The other thing is I’ve been working a lot. I’ve signed on to write a study guide on St. Thérèse of Lisieux so am once again knee-deep in The Little Flower, the Little Way, the Holocaust-Victim-of-Love concept, and so much more that dovetails nicely with the forty days in the desert into which we’re collectively heading.
THE CREATIVE LIFE
BUT BEAUTIFUL: ALTO SAXOPHONIST ART PEPPER
How did someone who seemed so seemingly morally weak and narcissistically disordered produce such sublime music?
THE TASSEL OF HIS CLOAK
Here’s a little something to listen to if you’ve a mind: a February 5, 2022 “Almost Good Catholics” podcast with Krzysztof (Chris) Odyniec and I entitled “Divine Intoxication.”
UP WITH RITUAL!
“Significant too is a second thing common among those who attend daily mass, they do not want a service that is too long or too creative. They want a creal ritual, a predictable one, and a short one. “
THE MYSTERY OF PERU’S NAZCA LINES
I get a kick out of those “militant feminists” who, while being supported by wealthy husbands, lecture their single, self-supporting sisters about the need to overthrow the patriarchy.
THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS: MY MOTHER
She never, to my knowledge, submitted another piece. She continued to be faithful to her marriage vows, her private vows to God, to her children, her church, and to her conscience: crystal clear as I imagine it. Long-suffering but dry-eyed, keeping her own counsel, along with God alone knows what secret sorrows and silent suffering.
AN INTERVIEW WITH–ME!
I put everything that interests me to use, one way or the other: martyrs, cults, women’s tennis, Scottish otter keepers, heroin-addicted jazz singers, cloistered nuns, serial murderers.
TREE OF LIFE
“Ora et labora,” as the monks say: prayer and work. Thus, I do my own housework, happily (not that I’m great at it). I shouldn’t own more stuff or inhabit more space than I can comfortably keep clean and cared for. And for me, the filling of the birdfeeders, the replacing of the batteries in the string lights, the polishing, scrubbing, wiping down, re-arranging, neatening, are all part of some larger, beautiful purpose, of a gift that’s been given to me.
SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN
Am I the only one who gets ever-so-slightly OCD over string lights this time of year?
O ANTIPHONS AND MORE!
Here’s the obit for one Renay Mandel Corren who died December 15. It begins: “A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday.” I hope I get such a full-bodied tribute when I keel over.
COME FLY AWAKE!
The Pharisees’ goal was to be “good,” correct. excellent. Christ’s goal was to come awake, in love.
THE MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS
“I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make this horrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that somehow she is the body of Christ and that on this we are fed.”
–Flannery O’Connor
THE GUARDIANS OF MY DESK
Christ had a soft spot for people who stepped out from the crowd: the one leper out of ten who said thank you, the blind man who cried “Have pity on me!”, Zacchaeus in his sycamore tree.
CURE IS A PARADOX
I think of those parts of me are burdensome and intolerable and must change, and the loving, laughing acceptance which takes them just as they are, joyfully, forever.