The other day I had an online conversation with a young seminarian, studying here in the States, who comes from Nigeria and hopes to have his writing published. He’s about to become a deacon and if all goes well, will be ordained next year.
He’s not been home for four years, an ache.
“We read of what’s going on there for Catholics,” I said. “That is so hard, and so sad!“
“The new statistics came out this morning. I can’t even look at them,” he replied.
(As of a year ago, 62,000 Nigerian Christians had been murdered since 2000).
“A friend of my brother, also a priest, was recently found dead, executed, in his car. To be a priest in Nigeria means the willingness to be a martyr.”
Rosamond Purcell (b. 1942) is a Boston-based photographer and writer whose domains are the palimpsest melding of past, present, and future; the natural and the man-made; the wonder and mystery of decay.
Raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts — her father was a professor of Byzantine history and Victorian literature — she’s spent much of her life in the dim back rooms of natural history museums.
In “Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals” (Mariner Books, $16.68), she writes:
“As a sojourner, I relish the random search: wandering through miles of corridors, opening hundreds of heavy doors, and choking through fumes, dust, and dark to find the holy grail.”
A huge thank you to all the many readers who responded to my call for Credible Witnesses: I so appreciate each and every one of you. I tried to respond to each person individually, but if I somehow missed you, my apologies.
Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of the spiritual classic “Man’s Search for Meaning,” wrote:
“Dostoevsky said once, ‘There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.’ These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom — which cannot be taken away — that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”
Catholicism is tailor-made to make us worthy of our suffering: past, present, and future. Whether our transmission just went out, or our house just burned down, we’ve been welcomed into and united with the suffering of Christ, which is to say the suffering at the heart of all mankind: the lame, the blind, the leper, the poor in spirit.
This is a piece that originally appeared October 26, 1997, in the LA Times Sunday Magazine.
I no longer live in LA. I’m no longer married. The LA Times no longer has a Sunday magazine, nor does St. Basil’s have a daily 5 pm Mass. And as the collective human heart breaks for the devastation in LA, the piece seems as timely now as it ever was.
COPA DE ORO
The newscasters here focus on the rats in the palm trees, the model-murdering photographers, the houses sliding into the sea, but there is so much they don’t say about L.A. They don’t say that the names of the purple flowers alone make a kind of poem: jacaranda, sea lavender, lilies-of-the-Nile; lobelia, heliotrope, blue-eyed grass. They don’t talk about white stucco walls curtained with bougainvillea the color of lit rubies or the sound of eucalyptus leaves, rustling like the skirts of ball gowns, in a Santa Ana wind.
Author Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, Harvard-trained economist and mother of eight, realized somewhere along the line that “in a two-child world, an eight-child choice begs for an explanation.”
Pakaluk happens to be Catholic but she didn’t choose her family size because the Church decreed it. Our stance on abortion and birth control notwithstanding, as Pakaluk points out, “There’s no doctrine that it’s holier to end up with more kids.”
I am safely arrived and settled in NYC for a couple of weeks.
Sunday, flight day, and Monday were the coldest days of the year to date. My bizarre faux-Cossack hat and super duper Arctic-worthy coat stood me in excellent stead! Yesterday I braved the cold and like a good tourist, made my way just for the heck of it (though had a goal in mind which was this Prints and Textiles exhibit at the NY Public Library) from 61st and Lex down Fifth Avenue to 42nd Street. HORDES of people. At the library, HORDES of people. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I stopped in a for a blessed respite, HORDES of people.
Had a new bed delivered a couple of days ago (a story in itself). Two guys pulled up in the truck–I welcomed them, showed them where to set it up, and went into my office to get out of their hair. “All set,” the one guy, Latino, 25 or so, called after a while. I went into the bedroom, said, “Wow, it looks great.”
And then, glancing around the room–which is adorned with a large picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a crucifix, a Tree of Life, several small retablo and prayer cards, and a portrait of St. Martin de Porres–he asked: “Are you Catholic?’
“Heck, yeah!” I confirmed.
“My wife is Catholic,” he continued. “She’s teaching me all kinds of stuff. LIke…Christmas is when the baby Jesus was born!”
Welp, I am back in Tucson from St. Andrew’s Abbey and am now officially a Benedictine Oblate.
