DappledThings.org

A quarterly journal of ideas, art, and faith

Announcing the Bakhita Prize for the Visual Arts

As a Catholic arts magazine, we find ourselves wondering what we can bring to the table during our country’s current crisis. The shocking death of George Floyd has shaken not just the United States but the whole world, reminding us starkly of how far we still are from seeing each other’s infinite dignity as children of God.

Most tragic of all is realizing that, if Floyd’s death has led to a great societal outcry, it is because he is only one among so many who have lost their lives in similar circumstances. Like many others, we are asking ourselves questions of how to respond to violence and the violation of human dignity, including persistent racial violence that has been directed especially against the black community.

Dappled Things is calling on visual artists to help us see more clearly: to help us honor and highlight the infinite worth inherent within each victim of racial violence. To do so, we are establishing the Bakhita Prize for the Visual Arts, which will be awarded for a photograph, painting, illustration, or sculpture that helps us better see the humanity and God-given worth of victims of racial violence. Saint Josephine Bakhita, after whom the prize is named, was a Sudanese slave brutalized by her captors, who later became a religious sister renowned for her joyfulness, gentleness, and charity. Today she is the patroness of Sudan and survivors of human trafficking. The Bakhita Prize will pay $1000 to the winner and $250 to the runner-up. The two winning pieces, plus up to eight honorable mentions, will be published in Dappled Things, and the artists of all published pieces will also receive a year’s subscription to the journal and the opportunity to participate in potential exhibitions that may be organized once social-distancing restrictions no longer apply.

Deadline for submission: August 31, 2020

Winners announced: September 30, 2020

Click here to submit your work.

FAQ

Q: Must the art depict racial violence, or identifiable historical victims of it?

A: No, the fundamental thematic element is that the work should “honor and highlight the infinite worth” inherent within victims of such violence. It is up to the artist to decide how to communicate that idea.

 

Q: Must the work be explicitly religious?

A: No, though certainly there are many opportunities within the theme to use the artistic and theological resources within the Christian treasury to great effect.

 

Q: Is any particular style or approach to art required?

A: No, though the judges will be looking not only for thematic fit but excellence in execution in the winning pieces. Familiarity with artwork previously featured in the journal would likely be helpful to those submitting their work.

 

Q: Who is eligible to submit their work?

A: Anyone who is not a staff member of Dappled Things or the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture, or a direct family member of them, is eligible to submit. Artists from all over the world, of any nationality, ethnicity, or race, can submit their own original work. Submissions will be judged on a blind basis.

 

Q: Should I include an artist’s statement?

A: No, we are looking for pieces that speak for themselves as visual art, without need of extrinsic explanations.

Flannery O’Connor: Imagination, Solitude, and the Oddities of Life

On June 3rd, Dappled Things had the pleasure of co-sponsoring a webinar hosted by the Ars Vivendi program of the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture, of which we are now a part. The event was a huge success, drawing close to one thousand attendees. For all those who wish they could have attended but missed it, you can find the whole video below. As an extra bonus for those who watch, the Collegium Institute will cover 25% of a Dappled Things subscription for any who use the coupon code mentioned my our Editor-in-Chief. Enjoy!

Dispatches from the Catholic Imagination Conference (1)

Good news, Dappled Things readers!

If you wanted to make it to the Catholic Imagination Conference (CIC) at Loyola University Chicago this fall–or if you were there but, like most of us, haven’t yet mastered bilocation and so missed talks you wanted to hear–the good people at Loyola have put together this resource:

https://www.luc.edu/ccih/2019catholicimaginationconference/conferencearchiveandmedia/

Inside you’ll find recordings of the plenary sessions and links to articles that describe and detail context and topics of interest for CIC attendees and fans. Check back, because they will be posting concurrent sessions next (including the panel with discussion of the contemporary literary landscape for Catholics, in which I had the honor of participating!).

I have many more thoughts to unpack from the conference, even many weeks later. For now, there is plenty to process in this first round of postings alone.

If you’re reading this in the United States, we hope you’ll have a peaceful Thanksgiving weekend. Wherever you are, we wish you a blessed Advent season. Slow down, pray much, make art, and be well.

(Image credit: “Nothing Beats a Fountain Pen” by kartikay.sahay via Creative Commons)

Announcing the 2019 J.F. Powers Contest Winners!

The Dappled Things editorial board is delighted to announce the following winners of the 2019 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction, honoring short stories that explore the lives of characters with “one foot in this world and one in the next”:

First Place: “Waiting for Camacho” by Angela Lorang. The immediacy of the narration, the believability of Camacho’s voice, and the elevated stakes of the action all contribute to make this piece outstanding. It is an unexpected conversion story: Camacho has seen and done terrible things and yet wants to make a radical change to the good. Due to Lorang’s deft handling of the prose’s revelations as well as of revealed truth, the story isn’t weighted down by its grave themes but instead achieves a remarkable range of effects: compassion, humor, grief over sin and pain, and authentic hope for redemption.

Second Place: “El Niño” by Angelica Esquivel. In exploring folk belief tangential to Catholicism and the ways in which it can weave in and out of and overlap with lived faith, the patiently crafted lines of this evocative and marvelously strange story build up to an unexpected shift in tone and a richly earned epiphany.

Honorable Mention: “Devotions” by Elaine Kehoe. The prose framing this window into the lives of a Jewish wife and Catholic husband, who grapple together with his changing sense of what his faith demands and what it might mean to be called by God, delivers its emotional effect through a blending of exquisite detail and straightforward reportage.

It Was the Last Time It Snowed

Bridget Muller

I. A Pelican of the Wilderness

At the trial for Kate’s murder, when Lou Steven Endicott takes the stand, he addresses his lawyer as:“My daughter.” He greets the seventy-year-old judge as: “My child.”

He calls the jury, who are a group of grey-hairs, many of them retired government workers: “My children.”

Over and over, those words, perverted by him. My daughter. My child. My children.

Bernadette’s mother, Mary Ellen—Kate’s sister—says she wants to smack him across his smart-alecky face for his sarcastic respect. The whole family, receptacles, line up on a bench, like they are in a pew at mass. The Lord is with thee.

II. When the people are gathered together

On the year anniversary of Kate’s death, Bernadette’s distraught mother, Mary Ellen—who teaches P.E. at Saint Phil’s and often breaks down crying in the middle of dodgeball games between elementary school students—hands Bernadette a fifty. “Treat the girls,” she says, then heads off to Saint Phil’s for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament because, Mary Ellen tells Bernadette, she simply doesn’t know what else to do. A hidden part of Bernadette (that she shares with no one) wishes she could accompany her mother to pray. Before Bernadette’s father walks out the door behind Mary Ellen, he looks at Bernadette, throws his hands in the air.

For no reason, Bernadette picks up one of the taxidermied crows on her dresser, yet another quirky gift from her Aunt Kate, and sees what’s written on the bottom of the wooden stand, there on a white piece of paper: In the eternal darkness, the crow, unable to find any food, longed for light—and the earth was illuminated. This is the Eskimo myth: light originated because the crow desired it. Bernadette sobs for a full minute, then reapplies her mascara. In the mirror, she still looks ungainly and freckled, pale.

