Annunciation, Jay Defeo, 1975 (an amazing show of her work at the SFMOMA right now)

Annunciation

Even if I don’t see it again — nor ever feel it
I know it is — and that if once it hailed me
it ever does –

And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,

as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t — I was blinded like that — and swam
in what shone at me

only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.

– Marie Howe

This year I took a break from preaching doing gospel “reflections” at Mass because I’ve been doing so many book related events, and I wanted to let other people have a chance to get up and speak at the ambo. But Advent is probably my favorite liturgical season, so I wanted to share with you a reflection I gave at Advent a couple of years ago, on the Flight into Egypt. It’s one of those weird Gospel stories that only occurs in one Gospel (theology geek out warning: thus it didn’t likely come from the Q source), and it only occurs in Matthew, which is frankly my least favorite Gospel. So writing this was a challenge. But it remains one of my best memories of public speaking, a task I normally look forward to like a root canal. Best wishes as the darkness enfolds us, even as it cannot comprehend us.

Vespers Reflection, Mt. 2:13-15; 19-23

December 22, 2010

Our reading tonight is often referred to as the story of the “flight into Egypt”. It’s a story about exile and return, and about the gifts given to us by people who are silent.

Tonight we approach the end of Advent, a time of waiting, listening, and – above all – a time of patience. But everywhere around us are symptoms of impatience. The crowded streets, people pushing a bit more than usual on Muni and Bart, the nightmare of airports and freeways.

It’s this impatience and darkness that leads many of us to shut down at this time of year. Perhaps for some of us, it is also a welcome opportunity to embrace the stillness of winter. Many of us wake in the dark, work in a closed space through the daylight hours, and head home in the dark. As a winter people, we crave light like we crave air.

This is why Advent directs us to tend to the things deep down inside of ourselves. Those of you who are heading to a midnight mass in a few days will hear the words of Isaiah: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone”. Just a few weeks ago, our Jewish brothers and sisters lit the candles on their menorahs for Chanukah, one light at a time until every light shone.

Now is the time for us to begin preparing our own lights. But an odd thing happens in tonight’s reading; as soon as Jesus is born, he’s chased out of Israel, and sent into exile. The light is lit, the family gathers around it, the Magi arrive, and Herod’s tyranny means Jesus must be hustled off into Egypt by his foster father Joseph.

This is a story of light gone into exile. It’s also the beginning of what many theologians refer to as the “hidden life” of Christ; the years when he evolves as a man, out of sight of the world. Those years are a time of silence. But this story teaches us to reframe the idea of exile. It helps to think of exile not as a time of isolation, but as a time of formation.

Thomas Merton captures this idea. “We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them”, Merton tells us. “We do not leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good.” Surely this applies to the story of Christ, who went into Egypt as a baby, but what about us? How many of us have been exiled or hidden? What parts of our inner lives have we stashed away? And who has protected us when we were most vulnerable, when we needed to be hidden in order to become who we are tonight?

Joseph is the foster father of Christ, yet in this reading about the flight into Egypt, we learn very little about him. Joseph is busy in this reading fulfilling two prophecies; Hosea’s prophecy that God will call his son out of Egypt, and the notion that the Messiah will come from a despised place.

We should take note of the fact that Jesus’ family had to flee because of the conditions they were living under. Richard Horsley tells us that Herod had turned Israel into “what today would be called a police-state, complete with loyalty oaths, surveillance, informers, secret police, imprisonment, torture and brutal retaliation against any serious dissenter”. That seems like a very contemporary story. How many people, even here in San Francisco, come fleeing conditions exactly like that? As Ched Myers reminds us, “the savior of the world begins life as a political refugee”.

We must remember that the Holy Family was poor. We must remember that they lived as exiles. And at this time of year, when we are prone to dark, lonely moods, we must also recall that they eventually found a home, even if it was not the place where they expected to end up. I want to return for a little bit to the figure of Joseph, because these readings from Matthew are really the only time we learn about him. When I came to Vespers last week, Reverend ______ reminded us of Joesph’s righteousness: how he kept his promise to Mary in spite of what was essentially an out of wedlock pregnancy, how he raised Jesus in a traditional Jewish home, reading Torah together, going to temple, honoring the Jewish laws.

