Heights and Depths and Memoria

by Jenny Lippert

“The glory of God is man fully alive.”

These words of St. Irenaeus came to mind as I gazed upon the cathedral in Chartres, France on my recent honeymoon. Chartres is an architectural gem, rising 371 feet tall, with enormous asymmetric towers, and imposing buttresses all around. The solidness of this centuries-old structure expresses a permanence and stability. It points to something unchanging, and stands in stark contrast to the modern mindset of convenience and ephemera.

I much prefer the cathedral in Chartres to Notre Dame in Paris largely because Paris is so swarming with tourists that one can hardly breathe sometimes. The relative emptiness of Chartres allows me the space to be quiet, to contemplate, and to appreciate the beauty of this great work of art. There is room to breathe and room to pray.

At present, Chartres is somewhat of a unique look back in time. It’s currently in the midst of a dramatic (and apparently controversial) restoration in which nearly 800 years of grime is being cleaned from the interior and it’s being painted to resemble what it would have looked like in the 13th century. The contrast between the restored and unrestored sections of the cathedral are dramatic. The light, colorful nave is so remarkably altered from the dark, grimy sections.

Restored on the left | Unrestored on the right

Not only is the building itself a marvel, but the amount of artistry inside and outside the cathedral is staggering -- meticulous stone reliefs, enormous stained glass windows, statue upon statue upon statue. Hundreds of artists and craftsmen put forth their efforts to enshrine God’s glory in stone and glass.

And yet, there is no signature on this masterpiece. No one knows the names of the architects or artists of Chartres. They remain anonymous to history, though their work endures.

In the rather strange docudrama “F for Fake,” Orson Welles gives a short monologue about Chartres, touching on this very thing:

“You know, it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand, choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust, to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish [....] Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash. [...] A fact of life. We’re going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced — but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.”

These words echoed in my mind the day after our trip to Chartres when we toured the catacombs under the streets of Paris. The Paris catacombs are an extensive network of tunnels and ossuaries deep underground that contain the bones of more than 6 million people.



Once you get over the initial creepiness of walking through millions of bones, there is a definite sobering effect to the experience. You begin to realize that what you can see on the tour (which seems to go on and on), is really only the tip of the iceberg. As you look on unmarked skull after unmarked skull, you register that each of these belonged to a person, an individual, who had a family and a life and a story and a legacy. Perhaps some of them were great artists, perhaps there were authors, poets, scholars, statesmen. There are no names, only staggering heaps of bones with inscriptions of where they are from and when they were moved. Even King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are there, laid to rest in a vast pile of bones with everyone else, in anonymity.

One particular monument features a line of poetry from the poet Gilbert, surrounded by two plaques that read “Silence, mortal beings” and “Vain grandeur, silence.”

Roughly translated (thank you, Google Translate), the poem reads:

At the banquet of life, unfortunate guest,
I appeared one day, and I die:
I die, and on my tomb, where slowly I arrive
No one will come to shed tears.

When our tour guide brought us to this spot, he asked us eagerly if anyone knew of the poet “Gilbert.” Met with silence, he revealed, “that’s the joke. No one has heard of Gilbert.”

The message of this particular monument was to say that you will all end up like these people and your name will not be remembered in the end -- a rather dark message, but perhaps with the ring of truth to it. At some point in the future, our names will likely not be remembered. What will be remembered of us?

Our tour guide pointed out several times inscriptions that denoted a romantic view of life and death. In a nutshell: we will all die, so live life passionately--full of emotion and intensity. This is, perhaps, how many people approach the inevitability of death. If it feels good, do it. Make a splash. #yolo

Inspirational bracelets for sale
in the in-flight catalogue on the way home

On the other hand, we have Chartres -- the unsigned masterpiece. A sacramental sign of God’s truth, goodness, and beauty. A testament to what man can accomplish with God. A “grand, choiring shout of affirmation” about life and humanity and God.

Likely none of us will be tasked with building a great cathedral. But what are we doing with the time given us? What small corner of the world are we quietly and anonymously beautifying? What ground has God given us to till and what will we make of it? In the end, all of our material works will disintegrate. What are we doing to build up God’s kingdom here and now? What are we doing that will bear fruit in eternal life?

Screwtaping: Comparisons

by Dan Masterton

From time to time, people will ask for spiritual reading recommendations. Never really the true academic scholar despite the preponderance of theology classes that I’ve taken, I skew lighter than most of my fellow nerds. For my money, especially when making recommendations to someone more so on the entry level who needs to be hooked quickly and in a compelling way, I lean on CS Lewis, most heavily on The Great Divorce and Screwtape Letters. These two books offer an imaginative, allegorical narrative style that comes from a place of substantial faith as well as literary accessibility. Here, I want to focus on the latter.

In Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis adopts the persona of Uncle Screwtape. Screwtape is a veteran demon, well worn in the practice of influencing humans. The book is written as a series of letters from old Screwtape to his nephew, Wormwood; while Screwtape seems to write from a mentorship point of view, no longer “in the field” so to speak, Wormwood is in the thick of it, working actively on a living person as they correspond. We don’t get to read Wormwood’s reports from earth, so we just get the one-sided input of his mentor-uncle.

As Screwtape advises his nephew on how to demonize someone, Lewis uses lovely vocabulary to invite you immersively into the mind of a demon. Screwtape calls God “The Enemy” and calls Satan “Our Father.” Perhaps most hauntingly, he refers to the subject of Wormwood’s demonizing as a “patient.” The whole equation leads you to reason through the strategies from the demons’ point of view, and then invites you to simultaneously analyze the demons’ tactics as well as reverse-engineer positive theology and spiritual insights.

In the introduction, Lewis warns that the two common errors with respect to the devil are (1) to claim the Devil doesn’t exist or (2) to be excessively obsessed with him; either way, these errors and the people who practice them are satisfying to the devil. While the book pulls the reader into the labyrinth of thought corruption and temptation allure that evil presents, the book illuminates the central reality of evil, which I summarize in the paraphrased words of Mike Patin: The devil’s goal is to make you think you’re alone, that you’re the only one going through something.

