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 8^th 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.

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.

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.

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:

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.)

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.

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.

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?

We live in an anxious age. Our collective unrest is evident across every level of our culture, our politics, our everyday lives. Yet in his letter to the Philippians, the Apostle Paul instructs us to “have no anxiety about anything.” Easier said than done, perhaps, but St. Paul does not leave us without a way to fight back: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” There are no better words to explain why Dappled Things exists. In a world where our technology constantly turns our gaze to every outrage, every scandal, every threat, the work of Dappled Things is more relevant than ever. But we can only do it with your support.

This past year has brought many successes. Thanks to a record level of donations, we were able to undertake new initiatives and publish some of our finest pieces yet. Among them are “Obedience Lessons,” the exquisite story by Abigail Rine Favale (now part of our editorial board!) that captured our 2017 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction, the invitingly beautiful photography of Matthew Lomanno, and an essay by California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia on the striking sculptures of Luis Tapia. We’ve expanded our (all-volunteer) staff, improved our online offerings (we were recently picked among the top Catholic sites on the internet), and seen a 20% rise in visits to our website—indicators that Dappled Things is poised to reach even more hearts and minds in 2018.

Our goals for the coming year are ambitious, both in terms of increasing readership and developing our content. First, we aim to reach a broader audience through a more active blog, drawing more and more of those readers to our print journal. We also intend to expand our non-fiction section significantly, featuring a steady stream of reviews and essays engaging with contemporary culture from the richness of the Catholic tradition. Dappled Things runs on a shoestring budget, but we must raise $15,000 in order to undertake these initiatives and continue to thrive in our mission.

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Dear Friends of Dappled Things,

We’re running a bit behind on our fundraising goal for the year, and we just received a pledge of $950 that would go a long way in getting us to our goal of $15,000. The catch is that for the pledge to be fulfilled, we have to raise an equivalent amount within the next week. The deadline is midnight on December 28th. That means that even more so than usual, every donation of any amount during the next week will be very important to us, and your gift will be automatically doubled. We really depend on the success of this campaign to continue pursuing the journal’s mission of sharing with the world the beauty of the Catholic faith. If you think this is a work worth continuing, please support us today, at whatever level you can afford.

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Founder & Publisher, Dappled Things

I couldn’t have been happier to hear that this year’s Nobel prize for literature has gone to Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his novel Remains of the Day.

Ishiguro’s careful, attentive prose style, which evokes and rewards an equal care and attention from the reader, places him in the class of writers that (if my eavesdropping is any indication) many believe has vanished from the world, never to return. It’s not too much to say that Ishiguro is one of the writers who restored my faith in the possibilities of the contemporary novel. Like many of our readers, I received an early literary formation relentlessly focused on all things pre-1960, and while in some ways Ishiguro’s work hearkens back to earlier eras, in others it calls us to pay ever closer attention to our own time. For readers like us, Ishiguro bridges a divide.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his novel Never Let Me Go, a futuristic dystopia rendered in such a subtle and restrained way that at first you aren’t certain it isn’t just a British boarding-school novel. Slowly, it is revealed that the students are not just students, the school isn’t just a school, and the society echoes ours in ways that are at once disturbing and entirely believable. The novel troubles the waters of our placid convictions about what couldn’t possibly happen here in the enlightened, affluent West, yet without denying the reader a fully human story that affirms the value of connection, meaning, and genuine love. For the Catholic reader, the novel is also a storehouse of insight about questions of human dignity, bioethics, and the moral drama inherent in the last days of human lives.

You could almost call his approach one of anti-desensitization. Where many late-20th and early-21st century writers seem to proceed from an assumption that the reader is already too desensitized by violence and therefore assail the reader with a violence that mirrors the violence their characters suffer — an extreme correction of O’Connor’s dictum that for the hard of hearing you must shout — Ishiguro has a light touch with language and a delicate approach to the harshest details of his stories that demands a similar compassion from the reader, acting as a corrective to the desensitizing tendency of contemporary life.

More details about the prize and Ishiguro’s career here; also, check out this amazing conversation between Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman from a few years back, which covers, among other things, the question of genre, the boundaries between literary and fantasy fiction (Tolkien comes up!), how readership relates to age and class, and how we stretch the boundaries of reality anytime we set out to write.