the siege of rebar and rubble seems endless. there are shards on our streets, and in our hearts.
the images stun me every time. images find their way in where words sometimes take roundabouts. of all the thousands and thousands of words that have passed before my eyes this summer past, that have sometimes settled into the nooks and crannies of my brain where i can’t shake them out, the images are otherwise: immediate, gut punch. they demand no absorbing. they are all but instant. as fast at it takes for the pupil, retina, and occipital lobe to zap into action. 13 milliseconds; a measure i can’t even measure. another name for instant.
no wonder we feel assaulted. the assault is everywhere.
this week i felt gutted. i am almost ashamed to hold up images of war against images of destruction that i cannot shake. the destruction that gutted me most this week was wrought by the sin of hubris, of addiction to power and greed. what’s rebuilt will not be a hospital for the deathly ill, the dying, the shattered. it will be for the clinking of crystal, and the lifting of forks that are gilded.
in a world of brokenness, we go dizzy sometimes thinking that all there is is evil. we don’t know how to stop it. which is why i spend my hours poring over the pages of sages and everyday saints, not the ones beatified and sanctified, the ones ushered into the hallowed halls of a hierarchy that’s laid out miles and miles of rules and red tape. the saints i search for are the ones whose names you would never ever know, the ones who populate the checkout lines at the grocery, who drive the buses and never fail to wait for the kid loping to the bus late and frantic, or the lady with the pail of cleaning supplies and the limp that won’t let her hurry.
henri nouwen
henri nouwen was a dutch-born priest, psychologist, and theologian who left the vaunted podiums of yale and harvard divinity schools to devote his life to those who might be seen as broken, broken of mind by worldly measure but not of spirit. he became pastor of l’arche daybreak, an interfaith, non-denominational, shared community where both the intellectually challenged and the not intellectually challenged live as one. it consists of eight homes, an old barn, and 13 acres in the rolling hills of ontario, about an hour north of toronto. its core belief is that beneath every brokenness there is light. radiant light.
henri nouwen is no longer; he died of a heart attack at 64 in 1996. but his books, some 39 translated into 35 languages, live on. his radiance, his wisdom, is without end.
nearly every morning, i read henri. he glides into my inbox deep in the night, awaits my morning. he sets me straight for the day. this week, one morning, he reminded this:
Everyone is a different refraction of the same love of God, the same light of the world, coming to us. We need a contemplative discipline for seeing this light. We can’t see God in the world, only God can see God in the world. That is why contemplative life is so essential for the active ministry. If I have discovered God as the center of my being, then the God in me recognizes God in the world…. The spiritual life requires a constant and vigilant deepening and enlivening of the presence of God in our hearts.
if we can look into the brokenness, beyond the brokenness, if our guiding principle is a belief that the Sacred is inextinguishable, cannot be broken, then we might, just maybe, find fortitude in setting our sights on seeing the God in our midst.
i know the nature of God is twisted and sometimes torn, depending on our stories, our pasts, those who taught us or not. i know that some refuse to utter God’s name, and some to deny God’s presence. but i use the name, the knowing, as that for which there are no words. the inexpressible, the depths that defy expression. i know God as the tender force that draws even strangers together. i know God as the hay bale into which i fall when i am afraid. i know God when i look into the eyes of pain without end, and a glimmer is caught, and love is made real, and by only the grace of God we pull each other out of the darkness, the impossible darkness. i know God as the depth and the light of me.
so when henri nouwen reminds me that if i keep God in my center, if i sense the palpable presence as often as i turn my attention that way, then i am equipped for what so often feels impossible: i can search for and find the sparks of the Divine in most any tableau i encounter. in the joyous laughter of the jamaican nurses who love my mama, who make her giggle like a schoolgirl. in the friend down the lane who is crushed and crushed again and again by the cruelties of someone she birthed, someone she will love fiercely forever—no matter the cost. in my absolute favorite grocery store checker, the one with the pink or purple hair, the multiple piercings, and more ink on her skin than it took to write Webster’s first dictionary, the one who holds my hand tight as the tears pour down her cheeks as she tells me the tale of her beloved who’s died, as she tells me how hard it is to still be alive.
these days i’ve shifted my orientation, my seeing. i’ve slipped out of the worldly paradigm, a paradigm that crushes me daily. i’ve moved into the realm of the sacred, the holy. the only way forward, as the rubble and rebar compounds, is to do as nouwen teaches: seek the sacred, be it the faintest of sparks or a bonfire. seize it, hold onto it as long as you can. even amid the rubble there will be the faintest stirring from under the dust, under the twisted steel rods. when the broad view, the overview, dares to pummel us, for all we can see is the evil, the hubris, the cruelest of cruelties, maybe the wisdom is in shifting our sights to whatever is holy and unfurls right before us: the faintest of kindness, of improbable light, of love that refuses to whimper or die.
the world beyond our reach is going to break us every time, but the world we can touch, the world we can sense with all our own God-given senses, that just might be what saves us. and the way we too can take part in the saving.
may it be so.
what broke you this week? and more urgently: what stirred you to see the Sacred?
the images above are of gaza, kyiv, washington, d.c. can you tell which is which?
it started because months, or maybe years, ago, i stumbled onto a poem that took my breath away. it was written by a poet i’d not known of, didn’t think i’d ever read. but the poem, titled “Nativity,” stayed with me, a poem that paints the first Christmas scene in strokes and shades that settled deep into my marrow, and forever more are the Christmas i imagine.
it’s a poem that lays the baby Jesus in a rough-sawn barn, the air pungent with animal. “the wind tugging at the shutters.” there is nothing gilded about it. and it was written, i knew right away, by someone at ease with being small, tucked off in a corner keeping watch. it was written, i could tell, by someone whose very veins course with humility, and understood a God who preached the same, a God who asks us to get about the business, the holy business, of loving as we would be loved without noise or bombast or folderol.
it turns out he lives on an isle on the scottish west coast, a place where the wind might tug at shutters. and it turns out he is something of a polymath: a poet, a painter, a children’s book writer, a translator of great works. and, above all, something of a pilgrim, a pilgrim seeking the quiet beauties that punctuate the everyday. he calls them “atoms of delight.”
and he writes of pilgrimage: “the word is often used to describe the journey to a shrine or sanctuary in search of spiritual transformation, which is a meaning i acknowledge. but now pilgrimage has become a much bigger thing for me; it has gone far beyond that rather heavy and medieval sense of going on a journey to visit a holy site. why shouldn’t it be about a walk to a hill loch to listen to the impossibly beautiful singing of red-throated divers? why shouldn’t it be about a child running into the forest in the early morning to find the treasure they dreamed of? these are journeys of the heart, seeking the profoundly precious places where little miracles happen. and why shouldn’t it be about panentheism—the finding of God in all things?”
it’s not hard sometimes to recognize a kindred soul.
what is hard is to imagine finding yourself in conversation with such a kindred someone. but that’s what’s happened. kindness is the thing that opened the door, his kindness. in a world ruled by transaction, where fees are paid and contracts signed for any exchange of goods—be it words or bricks or lumber—kenneth steven lives otherwise.
i found that out not long ago, when, during the editing phase of my next book, i dove into the task called “permissions,” in which for any chunk of text—poetry or prose or lyrics to a song—beyond a certain measure, you must secure permissions from its author. this can be a costly exercise. and it is always one that makes me quiver, wondering what walls i’ll encounter, and what cold-shouldered hubris i might have to tiptoe through.
it’s that poem, “Nativity,” that’s stayed with me all these years. and i’d included the whole of it, eight lines, at the start of an essay that i hope to include in the book.
wondering if i was whistling into the wind, i sent off a proper letter, the digital kind, and shipped it cross the sea. i’d no idea if mr. kenneth steven would ever reply. but, lo and behold, come monday morning, there he was, tucked kindly in my mailbox. and more than generously writing: “of course you are more than welcome to use the poem. i’m sure you’ll mention where you found it.”
and thus, with the stroke of his generous heart, a friendship has unfolded. and a treasure trove of poetries have now brushed through me. and i am richer for this scottish friend who, as a boy, awoke one night at midnight, and hearing a great and ferocious wind, hurriedly dressed and left the house, where he climbed a hill in howling winds, before crossing through a field to reach his favorite tree, where he knew the horse chestnuts would be falling, and he was out to save them, to gather them up. “i felt given a whole world,” he writes in an essay about the midnight escapade. “it was about the autumn and the big winds, and the thrill of running up that long hill and entering the field at last at what felt like the middle of the night.” and the indescribable delight of knowing “that all this treasure was mine.” the treasure: a cloth bag of chestnuts shaken from the limbs, their deep and woody smell, orbs that looked as though they were made of shoe leather.