In reality, at bare minimum, Christ is always with us, and we’re always with Christ. Even if we feel disconnected from friends or family, Christ never leaves us. When the devil is most successful, we allow evil to make us doubt God such that we fully separate ourselves from Him. The power of Lewis’ Screwtape Letters is the way that the inverted process helps us consider the ways that evil and temptation creep into our lives, especially into our thought processes. By reading through Screwtape’s explanations, we can see reflections of the darker parts of our own minds and hearts. His tactical rundowns create all too easy resonance (at least for this reader) with the more selfish and shallow parts of who I can too easily let myself be.

I thought, then, it’d be intriguing to invite myself into Wormwood’s shoes. If I were theorizing the playbook for my personal demons, what would it look like? Lately, I have been tempted toward comparisons. Rather than doing and being good for goodness’ sake, for Christ’s sake, for other’s sake, I can sense myself instead choosing favorable measuring sticks that might make me look better, and furthermore create context to unfavorably judge others, too. I’ll leave the rest to my inner Screwtape, and invite you to consider how your letter might look. It’d be intriguing to hear from your demons after you read…

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My dear Wormwood,

As demons do their bidding, we must be careful to stay out of the realm of reason, where The Enemy is all too effective in undoing our work. Argument has long been a wheelhouse for our foes. But your patient is laying tracks for trains of thought that you can build toward the house of Our Father. We must avoid debates where their style of apologetic can succeed. Instead, you can skew this path toward certain emotions and thus stoke self-righteous passions that help our cause. You know that Christian patients remain in play for us, and that their practice can even invite our methods to greater effectiveness.

Continue to show to your patient those churchgoers behind, in front of, next to him. Let The Enemy move his heart toward empathy for these others; let him feel for and sympathize with those who are late or those who are juggling children. Then carry the connection onward to comparisons. Show him the family that doesn’t come forward together for communion -- let him wonder why one stays back while the other go. Show your patient the ones who don’t kneel in worship of The Enemy -- invite doubts about their inconsistent piety. Show him the person beside him who leaves early before the gathering is concluded -- push for judgments against these disjunctors. But do not stumble as you link these chains, for the passions of the heart must be moved toward our Darkness, for if otherwise allowed, The Enemy may more easily move them into the light.

Find other avenues to carry on this comparative impulse. Be attentive to the peaks of virtue in your patient. Watch carefully when he is with his family. Wait for the moments of apparently selfless attention to the little one, and then show him her mother. But choose carefully -- let pass those times when she is otherwise engaged in potentially important activity and focus instead on apparent idleness. Sow doubt in the patient’s mind about the equation. Do not suggest fault in the mother; instead plant seeds of pride in the patient. Affirm and inflate this selflessness and incite celebration of the heretofore kenotic care the father gives. In this redirection, you may yet more effectively conjure feelings of malice and set off the building of a flimsy case of inequality between the parents, assembled foolishly by your patient. Then, without having even antagonized him, you have set a frictious course for him that shuts out more of that horrid light.

Look, too, to the humdrum encounters of daily life. The derelicte at the off-ramp, the man making speeches in the train car, the beggar at the end of the drive-through lane -- these are opportunities to buttress your work further. You may be tempted, dear nephew, to invite simple comparisons between your patient’s wealth and theirs, but don’t be so simplistic. These Christian patients have the basics mastered toward “those less fortunate,” and fairly comfortably do bits of charity to allay their silly souls. Tempting the patient toward ignorance can harden the heart as we seek, and this can invite a fair amount of shadows. Should you feel more confident and want to take the greater risk, choose a deeper tack, and go for the heart. While you cannot quite hear what The Enemy says to him, use your hand to make the patient see the close friends and dear family in these lowly men. Show him the face of his closest ones in these strangers and force that uncomfortable connection. The guilt of not giving money to people who need it only cuts so deep. Ignoring people entirely who might as well be those he claims to love? Well, this is more of a long shot, but its success only deepens and widens the chasm of doubt where we can do our best work.

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape

Monday Musings

Happy Monday, friends. While Dave is off honeymooning in Europe with his beautiful bride, Sarah, I thought I'd pinch hit with a few Monday musings. Enjoy these little vignettes from this blog's editor...

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1. This weekend, I attended a baptism for a family member. It was an afternoon ceremony in the parish church, so it was a smaller crowd of just friends and family. The parish deacon presided and celebrated the Sacrament for us. Before he began, he offered us a special explanation as to why he was holding an iPad and not a prayer book. He explained that he has some vision problems, so many years ago, he downloaded an app with the rites and prayers he'd need for his deacon duties. Rather than squinting at a static book with its small print, scrolling along with the backlit screen and easily enlargeable print allowed him to preside more smoothly and intentionally.

I was delighted. I think we are quite accustomed to seeing clerical folks with red prayer books, often with ribbons dangling everywhere and cracking bindings teetering ominously in tiny altar servers' hands. The visual difference is a small detail but certainly a detail to which one has to adjust. But major props to this man who made a small practical change in order to improve his presence and focus as a minister, especially a minister of the (some) Sacraments. Whether it bothered certain people or not, I was impressed by the simple, forward manner in which he explained himself. Such an approach is almost always the best and most effective way to defuse tensions. Rather than leave people to wonder about the iPad in his hands, people could instead acknowledge his decision and accommodation and better direct their attention to the babies being welcome into our Church. This deacon was to me a fine testament of the importance of a simply pastoral approach.

2. Being with my wife's side of our family, specifically her dad's side, always highlights the unique character of an extended family all assembled together. The greatness of this family is their connectedness, not just to each other (they keep impeccable tabs on one another), but to acquaintances, old friends, and even strangers and workers. They are immensely gifted at socializing, making small-talk, and finding connections. It's pretty awe-inspiring, especially to an extroverted introvert such as myself. On the flipside, they are not great at the details and processes. They struggle to pass along details of plans to each other, often serendipitously luck into things just working out, and take forever to leave somewhere, since everyone's FOMO prevents them from leaving first.