Over the past few weeks that I’ve been planning this reflection, however, another thing has stood out about Joseph, and that’s his silence. Exile is a kind of enforced silence, since immigrants and anyone fleeing oppression do not have much of a voice to speak with, but Joseph is literally silent: we never hear his voice. Thus a lot of theologians talk about Joseph’s life as a “hidden life”, much like the years between Jesus’ birth and the beginning of his public ministry.

Just because a life is hidden, however, doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. Henri Nouwen says that we should strive to be “hidden in life, but visible to God.” Joseph’s silence speaks multitudes. His job in tonight’s reading is not to speak, but to listen. And for many of us, listening in days when we feel the darkness pressing in is the hardest thing of all.

This past summer, I decided to attempt to do an eight day silent retreat. Even though I suffer from a genetic disorder called logorrhea – diarrhea of the mouth — I’d made it though a four-day silent retreat, so I figured eight days was manageable. There was an hourly talk each day with my spiritual director, but aside from that, we were not only forbidden to talk, we weren’t even allowed to make eye contact with the other retreatants outside of Mass. Not being able to smile at anyone, to look up from my plate at dinner, or acknowledge my friend who was also there began to bother me. “I’m going stir crazy”, I finally told my director. “It’s not a prison,” he reassured me. “Go for a walk into town.”

So I did. And I went out of my way to smile and gaze at every stranger on the street. Many of them probably thought I was nuts. But the silence at the retreat center forced me out of my normal role as someone dependent on language. When even facial communication was cut off, the only person left to talk to was God, and as we all know, God can be a bit taciturn. I had to learn to listen for God’s voice in the most unexpected places, from the most unexpected people.

Silence and exile force all of us to slow down, to be more patient, and to be more aware of the people around us, especially those whose own lives are hidden. Recently, a group of women at my parish started getting together to plan some meetings for a women’s group. One of them is a teeny, tiny woman in her sixties or seventies. We were talking about ministry, and said that she travels alone to San Quentin. When we asked how she counsels the prisoners, she surprised all of us by saying “Oh, I just listen.” Try to imagine for a minute this woman, barely five feet tall, passing through maximum security in order to spend time sitting with violent offenders, just listening.

Listening is also a challenge for many of us in the church today. For people in the LGBT community, for women, for anyone who feels marginalized or misunderstood, we have to listen harder in order to find representation and resonance. But, as they did for Joseph, the messages of what we should do will come to us at unexpected times. The more that I interact with other Catholics, the more I learn about how many of us are working for a more inclusive and more welcoming church, even in small ways that remain hidden to most people on the outside.  And just like Joseph, we work to protect and care for one another.

Tonight’s reading offers us a new idea about exile. Rather than being punishment, perhaps we can think of exile as a time of formation, a time when Christ’s worldview and ideologies are shaped. Formation leads to vocation. And the same is true for many of us; as adults, we seek communities of like-minded people. We find our families of choice. If the adult Christ found his own family of choice among the most despised and marginalized people in his society, to me that means that many of us here in the Bay Area, whether we grew up here or arrived seeking a tolerant community, should feel even more of a kinship with him. We love one another more for being outcasts, and accompany one another, as Joseph did. We are lights to one another.

The other night, I went to hear Chanticleer, who I’m sure many of you are familiar with, and they debuted a new composition, based on the opening words of John’s gospel. I want to leave you with these profound and reassuring words.

The light shines in the darkness

And the darkness could not comprehend it.

Contemporary liturgical music is 99% awful, but I’m still fond of the reworking we sing of the 23rd Psalm: Shepherd me O God, beyond my wants, beyond my fears, from death into life. I’m still puzzled by the idea of bodily resurrection; it helps, although it’s likely yet another heresy on my part, to imagine it on a more molecular level. To paraphrase Shirley Bassey, atoms are forever. Knowing this, however, does not negate the shitty thing about the march of time, the knowledge that life is finite. But in some ways, that’s a gift in and of itself. Immortality seems terrifying, to live forever witnessing the same cycles of death, violence, and sorrow, to know that joy is transcendent.

Oh gosh, can you tell yet that my birthday is creeping up?