befriending him, he who writes me every day now, sometimes more than once a day, is magical. is akin to befriending any of the authors from my childhood who’ve long entranced me, drew me into storybook tableaus: tasha tudor; e.b. white; frances hodgson burnett, who wrote the 1911 children’s classic, the secret garden, a book that featured my holy trinity—an orphaned girl, a padlocked garden, and a robin redbreast that finds the key—and once prompted me to fake a fever so i could skip church one sunday to stay at home and turn its pages.
long ago, when i’d be asked if i’d ever want to write a book, i demurred, brushed away the thought. didn’t think i could hold a thought long enough to pen more than a few pages. i didn’t know, though, that the magic of a book comes in all the threads unspooled along the way. threads that carry me to places far and wide, and to souls i’d never otherwise know. but words, like little birds, or prairie seeds, catch on the wind and settle into fertile loam. and we are richer for them.
in much the way, my beloved chairs, through all the words and all the years, have become my dearest treasures.
bless you.
love, bam
have you a penpal in this digital, globe-crossing, email world? someone you’ve not met but who seems a certain friend?
i promised kenneth i would share word of his beautiful meditative podcast, Imagining Things, on the patreon platform. recorded in a studio that seems to be just behind his island home, you can sometimes hear the scottish winds blowing off the atlantic, and a bird or two not far away. (or maybe i’m imagining.) and of course he speaks in a scottish-soaked timbre, and in between reflections he shares poems that will make you hit rewind so you can listen once again, so breathtaking are the lines.
his latest book, one that should be landing on my front stoop within days, is Atlantic: Selected Poems of Faith. but i’m already deep into Atoms of Delight: Ten Pilgrimages in Nature, and Iona: New and Selected Poems.
alas, the tuxedo-clad bird, decked out in what seems at swift glance a crisp white bib, along with obsidian jacket and tails, is reputed to be a plunderer of shiny baubles, be it crumples of tinfoil or pop tops of aluminum cans. as such, its reputation is nastier than it deserves. it’s thought to be a mischievous thief, a rapscallion of the ornithological world. one who surveys the landscape for the juiciest morsel to scavenge.
in that case, i am showing my magpilian virtues this week. i am, in summer’s height, plucking and gathering, assembling but a brief collection of baubles for your consideration.
lest we let the poor magpie’s reputation flounder down at the bottom of the seed barrel, science leaps to its rescue with news from the university of exeter that, in fact, the ‘pie is not a thief. it’s been exonerated by exeter’s ornithologists, it seems. according to a study published in the journal Animal Cognition, the bird is merely curious, and actually suffers from a malady known as neophobia, fear of new things.
here’s how the ornithologists explain it:
“The Exeter University study found that magpies were actually more cautious and less likely to approach shiny or novel objects, even when food was nearby. In 64 tests, magpies only made contact with shiny objects twice, picking up a ring and immediately discarding it. This behavior suggested they were trying to determine if the rings were food, rather than expressing an attraction to their shine.”
if only shakespeare had known. over and over, the bard plucks at the so-called plunderer.
“And chatt’ring pies in dismal discords sung;”
this, from Henry VI, Part 3 (Act V, Scene 6, Line 45), but one example.
again and again, shakespeare draws on the corvids—the raven, crow, rook, jackdaw, jay, and magpie—luring them into his scripts. and except for the blue jay, they often appear, according to those of the literary cognoscenti, the ones who read the bard closely, “together in ominous flocks to plunder the dead.” the magpie, specifically, was thought to be “possessed by the devil and channeled his evil words while chattering,” an idea traced back especially to king henry who in Henry VI pulls out “chattering pie” as the cutting-est put-down he knows for his archnemesis, the dastardly duke of york.
audubon’s plate 357, american magpie
nearly a quarter century later, j.j. audubon himself attempted to rehabilitate the bird’s roguish reputation, writing in his journal, the birds of america, of the american magpie in plate 357:
“It is extremely shy and vigilant in the vicinity of towns, where it is much molested, but less so in country places, although even there it is readily alarmed. When one pursues it openly, it flits along the walls and hedges, shifts from tree to tree, and at length flies off to a distance. Yet it requires all its vigilance to preserve its life; for, as it destroys the eggs and young of game birds, it is keenly pursued by keepers and sportsmen, so that one might marvel to find it maintaining its ground as a species, and yet it is not apparently diminishing in most parts of the country.”
all this to say that at this sauna-like point in the summer, when the air outside is thick enough to cut with a butter knife, and the sweltering has us curling up in arboreal shadows, i come bearing plundered fruits. i am the magpie of ill repute, the one before the reputational rescue. (a warning: not all fruits are sweet. some, too bitter for words, though words are one sure means of conveying even a hint of the harshness.)
joanna macy
for the third week in a row, i come bearing tribute to a great woman whose death leaves us once again with a great voice silenced, and a soul we pray lives on. joanna macy, the buddhist ecophilosopher and translator of rilke, died over the weekend at 96. four years earlier, in conversation with krista tippett, on the occasion of her and anita barrows’ then-new translation of rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, macy had this to say about living in the moment, and opening ourselves to the beautiful, during this moment in history she refers to as the Great Unraveling:
Well, it seems clear that we who are alive now are here for something and witnessing something for our planet that has not happened at any time before. And so we who are alive now and who are called to — who feel called, those of us who feel called to love our world — to love our world has been at the core of every faith tradition, to be grateful for it, to teach ourselves how to see beauty, how to treasure it, how to celebrate, how — if it must disappear, if there’s dying — how to be grateful. Every funeral, every memorial service is one where you give thanks for the beauty of that life or the quality of what — and so there’s a need, some of us feel — I know I do — to what looks like it must disappear, to say, “Thanks, you were beautiful. Thank you, mountains. Thank you, rivers.”
And we’re learning, how do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy? And that goodbye has got to be — has got to be in deep thanksgiving for having been here, for being part of it. I kind of sound like I’m crying, and I do cry, but I cry from gladness, you know. I’m so glad to recognize each other. You can look in each other’s face, see how beautiful we are. It’s not too late to see that. We don’t want to die not knowing how beautiful this is.
the thing about being a magpie in human form, is that shiny objects—the true kind, the sort that carry weight and depth all on their own, shininess aside—come all but hiding under rocks. i never know where i’ll spy one. might be bound between the covers of a great book, or might simply be scrolling along when i’m stunned in my own tracks. and so it was when i came upon this sumptuous reply to a post from suleika jaouad in her isolation journals recounting her recent breathtaking birthday trip to tunisia, where she spent much time during her childhood summers. someone named kim wrote this, and set me off on my own voyage into the uninvited beauties that populate and punctuate my world:
In my own world, beauty doesn’t knock. She slips in uninvited—smelling faintly of burnt sugar & sandalwood. She hides in the scorch on toast, the chipped bowl I can’t let go of, the silver cutlery I keep polished for no one but me. I light incense for no reason. I turn the spoon the right way in the drawer. I whisper thank you to the kettle like it’s an old friend who stayed.
you never know where poets are poking about…
but, oh, the reverie in my mind as i, too, considered the beauties too many to count…
i’m going to wade into troubled waters here, and there is nothing but tragedy and horror in the words i feel compelled to leave as the lingering ones of the week.
we cannot let ourselves be living in a world that has children too malnourished to let out a whimper, children whose every rib you could count as if an x-ray with the barest of flesh. in a world of abundance, a world where each night alley dumpsters are spilling with portions too overzealous for even a glutton, in a world where essential nutrition can be picked into space-food sticks, or gel packets meant for mass distribution, there is NO godly or ungodly reason for children or infants or mothers or fathers or the ones who’ve borne them to wither away, for flesh and sinew to waste (the medical term for the breaking down of tissue as the body desperately seeks energy), for breathing to be labored because even the muscles of the chest wall have wasted, and the barest of life-sustaining functions are on their last gasp.
