In this week’s Angelus News column, I write about Father Donald Haggerty’s new book: The Hour of Testing:: Spiritual Depth and Insight in a Time of Ecclesial Uncertainty. Interesting that the book’s publication coincided almost exactly with the election of our new Pope. Let’s all pray for him!
Category: OUTSIDE LIES MAGIC
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GOLDEN GIFTS FOR ALL
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!”
He hadn’t known.
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THE CRY OF THE EARTH
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
From the Pope’s monthly intentions for 2024:
“September: For the cry of the Earth. We pray that each one of us will hear and take to heart the cry of the Earth and of victims of natural disasters and climate change, and that all will undertake to personally care for the world in which we live.”
Earlier this month, I made a silent retreat at a Franciscan friary in Ireland’s County Donegal.
The natural beauty is stunning almost beyond belief. Photos can’t begin to do the area justice, partly because the beauty in large part consists in the panorama of sea, coves, shore, and sky. To walk, to smell the rich, sweet, damp, ferny bog and salt air, and to hear the cows lowing and the sheep bleating in the pastures above were rare treats.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
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THE MISUNDERSTOOD HERON: A CONNEMARA FOOD TRUCK
“Best Weekly Column on Arts, Culture, Food, and Leisure,” said the Catholic Media Association this year of my humble Angelus offering.
Food! Who knew? Not only had I been derelict in my duty, I realized, but my horizon had considerably widened.
To that end let me bring you to the Irish village of Leenane, and a food truck with a global following: Misunderstood Heron.
“Fresh, Local, Never Conventional” are its watchwords.
A café with wild Atlantic produce and views, the wood-paneled truck sits on a bluff overlooking the Killary Fjord in County Galway’s Connemara coast.
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NYC TOUR GUIDE
Manhattan, I reflected on a recent trip, is like a giant swaddling cloth, enclosing the Mystical Body.
Within a block of almost any Mass you can buy a cruller from the coffee-and-donut guy (“There ya go, sweetie”), a box of figs from the fruit guy, a fish gyro from the falafel truck.
As always when traveling, I walked everywhere I could, leaning toward museums, gardens, and churches.
I also set aside a day for a subway trip to Washington Heights, way up toward the north tip of the island. Step out of the 190th Street train station and you’ll see a raucous public basketball court and playground, right next to the St. Frances Cabrini Shrine.
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ROGER ACKLING: ARTIST OF SUNLIGHT AND WOOD
Roger Ackling, British artist (1947-2014), sat for hours training the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass onto pocket-sized pieces of salvaged wood.
The sun burned small dots; the scorched dots formed ordered lines. The resulting creations are exquisite miniatures: “counter, original, spare, strange” to steal a line from Romantic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty.”
Ackling was not a conventional believer but his thought, intense focus, discipline, refusal to pontificate, and sense of humor bespeak a profound respect for mystery.
“Between the Lines: The Work and Teaching of Roger Ackling” (Occasional Papers, $21), a book of personal essays, reflections, reminiscences, and photographs edited by Emma Kalkhoven, is a good place to start.
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BACK FROM RETREAT
“Perhaps the saints became holy because they never made peace with the impossibility of seeing God in this life. Among the poor, or in the midst of hostile or indifferent souls, they went in search of his face, only to return again to the silence of prayer where God once more hid himself. These souls lived as though always on the verge of finding a treasure and never succeeding. Blind and groping, cast back into darkness after refusing every partial vision–this was always preferable to taking comfort in a brilliant shadow.”
–Fr. Donald Haggerty, from Contemplative Provocations“It is yearning that makes the heart deep.”
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MAXIMILISM
I’ve been reflecting that the fruit/logical end to a culture based on power, property and prestige is an overweening cheapness, ugliness, homogeneity and banality; an oppressive force, monstrous in its seeming blandness but actually evil…militatating against vigor, humor, creativity, curiosity, interest, enthusiasm, spirit, life. Come, it says, fall asleep….
Understandably we want to anesthetize ourselves against the pain…blend in…belong to a tribe…It is probably one of the greatest gifts of my life that my own efforts in that direction led to an addiction so deep that I was faced with the choice either to quit or to die…
Of course I still have my own myriad ways to “fall asleep,” distract myself, avoid being awake. (And of course I also avail myself of the bits of culture that appeal to me: Is anyone else watching Wimbledon for the next two weeks?)
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BRING ME THE SUNSET IN A CUP
I’ve been perusing my Emily Dickinson poems…
“Oh sacrament of summer days,
Oh Last Communion in the Haze–
Permit a child to join.Thy sacred emblems to partake–
Thy consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine!”–from Poem 23/130, c. 1859, beginning “These are the days when Birds come back–“
Summer is by far my favorite season. Don’t be alarmed by the breaking-all-heat-records news bulletins from Arizona. Granted, if “the grid” went down, things would get pretty hideous, but my birthday is in July and I’ve always felt most comfortable, most hopeful, most loved when surrounded by air the temperature of amniotic fluid.
Which I just learned is approximately 99.7 degrees.
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CLIMBING MOUNT SISYPHUS
“If a man settles in a certain place and does not bring forth the fruit of that place, the place itself casts him out, as one who has not borne its fruit.”
