Friday Links
February 17, 2023
Gregory Luce reviews Ordinary Time by Sarah DeCorla-Souza
Paul Kingsnorth in First Things on “A Wild Christianity”
On Editing: Bernardo Aparicio García, Mary Ann Miller, and Greg Wolfe at the 2022 CIC
Shemaiah Gonzales on “The Way of Wandering”
Mary’s Song from the Notre Dame Folk Choir’s upcoming album, The Passion
An extraordinary essay from Christian Wiman in Harper’s Magazine: “White Buffalo”
Gregory Luce reviews Ordinary Time by Sarah DeCorla-Souza
Our own associate editor Sarah DeCorla-Souza has published her first book of poems, Ordinary Time, available from Plan B Press. Along with his wonderful review, Gregory Luce also interviewed Sarah for Scene4. Sarah’s debut poetry collection has both religious and secular poems, though as Sarah says, her Catholic faith is “at the core of my identity…so it's not surprising that it would be a major theme of my poetry.” These poems explore the sacramentality of our daily lives, how the “ordinary” things we do “can actually be sacred if we’re fulfilling our state in life.” Sarah will be reading at the Reston Used Book Shop on April 30 at 5:30pm. If you’re in the area, come say hello.
Paul Kingsnorth in First Things on “A Wild Christianity"
Paul Kingsnorth spent the night before his fiftieth birthday in Colman’s Cave in County Clare. Kingsnorth, both before and since his conversion to Orthodoxy, has found that “the retreat to the wilds to find wisdom is a story” that continues to speak to him. St. Colman Mac Duagh lived in Colman’s Cave for seven years, back in the sixth century when Ireland was a very different country, with “more than four hundred monasteries, and countless more cells, caves, islands, and hermitages, catering to a growing number of Christian ascetics.” These “green martyrs,” wild saints like Colman, escaped to seek God by dying to the world. As Kingsnorth notes, dying to the world often connected them to nature: “the holiest of the cave Christians, it seems, achieve such a level of theosis—union with God—that they approach again the Edenic state in which humanity was at peace with the rest of creation.” Saints like St. Kevin of Glendalough who, while praying crossfigel, found himself holding a blackbird nest. As the story goes, St. Kevin held his arm out until the nest was built, the eggs hatched and fledged, until “he has forgotten self, forgotten bird/And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.” Kingsnorth believes we are again approaching an age when “wild Christianity” is needed. He asks:
Why, after all, were the cave Christians so sought after? Because they were not like other people. Something had been granted to them, something had been earned, in their long retreats from the world. They had touched the hem. After years in the tombs or the caverns or the woods, their very unworldliness became, paradoxically, just what the world needed.
In this essay, Kingsnorth calls us back to “our roots, both literal and spiritual…the cave awaits.” Please do read it, and his essay, The Cross and the Machine, also in First Things.
On Editing: Bernardo Aparicio García, Mary Ann Miller, and Greg Wolfe at the 2022 CIC
Jess Sweeney from Collegium Institute hosted one of the many fantastic panels at the 2022 Catholic Imagination Conference in Dallas. DT’s Bernardo Aparicio García, Mary Ann Miller from Presence, and Slant’s Greg Wolfe discussed “the Catholic imagination and its relationship to the literary scene and the role that editors play in that.” It was such a wonderful conversation. Please do give it a listen. There’s much there for both writers and readers.
Shemaiah Gonzales on “The Way of Wandering”
Shemaiah Gonzalez has been on an adventure in England, where she walked and wandered, “absolutely aimless for hours each afternoon.” She chronicles this, and other experiences, in her Substack newsletter, Undaunted Joy. We live in a world that prizes snark and sarcasm, the biting tongue, the takedown. Shemaiah is doing her part to combat that, by seeking and seizing the “deep power in joy.” This particular entry explores the relationship between walking and wonder: “It is in wandering that I discover---who I am becoming, my place in this world and who God truly is.” This mode of discovery, with its intimate unveiling of the world and our place in it, cannot happen in a car. There’s something about walking, our footsteps and heartbeat in rhythm together, our senses taking in the world at a steady pace, unmitigated by steel and plastic, by doors and windows that allows us to enter into the experience of being.
When I first typed the title for this link, I misspelled wandering as wondering. Maybe I should have left it that way as these essays from Shemaiah are all about finding joy in the wonders of this world — walking as wonder-ing. There is indeed something about walking that invites and “opens” us to wonder.
Mary’s Song from the Notre Dame Folk Choir’s upcoming album, ‘The Passion'
The Notre Dame Folk Choir has a new album coming out on Ash Wednesday. The 40-track album was produced by Grammy-award winner, Joe Henry. Recorded in Jerusalem, the album “invites listeners to follow in Jesus’s footsteps from Galilee to Golgotha.” These songs are a wonderful accompaniment on our journey through Lent.
An extraordinary essay from Christian Wiman in Harper’s Magazine: “White Buffalo"
This is behind a paywall, but if you can get to it you’ll be well rewarded. It’s harrowing and beautiful and will remind you that you do not always know what you think you know. Wiman shares the story of his family’s troubles, the mess of their lives, and the extravagant goodness of God’s grace.