By six o’clock, it’s storming like mad. Cold rain drills on the hood of Bernadette’s gore-tex shell as she dashes across the parking lot, which is illuminated a bruised yellow from the streetlights on its edge. Then the lights blink twice and everything goes black and silent, except the thick splats of rain on her waterproof hood and the roving beams from the headlights of cars parking, the noise of their engines silenced under the deafening rain, its fat pinging on the metal of the cars, its broad smacks to the asphalt.

Like a cloud-dimmed underachiever of a sunrise, the streetlights and the strip mall lights struggle back on, and she tries to avoid puddles, hightailing it through the waterfall of a world.

Mary Ellen thinks they go to the steakhouse side of the restaurant, but Bernadette presents her fake I.D., the one Joanie’s current sketchy boyfriend made for her, and enters the full-on bar, which—of course—is where they always go.

All the patrons are shaking themselves dry.

It’s a fake western saloon called The Stable, with posters of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and Warren Oates and Slim Pickens on its paneled walls, an old sports bar trying to reinvigorate its identity. The Stable’s drinks have been given names like “The Magnificent Seven and Seven” and “The Unforgiven: a Pom-Cosmo.” There are ropes hanging from the ceiling. Mostly the bar serves gallons of draft beer to kids in the area because the prices are cheap, the location is convenient, and the place is an institution. Amidst the televised sports events and the crime shows, one flat screen always plays a western movie that nobody watches, except Jack—the bartender the millennial patrons love to hate. Tonight, the movie is High Noon.

Bernadette sees a high-top table open up, so she stakes it with her backpack and then orders a pitcher from Jack, with his candy-striped bow-tie and the suspenders he insists on, his pot belly and his misspent life, which he wears on his oily face. He has spikes of gray hair greased across his balding head. His handlebar mustache is a specimen.

“Hello, gorgeous,” he says to Bernadette.

“Very funny,” she says. “Pitcher of that IPA from Roanoke.” “You’re an original, sweetheart,” he says, pulling a plastic tap handle towards him, pouring honey-colored beer into a pitcher. “I like original art.” He skims off some foam with a butter knife. “I collect art, you know.” He slides her the pitcher. “Drinking by yourself tonight?” he says.

“Whatever Jack. Just give me three mugs.”

“You could definitely be somebody’s muse if you focused on it,” he says.

“Come on Jack,” somebody yells. “Pick up your speed.”

“Patience, children,” Jack yells back. He rings the cowbell when Bernadette leaves him a dollar.

She settles into the stool at her table, people jostling as they pass. A few guys cruise by, don’t check her out.

She returns the favor. Everyone sleek from the rain.

She sees her friend, poor Darlene, bushwhacking through the crowd. Downright dowdy, that girl. Bernadette knows she’s no prize, but Darlene is straight-up monochromatic, plump and pale. She’s hunched like she’s carrying the globe on her shoulders.

“What a day,” Darlene says, wrestles to remove her overcoat. Darlene has a huge frizz of long dark hair and oversized, worried brown eyes that wander all over Bernadette’s face as if she’s checking Bernadette’s markings to make sure she’s the real deal.

“How was traffic?” Bernadette says.

“Hell. As usual.” She kisses Bernadette on the cheek. The traffic around D.C. is Darlene’s pet peeve.

“Makes you want to move to the Great Plains,” Bernadette says.

“Not really. I have a good job here.” Darlene plops herself down.

“I’m kidding,” Bernadette says.

“What kind of career could I have on the Great Plains?” Some guy holds the door for Joanie as she walks in the bar, the streaming rain behind her. She’s illuminated, the headlights of cars backlighting her.

It’s not like Bernadette remembers being an infant, but she knows Joanie and Darlene were there, coaxing her to curl an infant fist around their three-year-old fingers. Bernadette doesn’t recall the milk from her mother’s breasts either. All the years at Saint Phil’s, then the youth group, their mothers like a terrorizing trinity watching over their antics. Now Darlene works for the IRS downtown and Joanie has taken a job as a “Sales Professional” (her term) at Lord & Taylor. She has aspirations of being accepted into their Buyers Program. And Bernadette, well, Bernadette.

Joanie slips off her Burberry raincoat, flips it open over the back of her barstool to expose the label, the plaid lining, and sits down. She’s wearing a royal blue wool dress, very tasteful, but form-fitting, and her mother’s dangly turquoise earrings and a silver and turquoise necklace so thick it looks like a harness. Her outfit is kind of clash-y, but she’s the pretty one, always has been, way short brown hair, turned-up nose, huge brown eyes and a slender neck. Plus, she’s a stick—has always made Bernadette feel kind of oafish.

“You didn’t have to pass out in his bed,” Joanie says to Bernadette. She still has her plastic nametag on from her day arranging racks, ringing up purchases behind glass counters. “You so didn’t even know him.” There are delicate drops of water on Joanie’s bangs.

She’s referring to a party from the previous weekend in which Bernadette had a drunken black-out, unfortunate fling with someone’s houseguest, who was from Dusseldorf or something. Bernadette doesn’t recall—Germany somewhere.

“This one’s literally dead to the world,” Joanie says to Darlene. “My friend, Georgina—her father’s a super big-time physician in McLean—wanted to call the rescue squad.”

“Georgina your new buddy?” Bernadette says.

“My friends were like who is she?” Joanie says, makes that face where her upper lip raises. How they suffered through each other’s specialties over the years. The innumerable soccer matches with Bernadette guarding the goal, a territorial lioness, hyped-up and rangy, tensile, agitated: the net her beloved backdrop. Chapped and red-faced, with bruised shins and a sore right shoulder, when her team lost, sobbing to the other two. Those endless concerts in high school auditoriums watching Darlene bang out essential Debussy selections, her head bent over the dipping keys. And Joanie, in every chorus, heavily made-up for the stage: Guys and Dolls, The King and I, Fiddler on the Roof. Red-lipped and cartwheeling, twirling across the stage, footlit brilliant in her Salvation Army garb and her Siamese genie suit, not as drab as she should have been when playing a poor Jewish peasant girl.

“How super fun to be able to disown your cousin in front of a crowd,” Bernadette says. “Self-righteous comma emotionally frigid,” she mutters. She pours beers. People stand in groups around them, laughing.

“What did you just say?” Joanie says. “Missus no one has suffered more than me since time began.”

“Guys,” Darlene says.

Bernadette slides a mug towards Joanie and the beer sloshes all over the table. “I thought we were your friends.”

“Naked, mouth-breathing in front of an entire party.”

“Guys,” Darlene says. She’s soaking up the spilled beer with a stack of napkins.

“What do you want me to do, claim the embarrassment as blood relation?” Joanie says.

“Give me a little credit.”

“Please, guys,” Darlene says. “Please.”

In the next room, couples dance. A few geeky guys are wearing cowboy hats.

Joanie swipes at her phone with a vague smile Bernadette interprets as accusatory. “She’s joining us by the way,” Joanie says. “Georgina.”

Around them, the noisy crowd shifts and regathers. The televisions cast blue light and the figures on the screens do stand-up or solve grisly crimes; they shoot semi-automatic weapons or catch a spiraling ball—the rhythms of their timing clashing. On the television showing High Noon, Gary Cooper, under a dark flat-rimmed cowboy hat, squints at them from a dusty main street. Bernadette puts her head down on her forearms.