–Anonymous 4th-century desert father
I’ve come to love Tucson and its somewhat extreme weather.
When it’s not either baking (June, July, August and September) or freezing (December, January and February), the wind blows.
Because the front yard, the back yard, the side cabana and the sidewalk median in front of my house are planted with old-growth mesquite trees, this means that I spend much of my life sweeping. In fall, the tiny oval leaves fall off: bushels accumulate. In spring, the catkins drop: bushels.
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OUR FRIENDS THE INSECTS, WOOLEN WHALERS’ CAPS, AND JAPANESE APPLIQUÉ
I’m going to start introducing some of my zillions of favorite artists (I use the term loosely) in my weekly YouTubes.
This one is on self-taught, 19th-century, deeply Catholic French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabré, who lived in relative poverty, would steal out in the dead of night with his little nets and boxes, collected some of his beloved friends, then spent hours and hours watching and studying them. He wrote a splendid, hightly fascinating book (not academic at all!) called Fabré’s Book of Insects.
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BRIDESHEAD REVISITED AND OTHER TRAVELS
I am safe home from my trip to LA and other points California, and very glad to be here. The cacti are beginning their glorious spring bloom.
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I AM ON A LONELY ROAD
And for all you Joni Mitchell fans, I am traveling…
Here’s a video, dateline West Hollywood.
For my readers are never far from my mind and heart!
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THE ROAD MORE-LESS TRAVELED
I’ve been in my beloved state of California since last Saturday. Boy, does absence make the heart grow fonder! There’s something huge to be said for leaving a place and coming back periodically to visit. Everything seems fresh, new, astonishing, delightful.
LAX, for example! Why what a huge wonderful airport with the sun shining, the runways happily busy, the lines moving nicely, the Thrifty car rental shuttle zipping promptly along. I’d never rented a car here and imagined that getting out to the 405 would be a nightmare, but no! Down La Tijera I went and next thing I knew was gliding past the Getty, merging on to the 101, and making my way smoothly up the coast.
At home I drive a 2013 Fiat 500 which I still think of as “new,” but again, was I in for a surprise. The Camry they gave me for one thing has about a thousand percent more pickup than my little vehicle plus it has a big touch-tone screen that–those of you who moved into the 21st century some time ago already know this–when I plugged in my phone automatically showed the map, played music off Spotify, showed lists of nearby Starbucks, enabled the making and answering of phone calls…
I have bluetooth in my Fiat which does enable me to make hands-free calls but that’s about it. I mean the car has a CD player (that requires the aid of a butter knife for ejection). I can’t simultaneously charge the phone and hear Siri or listen to music. If I want, say, Spotify I have to plug the phone into a separate CV or something like that cable. And when I put the car in reverse I don’t have a video screen that tells me if they’re something behind me I’m about to crash into. I crane my neck, old-school.
So a newer car alone was a pleasant revelation.
If anyone’s ever driven north on the 101 from LA to, say, Santa Barbara, you know there’s this one spot where I think it’s the 126 merges in and you go up and around a little rise and the first sign for San Francisco appears and on your left you suddenly see the Pacific. It’s absolutely thrilling, every time. It’s the California of John Steinbeck, Jack London, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac–or it is to me. For those of us who have come from another place, it’s a vision of the Promisesd Land. No matter how many times you’ve seen it, no matter how jaded you think you are.
Plus what follows is Ventura, which involves a 12-mile drive with bluffs on the right and the full-on gleaming ocean on the left, which happened I swear to be turquoise the day I was driving up, then Santa Barbara, Goleta, fields of yellow mustard flowers in the spring, rolling live oak-covered hills, the smell of eucalyptus, hidden beaches. All the people who love to hate California I feel so sorry for. There is a feeling of wide-openness and welcome and majestic beauty and life-giving energy that I haven’t experienced anywhere else on earth (not that I’ve traveled the earth, by any means).
I stopped this time in Solvang which is a dreadfully crowded fake Danish village on the far end of which is the beautiful Mission Santa Inés. I’d visited once before several years ago and it was lovely both times though probably a bit noisier and the gift shop wasn’t as good. No matter. The courtyard was full of roses, echeviera, sea lavendar…California flora that is so familiar and so dear and that you don’t see much of in Tucson.
Also one of the best things about the Mission is the half-hour or so loop walk you can take below. Looks like more trails may tendril off but I didn’t have time to explore.
From there I made my way to Santa Maria and spent two nights with my dear dear friends Tensie and Dennis. I have my own little hermitage while there, the conversation is nonstop and superb, and the spirit of thier marriage, family, work, community, hearts, and shared table is beyond compare. Their friendship are an unmerited and mysterious gift before which I can only bow my head and say Thank you, Lord.
We all went to 7 am Mass at St. Mary’s for the First Sunday of Advent and partook during the day of not one but two blessings of the Advent wreath. That afternoon Tensie and I had a long walk on the Estero Bluffs above Cayucos.
THEN, Monday, I drove to St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, an unincorporated community in the Mojave Desert. I’ve been on private retreat at this Benedictine monastery all week and it has been heaven.
A deep desire of my heart is being fulfilled, upon which I’m sure I will write much more in the coming weeks, months and years.
“Your way of acting should be different from the world’s way; the love of Christ must come before all else” (Rule of Benedict 4.20, 21).