read this statement below, issued yesterday by Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and decide what you might do to respond to the cry of this so-broken world:
“People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses…. One in every five children is malnourished in Gaza City as cases increase every day. When child malnutrition surges, coping mechanisms fail, access to food & care disappears, famine silently begins to unfold. Most children our teams are seeing are emaciated, weak & at high risk of dying if they don’t get the treatment they urgently need…. Parents are too hungry to care for their children. Those who reach UNRWA clinics don’t have the energy, food, or means to follow medical advice. Families are no longer coping, they are breaking down, unable to survive. Their existence is threatened.”
all you need do is glance toward the sky, eyes skimming over the players on high. sunlight and cumulus. sunlight and cirrus. sunlight and nimbostratus. sunlight and cloud ever in play, in duet, in doh-si-doh of shadow and light.
there’s a truth being told there, a universal and organizing principle of all creation. on the first day, in the second verse, there was darkness, darkness hovering over the deep. in the third verse, light. God commanded it. and God saw that it was good.
in our lives, the leitmotif is a given. light will come. shadow will follow. light will come again.
so it was in my reading this week, when first i tumbled deeply into a luminous shaft, a boreen* of writings from a norwegian bishop and monk, erik varden, whose power as a writer was pointed out to me by a poetry friend whose taste i know to be exquisite and deep. i swiftly realized the bishop’s thinking and writing are everything they were billed to be: rare. exquisite. deep. radiant.
but then, hours later, shadow: i began reading a string of sentences posted from the account of one of my lifeline poets, someone you might call a patron saint of heartbreak and healing, of being more alive than you’ve ever imagined. i started to read, as if it were just another brilliant post: “Whenever I leave this world, whether it’s sixty years from now, I wouldn’t want anyone to say I lost some battle. I’ll be a winner that day.” and then i got to these words: “Andrea Gibson was a winner today. On July 14th, at 4:16AM, Andrea Gibson died…” and my legs stopped moving, and my breath was caught in midstream, and i read and read again. and then my fingers started to tremble, and my knees too.
andrea gibson
andrea gibson, 49, colorado poet laureate in 2023, queer activist (they/them/their pronouns), who had been diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer in 2021, not long after they’d started a newsletter titled “Things That Don’t Suck,” had many, many times pried open my heart, pulled out the unspoken words and the fears and set them soaring. when i too found out what it is to live with cancer as one of the nouns in my story, i drew andrea into my innermost circle. the ones who know, without you uttering a word, just what you’re thinking, you’re feeling, you’re praying. the ones who some days save you. because even though the cyberworld is distant and intangible, it works in mysterious ways, and someone with whom you’ve never breathed the same air can become someone whose voice you can hear as you flutter to sleep, and whose courage you conjure as they glide you into the sarcophagus that is your biannual CT scan.
light. shadow. light from shadow. shadow deepening light. it’s the dance of the duet, interminably entwined. one is always more beautiful because of the other’s presence, because the duet is perpetual.
first, this week’s light:
that monk on a bicycle, spotted cycling through the garth just beyond the cloister, is all it took for me to want to whisper my vows, and cycle along.
as i’m quick to do, i signed up for bishop varden’s website, coram fratribus, a name derived from his episcopal (meaning “of the bishop”) motto, coram fratribus intellexi, latin for “understanding with my brothers.” because the bishop is shepherd of a flock spread across 22,000 square miles in the north of norway, extending beyond the polar circle, he sees his site as a way to speak to the diaspora, to think aloud of those things he finds beautiful or challenging, to gather his flock into a communion of thought. specifically, i felt my heart quicken as i burrowed into the bishop’s collections of writings under the tabs “life illumined,” and the shorter jottings under “notebook,” which he describes thusly:
“To scribble in the margins of texts is an ancient practice. There are people, these days, who make an academic career out of studying ancient marginalia. Any exercise of reading is fundamentally conversational. The notes collected here are brief responses to impressions received not just through books, but also through encounters, art, music, and films.”
now you see why i, a marginalian of long practice, swoon?
before i get to the paragraph in “life illumined” that drew me deep into thought, let us pause to note why we see that little outline of an owl, in the upper right corner, and hovering over every page of the site. the good bishop describes that choice thusly (emphasis mine from here on in):
“The emblem of the site is an owl. The owl does not just wing you back to the front page. It has for centuries been a symbol of the monk. Why? Because it watches in the night, when most people sleep; because it is able to see in the dark, discerning movements and patterns, foundations of meaning, where the human eye perceives only vaguely. I am fond of this Italian doggerel:
“Sopra una vecchia quercia c’era un vecchio gufo: più sapeva e più taceva, più taceva e più sapeva.
“In an old oak tree there sat an old owl: the more it knew, the silenter it was; the silenter it was, the more it knew.”
what fluttered into my mailbox the other morning was a page of the monk’s notebook on the nightingale, complete with an ancient poem (from the early middle ages, written by alcuin of york, an adviser to charlemagne) mourning the absence of the wild creature and its delicate throat. a recitation in english and latin, and including a recording of the nightingale’s song. that alone was more than beautiful enough. and then my poking and peeking accelerated, and that’s how, under the “life illumined” tab, i found a break-me-open paragraph on learning to pray.
in an essay focused on the simplicity of jesus’s prayer, and the universal cry of all believers, “lord, teach us to pray,” varden paints the scene of 72 disciples who learned not simply by listening to the words of jesus in prayer, but in witness to his consuming attention to the ways and will of God. varden expounds:
“Jesus’s teaching on prayer amounted to more than the provision of a text for recitation, that is clear. It was the sight of Jesus praying that made the disciples wish to learn prayer. The words of prayer, which touch our reason and orient our will, point towards the breaking-open of our heart, the transformation of our being as we dare to aspire, even in this life, to ‘become participants of the divine nature’.”
it is the breaking open of the heart, indeed, where the truest serum of our souls pours out. only in the last couple years have i understood that as profoundly as i do now. and, yes, that breaking so often comes with pain, or in pain, or through pain. but i’ve learned now how it truly is the propellent, the force that pushes us deeper into sacred truths than we might otherwise venture. without the breaking open, we might cling to the safer and shallower waters.
the bishop goes on. takes us beyond merely the breaking, and makes the point of its purpose. be it through prayer or through living, the breaking open is the vehicle for those who dare to aspire, in the here and now, to become participants of the divine nature. to inch as close as we can in this lifetime to something akin to sacred. i found a redemptive resonance in that line because at heart, even for the quiet ones among us, we are a people of communion, and there is a heartening, an emboldening, that comes in finding that your purpose, your aim, is not yours alone, but shared in common understanding with at least some of your sisters and brothers.
let us be broken open, then, if it points us toward our holiest purpose. through the break in the clouds, the light comes.
and onto the shadow, the eclipsing shadow…
less than one month shy of her fiftieth birthday, andrea gibson, the poet who boldly faced the coming of her death, who has been amplifying wonder, making us see the unseen, relish the oft-overlooked, took her last breath in the wee hours of monday morning.
i have been relishing her, here and in my everyday, for years now. curiously, her presence in my life spans almost precisely the arc of time in which i’ve been in the company of my own cancer.
the month before my lung surgery, when the world felt overwhelmingly like the depths of a cave, i wrote of andrea and lines i’d inscribed on my heart:
thanks to a friend i love with my whole heart, i stumbled on another wise soul with buckets of beauty to grace the world. a poet-activist-performer named andrea gibson, now a cancer survivor whose words might take your breath away. andrea identifies as queer, and uses the pronoun “they;” and they are known for their trademark honesty and bare-naked vulnerability, traits i find irresistible and blessed beyond words. here are just a few lines i couldn’t keep from scribbling down:
when it comes to hearts i want always to be size queen…
i love you because we both showed up to kindness tryouts with notes from the school nurse that said we were too hurt to participate….
when your heart is broken, you plant seeds in the cracks and pray for rain.
before i die, i want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain i will keep it safe. i will keep it safe.
yesterday, thursday, this slipped into my mailbox from andrea’s wife, meg:
A couple years ago, Andrea said, “Whenever I leave this world, whether it’s sixty years from now, I wouldn’t want anyone to say I lost some battle. I’ll be a winner that day.”
Whatever beast of emotion bucks or whimpers through you right now, I hope you can hold that line beside it: Andrea didn’t lose anything. If you had been here in our home during the three days of their dying—if you’d seen dozens of friends drift in to help, to say goodbye, to say thank you, to kiss their perfect face, if you’d felt the love that floored every hospice nurse—you would have agreed. Andrea won.