When she lifts her head, she sees Joanie spot her pal, all blond and soft-looking in a fuzzy pink sweater and a pink-and- white checkered mini-skirt, her shiny raincoat draped over her arm. Joanie stands on a rung of her barstool and waves.
Georgina plunges through the crowd.

“Howdy gals,” Georgina says. Then, “Oh,” when she sees Bernadette. She kisses Joanie on both sides of the cheeks. Her face is cat-like, round, and so heavily made up, it looks powdered.

“You remember Georgina,” Joanie says to Bernadette. “From the party.”

“Big hosiery sale this week ladies,” Georgina says. She looks at Darlene, eyebrows raised in a friendly way. “We can get you our discount, honey,” she says.

“Thank you,” Darlene says, “but I have very simple tastes.” “Darlene and I are cheap,” Bernadette says.

“Ignore them,” Joanie says.

Georgina pulls a vape pen from her oversized yellow leather satchel. She sticks it between her lips and sucks on it.

Darlene tells Bernadette how her anxiety attacks are kicking into high gear again. She’s worried about cracking up on the Fourteenth Street bridge and causing a pile-up. She tells Bernadette that the people in her carpool make her even more nervous. “Those losers?” Bernadette says.
“They have a lot of responsibility in our nation’s government,” Darlene says.

“Sorry,” Bernadette says. “I don’t know why I think I’m so funny.” She pours herself another beer. “I thought you were on medication for that.”
“Makes me tired,” Darlene says. “I mean, working at the IRS is not exactly suspenseful, so drowsiness can be a big setback.” Darlene pounds the table with her fist.

“Hey.” Bernadette touches Darlene’s shoulder. “You all right, Kemo Sabe?”

“The federal government is falling apart,” Darlene says. She fiddles with the turtleneck she’s wearing and leans her chin on her hand. “By the way, my mother wanted me to tell you she’s doing a novena for you.”

“What for,” Bernadette says.

Darlene begs for Bernadette’s pardon, explaining that she needs to visit the Ladies’ before she explodes. She merges with the crowd, and Bernadette loses sight of her, her black polyester suit, her mane of hair. Bernadette sits alone in the din.

Until the bar goes dark and silent. A whirring sound fades to nothing. Not light, not televisions, not music. Bernadette hears shrieks, the sound of footsteps, chairs scraping, glasses being banged on tables, all at what feels like a slowed-down pace, until the reverberations of the crowd re-explode. People brandish their flashlight apps. White cones of light slash the dark air. Bernadette shines her phone towards Joanie and illuminates Joanie’s neck, then her right shoulder, then her hand in front of her face. When she removes the hand, Joanie is skeletal in the over-focused light—at last, the heartbreak is apparent.

“It’s okay, Joan,” Bernadette yells. She stands up and walks around the table to her.

“Smile,” Georgina says and snaps a photo of Joanie.

“Lay off with the smart phone camera,” Bernadette says and shines her phone towards Georgina’s round face, towards her oversized blue eyes with their pinpoints of reflected light. “Today’s a very hard day for Joanie. In fact, it’s a difficult day for all of us here. Who’ve by the way actually known each other since we were born.”

“Well, coming from you,” Georgina says. Everything is shadowed. Their faces, around the table are lit by Joanie’s phone, which lies face up on the table and by Georgina’s and Bernadette’s, which are directed at one another. It’s a black and white film, a tragedy, they are moving through.
Joanie grabs the vape pen from Georgina and sucks in a drag. She breathes out a wall of white. She’s crying. Finally, Bernadette thinks. “My mother didn’t care about me,” Joanie yells. “It was all about her, her research and her stupid do-gooder impulses. That’s how she got herself killed. Now look at us. Me a salesclerk. You, flunked out of Villanova.” She shoves the vape pen back to Georgina.

“I am altogether speechless,” Georgina says.

Bernadette fights the impulse to slap Joanie and, instead, puts an arm around her, strong and confining, as if she is holding Joanie down, controlling her prior to some excruciating but necessary procedure. “I didn’t flunk out, okay?” Bernadette says. “And you’re not a salesclerk.”
“I’m a salesclerk,” Joanie yells.

“Y’all are an emotional bunch,” Georgina says, takes a sip of water, the outline of her chin a black line.

Bernadette turns, sees Darlene approaching, a shadow surrounded by jiggling daggers of light.

A scrawny guy with a black man bun who’s wearing a leather biker jacket, wide silver zippers mapping diagonal and horizontal across his chest, is behind Darlene. He holds two lighters in the air, flicks them to oversized flame near Darlene’s head. “Encore!” he yells to the crowd. Darlene turns, pauses, smiles, then leans her head into the flames, which ride up strands of hair until Darlene’s wild frizzy nest bursts, shimmering around her, orange and red and black-centered yellow.

Afire, Darlene runs at Bernadette and Joanie.

“You bunch of children,” Jack, the bartender, screams. “Dim- witted children. Someone save that poor girl.”

It’s odd how Darlene keeps smiling even though she’s screaming, how her arms are spread beneath the hot rage of flames that frame her face.
Bernadette releases Joanie, rips the Burberry off the back of the stool, sprints at Darlene. Bernadette lassos the coat around Darlene’s head, rolls to the ground with her. Bernadette feels the slam of the concrete floor against her hip, then her elbow, then hears a thud all the way to the eardrum.

Joanie is pounding on Darlene’s shoulder. “Are you alive in there?” She’s screaming. “Are you alive.”

“I’m alive,” Darlene yells out, muffled by the coat.
“Look what you’ve done to these poor girls,” Jack yells. There’s a frightened, reverent silence.

“I’m okay,” Darlene says. She’s up on one elbow, fingering her disrupted curls. Bernadette is beside Darlene, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling. Joanie sits close by with them, legs straight in front of her, dazed, the coat a tiny carpet.

“Thank God in heaven you’re not my children,” Jack yells at the crowd, featureless, shadowed, waiting.

“Go get the generator turned on, Jack-Off,” says the scrawny guy with the man bun.

“My children would be polite and charming,” Jack yells. He places his hand to his chest and raises his face towards the ceiling. He bellows out above the crowd: “My child.”

Bernadette is lifted to a seated position; words familiar from Stephen Lou Endicott’s trial ignite in her brain, rearrange themselves. My daughter.

Georgina is documenting the whole thing with her smart phone. “This is wild,” she says.

“Dude,” the guy with the man bun says to Darlene. “I am terrifically sorry for the mishap. Are we injured?” He offers her a hand.

“No worries,” Darlene says, accepting his assistance.

Joanie and Bernadette remain sitting on the floor. Two guys wearing cowboy hats reach towards them.

“We’re cool,” Bernadette says.

Bernadette looks up to Darlene, checks out her wet eyes, her singed hair. It comes to just below her ears now, ragged and unkempt, making Darlene resemble some woman philosopher pictured on the back of a heavy book, like the ones Bernadette sought out in the library before quitting school.
Bernadette decides it’s a look that suits the twenty-first century.

The guy with the man bun sweeps his flashlight across the room and arou
nd the walls and over the dimensions of the ceiling. He flaps his arms up and down, palms up, inviting. Other people in the crowd follow suit. The lights are cast upon the ceiling, arcing across it; the bar becomes a planetarium, gone spectacularly awry. The adults from the darkened steakhouse next door begin to peek in the doorways.

