Coming home anew.

This Colorado September has been just as beautiful as I was hoping it would be. The sun has shone every day, the evenings are cool, and every so often a morning has been crisp enough to hint at the cool autumn that Starbucks has preemptively begun to sell, once again. America is as it would be.

I live opposite a park now, with a little pond and a view of the mountains, on a street shaded by trees that look suspiciously similar to carob trees. On mornings when my legs want to wander, I meander around the pond and through the streets of funky little houses while I say morning prayer, one hand tucked in my pocket around an olive wood rosary from Bethlehem.

The park and the trees are a small piece of the Lord’s goodness in my life, one of so many bright pieces, that are currently colouring my world so vivid, I think nervously of the darkness. Sometimes I’m afraid of losing my ability to grope through the unknown. I adapted over many years to difficulty and uncertainty; what if the easy task of adapting to beauty and joy makes me complacent, an idiot, dry of compassion, a useless counselor? My greatest fear is being half a human.

But what about grace? Was all of that oblivious adaptation – embraced within a childhood I remember as more happy than not – a silent gift? Perhaps the Spirit shielding a young and growing consciousness from any visceral awareness of unhappiness. And if so, I pray for the faith to count on Him again, in the dimmer walks of the future, in the blind groping that completes our human experience and drives to ecstasy the moment when one searching hand finally grasps another.

For now, though, my feet have landed firmly, beneath blue skies, on a foundation of diamond that I didn’t realise was forming beneath them. Well. The blue skies are literal. The diamond is figurative. Literally, I have been unpleasantly culture shocked by how much asphalt there is in the Denver Metro area, and surprised by my surprise. My uptake is often a little slow, and I am only just now remembering I spent ten months lost in the French countryside, facing the Pyrenees every morning as I sang morning psalms outside.

The city brings something else, however. Last night I drove home from work past the finale of the fireworks at a Rockies baseball game in Denver, and all of us in our cars either pulled over or slowed to a crawl as colours and fire burst above the stadium. My heart soared too – above my feeble interest in baseball, above any criticism about the absurd luxury of fireworks, or my frustration about not being on my bike instead of in the car due to it having gotten locked in the garage with no access to the garage door key, and oh-my-expletives-what-a-waste-of-gas-and-the-lovely-night-air. It was wonderful to meet a surprise moment like that, and to share it with other surprised people, and that everybody was ignoring traffic flow because it was a worthy moment. I spent all this time in France, thinking a lot about people on principle. It’s nice to get out and finally meet them.

I chose to be in Colorado. I chose it, and I am here with my will and my joy intact. I am here with a new confidence and with the knowledge that I am loved. It is a beautiful, essential thing to love the life you have been given and to want what you have already got. Somewhere between the little chapel in Pamiers and the hills of St. Pierre and the morning mists of Jerusalem, I was blessed with the grace to love, deeply love, my life and myself and my God. I have been pleasantly surprised to find that same love has dwelt within me, has come home in me.

I have a pair of sunglasses that makes colours vivid when you look through them, and it’s disappointing to take them off because everything is a little less technicolour in reality. But my heart sees the world like that now. As melancholy as that heart is, as thoughtful and probing as it is, even the Denver asphalt glows very slightly these days. Even if only because my eyes are capable of seeing it and my mind and heart are capable of lamenting it.

Finding my own identity in Israel

Back in Colorado, I’m feeling a little bit like newish wine in an old wineskin, as the most mysterious human once said. Not quite new enough to go bursting everything around me and having a breakdown, but new enough that things will be a little stretched and distorted for a time, until I have configured and settled into the life that I came back here to live.

I never wrote anything about the trip to Israel because firstly, I was too busy, secondly, I was too busy, and thirdly, because I wasn’t entirely sure what to write. The experience of being there drew me into itself so completely that I lost track of everything outside of it. When I exited that sort of…cocoon of delight, and showed up in Dublin with my horrible smelling sandals and my tan from the beach near Tel Aviv two days before, I realised my heart had been reconfigured a bit from the way it had been. A piece was missing, of course, left behind at Emmaus-Nicopolis, somewhere between the giant yucca plant by my bungalow that scratched me every time I walked past it, and the light white of the beautiful chapel in the Beatitudes house itself, humming with prayer, and with the gold of painted Eastern icons, and also with several room fans to combat everybody’s long-suffering sweaty backs. And then, the rest of my heart, the largest part of it, had understood once and for all that my home on this earth is among the people of Christ.

