Public shaming, scolding, and snitching aren’t punishable by law, but everyone knows betraying a friend is a dastardly moral crime.
Or everyone used to.
In this culture where calling out “friends” is actually lauded, in this week’s Angelus column I ponder the nobility of the martyrs who went the other way and died under torture.
(more…)
This week’s Angelus News column is about a 1963 film called A Child is Waiting, directed by John Cassavetes. Burt Lancaster plays the psychiatrist director of Crawthorne, a state institution for children with mental and emotional disabilities, and Judy Garland is a new teacher who challenges his methods.
Over on Substack you’ll find a review of Tove Jansson’s A Summer Book and another of Rose-Lynn Fisher’s A Topography of Tears.
June is the hottlest month of the year here in Tucson, but I sort of like the long afternoons inside with my films and books and then Evening Prayer and Mass at Newman Center (I have other options as well).
Still one slot left in my next Writing Workshop–it starts a week from tomorrow, so last call!
My Angelus arts and culture column this week is on one of my (many) soul-mates: the very strange Hans Christian Andersen:
The truly brutal summer heat hasn’t yet quite kicked in here in the Sonoran Desert…though my front yard is overgrown with trees and agaves and is actually cooler than outside the “enclosure” as I’ve come to think of it, leading my monastic little life as I do.
I’ve taken to having my morning prayer outside, on the glider, with my candle and incense, accompanied by the dawn chorus of my beloved birds. There are a pair of resident cardinals, tons of mourning doves, house finches, goldfinches, and white-throated sparrows, I spotted a vermilion flycatcher in the back yard last week–oh, hummingbirds, of course–and a Gila woodpecker (these also abound, very comforting to hear them hammering away at the telephone pole) recently performed his ablutions in the birdbath…
Anyway, this, to me, is the “abundance” and “prosperity” people natter on about.
(more…)
This week’s arts and culture column features a podcast (the only one I listen to, actually) I HIGHLY recommend: Haptic & Hue.
From the H & H website:
Haptic & Hue explores the way in which cloth speaks to us and the impact it has on our lives. It looks at how fabric traditions have grown up and the innovations that underpin its creation. It thinks about the skills that go into constructing it and what it means to the people who use it. It looks at the different light textiles cast on the story of humanity.
All of humanity, not only women. This is a quality offering, and the people who make it do the world a great service.
Other news: The entire month of May in Tucson has been heaven. Temps haven’t yet soared to the uncomfortable 100-degree plus range. I spend each early monring on my front patio enjoying my aviary. A pesky ground squiirrel has teken up residence under an adcaent shed and keeps trying to dig a burrow in the back yard which I just know would extend underneath the house. Let’s just say I am an a first-name basis with several of the personnel at Termagon.
(more…)
This week’s Angelus News column is about the (my) unfortunate tendency to want the people I help to have PROMISE! Ha ha, good luck with that! Just ask Jesus…
On other fronts, I am having fun over at Substack and invite you to join me there.
I’m working up a column on four or five California food writers, which will make for some juicy reading.
I’m looking forward to my upcoming visit to LA, followed by a retreat at St. Andrew’s Abbey.
I have subscribed for a month to MAX in order to watch ROLAND GARROS aka the French Open. It took me months to recover from Garbine Muguruza’s retirement, but now my gal is Peyton Stearns.
And I am deep in silence, solitude, gratitude, and prayer.
Wishing one and all a lovely three-day weekend.
This week my Angelus News column features several iconic California novels:
“West was an eccentric and a huge boozer. He died at 37 when, en route back to LA from a trip to Mexicali, he ran a stop sign near the Salton Sea and caused an accident which killed him and his young wife.
He achieved posthumous semi-cult fame and “The Day of the Locust” was later made into a movie.
That’s a story with California written all over it.”
(more…)
Blessed Friday in the Octave of Easter!
Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a Jewish author from Austria who, having emigrated to London, was in his day one of the most popular and translated writers in Europe.
His 1939 novel, “Beware of Pity,” tells the story of a twisted psychological “romance” grounded in a deeply disordered concept of compassion. It’s been called frightening, gripping, intoxicating, and Zweig’s single greatest work.
Anyone who has ever been the victim — from either end — of unrequited love will squirm, it must be said deliciously (if with horror), throughout.