I won’t sugarcoat the fact that they desperately wanted more time on this planet that they loved so much. This planet of squirrels and romance and basketball and moonlight.
But the time they had was significant, prismatic, and wild. It was full of trampolines and mountain ranges, stage lights and pants-peeing laughter. In their words, they “juiced the sun for every holy drop.” One of the last things they said before dying was, “I fucking loved my life.” Their conviction stunned the room.
If Andrea’s life was a poem (and it was), could there be a better last line?
a little backstory, again from meg:
In 2021, before the diagnosis, Andrea announced they were writing a newsletter, titled Things That Don’t Suck. A few weeks later, we learned they had ovarian cancer.
At first, Andrea said, “What a terrible time to be committed to writing about what doesn’t suck.” Then, almost immediately, they shifted their perspective and said, “What a perfect time.”
And so, this space was born. Part journal, part poetry, part pep talk, part treasure hunt. It became an archive of Andrea’s ability to find beauty in unlikely places, to wring gratitude from even the hardest hours. A museum of how they danced through their diagnosis, always turning their compass toward joy. It fostered a community they deeply loved.
And Andrea wanted all of it to continue.
meg tells us it will. there are reams and reams of unpublished writings, lines scribbled under the silvery light of the moon on those nights when sleep wouldn’t come. pages poured into volumes tucked away. a memoir, unfinished. half-written poems. a documentary coming this fall.
and meg promises this:
And there are stories of our life, and of the last months, that I, as their partner, and as a writer, feel both lucky to carry and uniquely able to tell.
As gut-wrenching, impossible, and tear-soaked as this moment is, I’m grateful beyond measure that they were so prolific. Through their books, their reels, their interviews, their albums, Andrea’s incredible mind will reverberate for a century—I’m sure of that.
and so, in the presence of the bishop monk, and the absence of the poet prophet, we shall go on. awake in the light and the shadow. and the shadow that deepens the light.
in case you’re curious, a bit more about dear bishop varden:
it was only after absorbing so much of his writing that i circled back to learn a bit of his origin story.
varden was born into a non-practicing lutheran family in a small village in the south of norway, and would go on to earn a doctorate in theology and religious studies at the university of cambridge, and further study in rome. a convert to catholicism at 19, he was drawn to the monastic life, and joined the mount saint bernard abbey, a cistertian monastery, in charnwood forest, in leicestershire, england. he was called to rome to be a professor of syriac language, monastic history, and Christian anthropology. and two years later, returned to the abbey when he was named its eleventh abbot. and, in 2019, pope francis named him bishop of trondheim, a nearly 22,000-square-mile prelature north of the polar circle in norway.
mount saint bernard abbey, varden’s home monastery, is where the only Trappist beer is brewed in all of England, under the name Tynt Meadow English Trappist Ale. beer to the trappists is no earthly distraction. the belgian trappists have a saying: “Beer should be liquid bread, not coloured water.”
and here’s a morsel, this one on the theology of beer, as spoken at the blessing of the monk’s brewery on st. george’s day, 2018. from Dom Erik’s address:
“One of the fascinating things about beer, is that this (potentially) sophisticated beverage is made of the simplest ingredients. By being refined to manifest their choicest qualities; by being brought together in a favourable environment; by mingling their properties and so revealing fresh potential; by being carefully stored and matured, the humble malt, hops, yeast, and water are spirit-filled and bring forth something new, something nurturing and good, that brings joy to those who share it. Considered in this perspective, the brewery provides us with a parable for our monastic life, with the Lord as virtuoso brewmaster. The Scriptures favour wine as an image of the Gospel – but that is culturally conditioned; beer, it seems to me, is a much neglected theological symbol.”
*boreen, you might recall from a few weeks ago, is the old irish word for what we might call a pothole, a rabbit’s hole, but in ireland, an island etched with cowpaths, it’s a word derived from a meandering side path when the cow decides to venture off on her own….if language is a cumulative patchwork, boreen is a word now in my lexicon….
you’ll find a veritable font of andrea’s spoken word poems, and writings at their website, andrea gibson.org. spend some good time there.
If the intensity of my curiosities in this world were put to trial, and I was pressed to answer what question stirs me most, it would be the realm of the God I reach for as my North Star. I ruminate on the presence of God, the proximity of what I know as tender ballast, and though the edge of my knowing falls into a liminal mist, I aim anyway to live by what seems to be the timeless code of a just and loving, most merciful God.
Poetry, a gossamer web of knowing and unknowing, seems to be the closest frame through which to ask those questions, to rummage in the dim light and the darkness. It’s the poetry that rubs up against what seems true, and then falls swiftly away, that for me lasts and lingers. More so than sacred Scripture, I find myself venturing closest to the heavens when I follow poets unafraid to ask the unanswerable. The poets, so often, are my priests, my conduits from this much-battered planet to the uncharted heavens. Palpably alive and paying attention to the tiniest shards among us—the broken clock, the fallen sparrow, the furrow of a brow—the poet then leaps beyond or into, catapulting us into the vast, where the questions linger and the answers merely hover. Epiphany sometimes strikes. And we go forth, fortified.
I am particularly taken by those poets unafraid of doubt. As, truth be told, we live in mystery. It is those willing to expose their wrestling, their quest to question, that I find most resonant. Most true.
And when one of those poets dies, a volume closes; the possibility of question falls silent. We no longer knot our life raft to her fearless oceangoing vessel.
The world of poetry, from Ocean Vuong to those on the masthead at The Paris Review, mourned the loss this week of Fanny Howe (1940–2025), who died on Wednesday at 84. Over recent months, Howe, the daughter of an Irish playwright and a Harvard legal historian whose family traced its roots to the Boston Brahmin Quincy family, had been in conversation with the poet and translator Chloe Garcia Roberts, as part of the review’s Art of Poetry series. In a prelude I found as delicious as some of the conversation itself, Roberts sets the stage thusly in a piece published just last month:
“Howe has a sparrowlike figure and a blue peregrine stare. We met for this interview every few weeks over the course of several months from fall to spring, as she was moving out of her garden-level apartment in Cambridge into an assisted living facility just down the road. I would arrive midmorning, bearing scones and coffee with extra sugar cubes wrapped in napkins, and we’d talk each time for an hour or so. Our conversations circled family, motherhood, failure, race, and faith. After we were done recording, we’d gossip about the poetry scene and the succession of Pope Francis.”
And from there begins the interview, from which I pluck just a few snippets, and some of the Review’s own words (emphasis mine):
“I’d always been looking for a revelation that would open the whole universe for me and make it all have sense,” began Howe, who described herself as a “pagan Catholic,” and who converted to the faith at forty-one, counting among her guides Simone Weil, Giorgio Agamben, and the monks of Glenstal Abbey** in County Limerick, Ireland, with whom she stayed every summer for twenty years and whom she later watched on TV every Sunday, her personal Mass.
Howe was the author of an astonishing body of work—including twenty-five books of poetry, twelve novels, two story collections, and also essays, pulp romances, and young adult fiction. Her poems often enact the shock of belief, taking their power not from their devotional qualities—in fact, Howe avoided words like devotion and prayer—but their combination of faith and doubt. “I would think of poetry as a place where you connect your doubts to the things you don’t doubt,” she said. “Free-floating doubt wouldn’t trigger the lightning that contradiction does.”
In one of the hours of interviews, Howe let on that she considered it her “job” to be antidote to cynicism. When Roberts asked her to say more, she elaborated:
fanny in 1972 with her son, maceo
If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down. And that’s the spirit of childhood, usually. Once you know that that’s what you’re doing, even when you’re walking through a war field, you’re carrying something to keep it safe. It’s invisible but you know it’s there, and it’s a kind of vision and a weight.
(You can listen to Howe, warbly voice and all, speak those very words here.)
Is it not all of our jobs—or certainly the job of some of us—to labor to keep the soul fresh and clean, to strain to not let anything bring it down? It is our singular entity, the one form over which we and we alone can steer the vessel, make the choices, choose love not hate, choose silence not bitter words, it is ours to keep, to draw in all the light we can muster. Our bodies, I’ve learned, are not under our control. Pathogens come, and cancers too. We crumble under the weight of time and toil. Our skin wrinkles, breaks out in bumps. But not our soul. Our soul is eternal, is timeless. Our soul is what we make of it.