One of the most incredible things about being in Israel was just how many people believe in God. Or maybe – it’s not just that they believe, but that they live their lives in relation to God, which is another level. It’s not everyone, by any means, but there are a lot of devout people. I first saw a glimpse of this during that five hour layover in Istanbul airport, when I spent an hour sitting in a corridor near the Muslim prayer rooms (masjids), and felt immediately humbled as a Christian by just how many people were passing me to go inside and pray. Young, old, women, men, children. One of the tallest people I have ever seen, dressed in a white tunic that stopped way above his ankles, passed up and down the corridor with a smile, giving out bottles of water and pieces of paper-wrapped turkish delight. I thought about your average parish church in France, kept locked and hollow during the majority of the day. And here I was, in an airport of all places, surrounded by a tangible motivation for prayer, and an atmosphere of community, of life. I suppose, at a stretch, that perhaps none of these traveling Muslims had anything better to do with their layovers than to pray. But even at that, there was no denying that I was on the fringe of a part of the world that is, today, deeply different to where I come from. A difference that I think is increasingly one of kind, and not of degree.

This sense was amplified later, once in Israel, after I met up with the group – or at least, the half of it that arrived on time – and we made our way to Jerusalem. Kippas, everywhere, on so many heads. White-and-blue tallits and tzitzit. Men and boys with peyote of various lengths, riding bicycles in black suits and top hats. Miniature men in miniature suits, walking beside their dads. Women in long sleeves and skirts, with colorful headscarves tucked around their hair. We arrived on Friday, and so once sunset approached, we made our way to the Western Wall – along with hundreds of observant Jews, dressed in their best, to welcome Shabbat.

On the other hand, though the place where we stayed in Jerusalem – the guesthouse at the holy site of St. Peter in Gallicantu – was only fifteen minutes from the Wall, it happened to be nestled above a Muslim area. And so, as the Jews in the Jewish quarters across Jerusalem feasted on the first meal of Shabbat, having lit their candles, we were kept awake all night by the fireworks going off below us, as it happened to be Ramadan and our neighbors were also feasting, having fasted all day. And then at 4:30am, some of us noticed, groggily, the call of the muezzin for the first time.

We heard the Muslims of Jerusalem before we saw them, but as soon as you walk into the Old City and come near to the Damascus Gate, kippas become taqiyahs and headscarves became hijabs. While it’s true that you cannot determine a person’s level of religious conviction by their dress, there is something intense and very real behind the diversity of Jerusalem. As we neared the Temple Mount, walking through dim and narrow, bustling streets, we came to a clearing where only a few soldiers stood, blocking an archway. And we knew, before our fearless priest-leader-father told us we had to turn back, that the soldiers knew, from the look of us, that we were definitely not Muslim, and therefore that we weren’t allowed to continue. It is a city, and a country, where dress does define a person, and where any distinction between religious and cultural definition becomes very blurred. As Sr. Agnes mentioned to me one night during dinner, once we had reached the Beatitudes house at Emmaus – “I’ve lived here for ten years, and I only grow more aware of how much it matters which language you speak to which people. You have to know which language before you open your mouth. It matters.”

This mattering was more eye-opening than simply on a superficial level of “I’ve gone to the Middle East and seen how some other people live.” I realised, little by little, that this mattering defined me too – though it is true that as a Christian in a Holy Land, you have the unique privilege of visiting both (some) synagogues and (some) mosques. But that’s just it. On some level, a Christian in the Holy Land is a Christian. An American Christian is a Christian. An Irish Christian is a Christian. A Palestinian Christian is a Christian. It does get more complicated among Christians (as in, an Anglican is not a Roman Catholic is not an Armenian Catholic is not a Greek Orthodox), but what really touched my heart was the broader level.