Joanie’s brown eyes remain glazed.

“Your mother was thinking of you, Joanie,” Bernadette says. She unclasps the department store nametag from Joanie’s dress. Beside Joanie’s name, there’s a drawing of a red rose. “Here,” Bernadette says. “You forgot to take this off.”

“I know.” Joanie takes the nametag. “What about you,” she says. “Was she thinking about you?”

Bernadette says, “Me?”

III. This Shall Be Written for Generations to Come

Kate’s daughter, Joanie, told her not to worry, she was riding home to Northern Virginia from Virginia Tech with a guy from Rochester who had four-wheel drive and was an expert driving in the snow. Still, Kate, who’d grown up in Burlington, was concerned; it was falling thick, New-England worthy.

On North Capitol Street, next to a mailbox, which was already half-masked by snow, stood Lou Steven Endicott. He was hunched forward. Extended from his hand, like a hitchhiker’s destination sign, was a hand-scrawled placard reading, “Homeless. Lost. Searching for God.”The flakes were puffy and airy, large as popcorn, the chanting—a podcast—coming from Kate’s phone, angelic but righteous: Because of the loudness of my groaning, my bones cling to my flesh.

On such a night, with it being a few days before the solstice and with the storm and with everything that awaited around the season’s corner, the Looking for God bit touched her. She pressed pause on the phone. Pulled over. Lowered her window, pointed at his sign. “Me too,” she said. “I’m more lost even than you are, brother. I’d bet serious money.” He was actually a boy with a pale, round and flattened, full-moon of a face. He wore a goldfinch-yellow windbreaker and loafers with no socks.

She turned on her interior light.

The man leaned in her open window. She smelled his breath, like a dead mouse. He grinned at her, said, “I am without money Mademoiselle to undertake a bet.” His glasses—square gold frames—were fogged over. They were streaked with melted snowflakes. Yet there was a sphere of light in the corner of each lens, reflections from the interior light. Around her, D.C. traffic was scarce; they’d all been warned of the storm, yet Kate, overconfident of her abilities in snow, had stayed late in her office, deep into her research about the end of the Incan empire.

Then he laughed. The laugh, which was carefree—especially given the circumstances—made him seem, to Kate, like a lost, broken boy from a fable. She forgot everything: how the roads wouldn’t be plowed; how Virginians didn’t know how to drive in the snow; how her husband had dinner waiting; and how Joanie was dating a shallow kid, an elitist who refused to bring Joanie home for the Christmas break and introduce her to his family because she wasn’t “wealthy enough.” Kate forgot about the speech she’d planned to give Joanie: about self-esteem and take-no-prisoners, about love through time.
She thought only of the stranded boy’s mother, and how she would feel if she knew he was out here, with no socks, in such brutal weather.

“I haven’t got two pennies to rub together,” the boy said. “I’m trying to make it home for the holiday season. Blindsided by the storm.”

“Where’s home?” Kate said and moved to get out. The car was still running, but, as she stood, her cell phone slid from her lap. She experienced a tug of regret, like she did when she saw yet another missed call from Joanie. She was wearing her black cape and she felt its drama as she swung it around her. She began to think in the Spanish of her years of study—as she often did— especially in moments that struck her as poetic: con lo fuerte de mis sollozos, a través de la piel se ven mis huesos.

“From all over really,” Lou Stephen Endicott said to Kate. “Army brat.” He took off his glasses and rubbed them against his windbreaker. His eyes were small and blank and his hair was black strands, shiny and wet from the snow like charred seaweed. Under his eyes, the pale skin was so transparent, she could see threads of vein. It was as if they were underwater, the snow surrounded them so thickly.

“Isn’t it something?” she said.

When she went to wrap her scarf around his neck, a six- foot-long purple and yellow wool treasure that had been hand- made for her in Peru, she saw a tattoo of an eagle inked across his neck. The thought crossed her mind that, perhaps, in his past, he’d done a stint in the marines.
Kate finished twisting the scarf around Lou Stephen Endicott’s neck; the flakes were kissing and then melting all over her skin. She was still floating. She loved breaking rules. She loved taking chances. She loved being able to say to others, “Now just the other night, I had a real opportunity to live out my faith.” And then tell the story. She thought of her husband saying, Oh Katie. She handed the boy a crumpled five-dollar bill she’d found earlier on the cafeteria floor. Kate believed it was meant to be this boy’s five dollars, that destiny could descend even through small, inexpensive items.

“Happy holidays, brother,” she said. “Can I give you a ride to a shelter or something?”

“Hate shelters,” he said.

“Well,” she said, looking up to the sky. “I did my best.” Earlier that night, Kate tried to get through to her class
of college kids how vitally important it was to history that the Incas didn’t have records. “Listen,” she said. “They trashed the kingdoms that came before them, painting themselves in the most flattering light possible. They told the Spanish, who conquered them, how atrocious their predecessors were and how fabulous they themselves were. Okay, we know the strength of revisionist history. But the entire culture was written only in the architecture of their stone creations; they left no inscriptions. Think of how much we’ve made up—okay— deciphered from stone. We live according to the stories, half- intuited that we inherit.”

Most of her students were typing notes into computers or iPads and didn’t look up when she paused and raised her hand as if she meant to add to her statement. But if they had, they would have seen her put her raised hand down on the desk to support herself. The kids took on a deep significance. What were the stories that drove them? Every so often, she experienced moments where life distilled and became so vivid she had to close her eyes—as if she were lucky enough to understand she was residing in the instant before catastrophe struck.

Kate slid back into her car. She thought: Jesus, it’s coming down in sheets. The flakes were now pellet-like. Where was she? Where was her phone? She pushed the car into gear.

The boy opened her passenger door and moved in. A curdled odor filled the car. “Yes please,” he said.

A cold wet circle of metal pressed against her temple, so much harder than a fingertip, much colder, much hollower. She heard the click, right above her ear.

“What are you doing?” she said, managing her voice.

“What do I think I’m doing?” he said; his voice gained decibels and octaves—why even killers get nervous, she thought— the gun still touching her skin. “What do I think I’m doing? I’m chasing down that bitch of a girlfriend who took off with all my cash and my mutt, whose name is Kindred. I’m going to have that woman’s heart for Christmas Eve dinner.”

Kate spotted her phone on the floor by his feet. “Easy brother,” she said.

She saw the man’s thighs and knees from the corner of her eyes, his thick, damp maroon corduroy pants, the tiny pile of snow on one loafer. Smelled the layers of him.

She floored the gas, but let the clutch out all at once. The car jumped. Stalled. “Shit,” she said.

He followed her skin with the gun.

He pointed the gun at her crotch and said, “Look at my eyes, you spy.”

She reached with her left hand for the door handle.

“Careful now,” he said and pushed the handgun against her ribs.

“That’s not a real gun,” she said.

“I stole it,” he said. “I stole it from a fat cop when he was eating a doughnut and chugging a sugared-up cup of joe. Dumb cop.” He pointed the gun’s barrel skyward, touched the roof of the car, and pulled his index finger down. She ducked and covered her head. The shot ripped a jagged hole out of the convertible top of her vintage Cabriolet, the explosion muffled by the sky of snow.

She imagined the bullet blasting into paradise. Dear Jesus, Kate thought. Now I understand.