Turning 40 was easy because I’d just come back from Italy and was too jetlagged to realize what was going on. Turning 41 was easy because it felt like the soft landing after 40. Turning 42, however, which will occur in about two months, is hitting me harder for some reason. Perhaps it’s because I know of a writer I admired who died at 42 of a terrible fast moving cancer. Perhaps it’s because my own father was 52 when he died, and the idea of having only a decade left is scary: there are so many things I want to do. And perhaps it’s also because, as a person who saw death coming for someone I loved when I was very young, the repercussions of that continue to be manifest in surprising ways. Yet 42 does not by any reach seem old: my mother is robust and active and healthy at 74; I have friends in their 80s and even 90s who continue to work, write, teach and travel. But this vibrating line of worry runs underneath many days.

This is part of why I’m drawn to the liturgical calendar. Like my Jewish and Muslim and Hindu friends, I can mark time not but these transcendent California seasons, but by ritual. I’ve been starting my days listening to this podcast, and every day they announce that it’s the such and such Thursday in Ordinary Time, and Ordinary time on the church calendar goes on forever and ever. Just look at this pie chart:

Poor Pentecost barely gets a chance. I mean, that is a lot of plodding, boring, never-ending Ordinary Time. Rather like life, isn’t it. And then abruptly, just this week, we finally hit the end of it. Just as American culture hits its more horrific propensities to confuse greed and consumerism for caring about other human beings in a meaningful way, here comes Advent, a season of waiting and helping. And this year, Chanukah also arrives early. Only a few weeks ago it was Eid. And Diwali. There is something very comforting about knowing that turning into winter, nearly every religion marks not the end of the Roman calendar year, but the season itself, with all of its quiet and darkness.

So, having been born into that quiet and darkness? I think it suits me fine, being an introvert and liking the internal calendar more than the external one. Getting older is really about understanding that time does move fast in some ways, but in many other ways it moves only as fast as we allow it to. And the gift of being a writer is being able to stop time, slow it down, speed it up, bend it to your will. No, we can’t do that with life; we can only live and be kind and not waste life on worrying about when or how it will end. Because that’s impossible to know, and realizing that seems to be one of the greatest gifts of getting older. That and not giving a shit about what people think of you. Amen to that.

We’re feeling the first finger of autumn here in Oakland. This afternoon as I tried to sleep off the dregs of this nagging cold, it began to rain, very hard, so hard I thought someone was mysteriously hosing down the windows. Yet just a few days ago temperatures spiked into the 90s, and my students and I were red-faced and sleepy in the early phase of the afternoon. I detest hot weather and love the turning into solitude, quiet, and deepening darkness of November, so even if it’s a little cold, it’s a huge relief.

California is a state of oppositions. Geographically, where I live is an error, the flat ground out edge of Pangaea that dips into marshy edges of the Bay, the shopping mall down the street built on top of an Ohlone shellmound, the school where I teach rent by a geographic fault so deep and scary they’ve had to spend millions reinforcing the buildings so we might maybe, sort of, hopefully make it out alive in the event of The Big One. The Big One has been a reality my entire life, and this week, watching friends in New York wade through dirty water, I wondered how many of them left California because of the threat of The Big One. Which never seems to come — at least, not with the increasingly predictable frequency of their terrible storms — but remains underneath us at all times.

Our seasons are like that too: as a friend says, more moods than anything else. You’ll get a day of near violent heat and weeks of clouds. You’ll wear four layers in August and sandals at Thanksgiving. It’s impossible to know what’s coming next, and the forecasts are about as helpful as earthquake predictions, which is to say, not at all.

It’s been a time of uncertainty for me, not being sure what I’m writing next. When people ask what I’m working on now, they do it well-meaningly, but really, how weird it is after six straight years of writing, going from one book to another, to be relatively still. And peer pressure keeps cropping up, with friends busy in writing groups, NaNoWriMoing, preparing for publication, heading off for their MFAs. And I just say, every time someone asks, I don’t know. But what I should really say is that it’s unpredictable. The editor I worked with on Radical Reinvention is no longer with the publisher (the same thing happened with Slanted and Enchanted, briefly leading me to wonder if I was cursed). I have no idea how many copies I’ve sold: enough to land another book deal? Enough not to be an embarrassment? It’s unpredictable. Will I write more nonfiction? Yes. About what? It’s unpredictable. Do I need a break, after so many events, so much stress, one of the busiest and craziest years of my life? Yes. Do I feel guilty about taking a break? I’m an Irish Catholic. For God’s sake, yes. So, so guilty.

