Friday Links
Our Lady of Good Event, Quito, Ecuador
February 3, 2023
Feast of Saint Blaise
“Remembrance” Ryan Wilson in The New Criterion
An interview with Sally Read, Experiencing Christ in Life and Poetry
Jason Baxter on Tolstoy’s Moments Beyond the Clock
Tessa Carmen’s review of Sally Thomas’s Works of Mercy
Faith Stripped Bare: The Transfiguration of Doubt in an Age of Exile
"Remembrance by Ryan Wilson in The New Criterion
Let’s start off with this new poem from the poet, translator, and critic, Ryan Wilson. He’s conjuring up an ancient haunting in this exquisite poem and I love it.
An interview with Sally Read, Experiencing Christ in Life and Poetry
Sally Read, an English poet living in Rome, sits down with Matthew Wickman of BYU’s Faith & Imagination Podcast to discuss her new collection of poems, Dawn of this Hunger. Read converted to Catholicism, after a lifetime of atheism, which “threw everything up into the air,” including her poetry. She asked herself, “What does God want me to do?” In response to this, she started writing more prose, including her beautiful conversion story, Night’s Bright Darkness. The new collection of poems took her ten years to write, and Read and Wickman talk about that balance between work and inspiration. Please listen to the conversation. Wickmam is one of the best interviewers out there, asking deep, probing questions that enlighten us about the artists he interviews, their work, and what it means to live out our faith as artists.
Jason Baxter on Tolstoy’s Moments Beyond the Clock
Jason Baxter, a teacher in the Great Books Program at ND, writes about Tolstoy’s claim that his books were not novels, but rather icons. Baxter reminds us of Tolstoy’s advice, (found in Natasha’s Dance, Orlando Figes), to read his novels as “huge poetic structures for symbolic contemplation, not unlike icons, laboratories in which to test ideas.” Baxter notes that “The icon—both medieval West and Byzantine East—is a wonder-working image, not a work of art, intended to make the holy present.” What could icons, then, have to do with the novel, and what do either of them have to do with physics? Considering physics, Baxter writes, “the great nineteenth-century novelists treat their societies as energy “systems,” wherein the individual psyches of that society are something like atoms.” And this is what Tolstoy does in his novel — puts his characters in his “laboratory” to see what they might do. But Tolstoy is a great artist, not a mad scientist, and so in the “laboratory” of his stories, “he can’t help discovering, as if by accident, moments beyond the clock—what we might call “iconic moments.” Something outside of the web of time and space “accidentally” irrupts into the novel.”
Tessa Carman’s review of Sally Thomas’s Works of Mercy
This review of Sally Thomas’s extraordinary debut novel, Works of Mercy, by Tessa Carman is, itself, an extraordinary piece of writing. “Few novels explore how motherhood,” as Carman notes, “shapes a mother’s soul.” Works of Mercy is one of those novels that is unafraid to explore motherhood, a woman’s most essential calling. Through the teaching of Alice Von Hildebrand, Pope St John Paul II, Colleen Campbell, and Edith Stein, Carman deepens our understanding of the novel by examining the spiritual motherhood at the heart of it. Kirsty Swain, the novel’s protagonist, lives an orderly, reticent life, until she, “despite her reluctance, slowly is taken out of herself as she encounters those in need of a mother...” This spiritual motherhood nurtures the other characters and helps Kirsty, in her quiet, wry way, to flourish, to become more fully herself, and finally, most importantly, become “more and more open to the Mercy that is always working on and through her.” We live in an age that fetishizes the baby bump while disdaining the baby, an age that disdains the feminine while fetishizing a distorted view of women. It’s madness. Sally Thomas and Tessa Carman show us how we might begin to remedy this by responding to the spiritual nature of our calling to be spiritual fathers and mothers.
Faith Stripped Bare: The Transfiguration of Doubt in an Age of Exile
And, finally, on Wednesday night, after my Dostoevsky class, I was searching for an essay that would fit with today’s other links. While looking through The Symbolic World website, hoping to find something on icons, I found this article by Norm Grondin. A friend and I were texting at the same time about the ruptures in our lives and how making the right choice, even knowing what the right choice is, can feel a bit like walking on a tightrope. Just a little sign, I wrote, would be nice, because when I read a novelist like Dostoevsky, I wonder: Am I, like the characters in these novels, incapable of seeing reality as it is? Have I succumbed to the lies of the world? In the mysterious ways of grace, my friend had texted just at this moment of doubt, to let me know she was praying for me. And a quick search for an article about icons brought me instead to this one on doubt. In it, Grondin “aims to explore the themes of exile and return through the symbolism of the garments of skin found in the biblical narrative.” The essay is a long, but rewarding and deep exploration of what it means to conform ourselves to Christ. Grondin shares this quote, which I found especially moving, from Anthony Bloom:
As to the day, if you accept that this day was blessed of God, chosen by God with His own hand, then every person you meet is a gift of God, every circumstance you will meet is a gift of God, whether it is bitter or sweet, whether you like or dislike it. It is God’s own gift to you and if you take it that way, then you can face any situation. But then you must face it with the readiness that anything may happen, whether you enjoy it or not, and if you walk in the name of the Lord through a day which has come fresh and new out of His own Hands and has been blessed for you to live with it, then you can make prayer and life really like the two sides of one coin.