The funny subtext to all of this is the in-laws. We live in the midst of these simultaneously endearing and impressive yet agonizing and head-scratching traits. And time and time again, we realize that, while our better halves bring the social skills, we are the facilitators, the ones who build the schedules and make the trains run on time. While most of us greatly need the soft skills of our spouses and their ability to connect so well with others, they also need our itinerancy in marking out the logistics of life, and generally reminding them to eat meals and sleep a few hours.

I say all of this not because I think we've rescued our spouses or vice-versa. Rather, it's something my wife and I have always known about our own relationship, and something we can see manifesting in similar yet different flavors among her cousins and family members. While a marriage is built on the healthy mix and complementarity of two people who combine their selves and lives together, a strong family, especially such a larger, extended family, is firmed up and strengthened by the subsumption of good husbands and wives into the fold. It's neat to see how, in different ways, my wife and her family members, in their many similarities and bits of individual uniqueness, too, found in-laws that similarly have some fundamentals in common but bring complementary traits as well. A healthy, vital family is a beautiful thing to behold -- something I definitely believe in and freshly witnessed, albeit couched in consistent observational humor toward everyone.

3. I have never been a great pray-er of the rosary. I learned it in school growing up, but I never had a great personal piety toward it. Living in Ireland for a year, that temporarily changed. Each morning we would get to work for the parish daily Mass and join our community in its prayer. We would try to arrive in time for the rosary before Mass, but we wouldn't always make it. After a month or two, I decided that I wanted to always make it, so we agreed that we didn't have to all leave together if someone was running late. And thus it became that I prayed the rosary almost every day, under the careful guidance of our faithful older parishioners. Since leaving Ireland, I have had periods of time where I picked the habit back up, but it has never stuck with me quite so firmly as it did then.

This month of July has brought with it some extra cabin fever. Being completely off of work has its perks, but this stay-at-home dad has realized that those two days of work each week provided a great deal of sanity and balance to my life. Being home with Lucy almost every day necessitates some creativity and imagination to make sure we don't end up sitting around the house all day, every day. One of the simple joys of such free time is to just go for a walk. Even just unfolding the stroller and buckling Lucy into it brings her great excitement, let alone actually heading outside and walking our quiet neighborhood streets.

I used to put on a podcast or just walk with nothing in my ears, but recently, I rediscovered an app I had buried on my phone: The Holy Rosary. I had originally downloaded it for my solo work trip to Arizona when I scouted things for my students' immersion week. Now it has reemerged as a welcome companion for my occasional afternoon walk with Lucy. For someone who enjoys prayer but doesn't always remember all the words to the creeds or the keep the sets of Mysteries and their days of the week straight, the app is a welcome, gentle way to guide my pray in a positive direction. I don't think anyone has ever truly regretted praying the rosary.

4. Back when my daughter, Lucy, was a newborn, I reflected on the blessings of being a stay-at-home dad. I was enjoying my three months paternity leave with an eye toward part-time work to continue being home with her. In the quieter moments of an overnight feed or an early morning encounter when I was alone with her and my wife slept, I couldn't help but feel a monastic calmness toward it all. Even though I was not alone, the peace of a helpless human resting on me, unable to go anywhere else or do anything instead, brought the serenity of a cloister even without the walls.

Now, Lucy is 16 months old, stands (and walks) at 2'7", and weighs in (my frail arms can attest) at almost 25 pounds. She traipses around like she owns the place, whether that's our rented apartment, our parish church, or a restaurant where we're trying to eat out. She is an explorer who wants to climb, run, and touch whatever enters her field of vision. So when she sleeps into the early morning or stays down solidly for one of her two naps (gosh, I'll miss that second nap when it disappears soon), I sometimes find that monastic calm returning. This morning, with my wife off work and sleeping in and Lucy going down late after a long, full family day yesterday, I was able to get out for a run under the partly clouded sun, through the burning-off fog of a cool, rainy weekend. Now back at home, I can cool down with a cold Gatorade, an open laptop to journal, and the silence -- the unbroken calm with the TV off, the baby monitor quiet, and nothing but the background noise of an early Monday morning on our village streets and the gentle whirr of our ceiling fan.

I think back fairly often to the routinized peace of monastic life, as my choir friends and I experienced at the Abbey of Gethsemani while on retreat in college. The constancy and sparseness of their prayer hit me just right, and I always hope that the routines I build and embrace in daily life can more closely resemble monastic dedication rather than the modern obsessions with efficiency and productivity. As the weather has warmed and my legs have gotten running again, these mornings have felt that way. The early alarm, the bowl of cereal, the bit of brief morning reading, and the stretch and run terminate in a moment of calm -- my tired body catches its breath on the couch as the quiet restores and renews me to start the rest of a day.

Dear Mom: A Love Letter to Our Lady

by Erin M. Conway

Dear Mom,

First of all, I hope you don’t mind me addressing you so casually. I know other people often address you as “Our Lady” or “Holy Mother” or simply “Mary,” but when we walk around campus at the University of Notre Dame, my best friend Steph always calls out “Hey mom!” whenever we catch a glimpse of you perched on top of the Golden Dome and I’ve always liked that. So if you’ll allow it, I’m going to call you mom in this letter. I hope you recognize it for what it is, a sign of my deep love for you.

Posing with my earth mom and aunt
in front of the dome at Notre Dame.

As you know, I haven’t always appreciated you the way I should. Like Jesus, who grew in “wisdom and age” (Lk 2:52), it’s taken me some time to understand how much you matter to me and how much you’ve been present in my life. But then again, I think that is how it is with most people and their moms, right? We rarely realize how important our mothers are to us until much later in life.