The experience was huge, partly because it represents a more radical consecration of life and intention; partly because my faults and failings and wounds were revealed to me in a new way, along with what I am obligated to do to insofar as possible correct/amend them; and partly because, also in a new way, I saw the power of prayer and the communion of living saints.
Here, for example, is the email I received from the good Br. Sixtus at Portsmouth (Benedictine) Abbey in Rhode Island:
“Good morning, Heather,
Hoping that everything went well this week for your retreat at Valyermo, culminating in your oblation yesterday to the abbot of St. Andrew’s. Abbot Matthew asked me to let you know that he offered his Mass for you Thursday morning. I just got back Thursday evening from NYC and, before I went to Penn Station for my lunchtime train back to RI, I attended the 7 a.m. Mass at Holy Innocents Church on W. 37th Street. You may know of it, but Servant of God Dorothy Day made her first Promise of Oblation in that very church on April 26, 1955…
I offered up my own Mass Thursday morning for your intention. Later that evening, as the monks were gathered in the Calefactory for recreation after dinner and before Compline, I added your intention to the intercessions prayed for by the community. Lastly, on Sunday, December 1, the Portsmouth Oblates and Friends gathered on campus for an Advent Day of Recollection. I gave a presentation on next year’s Jubilee Year of Hope and the opening of the Holy Doors in Rome and elsewhere. I began by letting them know of your connection to Portsmouth and of your big day on Dec. 12, and we offered a prayer together for you. All in all, there has been a river of prayers heading your way!”
My friend Rita was praying for me from Rochester, New York. My old friend Lucy from St. Francis in LA, I believe she is 87, and will fly back to her beloved Phillippines on Dec 26th, and has suffered long and deeply from a variety of physical ailments, and watches EWTN Mass every day as she is now largely homebound, was offering fervent prayers from Silver Lake.
Dear friends Tensie and Dennis from the Guadalupe Catholic Worker drove 4 hours to spend the night before and to be at the monastery for the big Mass, and my brother Ross took the day off from his job as a teacher in Victorville, CA, to join us also. I can’t possibly say how much it meant to me to have the three of them there.
I also saw during my week there how, as an introvert, I tend to hang back. I’ve been going to the Abbey for 24 years, for example, and really only had contact during that whole time with one priest, Fr. Francis. Who died this year! I “know” the monks by name and bio, and have seen many of them every single time I’ve gone on retreat there over the decades, and they are therefore dear to me in an obscure way, and yet I never “interpose” myself. It’s true I dislike “intruding,” especially on people of prayer, but on the other hand, I will then notice that another retreatant is friendly and chatty with the monks and become judgmental and loathe as I am to admit it, jealous.
So THAT’S what I noticed. I can’t have it both ways. Plus I am now seriously pledged to join myself spiritually to the monks. So–I made contact with the new Oblate Director and said a bit about myself and went to Confession with him. I made sure to chat with a couple of fellow Oblates who live in the vicinity and volunteer at the Abbey, and to chat with Julie, who is lovely and schedules the retreats, and I pitched myself to give a retreat there possibly in 2026, and I approached one of the monks who gives spiritual direction and asked if it would be okay to write to him (huge quiet beneficient smile–“Of course it would”). And altogether just opened my heart and person in way I hadn’t quite there before.
We all have these kind of personality tempates that get put in place early on, and then life events conspire to cement them in place, they become the sea we swim in, and…we forget sometimes that we can change, and that we’re called to be at least open to change. If you’re the sensitive type who has experienced, or perceive yourself ot have experienced, a certain amount of rejection and abandonment, you can develop a whole persona that protects or purports to against more of the same. And the telltale sign that something is off is if you then start feeling sorry for yourself because no-one notices you, or validates you, or sees your questing, fragile heart, ravenous for God, and accommodates, connects with, and reinforces you!
You see the problem. Where is the desire and determination to accommodate, connect with and reinforce SOMEONE ELSE??
St. John of the Cross points out that God is concealed, and that if we want to meet Him, we must be concealed, too. Must forget ourselves, lose ourselves, hide ourselves in a way.
So: How can I surrender? How can I serve? How can I share?
SAVE ME A SPOT!