One the one hand, we share beliefs. All of us “observing” monotheists believe in one God, whether Muslim, Jew, or Christian. We all believe in Abraham and the rest of the patriarchs and the ten commandments, we all believe in charity, in morality, in humility, in prayer. Continuing through history, Christians and Muslims branch off from the Judaic root, and though that root remains, the differences are sharp enough that they also come to be identities. And so now, on the other hand, we have very different identities. I was very struck in the Holy Land to find that my identity as a Christian means more than simply “a person who believes in God,” which is what it tends to mean in the US and in a lot of Europe. But no, I realised tangibly, lots of people believe in God. As a Christian, I believe that Christ is the Messiah, foretold by the Jewish prophets, that He is not merely a prophet, but the Son of God, is God Himself. And when I come to this place, I come to discover not only the old, old root of my faith, but also the old newness – the life of some man called Jesus who came from the middle of nowhere, who slept in bushes and hung out with prostitutes but who changed the world immeasurably nonetheless, from the way we measure history itself to the curse words that many of us use, to the most incredible gift of the Eucharist.

I think it’s very easy to take Christianity for granted in Europe or the US or South America, or any country where it has been a shaping force for the past couple thousand years. It seems to be the dichotomy is, as I said, between Christianity and atheism. The crazy shit happening in the middle east has been, in my experience, cited alongside the Crusades and the Inquisition as an explanation for why all religion – mostly just implying Christianity – is nonsense. I don’t pretend to have any sort of rationalizing response for violence or discrimination, and certainly not for any of these things perpetrated in the name of God. All I can really say is that we are all proud and broken people, which only means we need an awareness of God’s love more and not less. But it does seem to me that all of these things are often taken out of context – as though human society was always a place of supreme rationality and sensibility, until these strange Christians came along with their funny morals and hypocrisy and belief in invisible things. Or as though, over the past 200 years, we have become so much more intelligent than all of our ancestors that we can criticize and discount their beliefs with some sort of ultimate intellectual authority. As though thinkers like St. Augustine (happy feast day!) or Thomas Aquinas were actually unintelligent.

In some ways, traveling to Israel was like traveling to the past, to a time well before the Enlightenment, where the question was perhaps so much not “do you believe or don’t you?”, but more, “in what do you believe?” And I think I can say that there was some relief in talking to people about who God is, considered from specific angles, rather than having to defend belief in the whole hog on principle. On the plane back from Tel Aviv to Istanbul, I sat next to Ahmad, a 53 year old furniture salesman from Nazareth who communicated a surprising amount of things to me about himself using very broken English and the photo gallery on his phone. When the conversation got around to my beliefs (as it sort of has to when explaining exactly what you’ve been doing in Israel for a month and a half), he raised his eyebrows and three of his fingers and said (something like), “you believe three gods?” To which I responded, “no no no! It’s all the same God!” And he just sort of smiled and shook his head like I’m a crazy person, before giving me his phone number so that next time I’m in Israel I can come visit and eat some falafal at his house. He actually clasped my hand and said, “now we friends” and my heart was just full of lovebeams. Maybe if we’d actually had enough words to have a theological discussion, things could have gotten more heated, but I doubt it. I had been afraid to bring up the religion thing, but once it came up we talked about it as casually as you might talk about which schwarma joint is better.

Back in May, when I was in Milan with my students, we visited the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan’s main art gallery. While the teenagers flirted – except for one precocious Bulgarian who was actually into art – and our tour guide despaired of getting their attention, I spent a while glued to Caravaggio’s rendering of Supper at Emmaus. Caravaggio is one of my favourite artists ; his work pulses with human vitality and a tenderness that I’m always relieved to see after walking through galleries of flat and pious Renaissance artwork. A lot of it comes from the way he uses light and shadow, creating contrast to highlight the human form, human expression. What captivates me in Supper at Emmaus is how this light comes from Jesus Himself, now having died and risen again, having shattered the old rule of human existence – and His light shines on earnest disciple and skeptical peasant alike. But in technical terms, it is only the difference between colours and shades that make a painting even possible, and only the darkness of the background that makes any of it seem important at all.

It was humbling in some way, to find this same principle in my life. I think I’ve taken my own faith for granted, like living as one green dot of paint on a canvas covered in mostly green dots of paint. I thought I knew all about what it meant to be Christian, while in fact my context was very limited. It’s a simple enough concept, but I couldn’t really see it until I, little green dot Maria, was transported to something more like this Rothko painting, and then being green began to mean something more distinct. Whatever about this being a crap metaphor – it’s a law of nature, after all, that it is only through the grace of contrast that we are able to see anything distinctly. And so, in light of that, I think I am very happy to have left a piece of my heart in the Holy Land. It is a heart, after all, that belongs to God, and it is the land, after all, in which He chose to make his human home. I’m happy to have discovered it, and to have discovered something more of who I am.