That’s part of the reason I’ve been thinking of late of the Black Madonnas. Jungian thought says that dreaming of the Black Madonna is a transformation of consciousness, an internal turn that will lead, in some manifestation, to external change. That’s the writer’s passage, I think. Into and out of darkness. Cyclical, right? Not like the weather in California, but like our internal weather, the kind that shuts down in the first chill. It’s not so much a time for writing and creation as it is a time for watching and waiting, and watching especially for those mysterious phenomena that miraculously turned these Madonnas all over lily white Europe black. Sometimes that mystery is better than creation. Sometimes that mystery is creation.

Stuck at a cafe without wifi for a couple of hours this morning, I cleaned out the “dump” folder where I leave essays I’ve started and abandoned for whatever reason and found this piece, which I actually sent off to a magazine which never rejected it, or bothered to respond. Which I guess means it’s good for a blog entry. It was for a series called “funny women”, and I guess I went meta with it. And maybe it’s not that funny. Or maybe the editor’s just a flake. Or maybe my email accidentally went to some stranger who was like WTF.

My childhood friend’s mother was convinced I was going to grow up to be a stand-up comedian. “You have such a dry wit,” she used to say. I was probably eight at the time and had no idea what this meant: because I have a lisp as the result of a lack of orthodonture, I tend to lightly spray people, so my assumption was always that my wit was slightly damp. Yet, the idea that I am funny has followed me around ever since. But it’s probably one of the last ways in which I would describe myself in, say, a personal ad. My basic stats — 5 ‘ 11″ but not thin, footwear obsessive with a socialist fantasy life, writer, college professor for chrissakes — would guarantee I’d only get replies from the occasional dude with a giantess fetish and maybe R Crumb. If I added that I was funny, men would avoid me like… well, like they already do, except for my husband.

Perhaps in the haute-Berkeley bourgeois world of my childhood friend’s family, where her mother was a retired fashion model and her father a high-powered attorney, having a chunky, pre-pubescent, Irish Catholic Woody Allen as their kids’ best bud was kind of a relief. I was keeping it real when my mom ferried me up to their hillside home from where we lived in the flats to entertain them with a verbal stream of ironic commentary. Said friend grew tired of my eccentricities when we hit high school, at which point something became clear: she was pretty, and I was funny, and when she failed to invite me to several parties where her equally attractive queen bee friends would be holding court, never the twain would meet again.

This dichotomy has been exhausted elsewhere, but it’s a paradigm I’m still familiar with as I enter my forties. Attractive female writers get author photos with airbrushing and fans blowing their long hair around. Funny female writers get author photos where we’re squinting painfully into the camera, trying not to make a joke. I look like I’m about to shit myself in my author photo, because I’m trying really hard not to say something that would make the photographer laugh and drop her camera, which I almost caused her to do several times. And every semester, my course evaluations reveal two things about my relationship with students: one, they think I’m a huge stoner, and two, they think I’m funny. Rumor has it that particularly attractive female faculty members regularly get “she’s hot” as the main comment on evaluations, so at least I never have to worry about what the Dean would make of that.

The thing is, I don’t try to be funny. I don’t do it deliberately in my writing, nor do I sit there during conversations attempting to assemble witty comebacks. But my sense of humor, such as it is, is tied up in a lifetime of being too tall, too chubby, too short of hair or weak of chin. Because society never approved of my looks, I stopped worrying about them, and as a result I stopped worrying that making people laugh would make me look stupid. And yes, sometimes I even laugh at my own jokes – the least funny ones, in fact, and when I laugh really hard I drool on myself. Everyone thinks it’s hilarious.

