Adele, Fulton Sheen, and the "Hookup Culture"

The artists of our world, Fulton J. Sheen once said, have a special role; they often are the first to perceive—and point out—the real problems in a society. Artists don’t necessarily offer solutions to modern problems—but the best of them invariably identify and put before the public exactly what those problems are. This is possible because through art man can be brought to understand that what is evil is ugly (and, by contrast, that what is good is beautiful), even if he intellectually is having difficulty agreeing that what is evil is wrong. 

Lately, I’ve encountered a recent illustration of Sheen’s point; and I may begin by recalling the name popularly attributed to our society: “the hook-up culture.” Our world has seen no less than four decades of skewed moral vision when it comes to romance, since the sexual revolution of the 60s. And now, two or three generations later, the artists of our day are beginning to point out the nasty afterbirth of the free love, hookup mentality in a very provocative way. Modern musicians especially, often themselves deeply imbued with popular notions of sexuality and love, are unmistakably starting to outline the current generation’s desolate frustration and deep-seated dissatisfaction with the hookup lifestyle--in fact, it is arguably the dominant theme of pop-music from artists who write their own songs. Years of rushing into sexual relationships, inevitable and bitter breakups, have left their scars on them, and it’s coming through in their music, perfectly detailing how painful “free love” is in reality.

One such case is probably a British pop-star that has hit the top of the music world in the last few years: Adele.  This contralto’s powerful soul-style songs, which successfully rocked the boat of the American music world, have led the charts for a long while now. And they are almost all depressing. With the exception of some hopeful, committed-to-love kind of songs (like “Make You Feel My Love”), Adele’s pieces are almost exclusively—and all of her top hits are definitely—tortured, frustrated breakup songs. Her music plumbs human heartbreak, exploring the whole wild and wicked scale of tangled emotions and passions: from burning emotional desolation, to sorrowful unwillingness to let go of the past in spite of the pain, to furious, bitter vengefulness.  Invariably at the root of the anguish in these songs is a background story of having let another soul come close in love, of having given away oneself to another, only to have that gift and that sort of “love” necessarily destroyed in a culture that treats relationships as “hookups.” “Rolling in the Deep” is probably Adele’s most famous, and some fans might balk at the idea of it’s being a mark of the hookup culture. Musically, the piece is enjoyable, almost Diana Ross or Mo-Town style, but the lyrics betray that the sentiment of vengeance expressed is neither a normal nor healthy way to end any relationship:

See how I'll leave, with every piece of you

Don't underestimate the things that I will do           

 . . .

Baby, I have no story to be told

But I’ve heard one of you and I’m gonna make your head burn,

. . . .

Think of me in the depths of your despair

Making a home down there, as mine sure won't be shared.

The message beneath the music plainly conveys a firestorm of fury; although the source is somewhat vague in “Rolling in the Deep,” another Adele song about heartbreak, “Set Fire To the Rain,” sheds a little light on the situation. “Set Fire to the Rain” comes from the same album, 21, which Adele supposedly wrote about her breakup with her lover of two years, and tells her story of passionate “falling in love,” consequent breakup, and ends with some disturbing imagery describing the singer’s sense of betrayal:  

When I lay with you

I could stay there

Close my eyes

Feel you here forever

You and me together

Nothing is better 

 . . . there's a side to you

That I never knew, never knew,

All the things you'd say,

They were never true, never true,

And the games you play

You would always win, always win. 

 . . . . . .

I set fire to the rain

And I threw us into the flames

And I felt something die

'Cause I knew that that was the last time!

Although less famous than Adele, another striking artist rapidly rising in popularity is Ingrid Michaelson, whose music betrays at the same time a desperate longing for fulfillment and a painful realization that a hookup lifestyle leaves one unfulfilled. “The Way I Am,” certainly her most popular song, describes a desire for committed, faithful love:

If you were falling, I would catch you;

You need a light, I’ll find a match . . .

If you are chilly, here, take my sweater;

Your head is aching, I’ll make it better

Because . . . you take me the way I am.

While she sings of fidelity and commitment, however, Michaelson also recounts how scarred living a free love lifestyle can leave a person, in her less-well-known, post-breakup song, “Starting Now”: 

I want to crawl back inside my bed of sin
I want to burn the sheets that smell like your skin
Instead I'll wash them just like kitchen rags with stains
Spinning away every piece that remains of you
But before you finally go there's one thing you should know: that I promise
Starting now I'll never know your name
Starting now I'll never feel the same
Starting now I wish you never came into my world
It's my world, it's not ours anymore.

There is a tangible pain and bitterness in these shocking lines, which simultaneously describe both the hookup world and exactly what it does to a soul: brings it to the apex of commitment, the utmost physical indication that a total self-gift has been made, only to destroy that sense of love and leave the heart shattered and aching in the end.

