“He is an advocate of the poor who has consistently opposed the Argentinian government’s ostensible programs for the poor. A social activist who rejects most social reform. A churchman who refused many of the elaborate trappings of his office while promoting the power of the church. A populist who denies almost every request for an interview. A leftist who denounces the state power and cultural changes demanded by the left. A reactionary who despises the accumulation of wealth and the libertarian freedoms praised by the right. No attempt to impose liberal and conservative definitions on him will succeed. Pope Francis simply won’t fit in those categories, mostly because the ancient religious insights of Christianity—taken, as he takes them, in their undiluted form—cannot find an easy place in the modern world,” – Jody Bottum.
Year: 2013
Faces Of The Day
Pinar stops to admire Johnson Tsang‘s sculptures:
The sculptor is perhaps best recognized for his “Coffee Kiss” piece from his Yangyuang series, in which two kissing faces are formed out of what seems to be coffee spilling from a pair of cups. … The artist’s metallic and ceramic structures often feature a cooperation between inanimate objects and human beings.
Death’s Checklist
Caitlin Doughty, the woman behind Jezebel’s “Ask A Mortician” series, explains the benefit of confronting one’s own death. She discusses “Ars Moriendi,” a manual from the Middle Age that “was basically an instructional tract for how to die, or the best ways to die”:
There was an experiment done where they went into a nursing home with elderly people, and they gave them a plant to take care of. And they said, “This plant is going to die if you don’t take care of it. You’re responsible for watering and caring for this plant.” And they found that the people they gave those plants to lived significantly longer than those who didn’t have them, because they felt some control over their life, they had some reason to be moving forward and to be taking these daily steps. I think “Ars Moriendi” had a similar purpose: The dying person is given this measure of control over their own death and moving ahead, not just a victim of our medical system where they’re like, “I’m just going to lie here and slowly go crazy and rot and die.”
Believing In The Beautiful
In an interview exploring the intersection of faith and art in her work, the painter Dominique Ovalle ponders our suspicion of beauty:
There is a tendency for some people to sneer at beauty or to revile it, because it is so attractive and magnetic. That makes it untrustworthy to fearful people. If people have been let down before—by life or the actions of others—there may be a tendency to mistrust things that appear to be good. It is hard to swallow that some things are good, beautiful, and true. Hans Urs von Balthasar said, “We can be sure that whoever sneers at [beauty’s] name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.” When people do encounter something pure and beautiful, they have an opportunity to accept it, to believe it. That is the pivotal moment: when art meets life, when it meets reality, when it meets you and me. That’s where the conversation is.
She described the painting featured above, “The Deposition,” this way:
This year I figured out that I’ve spent over 1,228 hours in churches, most of which was spent contemplating the art. This is my contribution to the tradition of illustrating the events in Christ’s life. This painting depicts a moment following the death of Christ, when His body has been taken down from the cross, and His spirit enters into hell. I hope this painting may add some spiritual insight into who Christ was– and of the beauty of his message, miracles, and good works; as well as the suffering and loneliness that he experienced during His time on earth.
See more of Ovalle’s art here.
“Why Pray?”
Joe Linker turns to Thomas Merton to discern the meaning of prayer:
For Merton, prayer seems to be a kind of poetry, but only after acknowledging a marketplace uselessness of both … The modern world presents problems for the poet and the prayer: “Can contemplation still find a place in the world of technology and conflict which is ours?” Peace, and wholeness, Merton argues, are not “the most salient characteristics of modern society.” No kidding. Yet, “What is keeping us back from living lives of prayer? Perhaps we really don’t want to pray. This is the thing we have to face.” But, if we do want to consider prayer, or contemplation, or poetry, how do we go about it? “If you want a life of prayer, the way to get it is by praying,” Merton says.
Merton’s practical advice:
“The real purpose of meditation is this,” Merton says: “To teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow.” Still, we might find ourselves bored with all of this, with the idea we are going to spend any time away from our busy schedules on something as trivial as prayer or poetry. We want to feel productive. We want to help others. We’ll go to church, appear to be part of some community, put some bills in the basket, sprinkle some holy water on our face, just in case there really is something to all the hocus-pocus. For the bored or busy, Merton seems to advise to not only get it while we can but where we can: “Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.” One can pray “with few words or none…half-hopeless.” There are poems like this, or there should be.
