Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: Lori King, Professor of Theology, is a U.S. citizen living in Assisi, Italy. She’s been confined to her home home since Sunday, March 8, at 9 pm. We connected recently via phone. “Even before the lockdown, Mass had been suspended. I’d gone to 6 pm Mass […]
EXISTENTIAL CRISES
AWAKE O YE SLEEPERS
In shaky economic times I must say, I feel right at home. Right away I descend into bunker mentality mode. In fact, having grown up one of eight in a blue-collar home–our father was a bricklayer–I’m more or less always ready for a disaster. I have enough semolina, bulgur, wheat berries, polenta, brown rice, pearl […]
CLOISTERED
Last night we Californians got word that the whole state is in “lockdown”– allowed to leave our homes only for “essential” activities: food, supplies, medicine, doctor, work. All “non-essential” businesses ordered closed. I must say I am peculiarly well-formed for the cloister and in fact have lived like this for months at a time over […]
NOWHERE TO RUN, NOWHERE TO HIDE
I mean that of course in the best possible way. Yesterday morning I went to Mass at the Church of the Assumption in Pasadena, then stayed for a Lenten mission talk by Fr. Francis Benedict of St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, CA. That afternoon I got word that my gym had closed “till further notice” […]
LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19
Fun times! Have you noticed that suddenly, overnight, everyone is an epidemiologist? People you’ve known for decades suddenly have a brother-in-law, a very good friend, or a sister (always unnamed, and whom you’ve never once heard mentioned before) who just happens to be an infectious disease specialist and THEY say… Suddenly everyone’s an oligarch: People […]
OUR POOR DISTRACTED HEARTS
“God alone knows what is in man. No one knows what really to make of himself in his poor distracted heart; whether his real self lives in his longing for a greater love of God, or in his unacknowledged and unrepentant grumbling at the immeasurable demands of his love.” –Father Karl Rahner
BREAD FOR THE ALWAYS UNCERTAIN JOURNEY
I was supposed to be out in the desert today, ostensibly attending the women’s qualifying matches at the annual Indian Wells Tennis Tournament. The two-week tournament, just one step down from a Grand Slam, is a very big deal in the tennis world, and always begins the second week of March. Many years ago I […]
THE FACE OF LOVE CAN BE UGLY AS WELL AS BEAUTIFUL
Roslyn Barnes was a Catholic convert. She dedicated her 1962 Masters’ thesis, a comparison of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Teilhard de Chardin, to her friend, Flannery O’Connor. In Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends, Barnes writes from Chile in August, 1964, to Fr. James McCown: “I am a […]
VAN NUYS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ORATORIO TO OUR DYING HOME
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: “Requiem: This Earth, Our Home” is a new oratorio, written in conjunction with the LA Master Chorale’s Voices Within Oratorio Project. The piece will premiere, for fellow students, the evening of Friday, February 28th at the Van Nuys High School Auditorium. A performance the following day, […]
GOOD THINGS OUT OF NAZARETH
The stock market is melting down, coronavirus is spreading its tentacles, we have in our day “no prince, prophet, or leader, no burnt offering, sacrifice, oblation, or incense, no place to offer first fruits, to find favor with you”…(Daniel 3:38). Yesterday morning on my way to Mass I pulled over to the curb in front of the […]
A LAUNCH INTO LENT
For the last three weeks, I’ve been holding a creative writing workshop in my apartment. This represents a new frontier–I’ve taught writing before, but not in my own home. Feelings of vulnerability, anxiety, awkwardness, fear arise as they do for me, and probably for many of us, when we foray into fresh territory. These are […]
CHESTERTON AND VON BALTHASAR
“The Church is the one thing that saves a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his time.”— G.K. Chesterton
CELEBRATE MARDI GRAS WITH MY TALK AT HOLY FAMILY IN SOUTH PAS
That’s right–the night before Ash Wednesday I’ll be giving a talk at Holy Family’s St. Joseph’s Center in South Pas. Here’s the flyer: LENT WITH SAINTS AND ARTISTS: Selling All We Have to Follow Our Passion Heather King came from a blue-collar New England family, excelled in school, imagined God as a cold, distant, high-school […]
HAPPY ALMOST VALENTINE’S DAY
“When I finally got wind of how things were, I wanted to be sure. And I was mad. Why should everyone know but me? I found my mother upstairs in my bedroom, butting new white sheets on my bed. ‘I want you to tell me where babies come from,’ I screamed. And I made her […]