If Bishop Sheen was right, and the artists of a time are the first to speak about the problems with a society, then modern music is a signpost pointing unmistakably to the modern notions of love.  There are others; Ingrid Michaelson and Adele are just two of many whose work runs along similar themes. These musician’s voices are singing some poignant truths about our world’s problems, and, while not prophetic or profound, and whether or not they realize it, as artists they are at least unanimously pointing to the same truth: the hookup culture hurts. It leaves souls desperate, thirsty for fulfillment, broken, feeling betrayed and angry. Hopefully, as the world listens to their music, it will start to listen to their words and what they have to say about our society’s stance on love.  

Our New Bigotry

 

For a nation whose founding document declares that “all men are created equal,” the U.S. has seen a whole lot of inequality, usually raising its ugly head in the form of discrimination and prejudice against particular minorities. We’ve even seen the widespread legalization of the most degrading prejudice: human beings transacting the trade of other human beings, treating real persons like commodities, something you can obtain if you want and dispose of at your will.

If you think I’m talking about slavery in the South before the Civil War, think again. I’m referring to something that happened earlier this very month.  According to LifeNews.com, Kevin and Deb McCrea from Iowa had more kids than they wanted—because through the use of In Vitro Fertilization, they had 18 extra embryos. So Deb found new parents for them . . . on Craigslist. Through the public, online market, she located couples who wanted to have kids, and sent her children to be born and raised through other women.  Deb felt she couldn’t sign off her own embryonic offspring to “just anyone.” “I don’t want to give up that right to see pictures of that child and compare that child to ours,” she said, “And see what they would have looked like and if they’re healthy and happy.”

Even though she just gave all 18 away, Deb wants to keep an eye on her other kids raised through surrogate mothers, because she feels she has a “right” to do so. But the poor woman’s words clearly indicate that she has a warped sense of what constitutes responsible parenthood; she doesn’t seem to understand that “rights” only come with “duties.” Although she must have known, when she paid for a whole batch of embryos through IVF, that she would never fulfill her natural duty to raise the children, she still wants the sense of fulfillment that comes from watching them grow.  

On the one hand, Mrs. McCrea’s desire to find loving homes for the children is somewhat understandable. Yet, unlike when a naturally-conceived child is put up for adoption because it’s parents can’t care for it, the very need for these kids to have parents and homes is purely a result of man’s scientific blunderings in God’s exclusive creation-zone. Situations such as these should never arise in the first place; yet with IVF, kids without parents who want or are able to raise them are made by the dozens in a petri dish. Deb McCrea’s search for new parents for her kids is not like an unwed mother putting her child up for adoption; it’s the moral equivalent of a woman naturally giving birth to as many kids as she possibly can, only then to decide she doesn’t want them and giving them all away.

Deb says she plans someday to tell the children the truth; it boggles the imagination to know what it will be for them to learn that they were the extra ones; that their biological parents chose to make them all, but wanted just one or two of them; that they chose a sibling from the same “batch,” while the others were the leftovers whose coincidental existence wasn’t important enough—or convenient enough—to merit a life lived with their rightful home and family.

Cases like the McCrea’s are stunning examples of what is so disturbingly wrong about IVF: it encourages a mentality of irresponsible parenting under the pseudonym of compassionate solutions for couples who are having trouble conceiving. Because they want a baby, IVF advocates essentially argue, couples should be allowed to create as many children as they want and then pick a few to live, so that they can fulfill their desire for parenthood. The rest of the kids, meanwhile, are given away or remain permanently frozen in storage.

The use of IVF treats children like a product—in the way that a puppy is a product to a breeder: a cute product, a product people get emotionally attached to, but a product all the same. They reduce a real, little person to a commodity, something parents can pay money to get when they want, and dispose of as they choose to, as the McCreas have done with their “extra” kids. But children aren’t puppies; they are persons, whose value is not based on the fulfillment their parents get from seeing them grow up.

“Human beings as a commodity?” I heard someone exclaim when they read about this, “I thought that went out with the Civil War!” But it hasn’t.  IVF is a new kind of bigotry that has become legally accepted in the US—a new legal sale of human beings like products, without respect for their personhood. Just as slavery was rooted in and perpetuated bigotry against blacks, IVF is steeped in a discrimination against embryonic human babies—because it creates many at once, and arbitrarily chooses which ones of the siblings will live with their parents, or live at all, and which ones don’t.  In the same way that the slave trade in the South was based on a denial of the rights and dignities of blacks, the selection process of IVF is based on a denial of the rights and dignity of human babies.