The work of my soul is abetted, most often, by those whose words I read, by those whose way of being I watch. It is, so often, in the smallest, quietest of kindnesses. The triumphs of spirit over the temptations to turn away, to forgo the sharp edge, the blunt force.
Ours is an ongoing work in progress.
In her role as perhaps a patron saint of doubt within the amalgam of faith, Howe staked her claim in her introduction to George Bernanos’s 1937 novel of the 14-year-old French peasant girl, Mouchette: “Like a healthy human heartbeat, which has an intrinsic irregular system, the body of an artwork gets its vitality from a rhythm based in uncertainty. (Sick hearts have a dull regular thump.)”
Among the many lauds that poured forth in the wake of her death, Kazim Ali, the poet and co-founder of the small indie press, Nightboat Books, wrote this of Howe, the first author Nightboat published:
It would be wrong to say she was a polar star or a beacon in the darkness, because Fanny believed in mystery, in unknowing, in bewilderment. She didn’t mean to shine a light, but rather to see in the darkness.
Fanny once told me, in our life-long conversation about God, literature, and the world, that she thought Gnosticism was evil. What she found so evil was the belief that the material world was inferior to, or somehow separate from, the spiritual one. This world was the world to Fanny. “Human was God’s secret name,” she said in one poem. “If this life isn’t enough, then an afterlife won’t be enough,” she said in another.
To live in this rich, infinite world was the most important thing to her. “One cathedral is equal to the sky,” she wrote. And to God, she begged, “no answers, please, to any of my questions.”
Her life and work were conjoined in a long, lucid series of questions. How lucky we all are to have heard her askings.
may her askings live on, and her memory be a blessing. rest in knowing, dear fanny.
other than life itself and living, how have you encountered wrestling with doubt? is it a plain that animates you, or is it a space from which you run? (as always these questions are meant to be considered in the solitude and sanctity of your own quiet womb.)
i nearly forgot! should you choose to dig in to a bit of fanny howe and her wrestling with faith, the two books you might seek (mine is coming from interlibrary loan) are Love and I: Poems (2019) and Gone (2003). in both she writes about her conversion to Catholicism, and her relationship to faith.
**because i’ve not found many a rabbit hole into which i’ve chosen not to burrow, my reading of howe led me to Glenstal Abbey, a place i now dream of tucking into for a fulsome contemplative spell. it’s a benedictine monastery in county limerick, ireland, housed in a 19th-century normanesque castle, surrounded by 500 acres of farmland, forests, lakes, and stream. you might just want to join me there…(and you can tune in any time for matins, lauds, vespers, compline, or daily Mass, in both recordings and livecam.)
and one more thing before i go. it seems bishop marian budde, she who gained fame (and infamy in some quarters) presiding over the prayer service at washington’s national cathedral following the inauguration, has now launched a substack, where she will gather her writings, and broaden the scope of her reach. she introduces herself with these words. . .
“On January 21, 2025, the day after President Trump’s inauguration as our 47th president, I chose to conclude my sermon at a Prayer Service for the Nation, held at the Washington National Cathedral, with a call for mercy:
“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”
she stirred up good trouble with those words. and in her new space on substack, she lays out her mission—”to live as best we can according to the highest aspirations of humankind revealed to us in Jesus” (also in Gandhi, in Buddha, in Brahma, in Allah, in Yahweh)—with this litany:
to recognize the inherent, God-given dignity of every human being
to love our neighbors as ourselves, and even to love our enemies
to share what we have and to strive for an equitable and just society
to refrain from evil and refuse to hate
to be mindful of the power of our words, and to speak without malice or contempt
to forgive, as we have been forgiven
to live in hope
to be willing to sacrifice, even our very lives, for the sake of love.
she concludes with these words:
“In this space, I hope to encourage a kind of human discourse in which we don’t have to see the world the same way, but we can all agree that we all belong in this world.
“In a culture of contempt, may we speak with dignity.
“In a world of mean-spiritedness, may we act with kindness and love.”
Mostly, this is a love letter. One I might have tucked in the pine coffin now buried beneath a foot-and-a-half of Chicago’s clumpiest earth, earth we shoveled onto it, one full spade at a time. The one to whom I write this, though, my fairy gardenmother, is not one ever confined by boxes or borders or hard lines scrawled in the dirt. She, my Marguerite, was as free a spirit as they come. So I cast this to the wind, and know she will catch it.
Marguerite made beauty for a living. She sowed joy in abundance. Not a single root or shoot was tucked in the earth or tied to a trellis without the ringing sound of her laughter.
Marguerite’s acanthus
She bequeathed me beauty, her beauty and that of this holy earth. And grace, and a tidepool of peace, the sort that settles deep within, calming what had long been a turbulence. It all came in a litany of botanic derivative, a litany I water and witness: tree peonies, fuchsia and ruffled and broad as a dinner plate; oakleaf hydrangea, its bottle-brush blooms now bursting in time for the Fourth of July. Pieris japonica (sometimes known as lily-of-the-valley shrub, or flame of the forest) whose delicate white star-blooms are the petit point of late springtime, stitched along the bluestone path that bends toward my front door. A dwarf lilac that defies its definition and perfumes profusely my brick walk out back. My garden blooms with acanthus, the ancient Greek thistle of endurance and immortality, and white bleeding hearts that, as instructed, seem to be on the verge of spilling succulence drop by drop by drop. Everywhere, the vanilla scent of Jack-in-the-pulpit rises. There are ferns in abundance, and climbing hydrangea who wouldn’t be daunted by Everest. And about a dozen other beauties whose names I often forget, and when I do I’d text her, and she’d remind me, always with annotation of what she loved most about it. And another something I might want to try.
If I tried to describe her, I’d begin with her face. Her face was alive, was radiant, was always revved up in joy. Or deep concentration. Her laugh came easy, so easy. Her limbs flowed. She was a ballerina in the everyday. Clogs buried in garden, wielding a shovel or pruners, she swayed with the wind, with the whims, with purpose.
She planted my secret garden, the one that meanders along the side of my house, from my writing room window, past the kitchen door, and into the garden out back. It’s the place I’d point to if pressed to answer the question: Where did you finally find your long-sought peace? It was there in the garden that Marguerite grew.
I first met Marguerite a garden ago, back in 1991, months after we married, my beloved and I. The very day we wandered into the old Victorian that became our house for a decade, the house to which both our boys first came home, the house that held so many joys and so many sorrows, Marguerite was there. She was packing up boxes with Jim the sculptor who was dying of AIDS, and who would soon leave us his beautifully sculpted three-story house (and a set of Old Willow dishes besides). They wept and wailed and laughed together. We heard the echo of their affections before we saw them, and when we climbed the stairs there she was: radiant, a mop of blond curls, eyes hazel and sparkling.
She knelt beside me summer after summer, teaching me much of what I know about what grows in a garden. We wandered nurseries and tree lots. We planted according to her unorthodox teachings. When anything ailed, she knew the fix. Or we yanked it and started again.
My jewel box of a tiny urban garden, one where the alley rats dared not roam for the fierce farm cat who patrolled it, grew to be a wonder. One whose measure in my mind far exceeded a yardstick.
When at last we decided we’d finished our work, at least for the time being, Marguerite and Ted, her rabbi of a husband who presided over a congregation of his psychotherapy clients, came by one late summer’s evening to bless the little plot. In a story I love so much I included it on pages 37 and 38 of The Book of Nature**, Ted offered up fertility prayers for my garden, that it would blossom and bloom, and multiply. Four months later, on the brink of my 44th birthday, after eight years of broken hearts and infertility, I discovered that I was the one blossoming and multiplying. I was “with child,” as the Bible would put it. I always giggled that Ted had mixed up his fertility prayers, and pulled out the ones for the barren woman instead of the ones for the garden.
ted and marguerite
And so, of course, and ever since, Marguerite is the one to whom I turned with every garden question, and every delight as it bloomed. When Ted died not quite two years ago, I knew Marguerite’s heart was shattered. And there was no glue in the world to put it back together. But I didn’t know it would kill her.
I now know that it did. For she died on Monday, and was buried on Tuesday. And ever since I’ve been strolling through my garden, stopping to marvel here, stooping to deadhead there. I’ve been shlepping my hose, and giving big drinks to each and every bloom bequeathed to me by my Marguerite.