That the most necessary stories arise when everything has been lost.

He leaned down to pick her phone off the floor, held it in front of him. The screen reflected greenish against his face. He spread open her cape with the butt of the gun, and she felt its round opening through her blouse, the pressure a torture, as if the gun’s barrel was stitching the outline of itself on the skin above her breastbone. Endicott put her scarf over his mouth and told her to drive. Snow fell on her through the hole in the car’s roof.

Near R.F.K. Stadium, Endicott told her to turn down a side street, stop the car. The streetlights, yellow saucers of light, shone through the snow—which had become seed-like.

“This is not right,” Kate said. “I have a daughter and a niece. I have a husband and a sister.”

Through the hole in the car’s roof, it snowed.

Kate had moved from the state of shock into the state of regret. You are too good for these shallow one-note good-looking bums you seem to go after, Joanie. I mean, darling, you, my Lenten rose. Resilient. Dusty lovely, early to bloom.

“Sorry,” Endicott said. “I’m on a mission and you got in the way.”

“Take my car,” Kate said.

“I like the cape,” Endicott said.

“Take it.”

“What’s your daughter’s name?” Endicott asked.

“She’s Joanie.”

“My mother’s name is Susan Rose,” Endicott said. “Lives at the base of the Green Mountains in a trailer that smells like piss. My mom is real sick. She’s been real sick since I was born. She’s chronic. Her name isn’t Joanie. Her name is Susan Rose, and she never steps foot outside even though she’s living in God’s country.”

“Yes, yes. I’m also from that area. Vermonter,” Kate said.

Always, there were mountains in her imagination. “Back then I skied all day. You must have if you ever lived there, felt that cold aliveness after hours on the slope, nothing like it, your skin stretched new with the cold. You like me, don’t you, son? Can’t you see I’m a good person? I need to finish my book or I’ll never get tenure. My husband is at risk for so many things; he enjoys life too much. But I’m like the cold, I go away. I’m doing the best I can. Please take everything. Just leave me. I can catch the bus. I can wait till tomorrow or the next day or the next.”

“I had an overprotective mother,” Endicott said. “Don’t even know how to swim.”

He glanced down at her phone, which was still in his hand. He put it on his lap and pressed the arrow icon to start playing the podcast that had paused. The slow-tempoed voices of the Trappist nuns echoed from her phone, chanting still. The recorded voices traveled from the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which is where the sound had started, in a small chapel, to Kate who was trapped in her last minutes in a snowbound car that evening: I am like an owl of the desert. She listened, merged with the past. Then the hours and the minutes became fluid and open-ended, preserved but elongated by her quiet, building panic. “What is this crap?” he said, opened his car door and threw the phone out of it.

“Maybe when you were just small and innocent back in New England,” Kate said. “I might have seen you.” As though she was being caressed in the center of the cold and the wind. She hadn’t ever known, not really, that mercy—true mercy—demanded such risk. Wasn’t that the unacknowledged underside of life? That mercy was radical, completely without innocence. Who knew that?

Who was left to tell that to the world?

He cocked the gun. “I wasn’t never innocent,” he said. “Nor I,” she said.

“You shouldn’t have gave me that five-dollar bill. See, that was insulting.”

She became an outline of herself.

To her girls, she was leaving nothing but an empty terror. My daughter. My child. My children. That’s what she screamed. Jesus, tell them I love them. Over and over, loud. As if she could carve the words into the lobes of this man’s brain.

He hummed, out of tune.

Knees jump up towards her chin, Kate, weightless as the moguls shudder her. Snow melting on her ski goggles, a whisper of sounds, dark pine trees rush by her. Santo, impío. A snow- laden tree in a place she never expected.

IV. Illuminate

A few years later, Joanie said to Bernadette, “Are you sure?” This was after the weather had changed for good and after she’d read what her cousin had written for her by hand.

The Family Miracles: Sometimes God Isn’t Subtle

As I explained last month in the first installment of this series, many serious Catholics today live, at least at times, as what I call “lapsed secularists,” assenting with the intellect to the truths of the faith but hardly believing that grace could ever break into our lives in any but the most ordinary ways. Yet the Catholic imagination is precisely one that sees the world as meaningful, a universe, as Hopkins famously put it, “charged with the grandeur of God.” Unfortunately, modernity all too often seems like a conspiracy to dull our imaginations, to erase the signs of God’s presence from our vision of the world, even when they are all around us, even when we have seen them with our own eyes. That’s why I’m writing this series. ,I want to share stories of what I am calling “family miracles” to remind myself, and share with others, moments in which God’s grace has broken into the lives of the people closest to me in extraordinary ways.

For this second installment, I want to recount something that happened to my parents about three years ago—April 22, 2015, to be precise—when they went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The book of Kings talks of God speaking in “a still, small voice,” and that is most often true. But then there are other times in which He really doesn’t seem to care for subtlety. This is that kind of story.

Several days into an amazing pilgrimage, my parents had the chance to visit the traditional site of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River. This site is often skipped by tour groups because it is located in the country of Jordan itself, in favor of a more touristy location within Israel that is much easier to access. Recently, however, Israel opened an access road that allows pilgrims to view the site in Jordan from the Israeli bank of the river, though the fact that the way is flanked by fenced-in fields with signs warning about the presence of landmines probably puts a damper on the crowds.

Sign about site Jesus' baptism in the Jordan pointing out landmines

I said there would be pictures, didn’t I?

When they arrived, despite the signs clearly stating that the water is not clean, my parents and some other pilgrims in the group couldn’t resist the urge to roll up their pants and at least wet their feet in same river in which Jesus had entered to be baptized by John. You can see them below. The structures behind them are on the Jordan side of the river, and you can see a baptismal font to the left of my mom’s head. Other than that, there was almost nothing around, expect a few scraggly trees on the Jordanian bank, mined fields on the side of Israel, and a cloudless sky above.

A priest was travelling with the group, so after they finished the preliminary looking around, they gathered together for a prayer service by the bank of the river. The priest stood with his back to the river, while the rest of the group looked towards it and the baptismal font on the other side. My mom could hardly believe she was actually praying on Jordan’s literal bank, the very place where Jesus’ public ministry had begun, where the Holy Spirit had descended on Him like a dove. She was trying to hold on to every second of this first amazing visit to the land where God walked on Earth, so she was perhaps overly attached to her camera. Despite feeling a bit guilty about not giving her full attention to the prayers, she kept her cell phone out and tried to discreetly film the service. When the priest began to read the Gospel, however, she thought it would be too disrespectful to keep filming, so she turned the camera off but kept the phone out with the intention of continuing her video once the reading was over. The priest began reading from Matthew, chapter 3:

Then went out to him Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sad’ducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit that befits repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. . . .”I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove . . .

And that’s when it happened.

I mean at that exact moment, just as the priest was saying “descending like a dove”—on that point my parents are adamant. Out of the empty, clear blue sky, a white dove appeared, flew down, and alighted for a moment on the baptismal font on the other side of the river. A shocked gasp escaped the group, loud enough to startle the priest out of his reading of the Gospel.

“What happened?” he asked in alarm.

The confused group tried to explain, but by the time the priest looked behind his back the dove had flown away and was nowhere to be seen. “I can’t believe I missed that,” he said. He could see in the faces of the pilgrims that something big had happened. My mom was by no means the only one whose eyes were full of tears.

