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?

Medieval-Enlightenment Humanities

My second-year students have worked really hard this semester. Below, a tribute to them: the list of works whose excerpts they valiantly soldiered through at the behest of their crazy instructor. (I didn't fully realize how crazy this was until I actually sat down to type out the list. Yikes.)

St. Benedict, Rule of St. Benedict

Einhard, Life of Charlemagne

Letters from King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII

Magna Carta

St. Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Canons of Lateran IV

The Rule of the Franciscan Order

The Primitive Constitutions of the Order of Friars Preacher

Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Giovanni Boccacio, Decameron

Canons of the Council of Constance

Dante, Inferno (no excerpting here--we walked alongside Virgil & his pupil to the depths of despair)

Diary of Christopher Columbus

Nican Mopohua

Bartolomeo de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance

Machiavelli, The Prince

Martin Luther, 95 Theses and Babylonian Captivity

John Calvin, Genevan Catechism and Institutes

Schleitheim Confession

39 Articles of the Church of England

William Roper, Life of Sir Thomas More

Canons of the Council of Trent

St. Francis de Sales, The Catholic Controversy

St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises

St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
Francis Bacon, aphorisms from the Novum Organum

Descartes, Discourse on Method (and a short jaunt into Meditations on First Philosophy for my favorite Descartes passage)

John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government and Letter Concerning Toleration

Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense

Greco-Roman Roots of Civilization

I'm very proud of my freshmen class. Most of them come to JPII with no exposure to studying the great works of Western civilization, and most dove right into the material and really worked hard to understand what was going on in each work and how they connected to each other.

This semester covered excerpts from the following works:

• Much of Homer's Iliad
• All of Sophocles, Antigone
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• Plato, Apology
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Metaphysics and Politics
• Polybius, Histories
• Cicero, On Duties
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
• Gospel of Matthew
• Acts of the Apostles
• Letters to the Romans and Galatians
• St. Justin Martyr, First Apology
• St. Clement of Alexandria, On Philosophy
• Passion of the Holy Martyrs Felicity and Perpetua
• David Bentley Hart, "Human Dignity was a Rarity Before Christianity"
• St. Augustine, City of God
• Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order

even in perplexity

"For still the vision awaits its time,
presses on to fulfillment--it will not lie.
If it seem slow, wait for it,
it will surely come, it will not delay." (Habakkuk 2:3)

"A telos is an end that illuminates the entire path. You might say the difference between telos and process is fundamentally pedagogical. With a telos, the entire path is redeemed and validated as a movement that presupposes, values, and remembers what came before. We know how to walk ahead because of the lessons the past has taught us. A telos can teach us how our past still has meaning because that past must be absorbed into our journey towards the telos." (Michael Altenburger)

"God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission--I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next...if, indeed, I fail, He can raise another, as He could make the stones children of Abraham. Yet I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling. Therefore I will trust Him...If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us." (St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, Meditations on Christian Doctrine, "Hope")

medieval philosophy + big band

what do Boethius, Dante, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando and Robin Williams have in common?

I'm glad you asked.

a Benque horarium

so, you might ask, how does a missionary teacher in Belize spend her days?

to be honest, it's really not that different from college life--I study and learn, go to class, sleep, eat, and try to block in adequate time to pray each day. Happily, the schedule here is very oriented towards the prayer life of the parish and missionary community, so that last one has been at least slightly more successful than it was at college.

on any given day, with slight variations, this is how I live:

6 am: wake up, shower, walk to church
6:30-7:10ish: holy half-hour with Benediction, plus I try to say Morning Prayer
7:10-8: eat breakfast in the rectory with fellow missionaries who are early risers (it's a small crew)
8-11:30: teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays or do class prep/grading on MWF
11:30-12:15: lunch, back at the rectory
12:15-5:30: more teaching/prep/grading + hanging out with students
5:30-6: supper at the rectory
6-6:30: chanted Evening Prayer with the priests and sisters
6:30-7: walking rosary (if my toe isn't dying--this hasn't happened for several weeks) or pray/read--I'm currently going
7-7:50: Mass (in Spanish except for Wednesdays)
7:50-10:00ish: finish up grading and hang out with the other ladies at my house, quick shower before Night Prayer and bed

Wednesdays are a long day--at 5:30, we have small group with the women students at the junior college, and after Mass is Super Missionary Night Prayer (SMNP)--games, snacks, a testimony from one of the missionaries, and night prayer together.

