marriages; good and bad people. The hospital comes into it. Various people need money or have too much of it. Maybe a snappier answer would have been, “It’s a big novel about a small town and the incredible weight of human souls,” though heaven knows I’m not one for snappy answers. Eliot stands alongside Austen & Dostoyevsky in my mind as being among the most psychologically astute novelists in the business. If nothing else, read this for the most accurate (& frustrating) portrayal of a narcissistic personality disorder in literature. Or join me in being an unapologetic fangirl of Caleb Garth & Mr. Farebrother (whose story I still need to know the end of!). But you’d do much better to read it because you love beautiful things & desire happiness. Read or re-read it in 2021 to make your year (& days, & hours) better.

Also worth mentioning: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (as wonderful & magical as everyone says it is) & Josef Pieper’s Guide to Thomas Aquinas (like a friend introducing a friend).

Barbara Gonzalez – Associate Editor

I will start off by saying that I watched the 1994 BBC adaptation of Middlemarch this summer and if you liked the book, I think you will enjoy looking up the series. It stars a young Rufus Sewell and was available on Amazon Prime earlier this year – maybe it still is.

My book of 2020 would be Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. It had been on my list for a while. Pope Francis said a few years ago that he thought all engaged couples should read it together. I found out there was a plague in it, so that pushed it to the top of my list. It was comforting to spend some time with this book and realize that maybe this year was not quite as “unprecedented” as the pundits said. It not only features a pandemic but also the separation and isolation of two lovers, meditations on the meaning of marriage and Providence, even some reflections on crime, corruption and justice, especially justice for the poor.

Rhonda Ortiz – Webmaster

Mere weeks before the death of George Floyd, I happened to read Melba Pattillo Beals’ memoir, Warriors Don’t Cry, about the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Talk about providential.

I’m not sure if I want to say more than that. 🙂

Terence Sweeney – Associate Editor

If there is a canon of Catholic literature, this year taught me that Claude McKay should be added to it. The Jamaicain-born Harlem Renaissance writer wrote searing poems and novels from the experience of oppression. Each depicts a lived solidarity of social outcasts and yearning for a deeper justice. This year I read one of his later novels, Romance in Marseille. The novel, written before McKay’s conversion to Catholicism, depicts Lafala a crippled African trapped between American, France, and Africa. Suddenly wealthy, he seeks love in Marseille and instead finds a deeper homesickness. I recommend reading it alongside his Complete Poems which depict his poetic seeking and eventual finding of a home in the Catholic Church.

Patrick Callahan – Book Review Editor

Sing-Song, A Nursery Rhyme Book with poems by Christina Rossetti and illustrations by Arthur Hughes capped off a great reading year for myself. It can be found rather cheap, but must be found with Hughes’ companion illustrations. It can be read in a single sitting, preferably aloud as the children play in the yard. Rossetti thrives in the humble materials and plans particular to the genre with subtle craftsmanship that reminds me of the deceptive simplicity of A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. It is the first work I have read that plumbs the paradox of the parent who both desires to see a colicky child sleep through the night and fears this very thing because some infants sleep never to wake again to this life. And it is a nursery rhyme book before the early 20th century invention of hermetically sealed and manufactured childhood. Some of the Victorian sweetness has been retained in modern imagery-angels and puppies; none of the Victorian gothic–fairy rings and death. All at risk of taking their adult selves too seriously and children who demand adults recognize they play for mortal stakes will profit from this slender volume.

Rosemary Callenberg – Associate Editor

My favorite work of fiction this year was Charis in the World of Wonders, by Marly Youmans. This novel was beautiful. The language was rich and poetic without ever crossing the line into “too much,” and I felt a great sense of intimacy with the main character in both her struggles and joys.

Another favorite read, this one nonfiction, was Evening in the Palace of Reason, by James R. Gaines. I read this partly because of the title, which caught my eye; partly because it’s about Bach meeting Frederick the Great, and we were studying Bach in our homeschool. It’s a weakness of mine that I often find it hard to focus on nonfiction, but this book was enjoyable and compelling enough that I read it from beginning to end without a “fiction break.” The author brought his figures to life vividly–both as individual persons and as representations of conflicting values at the beginning of the Enlightenment. And I learned a lot about Bach’s music, too–which the book often encourages the reader to pause and savor.