The first time I really recognized how cool you could be (sorry it took me 25 years!) was during my first day of new teacher meetings at Xavier College Prep in Palm Desert, CA. Taking that job had required a huge leap of faith for me, I’d moved across the country to live and work in a town I’d never even heard of before, not a typical Erin move as you know. Just a few days after my arrival I listened to a fellow new teacher (and later good friend) speak about how she had a special love for and devotion to you. I couldn’t tell you now exactly what Natalie said about you that day, but I remember the way it made me feel. She and I shared a middle name, Marie, and until that point I had always considered my middle name to be cliche and boring. I knew it mattered to my other mom (the one who gave birth to me) because it was her own mother’s middle name, but in all honesty, I had always wished that it was more unique. When Natalie shared her story, however, I realized that my name connected me to you forever mom, and since then I’ve always felt proud of being linked to you in such a way.

Not surprisingly, once I recognized our link, my appreciation for you grew deeper during my time at Xavier. My first year in the desert, I gathered often during lunch with a group of female teachers and we prayed the rosary together. It was always quick, maybe 15 minutes or so, but it connected me to you in a new way. Sure, I’d prayed the rosary since I was young (although if I’m being honest, I usually did it as a way to fall asleep rather than as an intentional, thoughtful form of prayer… sorry Mom!), but I had never prayed it together with friends. I think more than the prayer, though, I was grateful to be welcomed and loved by these women who had such a special love for you. I admired their faith and wanted to be part of something like that. In fact, as I look back at my time at Xavier (which you know were some of the most formative years in my faith life), I realize that all of the women who were most important to me, the women who helped me to live my life for Christ, who inspired me to love more fully and deeply, who walked with me as I sought my vocation, each and every one of these women had a deep love of you. I think this matters, Mom. As I look back now, I am filled with gratitude for you because I know you put these women in my life to be physically present when you could not.

The statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe
outside Dolores Mission,
decorated for her feast day.

And of course, it was during my three years at Xavier that I encountered you in another new way that deepened my love for you, in the forms of Our Lady of Sorrows and Our Lady of Guadalupe. At Dolores Mission Parish in East LA (named for Our Lady of Sorrows¹) I encountered a new way to live my faith, the people and programs of the parish showed me what it truly means to live the Gospel and to love God and their neighbor.² I can honestly say I wouldn’t be the person I am today without this place, and although it wasn’t an exclusive encounter with you, mom, I know that your love brought me there and guided the people of the parish. It was here, too, that I met what I like to tell people is my “favorite Mary,” Our Lady of Guadalupe. Obviously, every version of “Our Lady” that we encounter is you, mom, but something about encountering this embodiment of you, early on the morning of your feast day, during a mass that celebrated your presence to those on the margins, a mass that felt genuinely joyful, helped me to realize once again how much you mean to people and how much they love you. Anyone who gets up before 5 AM and signs their heart out must have a darn good reason for it!

Now Mom, I know you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, okay, Erin, all this is great, but why are you telling me this NOW? Why is all this so important to you in this specific moment in time? Hold tight, Mom, I’m getting to that right now.

For the past two weeks I’ve been on a pilgrimage through Spain and Italy, following in the steps of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Pretty cool, right? And while I’ve learned a whole lot of fascinating things about Ignatius and the early Jesuits, more than anything, I’ve been struck by your presence everywhere on this journey.

When we were in Spain, we stopped at something like seven different Marian shrines in four days. At first I was confused, why these places? I’ve never heard of most of these before, what do they have to do with Ignatius? We learned that even though visits to many of these shrines aren’t officially documented in Ignatius’ autobiography, historically it is unimaginable that a religious pilgrim like Ignatius traveling the direction he did would not have stopped at each of these places. This surprised me. I guess I never realized how important you were to my buddy Iñigo.³ I didn’t realize how central your presence was and is in Ignatian spirituality and devotion. As a product of his times in many ways, Ignatius, like many of his contemporaries, believed that the best way to access God was through you. As Jesus’ mom, you had a unique relationship and privileged access to your son. In the same way I call my own earthly mother when I’m overwhelmed or sad or joyful or just need someone to talk to, Ignatius visited your shrines to talk to you. It makes sense.

As I reflected back over my trip later, I realized that many of my deepest moments of consolation occurred at these Marian shrines. For example, at Our Lady of Olatz in Azpeitia, I felt God’s presence reverberating off the walls of the simple chapel, captured in the voices of my fellow pilgrims as they sang the Salve Regina. After seeing your image, found by a farmer among the thorns at Arantzazu,⁴ I sat outside and was awed by the beauty of the mountains and the soft breeze across my face. When we visited the Basilica of Our Lady of Pilar, I was wowed by the sheer number of people who travelled to see you. In Montserrat, when I came face to face with the Black Madonna, I wanted so much to share this image of you with my students. I found your representation as something other than white to be powerful and important, welcoming all people into participation in Christ.

The image of Madonna and Child

in the Cathedral of Saint Paul’s Outside-the-Walls in Rome.

But Mom, in true Erin fashion, I didn’t connect the dots at first as I visited these shrines. I didn’t realize that you were the thread that wove through all these experiences (crazy, I know!) until I sat face to face with you in the Cathedral of Saint Paul’s Outside-the-Walls in Rome. In a side chapel, there is an image of Madonna and Child, the very image in from of which Ignatius and his first companions took their first vows as Jesuits. This connection to Ignatius was enough to console me, but as I sat there staring at this beautiful image of you, I was floored by the realization that you’d been working in the background of my trip. Every key moment of consolation on my trip, was connected to you. You’d been with me the whole time and I didn’t realize it until then.

Even my purchase of the only souvenir I’d picked up thus far, a 10 bead rosary bracelet from the childhood home of my boy Francis Xavier, was connected to you. Because of the connections I’ve found between Xavier’s life and my own,⁵ this visit was the one I was most looking forward to. But the momento I picked up, although it had Frank’s face on it (like you and I, Francis Xavier and I are on familiar terms… I also hope he doesn’t mind), it was a tool to pray with you. Because you’ve always been there for me even when I didn’t acknowledge you.