Still, she had kept her wits about her. And as I mentioned earlier, her phone. The dove had only touched down on the baptismal font for a second, but it had been enough for my mom to snap a picture as it began to fly away.

Pics or it didn’t happen, goes the Internet meme.

Well, it happened:

Sometimes, God does things with reality that no writer of realist fiction could ever get away with. Critics would immediately decry the work as cheesy, overly neat, implausible. Yet somehow, when God does the same things, the effect is entirely other. He is the Great Artist, who knows exactly when the rules of good realism need to be broken. Pay attention to the universe and you’ll see this pattern everywhere. I mean the everyday universe, not just events that verge on the supernatural. How plausible is an elephant? A squid?

Certainly, some will say that the fact that a white dove (where none were to be seen) alighted on a baptismal font at the site of Jesus’ baptism on the Jordan river, exactly as a group of pilgrims listened to a priest read a line from the Bible about a white dove landing on Jesus in that same river to mark his baptism, is . . .  errr . . . a coincidence.

To that I say, sure, they’re entitled to that response. But if it is a coincidence, it is an embarrassing coincidence.

Some people seem sure that the universe is really just a bunch random, meaningless events happening one after another. That could be. But what a weird conspiracy that same universe would appear to be orchestrating to trick us into believing the opposite.

The awkwardness of Mass

I recently taught my first communion class to receive the host on the tongue, mostly because Cardinal Sarah is really in my head right now. I’ve actually been teaching first communicants this for a few years now and I always take the opportunity to talk to receptive (ahem) adults about it, too. His Eminence explains it in more blunt language than I would, but on the whole he, and the entire weight of the Tradition of the Church, has convinced me. There’s one aspect of receiving on the tongue, though, that fascinates me. It is awkward. It’s really, totally awkward.

It’s fairly unusual to allow yourself to be fed. My guess is that the only experience of ever seeing this this is when a bride and groom celebrate their nuptials by shoving a piece of cake shoved into each others faces. I don’t get it. But everyone does it, so there must be some basic, human instinct for this practice that has escaped me. There’s the laughter, everyone smiles. It’s a good photo op. And cake does taste good. Mostly, though, the ceremonial feeding is a sign of love and trust, a way of declaring, “I don’t mind being vulnerable with this person.”

I was thinking about the way that brides and grooms so willingly embarrass themselves. It’s silly. Except it really isn’t. It is pure vulnerability, a pathway into the heart of the beloved.

The liturgy of the Church is also odd in this way. The priest wears strange clothes that, quite honestly, are laughable to an outsider. We have numerous traditions that, without any context, seem very strange. For instance, last week I walked down the center aisle and threw holy water all over everyone. Even if it didn’t show on my face I was laughing on the inside while doing it. I may also have targeted a few parishioners in particular for reasons that shall remain my own. The signs and symbols of the Church are big and brash. When a bishop is ordained an entire jar of chrism oil is poured over the top of his head. When you come for Ash Wednesday, if Father is holding a secret grudge against you he might oh so carefully smear a massive black cross onto your forehead (aka “Father’s Revenge”). At confirmation, the Bishop slaps you on the cheek. I tell the 8th graders that their spectacles are going to fly off.

There is much good humor and whimsicality in Catholic culture. I really love it. And simply because we talk about it with a smile doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. Chesterton and Belloc covered their theological talks in a boozy haze, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t entirely earnest. We can do penance and practice devotion while, at the same time, enjoying a fantastic piece of fried fish on Fridays. Every time I’ve taught children to receive the Eucharist on the tongue, they giggle and talk about how odd it feels. But here’s the thing, it’s just like a bride and groom, because it’s part of this great wedding feast that we call the Mass.

The point is, almost everything we do in the Mass is ridiculous. We gather to sing some songs, chant a few things in Latin, the priest harangues you for a bit about some topic and inevitably quotes a poem or something at you. Then we pray at an altar with bread and wine and consume them. Then we go home. To an outsider, this seems madness. And it is. Unless it is true.

Think of it like a child at play. There’s no purpose to the playing because the playing itself is the purpose, and it is good and beautiful simply for what it is. It is ennobling and worthy simply to at Mass in the presence of God together.

The very first words the priest says at the foot of the altar are, “I go to the altar of God. To God who gives joy to my youth.” There is an innocent joy that is connected with our worship such that we become like little children before the face of God. Fr. Romano Guardini says that the liturgy unites us to a supernatural reality, a childhood before God.

Prayers at the foot of the altar

When I was a child, I played baseball with my friends in the park. The fence of the tennis court was the backstop and we would tape a strike zone to it. First base, which was a frisbee, was carefully laid out by counting our steps down the imaginary foul line. Second and third base were both baseball gloves of whichever teams was batting. A line of pine trees was a home run. We had elaborate, serious rules about every detail of the game. We were earnest and so intent on the rules that we spent most of the time arguing balls and strikes. It was all very awkward. This may seem ridiculous and I’m sure our parents all laughed at us, but this game was a vital part of our growing up, the way we negotiated with each other, encountered the ups the downs of success and failure, and discovered moments of delight when we had a perfect afternoon and played until the cicadas came out and the voices of our mothers called us home to dinner. The liturgy, too has laid down the serious rules to a sacred game.

Now, as an adult, think about those times a child has guilted you into playing. Chesterton says that, “Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.” Here’s the thing, though, God loves doing it again. Each morning he says to the sun, “Do it again.” Each evening he says to the moon the same. “He has the eternal appetite of infancy,” says Chesterton, while “we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” The Mass is the same every, single, day. In that repetition we are made young. Each time you worthily receive the Eucharist you are made young. This is the all too awkward, long explanation of the meaning of the elegant words uttered by the priest before he steps up to the sacred altar of God.

The Family Miracles: Part 1

This is not a post about Catholic literature, but I want to use that topic, which is so frequently discussed on this blog, as a point of departure. It’s almost impossible to talk about Catholic art and literature without someone bringing up the concept of the “sacramental imagination,” the idea that deeply embedded within the Catholic worldview is the sense that the material creation always points beyond itself. Commentators often observe that Catholic artists–even lapsed Catholic artists–don’t merely invent symbols to stuff into their books, but experience the natural world as place where symbols are discovered, a universe “groaning in labor pains” that “awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God.” There is much truth in that observation, but it also seems to me that many serious Catholics from younger generations, especially in rich countries, could just as well be described as lapsed secularists. Catholics in this group are people who have reached the conclusion that the Faith is true and try to shape their lives in accordance with those convictions, but they do it against a default pull toward a disenchanted worldview. They know that the world is suffused with God’s presence, but they have trouble feeling it. In many ways, I include myself in this group. We are believers who are quite ready to recognize the presence of grace in literature, to delight in its action in the works of Flannery O’Connor or Graham Greene–but when it comes to daily life? Well. We’ll assent intellectually to the action of Providence in the abstract, to the possibility of miracles in general, but it’s almost as if we can’t quite believe that such Divine action could ever really touch us, that the supernatural could manifest itself in any extraordinary way within the supreme ordinariness of our own planned, controlled, and insured lives.