Ann Thomas – Managing Editor

This year I made a priority of becoming acquainted with Cluny Media’s catalogue. They publish so many magnificent titles I hardly knew where to start, but chose to begin with Paul Claudel’s Poetic Art. True to Cluny Media‘s philosophy that, “A book, from cover to cover, should be an artifact, a work of art,” this slim volume is. In it, Claudel is not exploring prosody, or the creation of poetry, but rather the poetry of creation through our experience of language. “But, whereas, our existence down here is like a barbaric and broken language, our life in God shall be like exquisitely perfect verse.” Thanks to Cluny Media’s attention to craftsmanship, this is a book that will withstand the physical demands of being my constant companion for years. While I can say I’ve read it through to the end, it’s more truthful to say I’ve begun my journey with Poetic Art than “I finished it.”

Classes, a cosmology, the O antiphons in O Come O Come Emmanuel, and a love poem to Our Lady of O.

A Celebration of Angels & Saints by Eliot Weinberger

Katy Carl, DT Editor in Chief wrote, “Whoa, this looks amazing.” Point Reyes Books will offer this online conversation on December 14 at 7:00 PM PST:

Eliot Weinberger, called ‘one of the world’s greatest essayists’ by the New York Times, is joined in conversation by Pulitzer Prize winner Forrest Gander to celebrate the publication of Angels and Saints (New Directions and Christine Burgin). . . .

“The celebrated essayist Eliot Weinberger has mined and deconstructed, resurrected and distilled centuries of theology into an awe-inspiring exploration of the heavenly host.”

Doorways to the Sacred Virtual Series

More online classes of interest are coming up this week at Catholic Literary Arts, continuing their “Doorways to the Sacred” series.

• Tuesday, Dec 15, 7:00 PM CST “Birthing the Holy: Writing Advent and Christmas” $30
• Taught by Judith Sornberger
• Register here.

• Thursday, Dec 17, 7:00 PM CST Class Three: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Matryona’s Home” in “The Christ-Centered Short Story” Series
• Taught by Joshua Hren $35
• Register here

Lovely—and extraordinarily rare—late-Renaissance cosmography by Van Aelst

Boston Rare Maps announces the availability of an extremely rare late Renaissance cosmography from 1593 that includes the Apocalyptic visions of St. John the Evangelist on Patmos. At the sale page, you can click on the images and zoom into close-ups of the fascinating details.

Van Aelst’s treatment of the subject is distinctive in format, complexity and content. . . . Surrounding the whole is the coelum empyreum, populated by an array of angels and saints presided over by the Trinity and the Virgin Mary.

“At lower right an inset depicts St. John the Evangelist on the island of Patmos, where he received a divine vision, which an angel instructed him to write down (The vision is depicted as a wedge bearing 26 tiny pictorial panels, emanating from the Trinity and terminating above John.) This text forms the basis for the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation or Apocalypse of John (from the original Greek meaning of apocalypse as an unveiling or revelation). This included prophetic predictions describing the final battle between God and Satan, with Jesus’s second coming leading to the final victory over evil and a new world for true believers.”

History and Mystery: The O Antiphons in a Favorite Hymn

Before next week’s Friday links on December 18, the Church will begin singing the O antiphons.This article from a past Advent is about the O antiphons and how they are used in a favorite Advent hymn, Veni, Veni, Emmanuel, O Come, O Come Emmanuel.

“Each night between Dec. 17 and 23, wherever Latin Vespers or the vernacular Evening Prayer are prayed, an O antiphon is sung or recited before and after the Magnificat.” Each antiphon begins with an O followed by one of the scriptural titles of the Messiah, such as O Sapientia, Oh Wisdom and O Emmanuel, Oh God with Us. “The O antiphons powerfully express the Church’s longing and awe at this time of heightened anticipation, while Advent is coming to a close, and the feast of Christmas approaches.”

From the archives: O Come, Emmanuel, 8.75 x 10 inches. Gold leaf and soft distemper on paper. October 2019. Clare Bartel

The Love Song of Our Lady of O

My poem “The Love Song of Our Lady of O” was posted this week at the Catholic Arts Today page on the Benedict VI Institute website, with the photo of a statue I found and love of Our Lady glowingly expectant during the last week before the birth of Our Lord. The poem was one of the top five winners of the “Waiting with the Mother of God during Advent” themed contest sponsored by Catholic Literary Arts. Winners read their poems on December 9 at a virtual gala, and all the poems will soon be published at CatholicLiteraryArts.Org.