Marguerite will always bloom in my garden. Her longtime sidekick, David the cop, is coming soon to help me dream once again. There is a plot under the ornamental lilac and the row of burning bush, and I have named it Marguerite’s Garden, and I will be planting it before the month of her death turns to August.
And it will be abundant in beauty. Because that’s what Marguerite taught me to grow. And that will never die.
the jewel box of a flower shop: Marguerite Gardens (from Victoria Magazine)
Marguerite’s genius in the garden spread far beyond our little block of Wellington Avenue, 60657. When she couldn’t be contained, she launched a for-hire garden crew (a motley crew counting two cops, a U of C theology grad fluent in Mandarin Chinese, a commodities trader, a banker, and a pet photographer) with a seasons-long waiting list. She planted tulips by the thousands up and down Boul Mich, Chicago’s grand Magnificent Mile. She planted the city’s lushest rooftops and balcony gardens. She was a connoisseur of miniatures, and knew how to cram the most in the least. She opened a dream of a flower shop in Andersonville, aptly named Marguerite Gardens, and twice daily received imports from her beloved Netherlands. The shop, with the bell that tinkled as you walked in, held a European-style flower market, and was stuffed to the rafters with eighteenth-century antiques, from bird cages to terraria. Aptly, she was named for the daisy whose name means “pearl” in French, and is the bloom from which petals are plucked in the prognostication game, “he loves me, he loves me not.” Married for 43 years to the inimitable, unorthodox, Yale-educated rabbi and psychotherapist, Theodore Gluck, Marguerite died 656 days after Ted, three days short of what would have been his 95th birthday. Marguerite was 75.
**excerpt from pages 37 and 38, Marguerite’s star turn in The Book of Nature, in which i describe that first garden we planted and blessed together…
. . .That garden—where a priest, a rabbi, and a tight circle of people we love gathered for blessings shortly after the births of each of our boys; where baby bunnies and nestlings and goldfish were buried after premature deaths; where our stubbornly resistant house cat mastered the art of escape—that plat of earth became as sacred to me as any cloister garth.
Not only was it where I knelt to teach my firstborn the magic of tucking a spit-out watermelon seed into the loam and, each morning after, tracking its implausible surge. During seven long years of miscarriage after miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy and emergency surgery, and doctors finally telling us to give up hope, I dug and I dug in that garden, all but willing the tiniest bulbs and tenderest sprouts to beat impossible odds, refusing to let anything else die on my watch. And then, at the end of one summer, as the crab apples were starting to turn, a rabbi who lived down the block came by with his wife, whom I’d long called my fairy gardenmother for her magical ways and her unbroken guidance. Standing under the stars, the rabbi, his wife, and I, we blessed the garden itself, casting prayers and sprinklings of water. By that Christmas, I was pregnant, with nary a drop of medical intervention. Just shy of forty-five when that blessing of a baby arrived the next August, I’ve always wondered if maybe the rabbi mixed up the garden fertility prayers.
It’s all a holy whirl—that intricate and inseparable interweaving that is the cosmos.
one poem this week, from a bouquet of many i plucked:
Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself…
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism…
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth…
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
Um, I hate to be so bold but we could have used him a little bit longer. (You undoubtedly already know that.) Things are pretty rough around here. Whole swaths of this holy earth, and the people who populate it, seem to have lost their minds. And maybe their souls.
As You most certainly know, and definitely must have heard, his was the rare voice that could drown out the ungodly noise. The cacophonies of greed and grievance, the ugliness of sin and the Self that thinks it’s higher and mightier. He didn’t let up when it came to the terrible, terrible traumas of war—newborns bombed in hospital nurseries; toddlers drowning in turbulent seas, washing to shore, as if cast-aside flotsam; whole families entombed in the rubble of raining-down concrete and rebar in murderous twists.
He called it where he saw it: called out the avarice of modern capitalism and consumerism, diagnosed it as the fundamental root of the exploitation and suffering of the poor and the vulnerable. Named it “the Devil’s dung.”
He minced not a word in a letter to American bishops this February, when in the wake of the current administration’s drastic deportation campaign, he wrote that while nations have the right to defend themselves, “the rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”
He didn’t stop there: “The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.”
Il Papa, il mio papa!
Oh, dear God, thank you immensely for making his lifetime line up, at least for a while, with mine. I was starting to fall off the edge there, till the first puff of fumata bianca arose from the Vatican chimney back on March 13, 2013, and the bells from St. Peter’s rang through the city.
Dear Francis filled my lungs again. He preached the version of You that I’d long pressed to my heart, the One taught to me by my post-Vatican II Sisters of Loretto, they who puffed cigarettes behind the convent, traded in their flowy black habits for street clothes and lipstick, all while strumming guitars and singing kumbaya, and all while watching films like “The Red Balloon,” where we little Catholics were meant to evoke the godly meaning from the metaphor.
He was, far as I could tell, a walking-talking, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is, “love as you would be loved” kind of a guy. He colored wildly outside the lines, as if to shake us out of our stupors, our thinking the ways of the world were the only ways there were. As if to remind that love, honestly, could shatter the worst kind of walls, break through to the tender core at the heart of us all—the one You nestled inside all of us when You breathed us into being.
His time as the 266th charge of the Church was something of a Kodak carousel of indelible encounters, the ones you cannot forget because they sear you so soundly. (p.s. He was mighty fine with the pen, as well; at least one modern poet called him “the most literary pope of the modern Vatican.”)
He took on no airs. Which made his message all the more of a wallop. He seemed to be saying that we too, in our fumbling, bumbling, banged-up bodies, we too could reach for the heavens.
His message, quite simply, was to remind that we’re all equipped and ready to cut a swath of radical love through this world.
And what I really loved about the beloved Argentian Jesuit were the moments when he reached out his arms, and cradled the sobbing child, especially the little boy whose atheist papa had died, and the boy was so very worried about what would happen to his papa. When the little guy was all but choking on his sobs and the words to his question, “Is my dad in heaven?” Francis called out to the little boy, “Come, come to me, Emanuele. Come and whisper it in my ear.” And everyone sobbed, while Francis quelled the boy’s fears and spoke to the crowd: “What a beautiful witness of a son who inherited the strength of his father, who had the courage to cry in front of all of us,” Francis said. “If that man was able to make his children like that, then it’s true, he was a good man.”
Or the little ones born with an extra chromosome who sometimes wandered curiously right onto the altar in the middle of Mass, or a homily, and instead of shooshing the child away, he stood there beatifically smiling, clutching their soft little hand. And went right on with his papal business.
Pope Francis embraces Vinicio Riva, the man with neurofibromatosis.
Or that indelible image of Your Francis first kissing then cradling the man with the eruptions of leathery tumors curdled across his face, his scalp, and clear down his neck.
And what struck me most, dear God, when I awoke Monday morning to the news that he’d died in the night, was the sudden stunning realization of how breathtakingly he had died—a lesson for us all, and surely for me. I believe he knew these were his last days on earth, when he insisted on leaving the hospital, and knew that until he breathed his last he would teach his last most lasting lessons. In the last week of his life, he visited with 70 prisoners in Rome’s Regina Coeli Prison, from a balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square he blessed the crowds, and in his Easter Sunday sermon he begged for mercy for “the vulnerable, the marginalized, and the migrants.” He also sent an emissary to preach compassion to the nation’s second-highest ranking executive officeholder and fairly recent convert to Catholicism.
And then, and only then, he breathed his last.
I barely have words for the emptiness left in Francis’s wake. It’s rare these days to find a soul who’s proven her or himself worthy of speaking such penetrating truth that the whole world turns an ear to listen.
We listened, and some of us shouted silent hallelujahs every time.
We are a world with a spinning moral compass. Up seems down, and right and wrong are inside out and sideways. Hate is cloaked, too often, as a return to the old ways. Truth is chopped into bits and spit back out in bilious flows.
Are we meant to be the collective voice to fill the new and jarring silence? Is that the point? He constructed the paradigm, handed us the blueprints, and now it’s us who must step to the line, to be brave now?
Maybe it’s a blessing that much of the world is weeping. Maybe, if we follow our tears, we’ll dig down and rise up. Maybe, like Francis, we can look out at the battle field that is the world and make of ourselves the field hospital set to begin to stanch the bleeding, and work to heal some of the wounds.
