So many memoirs, so little time…I’ve already got the draft of a column called “Three MORE Great California Memoirs.”
Meanwhile, I came across this essay from a book of Christmas readings that’s on my list to read and feature in 2026. “The Dangers of Advent,” by J.B. Phillips, the essay’s called, and the blurb runs: “No amount of familiarity with the trappings of Christmas should blind us to its quiet but explosive significance.” Check it out.
I’m off to NYC December 22 for a week. This will be the second year in a row I’m on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for Christmas and I just may make it an annual ritual. Cannot wait to walk the frosty streets, see the lights, and mingle with the world’s hoi polloi as we await, whether we know/recognize it or not, the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
This week’s Angelus News column is on one of the world’s most beloved novels: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. I read it last summer for the first time since late childhood and realized I’d missed a whole lot.
As reported earlier this week, I’ll be giving a week-long Memoir Writing Workshop at St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, CA, July 6-10, 2026. More on this anon and would love to see you there.
I’m off to the Central Coast next Tuesday with two kinds of home-made cookies and a surprise snack for my hosts! Happy Thanksiving to all.
In this week’s Angelus News column, I give my take on a recent visit to Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, a world-class collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Modernist paintings.
So overwhelming was the bounty that I ended up collapsed on a bench, gazing mutely for several minutes at a tiny Cézanne of a white plate, a bunch of grapes, and a single peach.
In other news, I am reading The Intellectual Life by Fr. Antonin Sertillanges, OP, first published in 1921–who says I’m out of step with contemporary culture?–boning up on Rembrandt and van Gogh for my Jan. trip to Amsterdam, ascertained from my airbnb host there that I can do a laundry at her place and put it on a drying rack, booked a shuttle bus from Tucson to Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport for Dec 22 when I fly to NYC for Christmas, made a Walmart Superstore run for the Thanksgiving cookies and snacks I’ll bring to my friends in Santa Maria, CA, that week, watered the oleander out back, vacuumed the car, filled the birdfeeder for the finches, and on the advice of a friend from Maine just my age have started doing this Japanese exercise routine, only takes 3 or 4 minutes, called Radio Taiso.
According to an article I read, the whole country performs these exercises every morning in synch and then they are all cheerful and limber and live to be 120.
“He was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone on the way,” eulogized Duke Ellington.
I’m fascinated by the way we order our days. Ideally, one of mine includes a celebration of, and tending to, the spiritual, emotional mental and physical…
Emil Kapaun (1916-1951), a Catholic priest and U.S. Army Chaplain from Kansas, exhibited heroic virtue as a POW during the Korean War. “Just for a moment,” one of his soldiers said, “he could turn a mud hut into a cathedral.”
Head over to Substack for a piece called Pilgrim Feet and a reflection on my love of walking.
Autumn fever is upon me and I am headed near the end of the month to Philadelphia, there to spend a week with a friend and EXPLORE.
“When Jesus takes you into himself to give you to souls, wherever you go means a life of isolation. We find that apparent contradiction in Christ, a hidden, contemplative soul who ended up in giving himself to men, allowing himself to be consumed by them.”
Boston native Nicole Treska has written a memoir to read with an ache in the throat: “Wonderland” (Simon & Schuster, $27.99).
“How do you turn the province of drunks, sailors, and hookers into a dream of bright escape?” she asks in the opening paragraph. “You build Wonderland, one of America’s first amusement parks, located on the water right outside of Boston. Wonderland only operated for a few bright seasons, from 1906 to 1910, but its legacy shines on.”
It’s one of the best books I’ve read in ages–I even wrote Nicole a fan letter–and if you love memoir, and especially if you grew up in New England, I urge you to buy and read it.
This week’s Angelus News column is on a book called The Most Overwhelmed Women of the Bible by Mary DeMuth. Granted, they didn’t have e-mail and cell phones, BUT.
Today of course is a beautiful Solemnity and a Holy Day of Obligation: The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary body and soul into heaven. A few years ago, I went to a Mass at a women’s retreat place and the “progressive” priest man-splained the whole homily about how of course we women didn’t believe such nonsense, and all but apologized on behalf of the Church for having to celebrate the feast. I can’t bear playng “the woman card,” but give me a break–he didn’t even get how insufferably obnoxious it was to be forced to sit and listen to a guy tell me what I was supposed to believe and feel…especially because I was in fact trembling with joy at the thought of Our Lady’s special way of being welcomed into Paradise, there to be crowned QUEEN OF HEAVEN AND EARTH.
I felt exactly like the hungering and thirsting send-off crowd in Titian’s painting–
This week’s Angelus News column is called “Against Ease” (or was, before they changed the title to “How Much Failure and Suffering Must One Endure for a Good Life”).
Anyway, as Flannery O’Connor observed: “We are all rather blessed in our deprivations if we allow ourselves to be.”
Here in the Sonoran Desert, the high yesterday was 113. The whole last two weeks it’s been well above 100 every day. The effect is kind of like an extended snow day back East. You’re excused from just about all activity. Noon Mass is fun cause the thermometer in the car will say like 121 degrees when you come out afterwards and till the A/C kicks in you have to handle the steering wheel like a hot potato.
This week’s Angelus News column is about a chance encounter with a fellow random, gloriously joyful loner, in a rose garden, on the 4th of July. It’s also a paean to LA, and a tribute to the child-like heart.
“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.”
Hello people. As you may know, I write a monthly column for Magnificat Magazine called Credible Witnesses. The witness in question has to be a notable Catholic, dead, and uncanonized. His or her cause may have been opened, but the person can’t yet (and may never be) a canonized saint.
I have to submit my proposed list for the following year by June or so and am thinking to canvass you devoted readers for ideas! The range is wide: it can be an artist, a member of a religous order, a layperson, a member of the military, a priest, martyr, stigmatist, factory worker, housewife…but the person has to have done something noteworthy enough so that they’ve been somewhat in the public eye, however small the public. So it can’t be your late Aunt Agnes or your high school chemistry teacher, for example, no matter how worthy those members of your Personal Communion of Saints may have been.
Feel free to reply via comment, or to email me at hdking719@gmail.com. Thank you!
POSTSCRIPT, having rec’d so many generous responses:
Repeat: Person must be DEAD.
Repeat: Person cannot be a CANONIZED SAINT.
Repeat: Person must have had an influence beyond the local, which is why family, friends and cherished parish priests, no matter how holy, are generally not accepted by Magnificat.
Also, I’ve been doing this every month for over ten years so before you take the time to provide voluminous and again generous links and other info, you might want to check to see if I’ve already written on the person
Finally, the person, per Magnificat, has to have operated firmly within, and been obedient to, the Church. Doesn’t mean they can’t have had arguments with the Church, but they can’t have left and gone off on a frolic of their own. It’s definitely a conservative bent, in other words. I have had my own arguments with this, but that’s the way it is, and I can write about people I admire who don’t quite fit into that framework on my own.
“The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb.” –Cardinal Ratzinger
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.
