Author: Andrew Sullivan

Nick Ripatrazone urges a renewed appreciation for the great Catholic short story writer Andre Dubus, whose earthy characters he describes as “trapped in worlds timed by their immediate needs” – smoking, drinking, sex. He especially dwells on Dubus’ powerful tale, “A Father’s Story,” centered on the moral dilemma confronting its main character, Tom Ripley:

Ripley is divorced, owns and boards horses, and tells the reader about his daily Catholic rituals for the first half of the story. This telling would lumber forward in the hands of lesser writers, but Dubus makes the prose confessional, and we later learn the reason Ripley needs forgiveness. His grown daughter, Jennifer, spent a night drinking with friends. She struck a man while driving home, and weeps to her father in the early morning. He drives his pickup to the scene and voices simultaneous prayers: that the man was alive, and, “if he were dead, they would not get Jennifer.” The man is dead, and Ripley chooses his daughter over morality, over even God. He disposes of the body, and this is what he tells God: “I would do it again. For when she knocked on my door, then called me, she woke what had flowed dormant in my blood since her birth, so that what rose from the bed was not a stable owner or a Catholic or any other Luke Ripley I had lived with for a long time, but the father of a girl.”

Thomas Kennedy notes that the spiritual evolution of Dubus’s characters “might be seen as a growth to this ‘weakness’ [of love], to the openness of heart that, in weighing love against principle, chooses the former, although without releasing the latter.” This is the “moral paradox of the contemporary Catholic portrayed by Dubus, the encompassment into a single tension of the heart of the law of the Old Testament and the love of the New.” “A Father’s Story” is often misread. As the father of twin daughters, I fully understand Luke Ripley’s decision. Dubus recognizes that sometimes we must act poorly, immorally, in order to love. I cannot think of another writer who forces me to question God.

The Dish has given Dubus plenty of love – check out QFTDs from him here, here, and here. Previous Dish on “A Father’s Story” here.

Last year around this time, Richard Blanco, a gay Cuban-American, was named the Inaugural poet, the occasion for his writing the poem “One Today.” In an interview for his new memoir, For All of Us, One Today, Blanco discusses how growing up gay in a homophobic environment – his grandmother would tell him, “I’d rather have a granddaughter who’s a whore than a grandson who is a faggot like you” – impacted his writing:

When you’re a kid, you love her unconditionally, and you want to be loved, and at the time, you are just trying to please your grandmother. You act like she tells you not to act. What essentially made sense to me was that my grandmother ultimately made me a writer. She made this prancing little kid with his coloring books and his Play-Doh, she squashed the hell out of him, but she made him an observer of the world versus a participant. She made the little boy with an incredible will to survive — to learn how to read people, and most of all, how to read her emotionally, to know how to act, how to respond, and not be called faggot.

That made me a great observer of human nature, an introvert, and after all, what do writers do but look at the world and write about it. In some ways that was the forgiving moment. I was able to make sense of why my grandmother was in my life. I never had a forgiving moment with her face to face, as the poem describes. It was a great irony that she died without being able to speak. And the silence made me make peace with myself. That’s the only way I can make sense out of her. I don’t think I forgave her more than I just moved on.

Previous Dish on Blanco here, here, and here.

Alison Smale reports (NYT) on Islam classes offered to German primary school students “using state-trained teachers and specially written textbooks” in an effort “to better integrate the nation’s large Muslim minority and counter the growing influence of radical religious thinking”:

The Hesse curriculum effectively places Islamic instruction on equal footing with similarly state-approved ethics training in the Protestant and Catholic faiths. By offering young Muslims a basic introduction to Islam as early as first grade, emphasizing its teachings on tolerance and acceptance, the authorities hope to inoculate young people against more extreme religious views while also signaling state acceptance of their faith.

Leah Libresco argues that the classes “might be a cautionary tale for religious conservatives who want to see their faith more closely woven into state education”:

When running classes in Islam, generally, the German schools run into the same conflicts that must come up when they give students classes in generic Protestantism. Already, in one community, a group of Sunni parents are trying to keep members of the Ahmadiyya reformist sect from influencing the curriculum. When schools teach religion as a matter of ethics, not history, school administrators must either run ecumenical councils or, more likely, just set a curriculum more in line with the school’s goals than the faith’s …

The separation between church and state is there for the protection of both institutions. The state has enormous power to shape culture, and it’s natural for religious communities to want that power deployed molding the culture in their own image.