Anyway, God, we’re on it. And thank you, thank you, thank you.
Love, BAM
what memories or moments of Francis most lastingly speak to you?
photo above is from the little video i managed to capture when i managed to all but stumble into the path of the oncoming PopeMobile this past summer in St. Peter’s Square….
and p.s.s. a letter to God, i figured, called for capitals. thus, i made rare use of the shift key this morning….
“it’s like we’re the great kaleidoscope, all little pieces, but every time you turn it, it’s different. so you and i are made up of exactly the same stuff, but every one of us is unique. there’s only one in all the world. and the same with every petal of a pansy….i’m the star thistle, and the grass, and the dirt. i am you; you are me.”
i tumbled into this most breathtaking old soul, majestic soul, and i shall let her do the talking today. i quickly grew so enchanted by her voice, her deep and gravely voice, a voice that must have traveled rocky roads, that i began to take notes, and i am leaving those notes here: part transcript, part poem. i’m not catching every word but the words i’m catching are those i do not want to lose. it’s as if a great elder has come today to impart something. to share a light, the light she came to know was her one thing to share. to leave with the world.
may we all be so.
may we all by illuminated by this nearly 96-year-old, who is a veritable masterpiece of all that matters.
and here are notes, in prayer form, in poetry…
that i can still breathe easy i don’t want to have just visited this world i want to be a child of wonder and astonishment
i’m having my second childhood now, my happy childhood i was always the outsider, i was always pointed at, i always felt terribly self-conscious so i have fun now
i’m just learning about play because i didn’t know what play was when i was a child i think play means exploring, experimenting, being curious, looking, seeing, being in the body not being afraid
it’s about the miracle and mystery of being alive
“we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time”
that’s t.s. eliot.
i had cancer once and . . . and afterwards i had surgery and i felt like i had to give myself a reaon that i was spared. that i got my life back and then, over many years, i saw that i had something to give, my light
something ineffable that i don’t know that light of harmlessness and harmony and singing and being joyful and rejoicing and being grateful
we’re here to experience the wonder of being in a body. . . to know that we are each other that we’re the same we’re made of all the same stuff . . . we’re little bits of stars, we’re dust
it’s like we’re the great kaleidoscope all little pieces but every time you turn it, it’s different so you and i are made up of exactly the same stuff, but every one of us is unique. there’s only one in all the world. and the same with every petal of a pansy….
i’m the star thistle, and the grass, and the dirt. i am you; you are me.
. . . my prayer is to go gently and as much aware of myself leaving with gratitude and joy and the satisfaction, “i’m done, i’m outa here. and it’s ok” it’s all such a mystery
thanks, i wanna say thank you not try to figure anything out, or understand it
but just be in awe
what’s the secret? it’s go slow for me . . .
[breaks into song. . .]
this beautiful film was made by two south african filmmakers who go by first names only as far as i can tell, justine and michael. their mission: to explore our shared humanity. their enterprise is known as reflections of life, formerly green renaissance. i do believe there is a trove worth plumbing…..i do not know the name of this blessedly beautiful nonagenarian so i shall name her simply Wisdom.
as we enter into supremely holy time, in both the jewish and the christian spheres, (are we not always in supremely holy time?), our friend here prompts the question how will you choose to live in awe?
closest i got to Il Papa, when i found myself accidentally at the barricades that clear the way for the Pope-mobile
sages are in short supply, it seems. certainly now, and certainly on the global scale. i scan where i can, ever on the lookout. and wasn’t my eye caught when i read the words “artisanal path” to “handmade peace.”
tell me more, my little heart shouted.
though it sounded a bit like a recipe for earthy bread or hand-thrown plates, the sort that rise from the potter’s wheel, i sensed the subject here was far more urgent, and in dire need of replenishing. not what you’d find on any pantry shelf.
hand-crafted peace, peace constructed with care and attention. peace that we at home can build, without scissors or glue or a potter’s spinning wheel.
i clicked on a duly-provided link, and wasn’t one iota surprised to find that Il Papa, our most beloved Francis, was the one who not only dared to raise his voice above the blather, but considered it a requisite of his job’s description.
he is, after all, shepherd to a farflung flock. but more than that, he’s a prophet, which, according to the definition i found in richard rohr’s brand-new the tears of things: prophetic wisdom for an age of outrage, means a radical change agent, teacher of a moral alternative, and deconstructor of every prevailing order. rohr reminds us of the prophets of ancient times, the ones described by isaiah and ezekiel, whose job it was to hold the powers that be “maddeningly honest.”
bring on the prophets, please.
in these times, francis, our dear pope who from his hospital bed in rome reached out to the suffering of gaza, is the rare voice to which all the world will sometimes listen. thank holy God, he speaks the language of love without condition, clause, or pause. there are those among us, in this age of outrage, who might do well to listen. especially when they claim to take instruction from the very same God who whispers to Il Papa.
the new york times calls him “an increasingly lonely moral voice on the world stage.”
all the more reason to listen. and listen hard.
“peace is crafted; it is the work of our hands,” francis began at a prayer vigil in the central african republic back in 2015, “it is built up by the way we live our lives.” he was speaking to an audience of children, teens, and young adults in bangui, the capital of the central african republic, when that country was in the midst of a sectarian war between Christians and Muslims, and thousands had been killed, and more than a million displaced from homes, their properties looted or destroyed.
this artisanal path, “built up by the way we live our lives,” is spelled out, it turns out, in francis’s Against War: Building a Culture of Peace, a book i’ve ordered from my local bookstore, as it’s one with permanent claim to a slot on my bookshelf.
it’s not that i think i can build a culture of worldwide peace, though once upon a time i dreamed of such things. the point here, from the wee bit i’ve read, is that peace is a sphere we build bit by bit, as we travel through space and time, and it’s built by even the most unassuming of gestures, attitudes, and actions.
what the pope is saying, and what the world ought listen to, is that the tiniest empathies and kindnesses matter: giving cuts in the grocery line, waving someone into your expressway lane; taking time to take the call, dropping the tupperware of soup on your neighbor’s stoop. biting your tongue when you’re tempted to snap, and, yes oh yes, turning the other cheek, a trait i’m told no longer belongs in a world of dog eat dog.
what a game changer: here’s the head of a church that counts 1.39 billion baptized among its ranks, and he too concurs that we needn’t be rocket scientists in the art of magnanimous charitable persuasion to make a dent in the realm of ever-spreading goodness.
for one thing, it’s fairly contagious. if you’re out-of-the-blue kind to me, if you take my breath away with some wonder act of yours, chances are i’m inclined to be a copy cat and try the same. if for no other reason than the pure joy of watching someone be surprised you’ve not just slammed the door in their sorry, sorry face.
here’s where Il Papa begins his artisanal path to handmade peace, with this fulsome criticism of the futility of war:
“war is not the solution, war is madness, war is a monster, war is a cancer that feeds off itself, engulfing everything!”
that’s all i needed to keep on reading. and what i found, and what you’ll find should you decide to play along, is a compendium of his most outstanding commentaries on war and peace during the first nine years of his pontificate.
here are a few of the nuggets you just might choose to tuck in your peace-gathering pockets.
because one can’t best the pope when it comes to eloquence and voice, i am quoting from the book, here on in, and plucking five that leap out the most….
1.) seeing the world as one human family living in one common home.
The stars in the sky shine down on every single person — from the beginning of time to today — and learning “to look at the stars” will be “the most effective vaccine for a future of peace,” he said in Ur, Iraq, in 2021.
“Anyone with the courage to look at the stars, anyone who believes in God, has no enemies to fight. He or she has only one enemy to face, an enemy that stands at the door of the heart and knocks to enter. That enemy is hatred,” the pope said.
“There will be no peace as long as we see others as them and not us,” he said. Humanity lives under one heaven, under the gaze of one God who desires his children to be “hospitable and welcoming” to each other on earth.
2.) reconciling with one’s enemies and embracing unity in diversity.
The pope told young people in the Central African Republic that the first step toward being a peacemaker was “never hate anyone. If someone wrongs you, seek to forgive.”
“We only win if we take the road of love,” he said, and, with love, “you will win the hardest battle in life” and find peace.
But “we need to pray in order to be resilient, to love and not to hate, to be peacemakers,” and “you must be courageous,” he added. “Courageous in love, in forgiveness, in building peace.”