And in these same moments, as I scribbled furiously in my journal (my favorite form of prayer, as you know), I flashed back to Xavier once again (the school, not the saint), and I started (with your guidance, I’m sure) to connect even more dots. Everything that happened to me at Xavier and on this immersion began to click into place. It struck me just how Jesuit this devotion to you is and how much it had been present in my life without my acknowledging it. It was like when I started learning about the Ignatian spirituality and the Jesuits when I started teaching almost ten years ago. Day after day I was struck by just how Jesuit my life had been up until that point, but I didn’t realize it because I didn’t “speak the language.” My realization of your presence in my life and on this trip was similar. It was really Jesuit and it had always been there, I just didn’t see it.

So basically, mom, consider this letter as a long way of saying THANK YOU. Thanks for being my mother, for loving me even when I forget you’re around, for giving up your only son so that I could live, for placing women in my life who have shaped and guided me into the person I am today, and for working behind the scenes to help me build a relationship with your Son and God the Father. I honestly don’t know where I’d be without you!

Your loving daughter,
Erin MARIE Conway

P.S. Oh, and thanks for giving me the mom who birthed me as well, she shares a lot of these same qualities and I don’t always thank her enough for them!

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1 Dolores means sorrows in Spanish.^↩

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2 Dolores Mission Parish is the launching place of Homeboy Industries and the former parish of my hero, Father Greg Boyle, SJ. During my time at Xavier, I helped coordinate and lead immersion trips to Dolores Mission for our students. The parish to me is a beacon of social justice and Catholicism done right.^↩

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3 We used the names Iñigo and Ignatius interchangeably on the pilgrimage. The man we now know as Ignatius of Loyola was born with name Iñigo but then changed his name to Ignatius sometime while he studied in Paris.^↩

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4 The word Arantzazu literally means, “You, among the thorns?!” which is what the farmer who found the statue is believed to have said upon discovering it (he was looking for his cow).^↩

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5 To understand more why I feel so connected to Francis Xavier, check out my first post!^↩

Les Misérables

by Laura Flanagan

Last week, I reread a favorite work of mine - Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. While a powerful testament to grace, the brilliance of this book is its ability to have you root for the convicted felon.

From said book: “Despair is surrounded by fragile walls, which all open into vice or crime.”

The protagonist, Jean Valjean, begins the story as a hardened criminal recently released from nineteen years in prison. After being expelled from many places of rest under transparent pretexts, his encounter with the local bishop is one of dignity and mercy offered several times over. While confused and overwhelmed by the one man’s kindness, Valjean steals the bishop’s silver and flees, still despairing of kindness from the world at large - and when apprehended, he is forgiven and given the silver. This bishop gives Valjean the means to become an “honest man” when justice would otherwise quickly have returned him to his hellish imprisonment.

Afterwards, Valjean continually does the right thing, forever transformed by his encounter with Christ’s mercy in the person of the bishop at the novel’s beginning. His life becomes one of heroic virtue. The genius of the book is that you would understand if he did the wrong thing.

The world, embodied in the inflexible justice of Javert the police inspector, continues to pursue and stigmatize him despite his practical virtue of making an entire town and region of the country prosperous, and theological virtue of showing mercy and generosity to everyone he encounters. This relentless evasion and pursuit is maddening to Valjean, and might have induced despair in him if not for the joy of giving and receiving love from his adopted daughter, whom he vigorously protects.

When a person commits a crime out of despair, such as illegally crossing a border, what is our response?

I’ve heard, “Well, despair itself is a sin. They should have hope in Christ for [insert desperate situation] rather than turning to crime.”

Hope in Christ and his resurrection - indeed the boon of martyrs.

...Have we told them of that hope?

Have we been Christ’s mercy to them so they can understand its value and impact?

If we have not been prepared to give a reason for our hope while reaching into their despair, or to know and care for them as a person as Christ does, how would they find that hope?

If we personally cannot extend that mercy, do we have reason to believe that those we’ve allowed to be delegates for us will show mercy? Or do we offer only reason for despair?

Is the law making their action a crime even a just law?

Have we removed from them their children, their natural source of joy and hope?

Also from Les Mis: “If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”

One thing I love about the Church is that it holds us to the highest ideals. Heroic virtue is what is asked of us, supported entirely by the grace of God. But the culpability of those without heroic virtue is lessened if they have not seen heroic mercy out of Christians. The grace to bear suffering without despair lies in that mercy and in the sacraments, to which many do not have access. If you, like me, have not always within yourself the heroic virtue to get off your phone, I beg you not to cast the first stone.

For those who are tempted to hold up “justice” as the ideal, recall at least that disproportionate punishment is not justice. The “deterrent” to stealing bread in 1790s France was that it will get you five years as a galley slave; yet Valjean, in an attempt to save from starvation the sister and her children who had cared for him since youth, steals bread. I can hope one would understand why.

Stealing a loaf of bread does not merit five years of slavery. Fleeing a desperately violent situation in your home country and entering a country illegally does not merit the destruction of your family, or the traumatization (and possibly abuse) of your children. No one flees their home and undertakes a dangerous journey of a thousand miles merely as a general preference not to go through years of paperwork unlikely to succeed at prohibitive cost. President Trump’s “solution” given to reporters last Tuesday -- “Don't come to our country illegally. Come like other people do. Come legally.” -- intentionally belies the difficulty therein. I hope others who would point to those words as a simple and just solution unintentionally belie that difficulty.

Our sense of “justice” cannot be based on our own desires for security and wealth, and without balm for those who have already endured a greater injustice than the inconvenience we might (but probably won’t) face by expanding our country’s bosom to accept refugees and the downtrodden undocumented immigrant. Les Misérables aids us in understanding why said downtrodden might not have the greatest respect for that idea of justice.¹ Jean Valjean lives outside the law throughout the book and evades Javert’s “justice” at every opportunity. Every opportunity, that is, except the first: when another man might be condemned in his place via a case of mistaken identity (a case prejudiced by that man’s poverty and Valjean’s wealth at that moment). At that moment, he enters the courtroom and denounces himself.