Because I am insane, on top of teaching full time at Berkeley, writing books, and promoting them (the latter being the thing that’s eaten up most of my year thus far), I also spend many evenings in the summer doing pre-show talks at Cal Shakes, a theater in the Orinda hills I’ve had a long personal history with. Back when I was a wee 13 year old (technically not so wee as I was already 5′ 10″ with size 10 feet), I attended summer camp at Cal Shakes — called Berkeley Shakespeare back then — where I met the guy who’s now my oldest friend, the writer and theater critic Sam Hurwitt. Years later after college I auditioned for their internship program, and was turned down, which turned out to be one of those shitty-in-the-moment things that actually worked out fantastically, because I wound up pursuing a graduate degree in writing instead.

Anyway, my seasonal work at the theater just wrapped up, and since a few audience members always ask for copies of my talks, I thought I’d post it here and let it hang out for a while. There’s also an article in the program which I wrote and am crazy proud of. And, as you can see above, Leroy McClain, who plays Hamlet brilliantly, is also really, really easy on the eyes. The show’s been extended to October 21. Please go if you can.

Let’s begin with a quiz: What is Hamlet about? A man who hesitates? Revenge? Purgatory? Mystery? Love? Lust? Psychology? Language? Identity? Coming of age? Friendship? Rivalry? Politics? Stoic philosophy? The romantic mind? Parenthood? Mothers and sons? Spies? Theater itself? Pirates?

The answer is: all of the above. But Hamlet himself tells us what this play is really about: words, words, words. And oftentimes, words combined in startling ways. Shakespeare scholarship tells us that in writing Hamlet, Shakespeare not only introduces 600 words he’d never used before, he also added 170 words never used before in the English language. This range from colorful words like “avouch”, “blastments”, “fanged”, “gibber” and “strewments” to things commonplace in our contemporary English: “defeated”, “reword” and “survivor.”

But where Hamlet’s language is perhaps most original is in his pairings of words.  “The whips and scorns of time”. “The trappings and the suits of woe.” “Defeated joy.” “Bloody, bawdy villain/ Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain.” In Hamlet, we hear Shakespeare’s brain practically exploding with language in a way it never had before. And the paradox is that this linguistic explosion takes place within the context of a play about a man who can’t make up his mind.

So what lead Shakespeare to the creation of this very unique heroic figure? As with most of Shakespeare’s plays, he worked from source material: Saxo the Grammarian, a 12^th century author, wrote a collection of stories including the tale of a Danish king murdered by his brother. The king’s son, Amleth, feigns madness for decades (he whittles wooden hooks while whistling and eventually uses these to hang a net in which he traps his uncle’s associates) until he comes of age and performs his revenge for his father’s murder.

Most scholars agree that some version of Saxo’s tale eventually found its way to the stage in Renaissance England and refer to this as the Ur-Hamlet, the primordial Hamlet. Audiences of Shakespeare’s time were crazy for revenge tragedies, and Shakespeare learned to be a crowd pleaser over the course of his career. But he also reinvented any text he worked with, and in the case of Hamlet, his own life may have affected that reinvention.

In 1596, about four years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, his son Hamnet – named after his Stratford neighbor – died at the age of 11. The plague regularly swept through England at that time, and children’s life expectancy was in many cases cut short. And in 1601, Shakespeare’s father died. So Shakespeare took on the Hamlet story at a time when his son’s death was fresh, and his father’s death impending.

Grief, and the philosophic musings borne out of grief, is perhaps the most pervasive theme in the play. As Hamlet says, “What should fellows such as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?” In this moment of his life, it’s likely that Shakespeare was traveling through his own experience of grief, an experience complicated by the recent religious changes in England. The Protestant church had gotten rid of the Catholic notion of Purgatory, a place where sinners might burn off a few of their sins. And as a result, many English people of the time struggled with the notion that their flawed loved ones had likely gone to Hell. The ghost of Hamlet’s father tells his son he was killed without the sacraments that he was “sent to my account/with all my imperfections on my head.” And Shakespeare, showing many signs in his plays and poems of being a crypto-Catholic, or a secret Catholic, seems to himself have struggled with the idea of Hell.