France, as seen from Gate 213

This is a major throwback post, and I’m sorry that I’m not yet writing about Israel. There will be so much to say, soon. But, while I was sitting uncomfortable against a pillar during the interminable layover at Istanbul airport, I started to write a something about how I feel about my year in France. I finally found an afternoon to edit it and finish it, and so I’m posting it now, even though I have been out of France (well, sort of – the Beatitudes house in Israel is basically unincorporated France) for three weeks.

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I suppose I have now technically left France. Not yet for the Promised Land, but more for the endless walking in circles in a search for electrical outlets that is the international airport terminal. It’s a very biblical beginning to this trip. But it’s only been six and half hours since I left la belle France, and my French hasn’t had time to degrade yet, so I mean, as far as my brain knows, I’m still there.

I had an inkling last August as I left Colorado that the main point of my time in France was not really going to be to give French students any profound insights into the English language. I apologise to any of my former students who take a look at this from time to time, but I have to admit it. For anything they learned, I am very happy, but my heart knew it didn’t want to be a teacher’s heart before I went, and I spent perhaps…ten seconds wondering whether it was cheap of me to embark on an experience I already knew was not going to be a precursor to a future career. I wasn’t too concerned, though, because my heart also screamed “GO TO FRANCE AND DO NOTHING FOR A SCHOOL YEAR” (more or less) before I left. I had the idea that perhaps there was something for me there. Something equally or even more important than listening to the Terminale students of the Castella talk to me about blended families and scientific progress and racism in the United States for hours and hours and hours (but cheers to a certain English teacher for deciding to teach Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With,” because that really was a memorable discussion we had that day, when I discovered how it is almost as pleasing to lead a group in analysis as it is to analyze all by myself).

This is a subject I’ve touched on before. I’ve hinted at it every time I’ve posted anything here, because all of the writing on this blog is a direct product of the mental space I’ve had in France, in order to think and meditate and write. But I want to talk a little more directly about the providential aspect of this year, because when I think about how things fell into place, it’s very close to unbelievable. So, I’m going to lay it out, item by item, and then I’m going to tell you why I believe God loves me and is looking out for me, and that this year has proven that to me more than anything else. Hopefully you’ll take that, rather than leave it, and I hope you agree with it, but I’d rather you disagree and come up with a solid list of reasons why you disagree than that you walk away from what I have to say with no thought given to it whatsoever.

I had a crazy thought last summer. I think I thought about it too much, because sometimes when you spend whole afternoons pulling weeds after a night wandering around a mildly humming homeless shelter, you daydream. But I had this idea that maybe the Lord had something waiting for me in France. And I was definitely daydreaming about an intelligent, insightful, exotic-looking French man who would fall in love with me before I opened my mouth (because, naturally, of the little whimpering grub that is my ability to be captivating in French). But whatever my daydreams were, I wasn’t thinking about teaching, even from the beginning. I was thinking about going away, to a place with no emotional connotations, to a fertile ground with all sorts of unfamiliar trees growing out of it. A place (dun dun dun) of well-being.

I’m going to add this spoiler / piece of incidental interest, before you get your hopes too high. I did actually meet a handful of eligible men in France. This is surprising because I spent almost all of my time there living on the outskirts of a town that seems to have no men between the ages of 20 and 45 living in it. But none of them fell in love with me on first sight, and then I’d open my mouth and that was definitively that. But it’s okay. Because it would have overshadowed the so many more important things that did happen, and then I might not have noticed just how important they were.

The first perfect thing was the job itself. I think, frankly, if it had been necessary for me to have an instructive and immersive experience as a teacher, whichever secretary from the Academie de Toulouse who assigned me Pamiers probably would have been inspired to assign me to one of the normal schools where all the other assistants seem to have been assigned. Where they worked all 12 hours a week, teaching 10 or 12 students at a time, in a fairly structured manner. Instead, I was lucky enough to be assigned a school where my role was usually just to chat with 1-6 students at a time, to listen, to correct, to share cultural bits of interesting stuff, to play “Who Am I?” for days and days, and usually nowhere near the full 12 hours a week. Which gave me ample opportunities to verify just how much I prefer one-on-one discussion to talking to a group. And plenty of time to sit at home and look out the window, and pray, and think, and read, and write (sometimes), and be still. And watch copious amounts of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but we wont talk about that.