Victor Hugo again: “There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”

While he had bootstrapped his way up to the higher class, Hugo’s protagonist knew he would lose his humanity - truly, his soul - if he directly condemned another man to misery, especially one who had merely endured an impoverished existence. The mercy of Christ begat the mercy of the bishop begat mercy in him. We may need to rediscover our own humanity, redeemed in Christ incarnate.

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1 There are real issues with the state of our immigration system as it stands, and no, I am not advocating that we “have no borders.” Those issues need addressing, but our immigration “quotas” have been out of whack for a long time, and the separation of families, whether immediately upon apprehension or by deportation from a community they have already formed, merely makes plain our pure self-interest.^↩

Keep Lookin' Up

by Dan Masterton

I have been running since 5th grade. Our middle school had cross country and track teams for the 5th through 8th graders; I joined cross country in 5th grade and then track in 6th. It was mostly geared towards fun and community, but we were solidly competitive and even ran in a few invitational meets as well as the big conference meet. Our coaches were a teacher and a few parents, each with some legit runners’ acumen, who could find ways to encourage the uncompetitive as well as challenge the more serious athletes.

Over time, my game became the 1600 meter run. When the distance runners went out for long work, one coach would unleash me when we were still a few minutes from school, challenging me to sprint ahead and push the pace beyond what the group could handle. As my mile times improved, another coach taught me how to work splits -- you set a goal time, divide it in four, and attempt to beat that partial time as you complete each of the four laps; coach would stand in the final turn at the 300 meter mark and call out the differential to me to help me know where I stood as the race wore on.¹

Through my 8th grade season, I had gotten really good (for a 14-year-old). The coaches had even taken me off the relays to instead run the 400 meter dash, which I set a school record in three times; breaking my own record twice, I graduated with a 1:05 on the books (respectable but surely broken soon after). I also would have set the 1600 meter record, too, if not for a teammate who nosed me out at a meet where we both broke the record, though I guess technically only he actually did; we ran a 5:33. Being part of the team was immensely fun because I was playing with my friends, accomplishing things personally, and scoring some good points for our school in our meets.²

But times and ribbons and records aside, I always had a bad habit while I was running: I didn’t look ahead. While I ran, especially at increasingly longer distances, I had a tendency to look downward. My chin would sag a bit toward my chest, and my eyes would wander toward the ground ahead of me rather than the runners and course ahead. While I was improving my times and finishing better in races, I couldn’t break this habit. My coaches would point it out to me at practices. They would remind me to keep looking up during meets. And I would keep letting my gaze float downward. They encouraged me to have eyes straight ahead, watching the course, the runners in front of me, maybe peeking at the clock if there was one.³ I couldn’t keep it up.

Running with a club in Ireland at a meet in Fall 2011.
Eyes looking almost straight down.

I think mentally I knew that it was better to look ahead. I could feel as my chin and eyes sunk low that I would become more aware of the fatigue and exertion. Yet, this habit persists today. I still find my eyes sagging, my glance dragging downward. And this is the slightly masochistic grace of running. While one can always sign up for another race or time another run to fuel the competitive juices, you’re ultimately running against yourself. Unlike basketball or baseball, where a player may hit a slump where they can’t make as many shots or connect on as many swings, a runner can pretty much always (barring injury) soldier on and strive to run better. A runner will always be racing their ghost and grappling with the best their body and mind can perform.

Running a half-marathon in Wexford in Spring 2012.
Eyes a bit more up, 12 miles in, looking solid.

The mental part of running has always loomed large, especially since I achieved such results with the physical, time-able part fairly quickly. I had to learn the difference between pain and injury, between cramps in my side and runner’s knee flaring up in my leg. I had to learn how to budget my energy, to mentally stick to a race plan as best as I could. I had to coach myself to push hard and race myself on the clock, to hit that clip I knew I could hit and to leave every last speck of energy on that last all-out sprint to the finish.

Lookin pooped at this Fall 2015 15K in Chicago.
Eyes sinking down!

And when my eyes dropped to the pavement I was pounding or fell behind the heels I was chasing, my self-challenge to look up was a reminder of the people who first taught me the path. When I let my eyes sink, I lose sight of the race I want to run; when I keep my gaze high, I can see the whole course before me. Running is a sport of peers, a language spoken commonly by so many people, from hobbyists to the most serious short-shorts-wearing, singlet-rocking, shiny-shades-wearing runners.⁴ So from my first coaches to my many running-inclined friends, stories shared among us resonate easily and help us push each other to race and run as our best competitors.

Fall 2016's 15K looks a little better.
I'm that orange blur on the right!

On a basic level, keeping my gaze up helps me run better. Even more though, mentally, it helps me focus on good breathing, calm thought processes, and physical management. Emotionally, it calls to mind coaches I had when I was as young as ten years old, already pouring so much positive energy into my growth. Spiritually, it challenges me to remain humble and grateful for support and encouragement, past and present.

We have to keep our heads up to see the love of Christ coming for us and to be able to encounter others such that we can send that love their way. On the whole, it’s pretty easy to drop your gaze, to be single-minded on narrow, often selfish priorities, but that only causes one to lose sight of life more broadly, not just becoming blind to personal goals but also struggling to see the support and encouragement coming at you. It’s a habit I’m still trying to break, on my runs and in my life. When I can fight it off, I see the affirmations and positivity⁵ rushing toward me in the love of so many friends and family. I just have to keep lookin’ up.