Friday and Saturday nights the missionaries often hang out at one of our houses or in the (blessed air-conditioned) living room of Deacon Cal and his wife Ginny, who have been married for 56 years and served the community in Benque for 50 of those. We play games (Catan is a big favorite), trade embarrassing stories, or watch movies from the well-curated collection of the estimable Drew Kanne, one of our seminarians.

Sundays are free days--Mass, a leisurely lunch, and an afternoon for napping, letter-writing, reading, or wasting time on Facebook.

There's not a ton of leisure time and life is pretty busy, but it's good--and structured enough that I actually get things done!

spiritual direction

"And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment."

He has done all things well.

life in Benque

I've been in Belize for about five weeks now, and finally the dust is starting to settle.

I live in a lovely house with three other women missionaries who teach at the high school next door. It's an 8-10 minute walk to the parish in one direction and a 15-20 minute walk to John Paul II (the school) in the other, though I often ride to school in a van with the other teachers.

laundry (ft. the high school across the street)

The weather has been almost uniformly pretty hot and humid--upper 90s during the day and dropping down into the 80s at night. We're supposed to drink 3-4 liters (around a gallon) of water per day just to replace the sweat! And because it is so hot, showering multiple times per day is a cultural norm here. Neither the school, the house, nor the parish have AC, but we do have electricity and so keep fans running constantly.

our kitchen

There's a kitchen in our house, but we mostly eat in the refectory at the parish with the priests and other missionaries (there are 26 or 27 missionaries living in four houses). The food is extremely good: homemade refried beans or stewed red beans, homemade tortillas and rolls, rice, and chicken or beef cooked a variety of different and delicious ways. We also have fresh juice at almost every meal: watermelon, cantaloupe, lime, or tamarind (tastes a lot like apple).

I got an infection in my foot last week (which has almost healed by now, thanks be to God!) so I've been trying to keep off it. One of my favorite times of day when I have been able to walk, though, is a walking rosary around Benque in the evenings before Mass. The air has cooled off by then and the sun is setting. One of the altar servers who usually comes has taken to carrying the cross before us, and it's really beautiful to look up and see the cross superimposed on the sunset. I tend to get pretty distracted praying the rosary, but walking actually helps me keep my mind from wandering, and walking past different houses and shops suggests immediate needs and people to pray for. 

a simply enormous avocado
which cost the equivalent of $1.50

Belize was a British colony until the early 1980s, and is the only Central American country to have English as an official language. I've encountered a few people whom I have to talk to in Spanish, but in general I'm not forced to do so, so I can't say I've gotten much better at speaking the language. Most Masses as well as morning prayer and many of my students' conversations are in Spanish though, so I've gotten much quicker at hearing and understanding when others are speaking. I'm really loving teaching--the material we're studying is very interesting to me personally, so it's a lot of fun to prepare for class and to think about how I can most effectively and enjoyably teach the material to my students. Many of the students are excited to be there, and it's incredibly fulfilling when they make a connection that isn't obvious in the material but that I was hoping they would pick up on based on the trajectory of our discussion.

It's been a great first month and I'm thankful for how good this life is. Blessed be God.

OLA 2019

for God did not give us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power and love and self-control.

(2 Tim. 1:7)

My second week in Belize I spent camping in the Mt. Pine Ridge Forest with some of the other JP2 faculty and the first-year students. Called the Outdoor Leadership Adventure (OLA for short), the trip is a required part of the coursework at JP2. Students leave their phones at home to live for a week without electricity, running water, or a real bed on some property in the nature reserve owned by SOLT. Each day, students get up at 5:30 am to venture out on different excursions—hiking in the mountains, walking blindfolded down to a river, exploring a cave and natural water formation, and climbing a huge waterfall. In the evenings, after Mass and dinner together, we played chess (the students here are completely obsessed with chess) and talked around the campfire.

The terrain around Mt. Pine Ridge is very different from where I’m living in Benque and stunningly beautiful, so it was a real treat to get to spend almost a week there exploring it. I had been praying this summer that the Lord would fill me with love for my students, and as soon as I actually met them, He answered with an outpouring of desire for their good and so much consolation each time I observed one of them drawing close to Him in prayer or helping another student.

JP2 faculty

Probably the coolest part of the week was seeing how living in common for even such a short period of time concretely built up community and leadership among the students. By the last day, students had come to know each other, and were offering and receiving help in ways that made it clear they had not only a desire to help but a new awareness of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Young men who had hung back at the start of the week helped the young women with carrying bags and navigating difficult parts of the trail. Young women who had been reluctant to climb or get in the water at the beginning of the week pushed themselves through burdens of fear and insecurity. Students who had barely been able to speak a word when the OLA started were smiling and playing cards with their new friends.