So Hamlet, a scholar who’d likely prefer to remain at his desk, is forced to become a man of action and revenge. But he hesitates. And that hesitation, that time of waiting and planning, is what sets the plot rolling, another paradox. It’s interesting to note here that much of Hamlet’s hesitation is not only borne out of guilt, but out of his own thinking. “Nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so”, as he says. Hamlet begins the play in the tradition of Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and later, the French writer Montaigne, who wrote that “myselfe am the groundworke of my booke”. Stoics argued that the Sage, the person of “moral and intellectual perfection,” would not suffer from emotions that clouded his judgment. And much of Hamlet’s self-directed anger and self-criticism comes from that very emotional cloudiness. His friend Horatio, who sees much and suffers nothing, is the ultimate stoic, but Hamlet is really a romantic philosopher: he seeks to understand the difference between what is real and what is imagined, and he is in awe of and confounded by nature, both human nature and the natural world. He uses humor to diffuse nervous situations and passionately picks away at the workings of his own mind. If he only believed the ghost right away, the entire play could end at the end of Act 1 if Hamlet just killed his uncle.  And then we’d all be home by 9PM!

But we’d also miss out on the ingenious plot Hamlet sets into motion, which uses theater itself as the method for “catching the conscious of the king.” And we’d miss out on the love story, the friendship, the mother/son struggles, the coming of age of Hamlet, a man of thirty spurred into maturity in the most unlikely circumstances, the play-within-the-play, the philosophy, and yes, we’d miss out on the pirates. Although they’re offstage, you get the point.

One reason why Hamlet remains so popular and beloved hundreds of years later is its adaptability. Theatre companies and film makers all over the world have remixed Hamlet into their own cultures and times, and our director Liesl Tommy, who’s originally from South Africa, has done so tonight. Our Hamlet is a 2012 Hamlet in many ways: the cast looks like they might have walked into the Bruns from around the Bay Area (and we’re blessed with a charismatic and brilliant cast, especially Leroy McClain as Hamlet); the costumes and music are modern, and the set mirrors the decay and corruption of Shakespeare’s Denmark in a contemporary context. Ophelia’s bawdy songs of madness aren’t Renaissance ditties but contemporary indie pop songs you may have heard on the radio today; Rosencrantz and Guilenstern, Hamlet’s university pals, are male and female.

But the language is still pure Shakespeare. The plot is still Shakespeare. And the emotions spurred by this timeless story, so contemporary and so ancient in its themes, are the same. Grief. Sorrow. Impatience. Thought. But in tonight’s production, a surprising subtheme emerges: love. Hamlet emerges as a figure we want, as an audience, to love. And like Shakespeare loved his son, and his father, so we love the men and women he created.

The chief characteristic of the Dark Night of the Soul seems to be that it arrives without warning. Paradoxically, it’s also a step in a long process, and thus its arrival should always be expected. And yet, it’s not.

One thing about autumn in Northern California is that it’s a false season. From evening until noon, fog skids over the coast and pushes inland until things look shrouded. But by 2pm you’re sweating in relentless sun, which vanishes again at 7pm. A transient, sudden summer. And if you live with this kind of false weather for, say, your entire life, the end result may be a kind of false Seasonal Affective Disorder. There’s the longing for autumn, and interiority, and a time of thinking and depth, and then there are the people coming to campus in sundresses and sandals, and you can’t help but hate them for being able to go home and change in the middle of the day.

Part of this began just before I went to Los Angeles, when I found out someone I knew had died. Not someone I knew very well, but one I liked very much: whenever I saw him, there was a big smile, and laughter, and he was crazy about music in a way very few people are. I used to catch his voice on the local radio and think “it’s him!” and be happy. And then another friend’s friend died, young, and then I went to LA where it was 95 Downtown and there was no car and relentless heat that felt like being punished. Even though I caught up with some people I like very much, all of them seemed to be going through some sort of crisis: health, relationship, career. LA is the kind of place where everyone seems to be undergoing a long term crisis, where everyone is suffering under the false veneer of a city that’s bigger than God.  It’s very Joan Didion, though I would never walk through the market in a bikini, myself.

Nobody warns you when you begin to write that if your book comes out in the summer and you go back to teaching in the fall, you’re going to be exhausted and battling disappointment and watching the “prestige” books of the year all come out at the same time and eat up every possible inch of column space everywhere. And nobody tells you that if you write two books in six years you may afterwards sit there coming up blank for a very long time. Alternately, you may write a couple of things editors requested you to write only to get the response that the essays are “not right” for the publication, and that these will the the only things you’ll write in a calendar year and nobody will ever read them because you subsequently deleted the files. And nobody says “shut up you fucking baby and be grateful,” although they really, really should. Well, actually, a Catholic sister may tell you that, but not in so many words.