An aristocratic invalid in a wheelchair, a dashing but callow cavalry officer, a doting but judgment-beclouded father, a faux-martyr doctor: there’s an over-the-top 1946 movie starring Lilli Palmer, too.
Read all about it in my Angelus News column this week.
(more…)
Greetings, all.
This week’s Angelus News column is a reflection about sitting with Christ in the Garden at Gethsemane.
It begins with a quote from Albert Camus: “When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane.”
—from “The Myth of Sisyphus”
After Easter, I hope to start working up a new Writing Workshop format and setting some dates.
Wishing you all a rich, blessed, profound Triduum.
Meanwhile, I urge you to subscribe–which you can do FOR FREE if you wish–to my new Substack, which is essentially the blog you’re used to reading here.
As always, a thousand thanks for any and all support.
(more…)
Greetings. I hope everyone had a good week.
This week’s Angelus News column features Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl, patroness of ‘people without categories’ and a fantastic (and eccentric) French laywoman who lived among and cared for the poor. She also wrote many books, most notably The Joy of Believing.
Other exciting happenings: the people next door have decided to build an “ADU” (I call them ICUs–what’s wrong with the lovely phrase guest house?) Whatever you want to call it, the construction will take place about fifty feet from my office. I have already befriended the workers and learned the estimated completion time is three months which really doesn’t sound that bad. Plus, having attained a new level of maturity during Lent, I am not allowing the prospect of noise from 6:30 am to 3 each day to rattle me one bit!
From Father Donald Haggerty’s new book, The Hour of Testing: “As a consecrated woman wrote to my once, her suffering had become for her ‘almost like a precious royal garment that is given to me to wear–and it’s an honor to do so–but which actually does not belong to me.’”
In that case–happy to lend it out!
(more…)
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
Lent is upon us. Pray, fast, and give alms, saith the Lord.
Apropos of fasting, I recently read a food-based memoir that is about very much more than food.
Agata lzabela Brewer, author of “The Hunger Book: A Memoir from Communist Poland” (Mad Creek Books, $24.95), grew up in Lviv during the 1980s with a terrifying, unstable, alcoholic mother and a little brother whom she adored and protected.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
Recently someone with whom I’m walking the path of recovery chided me for being selfish. She thought I should offer myself for a certain kind of service that, at this point in my life, work, and Benedictine oblateship, I feel is beyond me.
“This isn’t just about you and your self-transformation,” she said. “It’s about passing what we have on to others.”
My first reaction was an inward, “Excuse me? My whole LIFE is a service!” The prayer, the books, the talks, the columns, the 15 years of blog posts, the endless correspondence, the travel, the countless “favors,” the hours spent in recovery circles, both giving and receiving. In fact, in the recent past, I’d faithfully shown up in service to her for an hour each week for more than a period of two years!
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
Sister Wendy Beckett (1930-2018), a contemplative nun and consecrated virgin, delighted audiences worldwide during the 1990s with her BBC documentaries on the history of art.
Born in Johannesburg, she moved as a child to Scotland; in 1946 she joined the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, a teaching order, and earned a degree in English Literature at Oxford.
She then returned to South Africa and in spite of her “constant longing to pray,” lived an active life of teaching from 1954 to 1970. When she began to have stress-induced heart trouble and epileptic seizures, she was given permission to return to England. There, in solitude and silence, she found her true vocation.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
The older I get, the more deeply I ponder the axiom that there’s a little bit of bad in the best of us, and a little bit of good in the worst of us.
That we can exercise incredible nobility of spirit in one area — and incredible sloth, or blindness, or pride, or ongoing compulsive behavior, in another — is an ongoing mystery.
I think of Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, whose lifelong addiction to nicotine led to the emphysema that killed him. Married for 53 years to the faithful Lois, a union that by all accounts bore abundant fruit, Bill nevertheless had a complicated emotional life that included deep relationships, at the very least emotional, with at least two other women.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
“Let’s make Catholicism weird again,” is the cri du jour (cry of the day) of today’s “influencer” crowd. Again? When has it not been weird?
For starters, we have a Savior who speaks in parables, who commands us to eat his flesh and drink his blood, and who then hangs suffering and silent, nailed to the cross. Can anyone possibly imagine Jesus trying to “curate an image,” or taking a selfie, or impugning his integrity trying to be popular or “trending” or cool?
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.