At the end of the first day, as students were setting up their tents, Fr. Beau sat down to draw me a map detailing how to get to the cave the next day. And the question that I would be working through the rest of the week hit me: what in the world does it mean to lead when you don’t know where you’re going?

Many of the students hadn’t been camping before. Many hadn’t been this far away from home for this long before. I was supposed to lead them, to support them, to guide them in the leadership the OLA was supposed to be developing.

Rio Frio Pools, another stop on our map!

I’d never been camping for a week before. I’d never been to Pine Ridge and I’d never been to the cave I was supposed to be leading them through the next day. I had literally moved one week before to take up semi-permanent residence in a foreign country.

How was I in any shape to lead these students?

Leadership, I told myself, is not primarily about knowing exactly where you’re going and what you’re supposed to be doing, otherwise I sure as heck cannot lead these students. Trying to figure out what it does mean, I remembered two things that had come up in conversation earlier that summer with two of the most incredible women leaders I know.

The first is a Boston College PhD who works at a DC think tank. “When you’re a teacher,” she told me, “Always make sure you’re working harder than your students. They'll see your hard work and know that there's something there that makes it worth it, and they'll try to find out what that is.” I know she means it, because that’s exactly what she does.

You can’t lead if you just to use your position of leadership to make people serve you and make life easier on you. Leadership means thinking something so important that you are willing to pour yourself into it in whatever way necessary to achieve your end.

The second runs a highly successful business in Nebraska. “Leadership,” she told me, “means you’re the one mopping the floors.” I know she means it, because that's exactly what she does.

Leadership means not pursuing the vision at the expense of people. Leadership is service: He came not to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. Leadership is constantly looking for ways to meet the needs of the people around you. It's a willingness not just to run towards the vision, but to be the first to volunteer to do the dirty, mundane, difficult jobs it takes to get there.

The verse from Second Timothy kept coming up all week, as I realized that when you're enslaved to fear, you seek control, and leadership looks a lot like knowing exactly where you're going and what you're supposed to be doing. The only way to lead through hard work and service is divine liberation from that fear. Blessed be God, this week allowed me to see how much He has done so for me over the past two or three years.

seeds of the Word (or, my working defense of the humanities)

I'll be teaching two humanities courses this upcoming semester, one on the Greeks and Romans and one on the medievals. Preparing for these classes has been an exciting and maybe too-consuming adventure, but it's been forcing me to look squarely at a question I usually shrugged off at Hillsdale: why prioritize studying the humanities?

I loved the classes I took for my history major, and I went that direction in the first place because I'd been enchanted by courses taught by the most wise and loving Great Books teacher a high-schooler could ask for. At Hillsdale, I took classes in philosophy of education and the liberal arts tradition, and I read A.G. Sertillanges' The Intellectual Life for devotional reading (ha! the Dominican spirit strikes again!) because it set my heart on fire. I thought then, and do now, that reading history, literature, political theory, philosophy, and theology impelled me to examine my life more intentionally and opened me to dimensions of human experience with which I had been unacquainted.

As I began to put together syllabi for my courses, though, I began to realize that my own experience did not constitute a sufficient apology for others to pursue a similar course of study. When one of the other missionary teachers asked me to describe in one word what I was hoping to find in Belize, I said, "integration." Integration of all this abstract thinking I've been doing for years with the practical realities of human life. Taking what I have discovered to be true and letting its implications permeate what I do and how I do it.

Well, here we are. The intellectual rubber meets the road to Benque Viejo.

The act of standing in front of a classroom and asking students to read Homer, Aristotle, Boethius, Aquinas, and Shakespeare stakes my integrity as a teacher and a human being on the assertion that these authors are worth reading and thinking about, not just for economically-privileged American students but also for economically-challenged Central American students. I will be cheating my students if I offer them anything less than a completely worthy use of their limited time and money.

The value of the liberal arts education that John Paul Junior College offers holds true only if liberal arts education is what it purports to be--an education based not on the particular race, nationality, sex, religious background, or economic situation of the person receiving it, but on the fact that he is a human being. Because he is a human being, he has the capacity to understand and responsibly exercise freedom. Because he is a human being, he has the capacity to wonder about and reflect on the conflicts and questions raised by his own experience. Because he is a human being, he has the capacity to discuss these questions with other human beings and alongside them to seek the truth about the human condition. An education which helps him to do these things is an education in realizing the potential inherent in his humanity.