On December 18, in the waning days of Advent, a feast was dedicated to Our Lady’s expectation of her son’s birth. Because an ancient law of the Church prohibited the celebration of feasts during Lent, the Tenth Council of Toledo in 656 A.D. transferred the feast of the Annunciation from March 23 to December 18. Eventually, the feast of the Annunciation regained its former date. December 18 later came to be known as the Feast of the Expectation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, commonly called Santa Maria de la O, even in the liturgical books. Though seemingly related to the O Antiphons, the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia states that name “Our Lady of O” stems from the custom of the clerics in the choir after Vespers on that day to utter a loud and protracted “O,” expressing the longing of the universe for the coming of the Redeemer.”

To enjoy bourbon, you have to roll it around your mouth for thirty seconds and let it burn. When your tongue is a little numb, you can swallow the bourbon and take another sip. This time, instead of just feeling the alcohol, you’ll taste the complexities of the bourbon. You’ll find the notes of vanilla and the oakiness that were masked by the burn of the alcohol before. You have to sit with it a minute before you can enjoy it.

Now, sit with this sentence from The Great Gatsby for a second: “For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.” Roll that around. Take another sip. “So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.” Mmmm. Take one more sip. “But [my lips] made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.” Pick up on that saltiness, that bittersweet flavor and savor it. Gatsby is the book that taught me to relish language many years ago; it was the first time I treated a literary work like a fine dinner or good bottle of bourbon. It must be savored.

If I’m going to be honest, I am often guilty of reading through a work quickly in a feverish rush to get to the end. I want to get not just to the climax but also the resolution – I want it tied in a neat literary bow. When I read Jane Eyre for the first time, I was pulled into the story line so much that in my anxiety for Jane I read the entire book in three or four days. I’d love to say that I’ve gotten better about this as I’ve grown older, but just a couple of months ago I did the same thing. I started reading The Bronze Bow to prepare for a literature class I teach and although I read carefully initially, making notes and jotting down discussion ideas and questions, as I grew more interested in the characters and plot, I stopped writing down thoughts or even underlining anything. The race to finish the book was on, and I was determined to sprint my way to the end. When I finally finished the last page, it was 3 a.m. and although I definitely had a Wow, what a book! moment, it wasn’t completely satisfying. Looking back at that first reading of Jane Eyre, I doubt it was satisfying either, beyond the simple satisfaction of my curiosity. It was about as satisfying eating fast food in the car while rushing to an activity rather than sitting down to a meal with my family or friends.

More than ten years ago, I read a few short stories by Flannery O’Connor for a book club and I absolutely hated them. They were violent, grotesque, and difficult. It was like driving past a train wreck and not being able to look away. I had a particularly difficult time reading, “The River.” It’s about a young boy who is baptized in a river by a preacher who tells him, “If I Baptize you. . .you’ll be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ. You’ll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you’ll go by the deep river of life.” In his childhood innocence, the boy thinks, “I won’t go back to the apartment then, I’ll go under the river.” Eager to escape the neglect of his parents, he sees baptism as a literal gate through which he will be able to enter the physical Kingdom of Christ, having no real understanding of the sacrament. When he returns home, his selfish, self-absorbed mother cares nothing about him or his baptism and puts him to bed without even taking his shoes off. When he wakes up the next morning, he is on his own to rummage for food while his parents sleep off their drunkenness, and when he remembers the river, he decides to go find the Kingdom of Christ. He submerges himself in the river over and over again until finally the current catches him and pulls him, “swiftly forward and down.” That’s it?! I thought. The poor neglected boy drowns himself looking for the Kingdom of God? I hated it. What a train wreck. I spent the next decade hating O’Connor’s work, at least in theory. I refused to read it.

Then one Sunday my priest talked about Flannery O’Connor in his sermon. I was not entirely surprised because over the course of the last decade I found one person after another who loved Flannery. When Monsignor, who is also my friend, spoke lovingly of O’Connor and her work, somehow it was different. I decided I must be missing something. I asked another friend, Elizabeth, what she thought about O’Connor. I anticipated that she would also be a fan but was still surprised by her enthusiasm. By this time I was not only curious but also determined to give O’Connor’s work another chance.