They say times have changed; and they have. Back in the day, you had to be Catholic, or black, or Jewish, to be the object of someone’s bigotry and discrimination. Now? Well, now, you just have to be an unborn human baby.

YOU KNOW THE FACE: A Hat-Tip to the Character Actors

          "Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street." 

                                         --G.K. Chesterton 

Just before his death in 2007, 100-year-old Charles Lane had begun work on a documentary called “You Know the Face” about his life and work as a character actor.  Unfortunately, the work was never completed; nevertheless, it would have been aptly named, because from 1931 until 2006, Charles Lane appeared in nearly 400 films and television shows, making him one of the most familiar faces in the backdrop of Hollywood productions for whole generations of film-goers.

Charles Lane, looking his usual surly self

Though seldom appearing for long in any feature, Lane filled roles of vastly-varying professions, from reporters to rent collectors, from psychiatrists to census takers, from secretaries to superintendents, and yet he played—almost exclusively—the same sort of character: a sharp-nosed, practical, antagonistic, business-first fellow in spectacles.  Lane himself recognized the queer continuity of all these roles: “Having had so many small parts,” he once said, “there was a character I played that showed up all the time and people did get to know him, like an old friend.”

Walter Brennan

That notion of an “old friend” beautifully sums up the special, undervalued role character actors play in establishing a film's quality and atmosphere—the way they help make a piece of Hollywood artwork “great” or “classic.” Of course, when we speak of “Hollywood actors and actresses,” it’s tempting to think exclusively of the stars, like Clark Gable or Audrey Hepburn.  But while the stars may be the center of everyone’s attention, the truth is that they never could have made those fantastic splashes of talent and popularity without the steady acting support of the forgettable but reliable “character actors:” actors who were type-cast or continually filled minor roles that colored in the background. Recurring in dozens of films, often playing the same sort of character, as Lane did, or at least playing different roles with a soon-familiar face, character actors made films more complete. They acted like pieces of the set or colors in the backdrop on a stage: even though they were never the center of attention, by their excellence of serving their purpose they made a movie more vivid, more realistic—in a word, more like life.

Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride
as Ma and Pa Kettle 

The inimitable Edna May Oliver

The reason for this was simply because they played people you meet in “real life”: mere “fellows-on-the-street,” non-glamorous side figures, non-heroes—the sort of person you find in the doctor’s waiting room, behind the cash register, on the train. They were there precisely to flesh out the world surrounding the central characters, and consequently they often packed a punch, so to speak, into the tiny tidbit-of-a-role they had.  Good character actors are the spice and color of a film; they are the sort of people of which the world is full—the “common man” incarnate in a particular way, a personality in a crowd.  After all, let’s face it—perhaps it’s true that everyone wants to be Cary Grant (“Even Cary Grant,” as the man himself once said), but the stereotypical hero of a story can often be less colorful than the life-like characters that surround him: the dying old soldier, the hot-tempered Italian grandmother, the dottering country minister, the local drunk, the obsequious villain’s side-kick, the drawling farm boy, the loony old professor, the brusque British police inspector, the wise-cracking taxi driver. 

Victor McLaglen, a Ford regular

These people aren’t the meat-and-potatoes of a film, but they certainly are the relish; and one director who knew this full-well was the legendary Irish-American John Ford.  Ford had a peculiar talent for gathering around him a group of actors and actresses he would reuse again and again as steady characters that seem to link together all his cinema creations into a cohesive whole.  Take for instance, Ford’s cavalry films—She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Fort Apache, and Rio Grande—each of the movies has an almost identical cast, with a few notable exceptions, and some of the characters even have the same names in the different movies. Ford, a compositional genius, doubtless knew that standardizing his background cast could unify and tighten the impression his films were to make on his audience. When you begin watching his movies, you start to grow accustomed to seeing the same faces in their old place; it’s an evocative sensation, giving the impression that members of a family are gathering around to tell a tale together.  There is a peculiar sort of comfort and delight in seeing those familiar figures again and again, in varying roles but always solidly delivering performances that heighten the atmospheric tint of the whole film.

Peter Lorre

Guy Kibbee

         So, here’s to the character actors, the fellows in the background, the faces in the street. They spice up the stories we love and make them that more believable, because they are tastes of real life--equally full of interesting and unusual people who don’t fit the stereotypes of hero or heroine. They remind us of people we’ve met and known, even in passing, and so they have become to us—as Lane put it—like old friends.   

The Worrywort

Midterms are Purgatory for college students. I would suggest they’re even harder than finals; at least during finals week there are no other classes and no other homework due. But during midterms, students juggle all the rigors of their regular schedule while simultaneously finding extra time for intense exam prep-work. Purgatory. Caffeine-driven, sleep-deprived Purgatory.