One could reasonably object that exercising freedom, reflecting on one's experience and seeking truth can be done without reading ancient texts. True enough. It seems to me, however, that one can think about reading these tests in (at least) two ways:

(a) "I will read Homer and try to figure out what he thought about x (hospitality, fame, immortality, family) so then I will know what an influential ancient bard thought about these things, and if I ever write a textbook on ancient Greece, then I can write about what Homer thought," or,
(b) "I will read Homer and try to figure out what he thought about x (hospitality, fame, immortality, family) and what the implications would be of thinking that way. I will think about why he thinks those things, and about whether or not I agree with him, and I will allow his perspective to bring nuance and depth to the way I think about these things."

No contest, folks.

The perspective of any given person is pretty limited, such that we learn best in the company of others. Reading ancient authors enables part of that company to be formed of those who have lived in times and places quite different from our own, who may think in categories utterly foreign to us, and who have foreseen difficulties (or solutions) in various paths of thinking not immediately evident to us.

SO. Super cool example I ran into the other day:

While putting together the ancient humanities course, I'd been pulling some sections from Justin Martyr's 1st Apology where he discusses pagan philosophy. He says, for example, pretty shockingly: "we have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them." Justin attributes the possibility of the rational pagan to the fact that "there seem to be seeds of truth among all men."

Ok, yes, he did just say that those who lived reasonably before Christ are Christians which is W I L D. Stick that on your back burner to consider, though, because it's not my point at present. 

Know where that same phrase popped up the other day, only a few weeks after I'd read it in Justin? The Instrumentum Laboris for the 2019 Synod on the Amazonian Region, the very same document which has created a tizzy in much of the English-speaking Catholic world, despite the general difficulty of source-checking any of the claims made by various Catholic news agencies as it is not yet available in English. One of the questions addressed in the document is the complicated question of what it means for Catholicism to engage with a non-Catholic culture. Where does the Church learn, and where does it teach?

Section 108 of the document reads "inculturation and interculturality complement rather than oppose each other. Just as Jesus was incarnate in a particular, determined culture (inculturation), his missionary disciples followed his paths. For their part, the Christians of a culture leave so as to encounter persons of other cultures (interculturality). This occurred from the beginnings of the Church when the Jewish apostles brought the Good News to different cultures, such as that of the Greeks, discovering there “seeds of the Word.” From that encounter and dialogue between cultures emerge new paths of the Spirit. Today, in this encounter and dialogue with the Amazonian cultures, the Church examines these new paths."

Yep, the Instrumentum Laboris explicitly invokes Justin's phrase. This suggests that the Synodal bishops think that understanding how Catholicism engaged with pagan Greek philosophy in the first centuries A.D. can help us understand how the Church today can engage with the cultures of the Amazon region. Not understanding the first will hinder our efforts to sort out the second--we'd have to re-do a lot of legwork that was already done, so to speak. (At least, the authors think that they think this; I'll have to read more of the document to get a better idea of how far the historical parallel can be drawn and how far the authors would want it to be.) This is a huge question being worked out by the Church right now, but it can be at least partially elucidated by our understanding of the past.

It's easy to treat great texts as desiccated museum specimens, but how much richer for us to know they contain dormant seeds of the Word to be watered by our encounter with them.

inaugural

"What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase 
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, 
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity, 
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, 
Every poem an epitaph."

(Eliot, Little Gidding)

Little Gidding was the poem that showed me why people read poetry; these lines gave me a vision of what writing should be.

2019 has been my own time of ends and beginnings, and despite some misgivings, I've decided to make a blog one of the beginnings. If certain of these misgivings end up being accurate, the blog may also be one of the endings as well.

One of my great fears is of cordoning off a blog, or really any writing or conversation, into a navel-gazing echo chamber. Somewhat alleviating my fear are those clear-thinking, incisive writers whose blogs have helped me to think more clearly myself. In particular, I take as unofficial, unknowing patrons Simcha Fisher at I have to sit down, Dorothy Cummings McLean at Seraphic Singles, and Rachel Fulton Brown at Fencing Bear at Prayer. These three women have showed me "the complete consort dancing together," even when their contributions to various conversations are ones with which I disagree.

Throughout my time at Hillsdale College, I found myself meditating repeatedly on the mystery of Pentecost, particularly on the connection between the outpouring of the Spirit and various gifts of speech and communication in service of the truth. The blog's address is taken from one of many poetic invocations of the Holy Spirit found in the ancient hymn Veni Sanctus Spiritus: Veni, lumen cordium! Come, Light of Hearts! It is my hope that the working of the Spirit may "disperse from my soul the twofold darkness into which I was born, sin and ignorance" and help me to write well and truly.