The thing about the Dark Night of the Soul is that it is part of a process. It’s the process of going deep inside through the darkness in order to get closer to The Source. And Autumn, and Winter, those are good times to do that. Rilke’s the perfect poet of these things. He even begins his Dark Night with a plea:

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.*

My professor used to say that Rilke was the loneliest poet who ever lived. But in his solitude, I don’t always see suffering. Remember that in the four noble truths the Buddha says there is an end to suffering: the end of Winter, the end of the Dark Night. Jesus tends to remind us of this as well. And yet, the next scene Rilke gives is seductive, in its own way, probably most so to the introvert.

Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander along the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

The same Catholic sister who told me to shut up and be grateful also reminded me of Saint Augustine’s prayer: restless is the heart, until it comes to rest in God. I would perhaps give that a modern translation: anxious is the heart. Anxious is the soul. Anxious for the next project, the next night out, the next new person who might unlock the key to the end of suffering. But the Buddha and Jesus know you have to sit under the Bodhi tree, or in in the garden at Gethsemane, staying awake for a very long time, and you’ll sit there alone. And that is alright. The people who care for you may fall asleep, but in their sleep they don’t stop caring.

Modern culture doesn’t like this kind of darkness, this kind of interiority. It’s the antithesis of how we should live and be. And it clashes with the responsibilities of daily life, and with those five hour bursts of summer I watch coming every day, knowing my feet will be hot in the boots I had to put on to deal with the chill of the morning. But in that burst the inner voice says “for fuck’s sake, get up and go outside.” And when I can, I do.

*Autumn Day, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged: school started, and that’s always a massive mental shift, plus I’m still cranking through events and just got back from a very, very hot weekend of readings in LA.

I’ve also gotten some lovely emails and requests from readers for more stuff that might be helpful in their own quests for a better understanding of liberal, social justice oriented, feminist, LGBT embracing Catholicism. So, sitting in front of one of the seven over-packed bookcases in my house (seriously: whenever I have to move the 3K odd books I own — and compulsively keep buying — is the biggest pain in the ass), here, in no particular order, is a partial list of things I read while writing this book (unfortunately, the Graduate Theological Union and UC Berkeley libraries, where I did a ton of research, don’t show records of your checkout history).We didn’t include a bibliography in the book because it’s technically not a work of research, but, yeah, it is TOTALLY a work of research. And everything on this list opened my eyes and changed the way I think about faith.

Bibles: New Jerusalem, Oxford Annotated, King James, NRSV

Raymond Brown: An Introduction to the New Testament

Ilia Delio: Christ in Evolution

John O’Malley: What Happened at Vatican II

Elizabeth Johnson: Consider Jesus, She Who Is, Quest for the Living God

Saint Augustine: Confessions, City of God

Saint Ignatius: Autobiography and The Spiritual Exercises

China Galland: Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna

John Dominic Crossan: The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant

John Dominic Crossan/Marcus Borg: The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary behind the Church’s Conservative Icon

John Meier: A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vols. 1-4

Sandra Schnieders: Written that You May Believe

Thomas Merton: No Man is an Island, Seven Storey Mountain, New Seeds of Contemplation, The Sign of Jonas

Abraham Heschel: The Prophets

Hunt/Neu: New Feminist Christianity

Timothy Radcliffe: What is the Point of Being a Christian

Kathleen Norris: The Cloister Walk

James Martin: The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything, My Life with the Saints

Butler’s Lives of the Saints

Dorothy Day: The Long Loneliness

Donal Godfrey: Gays and Grays

Joan Chittister: The Rule of Benedict

Susan Haskins: Mary Magdalen, Myth and Metaphor

Karl Rahner: Spiritual Writings

Thomas a Kempis: Imitation of Christ

Anonymous: The Cloud of Unknowing

St John of the Cross: Dark Night of the Soul

St Theresa of Avila: The Interior Castle

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems

John Boswell: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality; Same-Sex Unions in Pre Modern Europe

Rumer Godden: In this House of Brede

Brian Moore: Catholics

*image from The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, where I read this past weekend. One of the most beautiful bookstores I’ve ever been in.