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1 To those of you who are Mario Kart 64 aficionados and remember rumble paks and memory cards, it’s almost like racing your ghost in time trials. Splits and running in general are so well analogized by that nifty Nintendo 64 trope.^↩

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2 I was super proud of my school record, but finishing top 6 in my two events at the conference meet as an 8th grader was probably as accomplished as I ever got in my storied gym-class-hero-level athletic career.^↩

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3 As an adult, I’ve actually totally forsaken timing my runs. I occasionally will time a practice run as I prepare for a race, but I’ve found great liberation in just running off my internal clock with my rough feel for mile-pace and just pushing as hard as I decide, whether coasting in lighter training runs or really maxing out in races. ^↩

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4 Much like with youth basketball, the hairiness of others’ legs can often be a good predictor of the quality of competition. ^↩

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5 To all of you dear readers, your compliments, affirmations, and other feedback are so much appreciated by this silly author/editor. Every time I start to wonder if the blog is worth the work of sitting and writing and keeping the team organized (they do great work!), every time I inch toward thinking of perhaps wrapping up the blog, another person or two or three spontaneously tell me how they read our posts regularly and really appreciate the work. I am grateful for everyone who has ever given me or the crew an atta-boy, and I always love to hear your thoughts on our work, whether in social media interactions or when we see each other in person. Blessin’s to you all. ^↩

Adulting Like a Child

by Jenny Lippert
(the now-married artist formerly known as Jenny Klejeski)

“Look at the birds in the sky;
they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns,
yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are not you more important than they?
Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span?”
-Matt. 6:26-27

My recent wedding brought with it an extended visit from my sisters and their families, meaning my parents’ house was taken over by 7 nieces and nephews, ages five weeks to seven years. There is a particular kind of joy and exhaustion that comes from over and over bumping down the stairs with a 2-year-old, or doing the same sleight-of-hand magic trick for the endlessly stupefied 4-year-old, or soothing a floppy 5-week-old, or repeatedly letting a toddler use your body as a jungle gym, climbing up and flipping upside down.

My oldest nephew, Linus, likes to express himself in superlatives. When I gave him a big push on the swing: “I didn’t think it was possible to go so high!” “I’m a cardinal! I’m a blue jay!” “This is the most fun I’ve ever had!” I think I could have pushed him on the swing 50 times in the same way, and each time would have been the “most fun” for him. He also enthusiastically declared my wedding cake as “the best wedding cake he had ever eaten!” and my wedding dance as “the most fun wedding dance ever!”

His fervent accolades made me giggle, but in another way, caused me to see life through the profoundly genuine, childlike eyes of a 7-year-old. His innocent sincerity made me realize that he really did mean that it was the most fun, or most delicious, or most {insert adjective}. There was a newness and a freshness to each experience for him—an acceptance of things as a wonder-filled gift. It also made me realize how often I use superlatives for cheap effect, as a means of getting a reaction from my audience or as a tired way of trying to imbue meaning into otherwise shallow experiences (e.g. “that is literally the cutest puppy I’ve ever seen,” “you are the worst,” etc. etc.). Reality, rather than being treated as God’s sacramental self-revelation, becomes an arbitrary occasion for me to express myself, to define myself and my own experience, to make of the world a closed-circuit of self-expression.

Linus and his expressions of childlikeness have been bouncing around in my mind in a particular way during these first few weeks of married life. Certainly, these days have been marked with the delighted realization of having joined my life to that of my best friend and the novel excitement of setting up our new home together. Newness is everywhere. But also creeping in are the subtle anxieties of unprecedented adult responsibilities, the desire to categorize and control, and the temptation to fear that I’ll be an inadequate wife.

I want to be the best wife, the best homemaker, the best teacher I can be. And the best Christian. That’s an overwhelming burden. It makes me feel at every moment as if I’m supposed to be doing something else, or being someone else, accomplishing some other goal which feels impossible. Out of this anxiety, I find myself neglecting how God is speaking to me in the moment while frenetically attending to fringe duties with a sense of panic and anxiety. In doing so, I forget entirely what it means to be a child of God, failing to receive the gift of God in the moment, failing to work with the methodical peacefulness and joy, alongside Christ, that life affords me when I approach it rightly. Jesus promises me peace, peace not as the world gives, but as He gives. And He promises it to a disciple still on the journey—to a still-growing child.

My new husband shares my nephew’s childlike tendency to speak in superlatives. Like my nephew, he doesn’t do this, I think, as a mere rhetorical device, but as an authentic expression of how he experiences reality. Just the other day, as we were driving home from dinner and admiring a beautiful sunset, he declared it “the most beautiful evening I can remember.” It was a beautiful evening, to be sure. Was it literally “the most beautiful evening?” Well, it didn’t strike me as so, but maybe that’s simply because I wasn’t paying attention. I wondered if I even had it as a mental possibility to experience things in superlatives anymore. I’ve experienced so many beautiful evenings; is it possible even to expect to have a “most beautiful” one? Or do I just have a category for “beautiful evenings” now, that each new addition gets tossed into, without a moment’s appreciation of its uniqueness and possibility?

What to do about this?

In the Gospel reading at our wedding, Jesus commands, “learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin. But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them.” Jesus is inviting me to recognize myself as a flower, a lovely creature that he himself sustains. He is inviting me to enjoy the rains and the sunshine of his grace, and to know that His providence is providing for all that I need. He is inviting me to trust that, with His grace, He is gradually unfolding me, petal by petal into what He desires me to be. He wants me to pay attention to the gift of now and to allow now to be the now-iest now that ever now-ed.

"Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.”
-Luke 12:32

Please Won't You Be My Neighbor?

by Rob Goodale

A few days ago, my roommate and I walked down the road to the Neon Theater, an absolute gem of a movie house: two screens, cheap popcorn, decent beer selection, nothing like your average cinema and its much-maligned watered-down Cherry Cokes for an extra 25 cents. The Neon was showing Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the new documentary about a Presbyterian minister from Pittsburgh named Fred Rogers.

In truth, I did not grow up in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I was familiar with the show, of course, but I spent much of my formative years splitting residences between the Island of Sodor and the Hundred Acre Wood. An irritatingly precocious tot, it wasn’t long before I began demanding to be treated like a grown-up, and because I was a quick study I knew that nowhere was this more important than in my entertainment habits.

