no longer at ease in the old dispensation

     ...were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

    (Eliot, Journey of the Magi)

Don't Hesitate

 If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty

of lives and whole towns destroyed or about

to be. We are not wise, and not very often

kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this

is its way of fighting back, that sometimes

something happens better than all the riches

or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant

when love begins. Anyway, that's often the

case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid

of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

{Mary Oliver}

feeding the poor

Conservative politics: Either the government feeds the poor, or the poor feed themselves.

Liberal politics: Either the government feeds the poor, or the poor starve.

Catholic Social teaching: The poor could starve. The government could feed them. Or, you could feed the poor.

Peter Maurin, "At a Sacrifice," from Easy Essays

In the first centuries
In our own day
of Christianity
the hungry were fed
at a personal sacrifice,
the naked were clothed
at a personal sacrifice,
the homeless were sheltered
at personal sacrifice.
And because the poor
were fed, clothed and sheltered
at a personal sacrifice,
the pagans used to say
about the Christians
“See how they love each other.”

the poor are no longer
fed, clothed and sheltered
at a personal sacrifice,
but at the expense
of the taxpayers.
And because the poor
are no longer
fed, clothed and sheltered
the pagans say about the Christians
“See how they pass the buck.”

Education of the Heart: 35 Children's Books Featuring POC

All of these books are books I personally read and enjoyed as a child, with the exception of the two marked by asterisks. The first of those is a recently-published book by a favorite children's author of mine, and the second comes recommended by several friends.

Obviously there are many people of color who are not African-Americans--I'd love to put together another list of those books if there is interest. In light of the current heightened awareness of racial division in our country following the death of George Floyd (requiescat in pace), I want to bring especial attention to these books at this time.

There are no books listed for high school students, not because they do not exist, but because many high-schoolers can read adult books, and lists of adult books on this topic can more easily be found.

Picture Books
Snowy Day, Ezra Jack Keats
Whistle for Willie, Ezra Jack Keats
The Drinking Gourd, Jeanette Winter
Color Dance, Anne Jonas
A Fist for Joe Louis and Me, Trinka Hikes Noble*
Ragtime Tumpie, Alan Schroeder
Henry's Freedom Box, Ellen Levine
Wilma Unlimited, Kathleen Krull
Ellen's Broom, Kelly Starling Lyons
Freedom Summer, Deborah Wiles
Virgie Goes to School with Us Boys, Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard
A Picture Book of George Washington Carver, David A. Adler (illustrations: Dan Brown)
Everybody Cooks Rice, Norah Dooley
The Land is Your Land, by Woodie Guthrie (illustrations: Kathy Jakobsen)

Elementary-Level Chapter Books
Freedom's Wings, Flying Free, Message in the Sky (Corey's Underground Railroad Diaries), Sharon Dennis Wyeth
Meet Addy, Addy Learns a Lesson, Addy's Surprise, Happy Birthday, Addy!, Addy Saves the Day, Changes for Addy, Connie Porter
The Jacket, Andrew Clements
Rosa Parks, Kathleen Kudlinksi

Junior High
Yankee Girl, Mary Anne Rodman
The Journal of Biddy Owens, Walter Dean Myers
The Journal of Joshua Loper, Walter Dean Myers
Circle of Fire, Evelyn Coleman
The Watsons Go to Birmingham -- 1963, Christopher Paul Curtis
Bud, Not Buddy, Christopher Paul Curtis
Sounder, William H. Armstrong
Lilies of the Field, William Edmund Barrett*
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred D. Taylor
Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, Gary Schmidt

welcoming the Word

A talk I gave recently for the women of Hillsdale College's Catholic Society on hospitality, households, communion, incarnation, and Scripture:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11-UTVNjl4zlPf9NafOC3TRvozt6ZZAV-/view?usp=sharing

The sources we looked at:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fVPDA7BnfjKURDAMv37WWcBnPPcMVHXK4CzJcvU9EHg/edit?usp=sharing 

don't curse the darkness, light a candle

I've seen great sadness and dismay over the cancellation of religious services (especially Catholic Masses) due to Coronavirus. I think this sadness rightly arises from a desire to let Christ govern our lives, and an awareness that one ordinary means we honor His kingship is through worshipping with other believers. The last few days, I've been thinking about what it means to continue to allow Christ to govern our lives when we're deprived of this ordinary means.

If your bishop, priest, or pastor has cancelled services or if you have decided it is imprudent to attend services, it’s ok to be upset and to acknowledge this as a source of suffering. God made us communal beings and called us to worship together. God made us incarnational beings and called us to receive His grace through the sacraments. Communal worship and sacraments are good, and so temporarily losing access to them is rightfully a cause of sorrow.

You may think this decision is the product of collusion between diabolically-influenced clerics and the Illuminati. You may think this decision is an unnecessary measure taken by authorities who generally have folks' best interests at heart and sometimes slip up through fear or misinformation.You may think this is a wise decision made by a legitimate authority.

Regardless, coronavirus does not void that which is our privilege and duty: to consecrate the Lord’s day. If we become so upset over the situation that we forget that the hour or two we would have spent at church still belongs to God, Satan is pleased. Not the goal, I'm pretty sure, regardless of which of the three above categories you fall into. If (like me), you're not accustomed to sitting down to an hour+ of private prayer in a single go, a few ideas (not to be limited to Sunday, either!):

-Pray for a grace-filled outcome to this situation. Pray especially for those who are critically ill, doctors lacking needed rest or in positions to make difficult ethical decisions, and those who will be financially and materially hurt by the lock down. Pray for the wisdom to know your responsibility in helping provide for your community.

