I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
A Mind in Love
From Victorian to post-war England; from sheltered only child to woman of the world; from advertising to apologetics; from fairy stories to the greatest story ever told – Dorothy Sayers in one personality, in one story, is an almost-larger-than-life aggregation of experiences and qualities. (Quoting from my biographical essay, A Mind in Love)
Is there anyone who is unfamiliar with Dorothy Sayers and her work? Maybe! Just in case, I’m prepared to keep giving this brief talk that introduces her body of work – apologetics, philosophy, murder mysteries, humor, drama, and a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy – in the context of her biography.
I love Dorothy, and can’t wait to meet her in Heaven after being a bit of a Sayers Museum docent all these years.
The Glory of Form
The artist has in common with his Creator a desire to realize ideas in form. Those ideas may be inspired by observation of nature, life experience, Liturgy, other works of art, pain and suffering, hopes and dreams, but ultimately spring from the touch of the Holy Spirit. What we observe about the process and results of our own attempts to create forms gives us new insight into the human person, as the highest of God’s creations.
In this talk for fellow artists in the Contemporary Religious Artists Association, I reflected on the Catholic understanding of form in music, poetry, architecture and personhood, and the experience of art as a spiritual practice. The arts can in-form our spiritual lives, and our faith is expressed in creative forms that draw radiance from the Liturgy.
It was interesting to get feedback from listeners that they had indeed felt a sort of wall between Being a Catholic and Being an Artist. I felt grateful that this talk helped them better integrate those aspects of being. The full text is available on the CRAA site.
Souls at Work also deals greatly with the glories of form – looking through form, entering into and understanding form, and creating form. I love to use the word ‘form’ instead of ‘art,’ because most people don’t consider themselves artists, and need to learn that they still are makers-of form. When we organize a gardening club, or make a quilt, or write a letter, or offer a courteous gesture, we are making forms that hold meaning and potentially have beauty. You’ll find me ranting about this a lot!
Communicating Reality to a Child
Women raising children stand in a very powerful place as the mediator of reality. We are great at being womb-and-placentas for our babies. We do fairly well at providing a home life that expands their contact with the wider world. We must also be, like a healthy cell wall, a semi-permeable boundary controlling incoming intellectual, spiritual and emotional information. It’s a bit overwhelming!
As she restricts the child’s access to reality, Mom confronts her own attitude toward being impeded, constrained, limited – her own interior freedom models freedom for the child. At the same time, the child’s wonder and enthusiasm can help cultivate her own attraction to the world around her. He encounters the world poetically, and Mom is a critical matrix of support for this poetic stage of his education. This first pre-academic education underlies all later intellectual development and supports later work on the child’s ‘structure’.
Mom is also singularly responsible for the language development by which her child has a different kind of access to reality. When he begins to label, abstract, reduce, control and manipulate the world through the use of words, she’ll be there to help him voice emotional content so that he doesn’t grow detached from the intelligence of the heart as he develops in the use of reason. A truly Catholic education invites students to freely affirm the ‘Catholic proposal’ with a response, a judgment that involves the heart’s wisdom. How important it is, then, to cultivate a heart that responds to beauty, truth and goodness, and not just an intellect that affirms a code of ethics.
There are many different ‘educations’ going on at once, for parents and children. In this discussion, we looked at the classical model (Poetic, Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric stages) with an eye toward staying free, practicing freedom at every stage in appropriate ways. I gave practical suggestions for the kind of spiral growth that results in a greater freedom because it involves action that resolves the tension set up between heart and mind within a growing person. Naturally, I had to give credit to holy leisure for being the key to the kind of encounter with reality that cultivates true freedom!
This is a great talk for home educators.
Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners
I consider Mystery and Manners must reading! I have discussed different aspects of this work with parent educators, spiritual seekers, the Catholic Creatives Salon, and as a book study overview. It is a rich source of insight into the life of the artist, of the human person, and into literature’s capacity to be a vessel for truth. Everything Flannery (yeah, we’re on a first-name basis now) says about approaching a book is a lesson about how to approach other forms, people, created things.
Souls at Work continues the discussion of the way we approach form, art, people and creation. I’m sure it couldn’t have been written without my understanding of the difference between art and propaganda. If you get nothing else from Mystery and Manners, you’ll be way ahead of most readers just by avoiding flat, simplistic, propagandistic literature in which characters and story are used as vehicles for Truth Delivery and have no life or truth in themselves.
What we think about literature matters deeply, as it reflects what we think of ourselves as creations of a divine Author in stories that have an eternal trajectory. We live and move and have our being within the greatest story ever told, yet what do we understand of story, character, dramatic necessity, truth in art, and of the incarnation of Truth in lowly, concrete forms?
I suggest to potential writers, to teachers of literature, and to anyone who reads stories that they will improve their understanding of story itself, and of their own task as artists, audience, or teacher, by reading Mystery and Manners. As Flannery teaches us about the art of storytelling, she touches on such themes as the operation of grace, free will and determinism, maimed souls and broken personalities, and the responsibilities of one who would communicate Christ to others. All this, and my favorite quote has nothing directly to do with any of it!
Describing the cry of the peacock, which most people would think awful to hear, she says, “To me it has always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade.” To me, that speaks volumes about her own capacity to receive mystery through sometimes ‘grotesque’ form.
Poetic Education: Seeing Through Words
One of my all-time favorite teaching experiences was a five-day poetry intensive for middle-school homeschoolers. I wrote a book just to get ready for this one, and hope to do it all over again some time. Meanwhile, I’ve adapted the material for parents, and for a high school classroom, and enjoyed those venues, too. For all audiences, I stress the importance of poetry, and poetic education, in the life of a soul.
One of the exercises I thought up generated some of the best little poems. I asked the kids to choose an object – house, hat, shoes, animal – and think of five of those as different from one another as possible. We all (yes, I played, too!) wrote out descriptions of our five-of-one-things (mine were hats) and then personified each one, based on the characteristics suggested by the descriptions. In the interest of sharing this exercise, and some poetry that’ll likely never otherwise get published, here are the five hats I came up with:
My hat Maureen is a drama queen –
so mysterious, soft and serious,
wide brim shades her violet eyes,
purple flair for a touch of surprise,
ribbon trailing her,
dark net veiling her,
Every head in the room
turns for this costume.
Ten-gallon Tex, a faithful pard’ner,
tough brown felt, for working hard,
he strides into a room all quiet and slow,
his sweat-stained brim rolled up just-so,
faded and hardened by wear and weather,
an eagle’s plume in a band of leather.
Charlie Tap
is just a cap.
His sole ambition
is goin’ fishin’.
Worn and faded,
with never a frown,
perked up by ornaments
hooked in his crown.
Suzy Sunshine, made of straw,
blue gingham holds her posey.
A smiling, crumpled, outdoor girl,
with freckles on her nosie.
in her best Sunday hat.
All the rest’s hats cannot touche
the satin rouche on her yellow crown.
Mrs. Milliner goes beribboned
to Sunday service to advertise.
All the ladies there
notice all the care
taken to place her flowers just right.
She’s a leader in high society,
if not in humble piety.
Every Sunday’s a thrilling show –
her glory sets most hearts aglow!
Here’s a collection of my talks that feature poetry, poems, or poetic formation.
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