Meanwhile, I’m flying to NYC Sunday for Christmas in Manhattan. Good news is I am already half-packed from St. Andrew’s. I’m so grateful to be in my beautiful house, strung with vintage mercury glass bulbs, lights, candles and cards for the week, as we begin the O antiphons at Evening Prayer tonight.
Today I have a “fun” day planned–taking off at 7 am to drive to my dentist in Nogales, Mexico! That’s right. A couple of fillings, no doubt yet another piece of the dire news I seem to get every time I visit the tooth doctor. Big deal. A small sampling of humanity reminds me of the burdens and crosses of the rest of the world and I am humbled. A mother of a wheelchair-bound, deeply autistic daughter, and another newborn who is herself, the mother, trying to get clean and sober. Lucy, who has terrible back pain and will endure a 17-hour flight to the Phillippines to be with her people. The refugee, the homeless in winter, the war-torn. The lonely, the lost, the rageful, the depressed, the addicts of every stripe so dear to my heart.
I will pray for us all as I drive through the desert this morning. Blessed Third Week of Advent.
AN UPCOMING EVENT IN DENVER
FEBRUARY 1, 2025:
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: MAGNIFICAT OF DENVER LUNCHEON, 11 am-2 pm
TITLE OF TALK:“My Conversion Story”
Venue: St. Thomas More Church, 8035 South Quebec Street, Centennial, CO 80112 Organizer: Celia Kulbe, (303) 884-3902, magnificatofdenver@heather REGISTER HERE.
I make my final promises as a Benedicine Oblate at today’s Mass. They give you a piece of “parchment” and you hand-write out the pertinent passage of the oblation–“I offer myself to almighty God, through the Blessed Virgin Mary and our Holy Father Benedict…and I do promise before God and all his saints the reformation of my life, and the service of God and humanity…This I do on the 12th day of December, in the year of our Lord, 2024″…
In February 1945, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in the Russian prison camps. Passages in letters to a friend had been found by military censors to be insufficiently respectful of Stalin.
After his “rehabilitation,” in 1959 he wrote perhaps his best-known and most well-loved story: “Matryona’s House.”
It begins like this:
“For at least six months after the incident took place every train used to slow down almost to a standstill at exactly a hundred and eighty-four kilometres from Moscow. The passengers would crowd to the windows and go out onto the open gangway at the end of the carriages to find out whether the track was under repair or if the train was ahead of schedule. But these were not the reasons for the delay.
I am so not one of those people who sit around decrying the commercialism of Christmas. If buying gifts for your friends and family seems wrong or obligatory or like an empty gesture to you, or wasteful, or over-the-top, or show-offy and competitive or like a weaponized version of love, don’t do it.
I don’t–but I also don’t begrudge or much pay attention to what anyone else does.
My old friend from Maine sends me a Gustave Baumann calendar each year: I send her a book. I contribute to a few of my favorite charities. I hand-address and hand-write a message and send out Christmas cards. And I deck out my living space with old cards I’ve saved often for years, vintage mercury bulbs, Advent calendars, string lights and candles.
But mostly for me Christmas is about the mystery, the liturgy, the Sacraments. I love switching out my Ordinary Time Weeks 18-34 breviary, which I bought used decades ago and is swathed in dark green imitation plastic, for the Advent and Christmas season one, bound in dark blue leather.
Run, don’t walk, to “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light” at the Getty through Dec. 8. You could easily spend the whole day contemplating this beautifully curated, fascinatingly thought-provoking exhibit.
“Lumen” is part of the “PST ART: Art and Science Collide” series currently mounted at various sites around LA. Special installations by Pasadena-based Helen Pashgian and Charles Ross, both artists who explore light and space, extend “Lumen” throughout the museum.
An essay entitled “A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects” sets the tone:
“To be human is to crave light. We rise and sleep according to the rhythms of the sun, and have long associated light with divinity.”
“Indeed, we know that when the earthly tent in which we dwell is destroyed we have a dwelling provided for us by God, a dwelling in the heavens, not made by hands but to last forever. We groan while we are here, even as we yearn to have our heavenly habitation envelop us…While we live in our present tent we groan; we are weighed down beause we do not wish to be stripped naked but rather to have the heavenly dwelling envelop us, so that what is mortal may be absorbed by life.” 2 Cor. 5:1-8.