Mental Health Break
The Amish Romance Readership
Valerie Weaver-Zercher sizes up the market for Amish romance novels:
[U]nlike the audience for reality series like TLC’s Breaking Amish or the Discovery Channel’s Amish Mafia, readers of these novels don’t want to see their Amish wasted, tattooed, touring sex museums, swearing, or packing heat. They want chaste heroines, tender heroes, devotional content, and maybe the suspense of a family secret or a forbidden Amish-English love. Amish romance novels offer readers three dimensions of chastity: chaste narratives about chaste protagonists living within a subculture that is itself impeccably chaste, refusing seduction by the car, public-grid electricity, phones in the house, higher education, and modern fashion. Despite the suggestion by some that the appeal of Amish fiction must lie in the arousal of coverings coming off, or suspenders being suspended — hence the coy industry term “bonnet rippers” — most Amish novels are as different from Fifty Shades of Grey as a cape dress is from a spiked collar. A line from Cindy Woodsmall’s When the Heart Cries is about as erotic as it gets: “The longer he stood so close to her, the stronger the need to kiss her lips became. But he was afraid she might not appreciate that move.” Readers frequently express appreciation that Amish novels are “clean reads,” and that they can leave them lying around the house without worrying that one of their kids might pick them up.
Earlier Dish on the subject here.
Good Deeds Don’t Cancel Out Bad Ones
Just One Verse
While researching Reinhold Niebuhr’s papers in the Library of Congress, Justin Hawkins uncovered a fascinating exchange between the theologian and William Nichols, editor of This Week Magazine, who asked him, “If as a result of some cataclysm, it were possible to retain just one passage from the Bible – what would your choice be?” Niebuhr’s response:
The passage of the Bible which I would choose is Ephesians 4:32, “And be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” I take it that the purpose is to find a passage of Scripture which will contain as much as possible of the whole message of the Bible. I have chosen this particular passage because it combines the high point of the Christian ethic, which is forgiving love, with a reference to the whole basis of the ethic, which is the historical revelation in Christ. We are asked to forgive one another. The charity of forgiveness is, however, not possible as a duty. It is only possible in terms of the knowledge that we are ourselves sinners, and that we have been forgiven. It therefore combines the Christian Gospel with the Christian ethic in succinct form.
Hawkins comments:
While this answer stands with the majority of the Christian tradition, it is also distinctively Niebuhrian in several ways. First, it recognizes the limitation on human moral performance. Niebuhr notes that mere knowledge of the moral imperative is insufficient to actually perform it. Secondly, the humble approach we must take toward our moral performance is occasioned by the reality of sin. Though Niebuhr would later mention that he regretted so frequently employing the language of sin because it entailed historical and doctrinal baggage from which he wanted to distance himself, that language is inextricably bound up with the rest of Niebuhr’s political, ethical, and theological projects.
A Poem For Sunday
“Spring Uncovered” by May Swenson:
Gone the scab of ice that kept it snug,
the lake is naked.Skins of cloud on torn blue:
sky is thin.A cruelty, the ribs of trees
ribboned by sun’s organdy.Forsythia’s yellow, delicate rags,
flip in the wind.Wind buckles the face of the lake;
it flinches under a smack of shot.Robbed of stoic frost, grass
bleeds from gaffs of the wind.Rock, ridging the lake,
unchapped of its snowcloth, quakes.But autumn fruits upon the water,
Plumage of plum, and grape, and pumpkin bills:Two mallards ride, are sunny baskets;
they bear ripe light.And a grackle, fat as burgundy,
gurgles on a limb.His bottle-glossy feathers
shrug off the wind.
(From May Swenson: Collected Poems, Library of America © 2013. Reprinted with the permission of The Literary Estate of May Swenson. All rights reserved. Photograph © 2013 Mark Seth Lender)
The Dish 