Such were my thoughts two weeks ago as I rose from my desk, shaking and exhausted, to hand in my theology midterm. One of a few students left who had not yet turned in their test, I had been anxiously glancing up at the clock, frantically racing to finish my essays before time ran out. As I handed him the little blue book and turned to exit the classroom, my professor pulled me to one side. Looking me in the eye, he said quietly: “You know, Lauren, you should give up worrying for Lent.”

I was a bit taken aback, not by his admonition, but how incredibly pertinent it was. Not 10 minutes previously, I had just finished an essay about St. Francis de Sales’ advice on “spiritual circumcision,” the trimming away of anything that hinders us in the spiritual life, such as gossiping or keeping bad company. For Christians who wanted to get serious about this sort of mortification, de Sales suggested letting somebody else ply the knife—to allow someone who might have a better insight into your failings than you do to choose your penance for you, given the typical human blindness to our own faults. This practice is doubly good, he said, because it not only gives us an objective glimpse of our sins, but also cuts deep at the root of all sin—our pride.

Now, with de Sales fresh in my mind, here was my theology professor “wielding the knife,” gently but with piercing precision. He had seen my abundant anxiety and stress over this test and over the struggles of college life in general, and so he was offering some simple and honest fraternal correction. I worried too much, and he knew it, and so he suggested that I try to give it up. 

I stared at him blankly a moment, and then confessed abashedly: “That would be really hard.”

You see, worrying is one of my pet vices. I’m a great worrier: I can worry about anything. Or nothing. If my schedule is packed, I worry. If my schedule is empty, I worry. I worry about my family and about my friends. I worry about getting assignments done well and on time; as soon as I’ve handed them in, I worry about getting my grade back. By the time that happens, I’m busy worrying about something else. I worry about my vocation, about finding God’s will in my life, about doing the right thing at all times.

Of course, I justify my worrying by saying that I’m being practical and responsible and conscientious, and am trying to take proper care of all the people and things God has placed in my life. But as Lent rolled around this year, I gradually realized that this particular habit of mine was a vicious habit; my constant anxiety was nothing less than a manifest failure to trust in God.  As Servant of God Fr. Solanus Casey once said:

            “Worry is a weakness from which very few of us are entirely free. We must be on guard against this most insidious enemy of our peace of soul. Instead let us foster confidence in God, and thank Him ahead of time for whatever he chooses to end us.”

Fr. Solanus was very right: worry is indeed an “insidious enemy,” a direct and dangerous hindrance to Christian peace of soul. It attacks the human heart even in times of peace and quiet; it is the devil’s attempt to rob us of our trust in God. In my worst worrying moments, I have had a false sense that, if I wasted enough energy and time being anxious and distressed over everything going on in my life, I might somehow by virtue of my worrying take care of it all—and, moreover, that if I didn’t stress about it, it would not be taken care of. Such a mentality completely excludes a child-like trust in the loving Providence of the Lord; it shifts the focus from “All my cares are in God’s hands,” to “All my cares are in my hands alone.” And the antidote to this false vision of reality is, as Fr. Solanus pointed out, confidence in God.  

After all, truly living out the Christian life requires a total confidence in Our Father who provides and cares for us as His children. As a good friend recently warned me, “You shouldn’t worry, because God told you not to!” He was thinking of Luke 12:22-26, where Christ tells his disciples point-blank to stop worrying, because their anxiety over daily cares does them absolutely no good: “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life . . . Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest?”

So I took my professor’s challenge. I resolved stolidly that I would give up worrying for Lent.

So far, I have utterly failed. As it turns out, bad habits are hard to get rid of. But with God’s grace, I’m not giving up on this battle; the longer I fight the temptation to worry, the more necessary I realize it is for me to surrender myself trustingly and completely to the Providence of God, without holding back any little desires to fear, to fret, to worry things out on my own power. It’s an up-hill struggle, but with time I hope to learn how to put this one simple fact of confident trust into practice: because I am not God, I do not have ultimate control over everything in my life. But He does, and He knows what He’s doing.

Lost Imagination

If there is one rule that I have learned from the children in my life, it is this: that if children are not given an occupation, they will demonstrate a special capacity to “occupy themselves.” Or, to put it simply, when children have nothing to do, they will find something to do—even if all they can find to do is mischief.  

However quietly he may be sitting, a child will never quiet his imagination; he looks at the world around him with fresh eyes and sees in it fantastic and fabulous things. Any adult knows this truth merely from remembering the time as a child he spent in waiting rooms, or playing alone in his backyard, or following his mother around as she ran errands.  It is as natural to an adult as to a child to seek to occupy oneself somehow—if only with one’s thoughts. It is merely that a man has learned to hide it better. Waiting in the doctor’s office, a child will ask his mother loudly why the lady on the other side of the room looks like Cruella DeVille. The grown man will not ask this aloud—possibly only because his mother is not there to answer—but he will certainly ask it, and perhaps answer it, in the silence of his mind. 