I began the first story of The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor with some trepidation but was pleased to find that I was actually enjoying it. “The Geranium,” was not the train wreck I remembered of her stories. However, when it abruptly ended with the main character staring out the window and down into the alley where a geranium plant lay on the ground, its pot smashed and its roots sticking up in the air, while the man in the building next door says, “I don’t like people looking at what I do. . .I only tell people once.” I kind of threw my hands up. WHAT?! I shouted inwardly. Fortunately, I saw Monsignor that day. When I asked about these ending lines, he opened the book, read it aloud, and said, “Mmmm. That’s good.”

There was no explanation offered aside from his apparent satisfaction, but this alone changed my view completely. As I continued reading, I grew comfortable with the fact that I didn’t understand everything perfectly. I learned to appreciate the abrupt, untidy endings and to expect catastrophes, which I learned were opportunities for the characters to accept or deny the grace of God. “If you read from a naturalistic perspective,” Monsignor had said, “it’s going to appear grotesque. But if you read it from a supernatural perspective, you’ll see more.” Not only have I gotten better at seeing more than the train wrecks the characters are and the wrecks they make, I’ve grown to enjoy the language and to savor the work, taking nutrition as well as enjoyment. I’ve even learned to appreciate imperfect endings, which is good because life rarely presents us with perfect endings wrapped up in a neat little bow.

When I first read, “The River,” I rushed through it, mouth agape and eyes wide, horrified. In my rush to get to the end, I missed any beauty along the way. When I read through it this time, I noticed sentences like, “The sky was a clear pale blue, all in one piece—except for the hole the sun made—and fringed around the bottom with treetops.” Even though this sentence was leading up to the boy’s death and I had the anxiety of anticipation, I could appreciate its loveliness. I’m learning to find beauty where it exists, despite stress, anxiety, and tragedy.

This past year, I was incredibly grateful for a particularly gorgeous Spring. I remember clearly one particularly beautiful sunset that cast a pink glow over everything, making the pink buds on our trees even lovelier. Actually, I remember that one evening far more clearly than any other in that six weeks.

This time, when I read, “The River,” I savored it. I appreciated the sentences, images, symbols, and ideas rather than rushing to the inevitable outcome. Rather than just hating that the poor boy drowned, I thought about the tragedy of his lack of formation, how horribly the adults around him either neglected or used him for their own purposes and how on one side, people ridiculed religion while on the others sought to convert him more in conquest than in love. No one took the time or spent the energy to show him the love of God. I considered the characters and their faith or lack thereof for the first time. Although the boy was so grievously misunderstanding what the Kingdom of God was and how to get there, I have to appreciate at least a little the zeal with which he sought to find it, misguided though he was.

“The River,” actually reminds me of some happy moments at Mass. Our priest uses a fair amount of incense, which is heavenly, and every week it’s a particular joy to see the clouds of incense rise toward Heaven, escorting our prayers to God. Once in a while, though, the incense rises from the swinging thurible, floats around the Sanctuary, then floats out toward the pews where it hovers over our heads, playing with the light streaming in from the windows above us. The first time I noticed this, it was like being underwater and looking up to see the surface of the water flowing and rippling over me, and it was mesmerizing. When this incense stream happened again, I couldn’t help but think of, “The River.” Perhaps I have not literally dived into a river to find the Kingdom of God, but I have been immersed in the river of His grace and mercy.

It could be argued that I was distracted by the incense, but I would say that those moments of visualizing God’s grace swirling around us were not unwelcome distractions. It could even be an aid in appreciating and praying the Mass. Sometimes allowing yourself to notice details, giving all your senses the opportunity to soak up what you’re experiencing, can bring you more deeply into an experience. When you go to a nice restaurant, you don’t just stuff your face, pay your bill, and leave. You enjoy the ambience, the music, the candlelight, the smells and textures and tastes. You linger over the menu and the conversation, maybe even trading samples of your dinner or drink with your friends, and you allow yourself – all of you, your senses, your mind, your focus – to be in the moment and this, not the food alone, is what makes the meal satisfying.

This world is crazy, and most of that craziness is beyond our control. It’s so very tempting to worry about it all, which really only serves to rob us of our peace and the opportunity to be fully present to the people around us or even to our own thoughts. It’s difficult to really enjoy a book that you’re devouring as though you’re stuffing your face rather than enjoying a good meal, but there is so much reward in taking the time to enjoy those beautiful sentences and to enter into the depth of the ideas. Things won’t always have a nice, neat ending and there will be things I can’t completely understand, but if I accept these things and focus instead on the beauty along the way, I can make the most of the stories unfolding before me.