Even as I have grown in my intellectual assent to Catholicism and (I hope) the practice of the faith, the longer I’ve lived in the United States, the more this secular sense of disenchantment has become for me an easy attitude to drift into. Note that it’s not a belief or a conviction, merely a posture or disposition, yet precisely for that reason it’s something that can wreak havoc on the spiritual life. The Latin American Catholicism in which I grew up is not without serious deficiencies–it is intellectually weak and liturgically barren, to begin with–but our culture is not yet entirely disenchanted, and that can count for a lot. Miracles or interventions of Providence are not events one only expects to happen to other, distant people (if at all), but rather realities that, while always surprising, are certainly expected as part of the experience of one’s life. I know these things also happen in the developed world (they have to my family, and why should they not?), but somehow they never become a part of our family histories, our personal histories, and thus fail to influence they way we see the world. Consequently, in an effort to fight against this posture of disenchantment, both for my own sake and for the benefit of anyone who reads this blog, I’ve decided to record my family’s own stories about moments of extraordinary grace. Some of the stories involve events that I would consider outright Miracles, while others could perhaps be interpreted simply as bizarre or beautiful coincidences, but they are all moments when it was hard for us not to see God’s hand at work. I want to save some of the good stuff for later since this post is already getting quite long, so I’ll begin with a fairly simply story that always brings a smile to my face.

*

During the fall of my sophomore year in college, my parents couldn’t afford to bring me home for Thanksgiving. My parents had moved to South Florida from Colombia around the time I finished high school, and they were in a very difficult financial situation. I had received a very generous financial aid package to attend Penn, but still the portion of tuition my parents were liable for was a huge strain on the family. Since I was going to school in Philadelphia, there was not even the option of driving, but I didn’t really mind staying for a quiet week on campus. It had been the same thing the year before. Since I had not celebrated Thanksgiving growing up, I didn’t really feel that I was missing anything. For my mom, however, it was a different story. With only one Thanksgiving under her belt as a US resident, she already felt a depressing lack at not being about to fly me home for the week. Unbeknownst to me, as the holiday approached she became truly heartbroken about it, and would spend futile hours looking online at tickets that were way too expensive to even consider.

Then one day, just a few weeks before the break, an astonishingly cheap ticket popped up on her screen. It was $135 round trip; nothing else she had looked at came even close. She was sure that the offer would be gone at any moment. Such was the family’s situation at that time, however, that we simply didn’t have those $135. The money wasn’t there, but the find seemed like such a godsend that she called my father to discuss whether there was any way they could afford the ticket.

“Get it,” my dad said at once.

“But how are we going to pay for it?” my mom replied, ever the practical and responsible one.

But if anyone in the family is good at abandoning himself to the will of Providence, it’s my dad.

“Get it,” he insisted. “Put it on the credit card. If God put that opportunity before us, he’ll give us what we need to pay it off.”

Usually, my mom would have argued back and reminded him of everything that could go wrong, that he had no way to know if that was really God’s will, but in this instance her desire to have the family together for Thanksgiving was so strong that she gave in and bought the ticket at once. My parents called me that night and announced I would be joining them for the break after all, that they had found a flight at a great price. They never said anything about my mom’s tears or the seemingly reckless decision to buy the ticket. I was pleased with the news and took it as a sign that their finances must be stabilizing at last.

During the weeks that followed, with the credit card bill looming, my mom continued to fret, but my dad remained calm (likely to my mom’s great annoyance and distress) in his conviction that God would figure it out. Yet as the morning of my flight arrived, my mom’s joy in knowing she would see me later that day was still marred by worry about the coming bill.

It was my dad who came to pick me up at Fort Lauderdale Airport that morning. I met him on the curb in the Arrivals section, where he greeted me with a kiss on the cheek and took my suitcase to place in the trunk. As he did so, I saw off the corner of my eye something fluttering on the ground. My dad saw it too and we instinctively looked down for a better look.

There were a few dollar bills on the ground.

As we looked for another second, however, we realized there were more than a few. There was a whole trail of them strewn along the curb and sidewalk right by our car. Looking around, we saw there was no one around whom we could identify as a potential owner. At that point we rushed to pick them up before they fluttered away. I handed my bundle to my dad, and a knowing smile started spreading across his face as he began to count them.

“One hundred and thirty five dollars,” he said, as if the number had some special meaning.

Chesterton’s strangest admirer

G.K. Chesterton never hid his opinion. During his writing career he carried on innumerable controversies with all manner of public figures. He criticized Germany relentlessly, took aim at modernists, critiqued other famous writers of the day, defended the most indefensible institution of the age (The Catholic Church), and laughed all the while. His manner was incisive and direct, but it was never ad hominem, always humorous, and always fair and sympathetic in the way it interpreted the work of others. This is how Chesterton managed to remain universally beloved. It didn’t hurt that he pretended to be fatter than he was and was said to have collaborated with Belloc to cover Catholicism in a boozy halo.

Speaking of Belloc, his style contrasted with of Chesterton and was far more acerbic. For instance when H.G. Wells wrote his history textbook, Belloc tore into him repeatedly in print for his atheistic explanation of the world until their personal relationship was soured. Chesterton, on the other hand, responded with Everlasting Man and the two remained friends.

Another nemesis of Belloc and Chesterton was George Bernard Shaw. Shaw and Chesterton could not have been more different, even extending to their physical appearances. They debated each other vigorously in both print and in public talks on almost every single issue. And yet they were fast friends. Perhaps the following exchange, noted by Dale Ahlquist, illustrates why:

Chesterton: I see there has been a famine in the land.

Shaw: And I see the cause of it.

Shaw: If I were as fat as you, I would hang myself.

Chesterton: If I were to hang myself, I would use you for the rope.

Suffice it to say, Chesterton may be a saint simply for his ability to defend the truth winsomely and without creating enemies. Because of this, the company of his admirers are sometimes surprising.

Enter Alan Watts, the zen-appropriating, sometime Episcopal priest, amateur psychotherapizing, proto-hippie author. Watts made no secret of his dislike for traditional Christianity, which he thought placed far too much emphasis on guilt and sin. He later graduated into the harder stuff like mescaline, LSD, and, apparently, Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis.

Joseph Pearce writes in his biography, “Writing soon after Gilbert’s death, Watts confessed a love for Chesterton based upon that latter’s spiritual joie de vivre.” He goes on to quote Watts from an article titled “G.K. Chesterton: The Jongleur de Dieu” (a title Chesterton had applied to St. Francis of Assisi)

Although I am anything but a Roman Catholic, the recent death of G.K. Chesterton felt almost like a personal loss. For with no writer of today did I find myself in deeper sympathy. It was not that I agreed with all his ideas, but rather that I felt myself in complete accord with his basic attitude to life.

Later, in a lecture entirely about his love for Chesterton, Watts says, “Chesterton’s fundamental attitude as a poet and a theologian was that even God needed surprise.” Thus, free will, the magical nature of creation, and humor. He comments, “This is why Calvinists are so dreary,” and, “That’s what you would do if you were God.”

He actually has some insightful comments and there is plenty of merit to his understanding of Chesterton. Listen to the full Watts lecture:

Idolatry and loss in art

Is there an inner this-ness or inscape to a thing? When you, as a writer, observe an object and describe it, are you bringing an inner reality to light, or are you merely describing your own experience of that thing? Is the reality of it entirely mediated by your intellect and craftsmanship, or is it somehow already there waiting for you to discover it? I guess what I’m really asking is, when a writer describes an object, is he beholden to seek out the inner truth of the thing described?