3.) the difficult art of dialogue and listening, which can sometimes be as hard as building a bridge over an abyss.
Pride and arrogance must be eradicated from one’s own heart, he told young people at a congress of the educational project, “Scholas Occurrentes,” in 2016. “Our world needs to lower the level of aggression. It needs tenderness. It needs gentleness, it needs to listen, it needs to walk together.”
Dialogue is “the capacity to listen, not to argue immediately, to ask,” he said. “Everyone wins in dialogue; no one loses” because “it is about agreeing to proposals so as to move forward together.”
Dialogue is to put oneself in the other’s place, “to form a bridge” and “persuade with gentleness.”
4.) peace is a constant journey of “getting one’s hands dirty,” concretely working for the common good.
“Our path leads us to immersing ourselves in situations and giving first place to those who suffer,” he said in Assisi for the World Day of Prayer for Peace in 2016.
Feeling responsible for helping others and refusing to be indifferent cleanses the heart and requires the “purification” and conversion that can only come from God, he said in Irbil, Iraq, in 2021.
This new order must meet humanity’s desire for justice, equality and participation, he said in his World Day of Peace message in 2020. A democratic society recognizes everyone’s rights and one’s duties toward others, which can temper a harmful, unbridled understanding of freedom.
5.) living the beatitudes is to bring heaven––and peace––to earth.
In his homily in Baghdad in 2021, the pope said, “We do not need to become occasional heroes, but to become witnesses, day after day,” embodying the wisdom and love of Jesus.
Jesus changed history “with the humble power of love, with his patient witness. This is what we are called to do,” he said, and “that is how the world is changed: not by power and might, but by the beatitudes.”
People who live the beatitudes “are helping God to fulfill his promises of peace,” he said. “This is the way; there is no other.”
in these tumultuous times, i am turning hungrily to prophets and sages in the news and on my dusty bookshelves. i’m inclined to not fill this space with my own blather, but rather to bring any lights that might dapple our paths. it’s always a tug-of-war to quiet the chair or keep it going with whatever bits i find. this doesn’t seem like the time to turn to silence. so my aim is upped to break through blather and bring voices that will wedge open our hearts, and like a doorstop, keep it wedged till we get through to the other side….
i’ve raised a blog, it seems, from birth to the verge of being grown-up. eighteen years: 12.12.06 it all began. 1,200 posts before today, so this––wondrously (to me, anyway)––is 1,201. at first i tended it, this conversation, this wondering aloud, this occasional epiphany, every weekday for a year, then chiseled it down to thrice a week. and then, yet again, i distilled it: once weekly––religiously every friday morn. here and there i’ve taken rare short breaks. a bit of summer breather once or twice.
and yet, kept on. and on and on. (sometimes wondering if maybe i should just be quiet.)
cycled through waves who’ve pulled up chairs in ebb and flow as of the tides. friends who’ve come to stay awhile, then shuffled off for one reason or another. at least a few i’ve deeply loved have died; angels still among us. some who’ve pulled up a chair have never ever strayed. here from the beginning, faithful as the day is long. bless them. bless and bless and bless them.
i too have ebbed and flowed. waded into deep and deeper waters. shed old fears, grew courage. been puzzled. pondered. hatched new fears. wobbled. stumbled. inhaled courage again, again, and again. i’ve wondered and worried aloud. weathered aching heart, and phone calls and headlines that left me breathless. i’ve loved and loved some more. i intend to never stop.
my school at first was all that unfolded under this old roof, where creaky twisting stairs and a nearly antique Garland stove––six burners, flattop, quasi-oven, a behemoth you’d find at any all-night diner––came to animate so many stories. it was my boys from whom i mostly learned and learned the most. and learned and learned again. and of course the holy earth and heavens high above: the gardens, the birds, the trees, the stars and moon, the dawn and dusk and nighttime’s inky darkness that never fail to draw me in. the book of nature, i’ve come to read, where lessons rise and fall season after season after season. i found a holy peace in this old house and the ramshackle plots where i kneel with trowel and soul wide open. i’d been chasing that peace for years.
i seem to have stumbled into a new teacher these days, one i’d never thought could bring such knowing: it comes with darkness, yes, though i’m reminded that darkness is the embryonic space where stirrings first begin. and it’s nighttime’s darkest hour when stars most brightly shine. stripped of distraction, of the nettlesome sorts of things that blur our everyday, it denudes us to our barest essence. it’s cancer (even when i do not name it here it’s ever present in my rumblings, and has catapulted me to highest most-reverent attention). mine is an especially wily iteration, one that doesn’t follow rules. and brings me squarely into the land of uncertainty. where i, a girl who likes to know things, am finding out how not knowing whittles the knowing to one or two immutables: love is the force that triumphs over all; its alpha and omega, the God who dwells within. within me, and you. and even all the ones who make us want to scream and run for cover.
here’s what i know 18 years in: there is nothing that love––true, deep love in all its iterations––cannot infuse. and in the infusing, molecules are stirred, shifted, and forms reshaped, dissolved, emboldened, made new. i’ve felt mountains move. i’ve felt fear melt away, like butter on hot biscuits. i’ve felt surrender––holy, holy “thy will be done.”
and a life well lived is one in which we love as unstintingly, as capaciously, as we might never have known possible. to live a life of loving is to scatter the few seeds that might blossom in our wake, that might rise in the seasons beyond us. it is the deepest mark i hope and pray to leave: to know my heart, my soul, has found a way in, forever in, to those whose lives i might have touched.
it all becomes so spare, so simple, in the end. when you realize your days––for as long as they stretch––are your one rare turn to hone the art of loving, as it is meant to be. as it is meant to make the holy difference. to trace the path from here to heaven.
that’s some of what i’m thinking eighteen sweet years in.
and now, because the older i get the more i glean from the wisdom of those who’ve left their trace, here’s my birthday bouquet to ponder for the day, the week, the hour…an indelible quote, a poem to make you laugh, and one to maybe melt you….
first, a quote from the french philosopher and playwright gabriel marcel, from the mystery of being:
“You know you have loved someone when you have glimpsed in them that which is too beautiful to die.”
a poem that might make you laugh, and certainly leave you with a smile:
Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Slam BY DAN VERA
I will tell you why she rarely ventured from her house. It happened like this:
One day she took the train to Boston, made her way to the darkened room, put her name down in cursive script and waited her turn.
When they read her name aloud she made her way to the stage straightened the papers in her hands — pages and envelopes, the backs of grocery bills, she closed her eyes for a minute, took a breath, and began.
From her mouth perfect words exploded, intact formulas of light and darkness. She dared to rhyme with words like cochineal and described the skies like diadem. Obscurely worded incantations filled the room with an alchemy that made the very molecules quake.
The solitary words she handled in her upstairs room with keen precision came rumbling out to make the electric lights flicker.
40 members of the audience were treated for hypertension. 20 year old dark haired beauties found their heads had turned a Moses White.
Her second poem erased the memory of every cellphone in the nightclub, and by the fourth line of the sixth verse the grandmother in the upstairs apartment had been cured of her rheumatism.
The papers reported the power outages. The area hospitals taxed their emergency generators and sirens were heard to wail through the night.
Quietly she made her way to the exit, walked to the terminal and rode back to Amherst.
She never left her room again and never read such syllables aloud.
and finally, a christmas poem that just might melt you, as it melted me. . .
Kenosis by Luci Shaw
In sleep his infant mouth works in and out. He is so new, his silk skin has not yet been roughed by plane and wooden beam nor, so far, has he had to deal with human doubt. He is in a dream of nipple found, of blue-white milk, of curving skin and, pulsing in his ear, the inner throb of a warm heart’s repeated sound. His only memories float from fluid space. So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash, wept for the sad heart of the human race.
thank you, with all my heart, for pulling up a chair, be it only for awhile, or for some or all these years. i am holding especially close against my heart this morning ginny, my once closest reader (my beloved mother in law who was quick to call if she liked what she’d read, and deafeningly silent if she did not!), mary ellen, and ceci, who waft over my shoulder, angels to my every day….and especially to my boys, who animate each and every pulse of my heart and every breath i breathe….(and certainly to will, who got this whole thing started, when he insisted i could do it, and built the website to make it happen….) xoxo love, bam
pull up a chair 