-Spend time reading and meditating on Scripture.

-If your church uses a cycle of readings, read those Scriptures alongside your fellow believers, in spirit if not in body. (Catholics, Magnificat, which has the Mass readings and reflections on them, has been made available online for free: https://us.magnificat.net/free!!)

-Spend time in listening silence away from technology

-Do some non-Scriptural spiritual reading

-Listen to or sing hymns and praise music

-Watch or listen to a Mass (if you’re Catholic) or another service (if you’re not) online, on TV, or on the radio

-Check your church website to see if your pastor has posted (or ask if he would be willing to post) a reflection or sermon on the Sunday Scriptures

-Pray with your family. "Where two or three are gathered" doesn't only apply to non-blood-relations.

Beautifully, too, because this is a cause of suffering, we can particularly heed the command of Paul to “offer our bodies as a living sacrifice.” There are many who experience a desert of communal worship and sacrament on a far more regular basis who can use our prayers and sacrifices at this time:

-those who are currently struggling (spiritually, physically, or materially) who have not had the church reach out to offer them support

-those who do not attend religious services at all because they have never heard the Gospel, or have never heard of God's love from people whose witness is convicting

-those who love God, but who do not live in an area where they have weekly (or even monthly, or yearly) access to the sacraments

-those who desire to receive the Eucharist but currently do not because of irregular marital circumstances

-those who have left the church because of abuse (or any lesser failure on the part of members of the church to live out Christ's self-sacrificial love)

-those who have sought and been unable to find a robust church community that is both welcoming and challenging

Also, I'm personally thankful at this time that at least I don't live in the Middle Ages, when interdicts were imposed on cities and entire regions for political squabbles that usually had little to do with the conduct or interests of those who ended up deprived of the sacraments. Nothing like a little history to keep things in perspective.

they shall be satisfied

"The Church has an obligation to feed the poor, and we cannot spend all our money on buildings. However, there are many kinds of hunger. There is a hunger for bread, and we must give people food. But there is also a hunger for beauty--and there are very few beautiful places that the poor can get into. Here is a place of transcendent beauty, and it is as accessible to the homeless in the Tenderloin as it is to the mayor of San Francisco." (Dorothy Day, speaking in St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco)

"The appearance of Mary to the native Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac in 1531 had a decisive effect on evangelization. Its influence greatly overflows the boundaries of Mexico, spreading to the whole Continent. America, which historically has been, and still is, a melting-pot of peoples, has recognized in the mestiza face of the Virgin of Tepeyac, in Blessed Mary of Guadalupe, an impressive example of a perfectly inculturated evangelization." (Pope St. John Paul II, Ecclesia in America)

Earlier this semester, when my students were studying the colonization of the Americas, I had them read parts of a translation of the earliest record we have of the Guadalupe apparitions. We had just been discussing the horrific treatment perpetrated on the people of the Americas by Spanish soldiers, many of whom justified their imperial project on the grounds of evangelization but in fact cared for nothing of the sort (without disparagement intended towards those small groups of religious who came and valiantly spread the Gospel without sequestering land, money, or power for themselves). A Spanish Dominican friar, observing these crimes, remarked with ire that "the Spaniards, from the beginning of their first entrance upon America to this present day, were no more eager to promote the preaching of the Gospel of Christ to these nations, than if they had been dogs or beasts. Worst of all, they specifically laid many restrictions on the Religious, daily afflicting and persecuting them, so that they would not have time or leisure to attend to preaching and the Divine Service, for they looked upon that to be an obstacle to their getting gold, and raking up riches which their greed pressed them to obtain."

If I were in those circumstances, I thought as I prepared for class, what would I say to the faith of these men who came from without, who brought more disease and violence than they brought order and love? Why would God send the message of His universal redemption through people who did not live the universal love demanded by the Incarnation? Why would I accept a faith that seemed more an imposition of European-ness than a gift intended for the ends of the earth? To be honest, I thought, I probably wouldn't. The relationship of conqueror to conquered is not a relationship that manifests the living reality of the Church.

The ten years after Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico became ten years of increasing failure on the part of God's wayward Spanish sons to show the American people a Church is a mother and bride, not master. Could it be coincidence, then, that at Tepeyac He gave, not an education broken by sin and language barriers, but contact with the living reality of His Mother, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, the type par excellence of the Church Herself? You are mine, Juan Diego, she said, not because you are Spanish or European but because you are a man, just as my dearest Jesus was a man.

Someone once told me that people study history because they don't have the balls to study philosophy (rough paraphrase). Maybe, if you're a Gnostic (and then who cares what you have the balls to do anyhow?) But if you're Catholic, philosophical truth (logos, if you will) became incarnate at a particular time at a particular place. History is important to us because history is important to God. It matters not just that our Lady appeared, by when she appeared and where she appeared. She appeared in 1531 at Tepeyac because she was needed there. She was needed then.

I tried to say this in class somehow, but the reflection was still new and more tinged with awe than eloquence, so I'm not sure how much of what I tried to articulate above really made it from my heart into my students' minds. But I do remember that one of my students, who isn't always particularly attentive, was leaning forward in his chair with every ounce of concentration focused on what I was saying. When I bumbled my way rather clumsily into some kind of conclusion about the historical import of the event, his eyes got wide, and I almost started crying right there in class. I still do when I remember it, because I could see in his eyes that he got it. History was suddenly no longer one damn thing after another but a narrative unfurling within the providential grace of God.

Why do the liberal arts, the studia humanitatis matter to a developing country? After moments like that, how could one say they do not?