All I can say from personal experience is this. I used to do quite a bit of painting. Whenever I would attempt to paint without reference to a physical object or gave no respect to the physical objects as I depicted them, my work was abominable. When I concentrated on, say, an apple and tried to paint it the best I possibly could, my work was tolerable. Anecdotal, I know. But there it is.

I’ve been thinking along these lines while working through a related set of questions (that, funny enough, began with an editorial board discussion here at Dappled Things about the nature of sacred art, and I haven’t even gotten to writing on that particular point yet, although I may have lost the plot. I know I had a plan at the beginning to get there but I’m like a cat chasing a string, here, and well, you can see how it would happen. After all, I just typed an 87 word digression all in parenthesis and have no plans to edit it.)

Caravaggio – Still Life

Here is what Romano Guardini has to say in Spirit of the Liturgy, “Beauty is the full, clear and inevitable expression of the inner truth in the external manifestation. “Pulchritudo est splendor veritatis”–“est species boni,” says ancient philosophy, “beauty is the splendid perfection which dwells in the revelation of essential truth and goodness.”

So, we know where he stands.

What Guardini is anxious to avoid is a beauty that relies purely on surface appearances. Although Beauty and Truth are not reducible to one another, as he makes clear, the two are still related. Any truly beautiful representation will bring forth the inner truth of the object.

Now consider an interesting implication of beauty having integrity all on its own. Beauty for beauty’s sake is a viable artistic outlook, and may in fact produce gorgeous art. Guardini argues that it is dangerous in the extreme, but nevertheless it is possible. It is this purely surface-level beauty that he warns against.

What we need here is a good look at some old-fashioned idolatry. It might seem a digression but I promise that it will come together in a bit.

Drawing on the Israelite monotheistic tradition, St. Paul seems to think of idolatry in two distinct ways.

The first is to recognize an object as a totem of a god or power to be worshiped so as to achieve some sort of control or response from that power: a good harvest, fertility, rain, and so on. For instance, Paul tells the Corinthians, “the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons.” To the Colossians, he expands this definition a bit, telling them, “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.” Idolatry, defined in this way, is clearly not limited to primitive pagans. Although we are skeptical of the way such idolatry is phrased, modern many still very much worships at the altar of power, health, and wealth.

The second way of understanding idolatry is more literal. An idol is a material object. The rejection of it dismisses idols as physical objects, mere wood and stone to be rejected. A man-made object is no god at all. This is the message that got Paul chased out of Asia by a riotous, bloodthirsty crowd. I’ve been thinking about this, and perhaps it’s shocking to consider, but this type of idolatry is also a continuing temptation for modern man. In fact, it’s related to this whole question of the relation of Truth to Beauty.

Cezanne – still life with apples

When it comes to materialism and our relationship to the physical world, in fact, we’re much more primitive than ancient peoples were. What I mean is that, an ancient person perhaps worshiped a statue but, because he had such a pantheistic experience of the world, would have understood the object itself as being somehow connected with a power. He wasn’t dense enough to think that the carved bull he made was going make it rain. He’d be annoyed if you stole it but only because it would mean he’d have to procure a new one, not because he thought you’d kidnapped an honest-to-goodness god. In other words, the two types of idol worship were connected, which is why St. Paul would sometimes resort to one method of dismissing them and sometimes another. They were, at the same time, both dumb objects and extremely dangerous totems that participated in demonic powers. Even more, those objects and powers were intimately connected with the subject a he interacted with them, thus their power and influence via quid pro quo arrangements.

Owen Barfield, the strangest Inkling of all, refers to the intimate connection of object and subject as “original participation.” In his book The Idolatry of Appearances, he proposes an interpretation of history that basically boils down to the slow loss of this participation over the centuries to the point that, in the modern mind, objects are seen as totally foreign to the subject. They are material objects only, and each thing is distinct from another. Every thing is Other.

So, modern man is not superstitious, but he is very, very idolatrous. We give our lives to acquiring material goods. We find meaning in them. We experience loss without them or depression at the inability to acquire them. We are jealous of those who have and contemptuous of those who have not. It’s a twisted form of beauty for beauty’s sake, the pursuit of an object merely for its surface-level qualities, devoid of any spiritual or moral meaning. Our idolatry is, if anything, more naive than that of ancient man. We simply adore the object itself and cannot conceive that it might be anything more. I almost wonder if a man from two-thousand years ago would laugh at us if he saw how strange we are.

To the Catholic imagination, this outlook is as dangerous as the older pagan forms of idolatry ever were. More to the point, it happens to be destructive of art, a pursuit that finds its very identity in the fact that, even while it is valuable in its own right as a beautifully crafted, physical object, it points to something more.

Guardini talks about how the focus on surface level beauty takes every object, neuters it of its true meaning, and then uses it as a pretext for expression. The artist is placed in the role of the arbiter of meaning and seeks freedom, in this manner, from the necessary value of the object. It’s a modern outlook of radical freedom. But of course, an idol ends up enslaving those who bargain with it. “People who think like this have lost the ability to grasp the profundity of a work of art,” writes Guardini.

Van Gogh – Six Sunflowers

I pause. And I wonder. On a scale of dandyism ranging from “Cotton Mather” to “Oscar Wilde”, I’m somewhere around “David Niven”. Beauty brought me into full communion with the Catholic Church and I’m a full blown aesthete with pretensions to decadence. I think that Guardini overstates his case, for instance take a look at the list of Catholic converts in England who emerged from the aesthetes, but I do think that his point of view has merit. For instance, that same aesthetic philosophy promoted artificiality and garishness in all things and man lost their moorings under its influence. Beauty for beauty’s sake can lead to truth…but it might not?

How is it we could be tempted into embracing the idolatry of surface appearances if it means that our art will lose its ability to overpower us? What’s the benefit? Of course, it might be the end of a game being played out involving radical autonomy, in which case the benefit is clear, but most of us probably aren’t that arrogant. For me, though, what’s the hesitation to encounter great art and consume some surface-level effort instead? It’s easier.

Great art that is both true and beautiful requires a great deal of sacrifice. The artist sacrifices, the one who encounters the art sacrifices, and even the object involved sacrifices, whether it be the subject of a poem or novel, a still-life, or a song.

Guardini explains, “The fulfillment of all inwardness,” of any object, “lies in the instant when it discloses itself in a form appropriate to its nature.” There is fulfillment but also a sense of loss in doing so, though, because it isn’t a simple pantheistic transfer of essence between interior and exterior. It’s the negotiation of universal with particular in a way that eventually finds expression through the skill of the artist. It is nostalgic and heart-breaking, but also a sacrifice that transforms an everyday object into a seed of the transcendental. In the hands of an artist, heaven is in an apple. Describe it and you’ve described the Garden of Eden. Art is a rehearsal of the Passion. It cannot remain on the surface, but must cut to bone and sinew. The object, the artist, and those who encounter it are deeply marked by the experience. Guardini writes, “this grappling with expression, triumphant expansion, and timid, dolorous contraction, together constitute the tenderest charm of beauty.” False gods promise easy answers, but true beauty is in the struggle.

Knowing this, how can we be content to remain at the surface level?

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