Looking back at those sentences from Gatsby that I loved so well, I am a little surprised to find that they fit this theme as well as they do. “For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.” The control we imagine ourselves to have is unreality, a dream, “founded securely on a fairy’s wind.” To quote Monsignor, mmmm. That’s good.

“So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.” In the moment before Gatsby kisses Daisy for the first time, he realizes that doing so will transform her from the dreamlike figure of his imagination to a woman of flesh and blood and that the moment will be fleeting, so he pauses, soaking up every ounce of the moment that he can. Time passes. Everything changes. We have the present for a moment before it becomes the past. Though this is sometimes a good thing, some moments must be savored in their entirety, using all your senses. See the stars, the sky, the look of a loved one’s eyes; hear the music of the breeze, birds, orchestra, or children around you; feel the softness of your child’s hand, the sand beneath your feet, the breeze in your hair; smell the saltiness of the ocean, the scent of your child’s head, the earth, the rain; taste the saltiness of tears and the complexity of your coffee. Soak it all up because in the next moment it could all be gone.

“But [my lips] made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.” Time passes and once a moment is gone, it is gone forever. I don’t know how many moments I wish I could relive. I would love to hold my babies to hold my husband’s hand for the first time again, but those are all firmly in the past and, all too often, what they meant to me then as well as what they mean now are uncommunicable. These are things that must remain forevermore in my heart because they will never mean to another what they do to me, which makes it all the more important to really savor these moments as they happen.

Dinner is not just about filling your belly, it’s an opportunity to connect with family and friends and to feed your heart and soul as much as your stomach. Reading is not about finding out how the story ends, it’s about learning from other people’s experiences, savoring creativity, and digesting ideas. It’s about broadening your vision, experiencing something new, and finding greater depth. It also feeds the heart and soul, which is why a good book can feel like an old friend. More than that, literature can connect us to people, places, and times, helping us to experience life more profoundly, but in order to do so, you have to dive in, involve yourself, and savor it. Move it around your mind and find those tasty morsels, delicious sentences, and meaty ideas. You can’t really appreciate bourbon if you don’t take the time to roll it around your mouth looking for those hints of flavor, you can’t get the most out of a moment or meal without involving the senses, and you can’t be truly satisfied in a book or experience without investing yourself in it. Listen, just for a moment, for the tuning fork struck upon the stars.

Kiera Petrick is a Catholic homeschooling mother, teacher, photographer, writer, and is great at making cakes, at least according to her daughter. Her blog, Talking in the Shower, contains a variety of her writing.

“I am a poet in a Family of Prose.” This pithy little sentence tucked away in one of her letters to a friend was the beginning of my fascination and friendship with Emily Dickinson. It was a moment when I sighed aloud to my book, but really to her, “You too?” For, my family of eight brothers and sisters was very much a prose family. This does not mean they were not fascinating in their own right. I have an aeronautical engineering brother and a sister I would not hesitate to own as math geniuses. They have been known to sit at our kitchen table at long ago family get-togethers and work out some complicated math equation over beers together with a look of absolute, dare I say it, glee. I was continually flummoxed by them while looking over the top of my Wordsworth with the complete disdain of my young romantic soul. There was simply no poetry in mathematics – I would declare to myself – no imagery, no metaphor, no trippingly lovely cadences. No one could possibly rhapsodize over math, and life was not worth the living if we could not rhapsodize! I impulsively trampled math underfoot as a thing of naught and washed my hands of it, and I remained the sole poet in a family of prose for a long and lonely time. I was very much loved by my family, but not ever fully understood by them. I could not even understand myself! Understanding was to come later and in quite a delightful way.

I remember the day I met Dr. Richard Ferrier. He was to be my Junior year mathematics teacher in college – for Descartes, no less. He was standing with a small knot of students who were exuberantly singing the haunting English Madrigal “The Silver Swan.” He joined in quite impromptu with a look of…rapture. How could this possibly be? A mathematics teacher singing with a pathos that would rival Keats? I was cautiously optimistic. Who was this man? He had the look of a poet, with a delightful shock of curly hair that was always mussed up by his ever restless hands. He smoked a pipe and wore a tweed coat which was rather on the smaller side. His face was always moving with a myriad of expressions. He arrived as a centaur to the college Halloween party to everyone’s delight. He quoted parts of Dante by heart with tears in his eyes. When someone finished a Cartesian prop on the blackboard in class, he would cry out in sudden delight: “Beatrice!” This man spoke my language. He was a poet and a mathematician and gloried in both; he showed me how to glory, too. He was all wonder at the Universe. I had never met anyone like him before. And it is no slight to my own father whom I love dearly, when I say that I had found a spiritual father in Richard Ferrier that year. This was a person of whom St. Ireneus was to cry, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” He was to teach me who I was. He was to explain myself to me in a way that my biological family was just not able to do, and he was to show me that I was not an anomaly after all. They are so important, these spiritual fathers we encounter during our lifetimes. They enrich our lives by helping us grow into the adults we are to become. We owe much to our biological fathers – absolutely – but we also owe a debt of deepest gratitude to the teachers who father-forth the best in us through an understanding of our deeper selves.