Grown-ups argued about sports and used humor as either a shield or sometimes a weapon and told stories about bad guys hurting good guys and good guys hurting them back, and so that’s what I imagined it meant to be a grown-up. While this tragically was and largely remains empirically true, such empty show has never been the real stuff of maturity. All along, the square geezer with the cardigan and the trolley was quietly, gently, patiently insisting that there was another way.

In his three decades on television, Fred Rogers demonstrated a unique brand of holiness. He was exceptional not because of transcendent talent or exceeding genius, but because he sincerely desired to greet each human person as a neighbor, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what it would cost him. He did this again and again, mostly with the same children that the rest of the entertainment industry greeted solely as a source of income.

He had a unique way of making people feel seen, which Tom Junod described in a 1998 feature for Esquire Magazine: “There was an energy to him, however, a fearlessness, an unashamed insistence on intimacy, and though I tried to ask him questions about himself, he always turned the questions back on me.” This struck me as eerily similar to the way C.S. Lewis described saints in Mere Christianity: “Every now and then one meets them. Their voices and faces are different from ours: stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant… You tend to think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do, but need you less.”

Rogers knew from its advent that television would be not just a means of communication, but a ritual: that we would be transformed by what we watched on TV. He believed that the space between a human being, especially a young human being, and a television screen was holy ground, and he was persistent in treating it as such.

But what perhaps made Mister Rogers most exceptional, at least in my eyes, was the way he followed Christ. He recognized the inherent incontrovertible immutable indelible belovedness of each human person: that before anything else, each of us is, as Pope Francis says, “looked upon by the Lord in love.”

Fred Rogers embraced the universal dignity of the human being not primarily as mere dogma or concept, but as a mission: his every word and action was imbued with that reality, so that his whole life became what Pope Benedict XVI described as “that act of the entire being that we call love.”

He is, in my humble and unqualified opinion, a saint: a pillar of human goodness who belongs in the same breath as other 20th century giants like Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II. He will never, of course, be recognized as such by the Catholic Church -- a sad byproduct of centuries of human division -- but I brazenly believe that he belongs in my litany.

As the film ended and the house lights came back up, there was a pregnant pause. No one in the theater spoke. Hardly anyone moved. Sitting on the aisle in the second-to-last row, I myself had an unobstructed path to rush on to the next thing (there is always a next thing, isn’t there?), yet I too hesitated. Perhaps it was because we were all emotionally frayed, our feelings a bit too near the surface for the sunlight. Perhaps we were subconsciously obeying our training and waiting for a vague, wasteful, and only-infinitesimally-relevant post-credit scene. Or perhaps the forty or so human persons gathered in that tiny theater in downtown Dayton silently and collectively recognized a yearning to linger in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as long as we could.

On Hypocrisy

by Tim Kirchoff

One of my least favorite patterns in contemporary political discourse is our collective fixation on hypocrisy. The controversy that erupted over Sarah Sanders’ ejection from a restaurant provides a convenient and recent example. People on both sides immediately compared the situation to the Masterpiece Cakeshop controversy that was recently settled by the Supreme Court. The Left gloated about someone on the Right being denied service, just as a gay couple had been denied a wedding cake by a baker; meanwhile, the Right gloated about the Left now availing itself of a right (to refuse service) that they had so wholeheartedly opposed in the case of the bakery.

That the analogy between these cases is far from perfect is beside the point.¹ Each side gleefully points at the other’s willingness to abandon their standards when circumstances change.

We can see a similar case almost perennially with respect to the filibuster or judicial nominations in the Senate. The majority will often threaten to bypass or abolish the filibuster, while the minority protests that the filibuster is one of our country’s most important checks on the power of the majority. Then, when the party in power changes, each side points to the other party’s previous stance as a justification for their newfound contempt for or love of the filibuster. Now, with the retirement of Justice Kennedy, Senate Democrats seem poised to try to use the upcoming midterm to block any judicial nominee that Trump puts forward, citing Republican obstruction on the Merrick Garland nomination.

Neither side actually knows what they want the rules to be. They only want the rules to favor their side in their pursuit of power. Neither side seeks integrity. Instead, both use the other’s lack of integrity as an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for their own hypocrisies.

This is the opposite of Jesus’ prescription that we should remove the logs from our own eyes before we presume to pluck a splinter from anyone else’s. Others’ hypocrisies are not legitimate excuses for us. The standard which we measure out for others is the standard by which we shall be measured.

I would like to approach the USCCB’s outspokenness on the current immigration situation through this lens. The bishops are speaking out loudly and unanimously against the separation of children from their parents in detention, and the Catholic Left is rightly elated. The Catholic Right, meanwhile, might remember how much the Left sulked when the USCCB was pushing, for example, the Fortnight for Freedom, and take that as an excuse not to join the USCCB in condemning the administration’s actions today. The Left can then take the Right’s current reticence on immigration as an excuse to not join in the next time the Church’s stance on an issue becomes politically useful for conservative politics.

Again, this is the opposite of what we ought to be doing. If the boldness of the bishops’ stance on immigration makes you uneasy, think about what response you would like to see from other Catholics when the bishops speak out on an issue they aren’t comfortable with. On the other hand, if the idea of the bishops joining the Resistance is an exciting one, think about what you would like to see from other Catholics right now, and keep that in mind the next time the bishops speak up on an issue you are not so comfortable with.

If you want Catholics to listen when the bishops speak about abortion, then listen now. If you want Catholics to listen to the bishops now, then make sure you’re willing to listen the next time the bishops speak out. Otherwise, it’s time to start being honest about whether your Catholicism comes before your partisan identity.

The sign I carried at the Keep Families Together march in Chicago.
It'll be just as appropriate at the March for Life in the January cold as it was in the summer heat.

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1 In the case of the bakery, it was not a categorical denial of service, but a refusal to provide a particular kind of product.^↩