Yet, in our day, moments of simple waiting are nearly obsolete.  From waiting in line at the coffee shop to waiting for a red light to change, in an age of instant communication and entertainment we feel the need to communicate or be entertained not only instantly but constantly.  With our iPhones and blackberries, we now carry with us everywhere the limitless ability to waste moments of waiting.  And that is a death-warrant to our opportunity to contemplate the world about us, and a fatal blow to our imagination.

It was once much less easy to so fill up one’s “waiting” time.  In G.K. Chesterton’s essay “What I Found In My Pocket,” this genial giant of a writer found himself on a train without any regular form of amusement or occupation, having neither book nor newspaper nor anything to write on—and not even any advertisements to look at. “Now I deny most energetically,” Chesterton declares in this desperate situation, “that anything is, or can be, uninteresting.”  That one rule may be called the grounding principle upon which GKC’s philosophy of natural wonder is based—and, true to form, Chesterton lived it out in this particular situation, simply by exploring the contents of his pockets.  Among other things, he discovered a pocket-knife, chalk, and a box of matches.  In each case, his imagination runs wild, inspired by the object he is contemplating: in the pocket-knife he sees “the mystery of the thing called iron and of the thing called steel”; the chalk calls to his mind “all the art and all the frescoes of the world.”  Free from the distractions of daily duties and usual occupations during his train ride, he saw in what could have been a dull time a richly fertile opportunity for his imagination, for him to contemplate the miraculous and mysterious element in every ordinary thing around him, from wood to tram tickets to coins.

Such a child-like attitude and simplicity which can take an unabashed interest in little things is swiftly disappearing—or at least growing decidedly uncommon. The bored child and the bored man in the waiting room who take an interest in the people and things about them are a dying race.  No one in a waiting room sits unoccupied, merely contemplating their surroundings—except the very old and the very young. Nowadays, your average fellow indeed turns to his pockets; but he does not pull out a pocket knife or a piece of chalk. He pulls out a phone and begins texting. Or tweeting. Or checking Facebook. He is occupied; he is entertained; but his imagination is dead.

As Chesterton’s own musings illustrate, an imagination is like the artist in each soul: it cannot flourish except when given time, space, freedom—in short, a blank canvas. If we perpetually fill every free space in our day with some form of entertainment or communication or “networking,” there is no time left to see the beauty and potential of realities right under our noses; no time to imagine, to contemplate; no time left for our own creation. 

Pure to the Pure

In the 1941 British film Pimpernel Smith, Leslie Howard plays a seemingly-mild-mannered archeologist history professor who secretly rescues fellow intellectuals from the clutches of the Nazis. In one scene, at a high-society soirée, the professor refers innocently in the course of a conversation to the fact that the ancient Greek statue of Aphrodite he unearthed was (of course) nude.  Shocked by his frank simplicity, the prim-and-proper bystanders are a bit flustered; the Professor, realizing their embarrassment, mildly replies; “Oh, well, to the pure all things are pure.”

When I saw this film for the first time, this quote fascinated me, so I determined to look it up. As it turns out, the line originates with St. Paul, who wrote in his letter to Titus: “To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure; their very minds and consciences are corrupted.”  

This little line struck me so deeply because, as I recently studied in a philosophy class on Ethics, there is a fundamental connection between the way we perceive things and our purity of heart.  During the course, we reviewed the writings of Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper on chastity in The Four Cardinal Virtues.  Selfishness is blinding, he argues, because it makes one see only one’s own private good as good.  Unchastity, then, is uniquely blinding because it is uniquely selfish in an area—sexuality—where man is called to be especially unselfish.  Our purity of heart or lack thereof, Pieper concludes, dramatically affects our moral vision. On the other side of the coin, chastity makes you see things clearly, as they really are.

Pieper’s point makes perfect sense, and coincides exactly with Paul’s.  A person who sees things through the lens of purity will not see indecency or innuendo where there is none to be seen; but the man who sees all things by the light (or darkness, rather) of unchastity will see sinfulness in all things.  Adam and Eve saw each other’s nakedness with pure eyes before the Fall; once their vision was altered by sin, they felt the need to cover themselves. Similarly, Michelangelo’s paintings that bedeck the Sistine Chapel have been condemned by various puritanically-minded groups and figures throughout history who felt they were more pornographic than sacred. But John Paul II reverently defended the artwork, calling the Sistine Chapel the “sanctuary of the theology of the body.”  