Edward Hitchcock

Emily would have understood my gratitude at finding Richard Ferrier. She, too, found a spiritual father who was to make all the difference to her inner life. His name was Edward Hitchcock. Professor Hitchcock is the reason Emily Dickinson’s poetry is filled with accurate observations of volcanoes, chemical processes, an intimate knowledge of flowers, earthquakes, gems, alloys. There is more mention of these things in her poetry than, “in the poetry of Keats, Emerson, Browning, and Shelley combined!” He was her Natural Science teacher at a little jewel of a school called Amherst Academy. This was a high school of sorts that would be the feeder school for Amherst College. Here, in this small place, were collected many young and wonderful teachers. Both men and women were equally and thoroughly educated in all subjects (hurrah!). The teachers and prefects were encouraged to eat with and discuss with the students after class.

Edward Hitchcock was a star graduate in Natural Science at Yale when he moved over to head that department at Amherst College. The younger students at Amherst Academy were encouraged and allowed to attend classes at the college. That is when Emily met Edward Hitchcock.

He is aptly described in her delightful way as passing on, “the ‘phosphorescence’ of his knowledge to his students and to glorify God by opening their eyes to the wonders of the created Universe.” He was on fire with enthusiasm for the Natural World. He was an accurate scientist AND poet. We read from one of his former students that, “his voluminous scientific writing is for the most part strictly disciplined and factual,” but, “in his prefaces and introductions and wherever the text gives him the slightest opportunity, his style becomes rhapsodic.” Emily read all these texts. She became completely enamored of nature because of him. She had an herbarium complete with, “carefully printed Latin names for each item,” and was known among her friends for having a detailed knowledge of the flora and fauna in and around Amherst. He took them on field trips and they handled rocks, gems, stones. He wrote a very lovely treatise on the seasons and there combined scientific rigor and poetry. Later in life she would say,

When Flowers annually died and I was a child, I used to read Dr. Hitchcock’s Book on the Flowers of North America. This comforted their absence – assuring me they lived.

These are the tender words of a daughter for a beloved father. A man who fathered-forth and unlocked the beauty waiting for him in her mind. He was to show Emily to herself in a way she had not known before. Emily Dickinson’s younger self gathered all this knowledge and love of learning from him. And it overflowed in her poetry effortlessly as part of her mind’s store of treasures. It is a beautiful thing to think about – the debt we owe to Edward Hitchcock, a Natural Science teacher – for the genius that is Emily’s poetry.

Another student put him best when he said,

One of his greatest qualities was the spirit of love, amounting at times to rapture, which animated his studies. ‘No language can express what he enjoyed, when body, soul, and sprit were all in harmony, and all seemingly filled with the charms of nature, the delights of science, or the love of God.

I knew the joy of these words in my own life. I had my own Edward Hitchcock. I was able to meet Dr. Ferrier once again, not too long ago. I wondered if he had changed and what my middle-aged self would think. Was I just remembering him with rose colored glasses? No, as it delightfully turns out. He was the same. He hugged me like a jolly Santa Claus and took my husband and I on a tour of his wonderful, quirky, beautiful garden. We sat down to beers with him and his equally delightful wife Kathy and we talked and rhapsodized about everything under the sun. My memories had not deceived me. He was still my spiritual father and even now, after all these years, he was able to stir up my mind and heart renewed love for the beautiful, the good, and the true…. even….to my complete surprise…mathematics.

Let us give deep thanks for our families who raised us. But let us give equal thanks for the spiritual fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters who have entered our lives and who have introduced us to the beauty of our better selves. It is God the Father from whom they get their name, and whose gift they are to us. Praise Him!

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.