A month and a half after my book came out, I’m grateful for any reviews, especially thoughtful ones. And this one from Sadie Magazine does a pretty good job of limning the main underlying issue that seems to course through the book, that people want to ask me about at readings, and the same underlying issue that pervades a pretty huge chunk of every day of my life. As the reviewer notes, “If you’re looking for answers, for a neat fit between Roman Catholicism and feminism, then you won’t find them [in Radical Reinvention]. And perhaps, in a way, that’s the point.”

She’s right, because there is no answer to how a person can be both Catholic and feminist. It’s like asking how we can be feminist and academic, or feminist and a musician, or feminist and wear pants/skirts/boots/heels/makeup/no makeup. Everything about the institutional church screams of sexism, millennia worth of it, in fact. And everything about my day to day life screams of feminism: I’m an academic (and women, like it or not, are still rather a minority in higher ed; in the summer creative writing program where I taught in June, I was the only female writer on the faculty). I write about feminism. I don’t have kids, and I don’t feel regret about that (for various, too boring to go on about health reasons it’s likely that I wasn’t going to be able to anyway, but I’m also 41, which means my body’s like, psych). I roll deep socially with a lot of feminist thinking writers, artists, musicians, and other creative types, many of whom are men, gay, straight and trans. I teach feminist topics in my writing courses (this coming semester: a whole unit on Riot Grrrl, just in time for the Pussy Riot mess to unfold and remind us again that women get STILL smacked down for self expression).

That’s all par for the course. But I still go to Mass every week, sometimes more often than that. And the person behind the altar is still a man, every week, week after week. And the person above that in the bishop’s office is a man, and the cardinal is a man, and the Pope. God, by the way, is not a man, but explaining why that is would be a whole different book. Please read Elizabeth Johnson for an explanation of that (I cannot recommend her classic She Who Is highly enough). And, you know, sometimes I’m in my pew in the back of the church — the bad girl section, also appropriate for really tall people) — and it bugs me that there isn’t a woman up there celebrating the Mass.

But here’s the thing: there are women in the pews. There are, in fact, way more women than there are men. The recent backlash against American Catholic sisters for the sin of “radical feminism” points out something most Catholics have known for hundreds, arguably thousands of years: feminism has always been part of the Christian faith. Just this week we celebrated the Assumption, and heard the Magnificat in church (which we should really hear every week, but I’m not a liturgist, so…):

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,

and has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich he has sent away empty.

That’s a feminist God. As is the God in Luke who takes the form of a woman sweeping out her room, who finds a coin and invites everyone in the neighborhood to come celebrate. As is the God of the Book of Wisdom, and Jesus, being a Wisdom figure, therefore brings a feminist God down to us in corporeal form.

So there’s that. And then there are the hundreds of feminist saints. And there are the 80+ women who belong to the women’s group I help coordinate at my church, one of whom wanted to come to our last gathering because a letter about the health care mandate in our local diocesean newspaper was answered with a curt response that health care is great, but the Church doesn’t want to advocate for birth control. This woman, in her sixties, was livid: “Of course women want to have children!” she told us. “They just don’t want to have twelve of them they can’t afford to feed.” And we nodded and sighed.

When you’re a Catholic feminist you nod a lot (when another Catholic woman says something you agree with) and sigh a lot (almost every time a bishop/cardinal/Pope opens his mouth). But you still believe in social justice, the preferential option for the poor, the communion of saints, the solidarity you discover working with the poor, the men in the church who do listen to women and who do compassionately work with them (they exist! hallelujah!), the embodiment of Christ in the people around you. And you still believe that Jesus, who sat with women, traveled with women, cared for women, died with women, was born again into the witness of women, and sent women forth to be his apostles, is okay with the fact that you are a woman, and that he believes, in his own radical feminist way, that you are equal to men.

That’s how you survive, as a feminist, in the church. It also helps if you talk about it and write about it. Which I am trying, in my own way, to do. I want to quote Dorothy Day here; like most of the saints, she says it better than I ever could.

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?