As coming across that line from Paul in the context of the film made me realize, what Paul and Pieper say easily applies not only to art but to daily conversations and thoughts. The first incident that came to my mind was when I recently recommended a song to someone. “The lyrics are very sweet,” I said, “Except for one line which implies something inappropriate.” When my companion asked me what the line was, I told him; with a puzzled look on his face, he replied, “Um, that doesn’t have to be something bad.  That could be interpreted as something wholesome.”  I felt abashed by my friend’s purity of heart. Where I followed the trail of innuendo, his thoughts remained on a simpler, more innocent plane.

Impurity in our hearts can especially affect daily conversation in the realm of gossip—when a nasty rumor spreads quickly around a community and swiftly mushrooms completely out of proportion.  One foul mind can defile a situation by its own perception, and pass it on thus contaminated to others.  Take, for instance, the story of Marian the librarian in The Music Man.  “She was seen going and coming from his house,” the chattering ladies of town begin whispering to each other, and the mutterings crescendo to wild misjudgments of her character: “She made brazen overtures!”  As it turns out, Marian’s actions—paying a visit to a family friend—were completely innocent, but the society gossipers saw her only through their own tainted lens.

It is so easy to make similar misjudgments of others, to unfairly project motivations or actions onto the characters of others: to assume, for instance that the elderly lady in the back of church prays loudly for attention, not because her hearing aid is off; or that the person who leaves daily Mass early does so disrespectfully, and not because it is the only way he can both attend Mass daily and make it to work on time; or that the young woman in the supermarket dresses immodestly for deliberately sinful reasons, rather than out of simple ignorance.

But to the pure, all things are pure.  So we must strive to be supremely careful in our judgments of others, because if we take a look at the way we see others, it will be a reflection not of their character, but of ours.  Our sin clouds our vision of our neighbor—and that means that ultimately it clouds our vision of God.  Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God. 

A Christmas Letter

Yuletide Reflections, reprinted from The Catholic Young Woman

My dear readers,

The close of the year and the quiet pause afforded by Christmas break fittingly cause me to reflect on what has passed since I last posted here. Much as I had anticipated, once I left home in the heat of late summer and returned to Christendom College, my days were so full that I barely had time to catch my breath, let alone write anything.  Just as I felt I was getting used to my hectic schedule and finally getting a handle on all of my various and sundry goals and responsibilities, it was half-way through December and I was packing up to go home.

On the one hand, the time I spent immersed in the world of classes, work, choir, and friends at college went very fast—so much faster than freshman year.  “What,” I cried in early September, “It’s time for the Italian Night dance already? I thought the semester just started!” And the rest of the semester passed in much the same way. Midterms? Halloween? Winter Formal Dance? Finals? Glory be, didn’t we just get here?

Yet, when I measure my days by all that happened between one milestone and the next, I realize how much time really has passed. My life has been full—full of beautiful things, of tough decisions, of new experiences and lessons learned.

There are a thousand things I could take away from this semester and relate here to share with all of you, but if I should choose just one thing, I think it would be this: that during this semester, the new and unexpected spectrum of experiences I have gone through have made me approach truths I’ve always known with a new perspective.

One little incident comes to mind as illustrative of this lesson. During a class on the Song of Songs, my theology professor was explaining some of the deep images in that unique canticle.  “In this passage,” he said, “the Beloved is gazing into the eyes of her Lover and sees her image reflected there as in a mirror.”  From the back of the classroom, a student piped up quizzically that such imagery did not strike her as very moving or even romantic.  There was a little silence, and then my theology professor replied quietly, with a twinkle in his eye: “Try it sometime. Then we’ll see if you think differently." 

This semester has brought me trials and challenges I knew about and understood in a peripheral fashion, but can comprehend in a different and more profound way once I have passed through them myself.  It is one thing to write about how perfectionism is a fault; it’s another thing to fight a losing battle against it through papers, midterms, class readings, and finals and come out on the other side realizing my limitations.  It is one thing to write about how to be open to God’s plan for one’s life; it is another thing entirely to figure out how to be open to it in my own life.  It is an amazing thing to learn and discover (through an absolutely incredible philosophy class on Ethics) about what true friendship is; discerning how to put that truth into practice in the daily reality of living with one’s friends is another struggle altogether.  It’s humbling—and wonderful—to discover what it is like to try and really live what I believe.  

At the end of the semester, I have to admit that facing all these new challenges and experiences has made me realize, once again, the unfathomable debt of gratitude I owe to my Beloved. Everything he has placed in my path, while it may seem at the time like a stumbling block, is in fact a stepping stone to Him.  He has not chosen to show me yet precisely where my life is going, and by that He is teaching me trust Him and not be afraid of the path ahead of me:  

For I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, 
plans for welfare and not for evil, 
to give you a future and a hope.

Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me,and I will hear you.

You will seek me and find me; 
when you seek me with all your heart.

-Jeremiah 29:11-13

I wish you all a blessed and Merry Christmas! May the joy and peace of the Christ Child fill all your days! Please pray for me, and I will keep all of you in my prayers!

God bless!

Lauren 

The Close of Summer

God is good, all the time. All the time, God is good.

Summer usually is, or ought to be, something of a break from the hectic schedule of the rest of the year. It should be a period for reflecting upon God’s goodness and mercy and taking the time to notice His beauty even in little things.

For me, this summer has been filled with many blessings, both big and little; and not the least of them has been the opportunity to work at some serious writing here at my blog, at Catholic Young Woman, and at Catholic Exchange. It’s been a very good “learning experience,” as the saying goes; I’ve faced a few very important lessons, like how to address current events and how to take criticism when someone disagrees with me. It also brought me the blessing of becoming not just a guest author but a regular contributor to the beautiful community at the Catholic Young Woman.

But now the summer is drawing to a close. Although the thermometer is still wavering in the high nineties, the local school busses have already begun to make their rounds in my neighborhood and little kids are sporting new books and backpacks. Soon I too must pack away my summer gear and return the rigors of academic life.

As much as I truly love to write, while I am at school I find that my schedule is usually quite full and doesn’t allow me much time for writing anything besides papers, essays, and notes. I know that, if I let God lead me, this necessary respite from my own personal writing can be a time of spiritual growth and learning that can help me grow to deeper insight into the mercy and love of God, and ultimately help me better to write of Him. I find a comforting lesson in the wise words of Fr. Adrian van Kaam, who said:

“Writers are writers for all hours of the day. 

They never take leave from writing. 

Every experience, every observation, 

all their reading, conversation,

 study, and listening

 nourish in some way their authorship.”

My heartfelt thanks go out to all of you who regularly have read my blog over the summer, for your kind comments and for sharing your own insights. I will, of course, try to write here as often as I can, so feel free to check back now and then. Please pray for me as I start the journey of a new and challenging academic year.

In Christ,

Lauren 

The World Is In Flames

"The world is in flames: the fire can spread even to our house, but above all the flames the cross stands on high, and it cannot be burnt." --Edith Stein (St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross).

England and the outbreak of rioting there have been very much in the public eye during the past week. The reports are all disturbing—and somewhat disorienting. I cannot pretend to understand precisely what these brutal, Twitter-organized mob risings are really about. I’m not a politician, nor a social analyst—though even those supposed experts cannot seem to agree on what is going on.

But the very notion of a riot mystifies me, and the more I learn about rioting, the more horrible it appears to me.  Riots often seem to occur for no other clear reason than a sort of mob bloodlust which brings out the most diabolical side of humanity. My brother was caught in Dublin at the time of the riots there a few years ago; he ducked into a shop and hid while Dubliners smashed Dublin’s windows, lit fire to its cars, and otherwise damaged their own city. During the Civil War, women in Richmond went on a riot, supposedly enraged over the shortage of necessities which the war had caused; they stole and wreaked havoc that even Yankee troops had not yet been able to do in that city. Confederate President Jefferson Davis himself came out and begged them to stop, taking what money he had in his own pockets and throwing it to them in a desperate attempt to appease them. They eventually straggled away to their homes . . . and social conditions in the South were not improved one whit for their mad ravages of the city which was their own home and last stronghold against the North.

In a 1934 British film about the French Revolution, an Englishman hears of the terrors Frenchmen were enacting on other Frenchmen, and remarks sadly: “Damnable, useless cruelty.” That, I think, summarizes the reaction of all sane men to the bestial violence now taking place in England. It is not only cruelty; it is useless cruelty—cruelty without an aim, cruelty without a point; evil for evil’s sake. When the riot is done and the streets are filled with the dark and empty silence of death, the rioters may sit atop their charred pile of destruction and look about at the harm they’ve done, confident that they’ve achieved . . . nothing. Do they expect to improve their social condition? To win jobs, homes, benefits from the government by treating jobs, homes, and the government with extreme contempt? Do they demand to receive the dignity due to men, when they have behaved liked animals—or devils?

All such weird riots are a stark and startling reminder of how very low man can fall; they leave us asking why men would willingly do such damage to their own home towns and countries. The riots do worse than no good; they do deliberate evil. They seem a mark of the uncivilized; but as a saner Briton, G. K. Chesterton, pointed out in The Everlasting Man, sins that are evil for evil’s sake are actually the mark of a civilization that has grown decadent: 

There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of 'pretending'; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when the man is tired of playing at mythology . . . The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense   . . . They try to stab their nerves to life . . . They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.