But the state’s power will serve the state’s ends. So state-sponsored religious education will still, ultimately, be designed to raise good citizens, not good Christians.

Mark Slouka struggles to come to terms with the death of his father:

[A]s far as I can tell, there is no after-map or, more precisely, we each begin making our own the instant the news reaches us that someone we loved is gone. Which is unsettling: this terra is your own, brother, and as incognita as they come. Kübler-Ross? Sorry, the good doctor can’t help you here. The run-up to death may have its stages, as clearly marked as the Tour de France, but past Paris, so to speak, for those remaining on the field, things get fuzzy quick.

No search engine can find you. The guides have disappeared—they don’t know this place. And what were you going to do, anyway, Google: “Dad, who used to tip up sixty-pound rocks so I could grab the red-backed salamanders hiding underneath them when I was four”? No, in the aftermath of loss, the ones you love will keep you whole, but the journey is yours alone. Whatever you do, whatever you feel, becomes the map.

So it’s a problem. Because I miss him. Because I want to tear down this fucking wall between us with my hands. Because the angels and the harps don’t work for me. Because it wasn’t Our Heavenly Father who carried me out to the car at dawn when I was a child, who laid me down on the back seat of the DeSoto and covered me, who was there as I grew, who embarrassed me, disappointed me, loved me.

After experiencing the loss of their parents, Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner started a website, Modern Loss, for mourners in their 20s and 30s:

“This project is called Modern Loss for a reason,” said Soffer. “Older generations seemed to deal traditionally with discussing loss in different ways than we do. And that is a huge generalization, but I didn’t get from people my age ‘they’re in a better place now,’ or ‘now they’re an angel,’ or ‘it was meant to be’ as much as I did from older people, because they’re used to saying that. They’re used to brushing it under the rug, they’re used to not being open about the excruciating aspects of loss.” Birkner and Soffer envisioned a site that would match their group’s conversations: loose, occasionally sarcastic, wide-ranging, and nonjudgmental. Without encouraging readers to wallow in their grief, it would seek to remind them that there is no expiration date to sadness. “The narrative of the long arc of loss is forever. It doesn’t have to own you, but you’re going to experience it in many different ways. It’s OK, because we still experience it,” said Soffer.

In an interview about his new book, The Slavery of Death, Richard Beck thinks through the question:

The answer most of us would give, shaped as we are by the culture, is this: you’re a nobody. If you’re not someone who “stands out” you’re a nobody. Brene Brown calls this the “shame-based fear of being ordinary.” Nobody wants to be ordinary. We want to be extraordinary.

And why is that? Because of existential (death) anxiety. We want our lives to matter, to be noteworthy and significant in the face of death. We don’t want to fade away, we want to leave a dent in the universe. So we grasp at anything that makes us stand out from the crowd, that allows us to make and leave a mark. And so we get caught up in the neurotic social comparison game–online, at work, and in our social relationships. The main symptom of this “shame-based fear of being ordinary” is envy/jealousy fused with a feeling of inferiority and inadequacy. The trouble with this, and here is the pastoral turn, is that everywhere we see Jesus asking us to “take the last place.” To be a servant. To be the littlest, least, and last.

But that is impossible if our egos are being driven by a neurotic and shamed-based anxiety. Because the reality of Good Friday is that if you become like Jesus–if you carry his cross–nobody will pay attention, no one will say thank you, no one will recognize your work. That’s crucifixion. Of the ego, of the self, of our aspirations to be “a somebody.”

So that’s the rub. Jesus asks us to become a “nobody” in the eyes of the world. In our own eyes. But because of our death-infected neurosis–the shamed-based fear of being ordinary–we can’t accept Jesus’s offer. We don’t want to take up the cross. It’s too embarrassing. We don’t want to be a servant. No one will applaud or like us on Facebook.

The Dish previously has featured Beck’s work here, here, and here.