Friday Links
December 8, 2023
The Immaculate Conception by Giovanni BattistaTiepolo
Rowan Williams: Heaven Meets Earth
Angels I Have Heard on High by Joseph Bottum
Joshua Hren on Testing the Spirits of Jon Fosse’s The Shining
Literature at the End of the World: Valerie Stivers on Louise Kennedy
Amy Welborn: Are You Listening? At All?
Rowan William: Heaven Meets Earth
This means that the “repair” involved in Christ’s coming in flesh is a repair of our relation to ourselves. Saint Augustine memorably said that our problem is that we are away from home; we are never properly “inhabiting” ourselves, living in our actual bodies and memories. Christ comes to introduce us to the self we have not met – the unique responsive spark that springs up out of the recognition that we emerge as gifts from the hand of God, that we are made alive only as part of the symphonic flow of all things working together, that our fullest “actualization” is to stand in and before the divine mystery saying “Abba” in the spirit of Jesus. The gift of the Spirit is something that makes us see where and how we are fed, the depth at which we are always receiving, being given birth. It entails seeing the persons and things around us as bearers of life – whether they look like friends or enemies at first sight.
Angels I Have Heard on High by Joseph Bottum
A sinner—corrupt and soulsick, heartsore and muddled in my thoughts—I sometimes wonder what this world looks like to the saints. The universe must glow, every day a holiday, a holy day, like the blinding sunlight off clean snow and sharp swirls of sparkling ice. But it needs no individual grace, no special sanctity, to feel the life of the Christmas season. Portions of the wall are tumbling down, and through the breaches anyone can discern some of what we ordinarily keep hidden from ourselves: Christ himself in the faces of the poor and battered. The treasures that charity lays up in heaven. The extra-worldly beauty of nature. The joy of creation in the objects all around us. The almost sacramentality of everything real.
Joshua Hren on Testing the Spirits of Jon Fosse’s The Shining
Through a mesmerizing accretion of plain but rhythmic language, Fosse lures us into a “secular” wood only to depict strange spirits with steadfast matter-of-factness. The boundaries between super-nature and nature are profoundly porous. Lost like Dante, the man is “locked into a closed room in the forest, trapped, but at the same time it’s like the room is unbounded.” Like the denizens of the Divine Comedy, Fosse’s characters are for the most part fixed in continuations of their erstwhile, earthly habits, as when the narrator’s mother chides her husband for not talking only to conclude, “It’s always the same, you never say anything, not even when your son is standing right in front of you just a few feet away do you say something.”
Literature at the End of the World: Valerie Stivers on Louise Kennedy
Kennedy makes such compressed eventfulness look easy. She also traffics in a kind of disorientation that feels particularly original and modern: There is no perspective on anything; no one has any distance from her life; there is a claustrophobic sense of not being able to see out of a trap. And the structure of her stories is unusually clever and inventive; the one based on a funeral montage showcases her particular genius for the details of daily life. As a crowning achievement, the collection builds in tension with each piece, and reaches a thematic climax that feels more like the ending of a novel.
Amy Welborn: Are You listening? At All?
Do you believe this stuff? Do you believe that human beings are created by God and called by Him to live with him forever? And do you believe that divine invitation is experienced in great and small ways in every moment of our lives, whether we recognize that call or not? That every person, no matter what their background or professed beliefs, is being invited by her Creator on this journey of love and life—whether they know it or not?