Chesterton’s analogy is uncannily accurate, as any mother will testify. It is positively true that when a child wearies of his ordinary occupations, he turns most easily to mischief; that it is in a sort of wild idleness and boredom that an impish look will come into his eye and he will happily tear to pieces the book he has been told not to touch, or carefully and deliberately smear his dinner across the wall.

Perhaps the Englishmen tearing England apart are suffering from a similar “staleness” and are indeed seeking “stranger sins” as “stimulants to their jaded sense.” Perhaps they are acting precisely like over-tired toddlers in a tantrum. It may be that they are weary of their virtual online communities and social networks, and even of their virtual video-game worlds of destruction, and have decided, in a sort of desperation, to forge for themselves a brotherhood of real destruction in the real world. One thing can be certain, and must be said; no social conditions, no poverty, no failures of government can excuse such bestiality, theft and ruin and bloodshed.  I have heard commentators try to work up sympathy for the rioters by saying that it is because of this government policy or that social inequality that the rioters are rioting. If they were really starving, there might be some excuse for them to steal food, but not to set fire to homes. They are guilty of foul, brutal inhumanity—no less guilty because they may have had some reason to be unhappy.

In the end, the word used by the Englishman to describe the French Reign of Terror is the only word to describe the English riots: “Damnable.” They are doing it, quite literally, for the hell of it. If they are not stopped, if sanity and common sense do not rein them in, then it may happen that they will remake Britain in their own image, and it will become—like France in the Revolution—a living hell.  

Homeless

If I had to name one of the most unique characteristics of my childhood, it would probably be the fact that, because of my father’s job, my family relocated every three or four years. We pulled up roots and moved so many times that the smell of cardboard boxes and packing tape makes me grow nostalgic. By the time I was fifteen, I had lived in more States than my mother had so much as visited by the time she was twenty-five. 

When I tell people this, they often ask: “What’s it like to just leave and start all over again every few years?” I usually smile and say it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds.  True, there was a little heartache of parting and the headache of reassembling an entire household every once in awhile. (Why is it that you always find the box full of Christmas decorations when you desperately need to unpack the dishes and silverware?) But looking back, through all the growing pains amid the packing boxes, I wouldn’t change a year of it, because it taught me some crucial lessons.

There is something a little shaking and soul-searching about having to leave behind what feels so incredibly permanent, like a house. But leaving my houses and finding new ones so often caused me to reflect and re-evaluate what really was lasting in my life. It took quite some time, but it eventually dawned on me that I was perpetually leaving my house—but I never left my home. My home was something entirely different from where I lived.  Even when my older siblings grew up and moved out, there were certain things about my home that remained permanent through the years when everything else changed: my Catholic faith and the love of my family, and the two were inextricably intertwined.

My mother is fond of saying, “Everything in life changes. Families grow up. Friends change and move on. The only thing in life that doesn’t change is God, and as long as He is in your heart, everything else will turn out okay.” Even for those who live in the same towns their whole lives, the passing of time will bring challenges they cannot predict and probably would not have imagined. But the love of God never changes, and as long as we are firmly rooted in that then all the rising and falling tides of life cannot break us. Without it, we will buckle under and grope hopelessly to make some sort of sense out of the strange trials and sufferings that we meet on the journey of life. Servant of God John Randal Bradburne—a wanderer himself, and a possible saint—once wrote a poem call “Strange Vagabond” that summarized it perfectly:

God’s love within you is your native land

So search none other, never more depart.

For you are homeless,

            Save God keeps your heart.

            After years of learning to cope with changes in my life, I began to gradually soak up this little lesson: that without the love of God in us, we are truly homeless. If we have it, we are at home no matter where we are or what battles we must face. After all, until we reach Heaven, we are still pilgrims on a journey. St. Augustine grasped this truth in a moment of inspiration when he wrote: “You made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

There was a very beautiful family I know of that faced many changes and was forced to relocate several times. But they kept their trust in the Providence of God, though sometimes they were uncertain about whether they would even find lodging in a new town. The mother of this household was a true homemaker; her heart was always focused on the Lord. The Blessed Virgin Mary knew better than anyone that it is “God’s love within us” that makes a real home. No matter what frightening changes or unexpected experiences she faced, she trusted God, and so “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”  She was, in a sense, always at home, and made wherever she was home for her family. She is a perfect model for those of us in this “valley of tears” still facing years of changes ahead, as we learn to pack up at the end of each stage in our life and move on, knowing that whatever lies around the bend, God is our home.