Then, there was Myriam, my colleague and housemate, who is the most openhearted and naturally generous human being I have ever met. Who just so happens to pay attention to how she eats, and who spends lots of time in nature, and takes life at a slow place so that she doesn’t burn out. As I’ve made very clear : I needed a person to show me how to eat well. I was hoping to go for hikes in the Pyrenees from the moment I discovered I would be right next to them. And I desperately needed encouragement in slowing down and taking it easy. I learned an incredible amount from living with her, in that sort of deep-marine, internal way that isn’t visible to your intellect until your habits and attitude are already in better shape and you realise, suddenly, one day, that things are not feeling so shitty as before.

I was also hoping to welcome my parents when they came to visit me. And at her house, not only did they have a room and a real bed and a real French person to cook them Real French Food, but she lent us her car to go discover things and fulfill dreams. When my dad came to visit, he was charmed by her parents who were also staying with us at the time – camping outside in their caravan – and they were all uproariously surprised to hear a real-life Christian making jokes about monks and other unstuffiness that is so vital for breaking stereotypes and starting conversation. Through her, I was able to bring my parents something for once in my life, and I really appreciated that. I can only hope that we, and that I, brought her a tiny bit as much as she brought me during my time with her.

There was the parish of Pamiers. I think that – as the child of a member of the Beatitudes, in the beautiful diocese of Denver – I forget how easy it is to take available adoration for granted. Especially in a country like France, where odds are even that a person with whom you strike up a conversation will have zero to say on the subject of religion. But I ended up in a parish with an energetic and chipmunk-cheeked parish priest who had the good sense when he came to Pamiers to establish daily adoration. All day. Which revitalized the parish, which meant there were lovely people for me to meet and appreciate and get to know, who came to watch out for me and give me and my bike a lift home when it was late and cold. And this adoration also, most importantly, allowed me to commit to spending at least an hour in adoration every week, which has made me vastly, inexplicably richer as a human being and as a Christian.

There was the Student Parish of Toulouse. Hundreds of people my age, vibrant, beautiful, well-dressed, funny, loving people, filling a Basilica every Sunday night, singing, harmonizing, praising together. A group of really real friends, who rescue you with tea and pastries when you find yourself unexpectedly stranded in Toulouse with nothing to do. The sort I’ve been looking for for a long time. A parish and an inspiration for the life that we can bring to the Church when we get together, sharpen our talents, and bring our love and enthusiasm. That’s all I have to say about that.

The Community of the Lamb. Where do I even start? I wrote the last blog about them, so it’s almost redundant to repeat their importance in my life, except that I haven’t told much of it at all. I first met two of the Little Sisters in Toulouse during a formation weekend, and they invited me to St. Pierre – 35 minutes from Pamiers, of course – for Mass and dinner. I forgot for a few weeks, until I found myself in Lourdes, on the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, waiting for my mother to come out of the baths. Little Sister Emmanuela from Scotland called me out of the blue to ask if I still wanted to come visit, to which I replied, yes! And five minutes later, my mother and I ran into a group of Little Sisters in blue, including the ones I had met a few weeks before, and they smiled and laughed with us and sang for my mother for her birthday which brought tears to her eyes, and of course we went to visit them three days later. And so began the love affair and a profound deepening of my faith.

It became immediately clear to me when I came France that I want to continue working with the poor. Spending time with the Community of the Lamb gave me a spiritual, visceral awareness of what it means to be materially poor, an experience that is invaluable if I ever expect to approach a person who needs my help in any sort of real charity. They also taught me to recognize my own spiritual poverty, before others and before God – to see, however difficult it may be to internalize – that I am weak by myself, just as weak as any other human, just as incapable of loving purely, and just as in need of forgiveness. This is a truth that exists outside of how much stuff you have or don’t have, and it’s a truth outside of how miserable or ecstatic your experience in life is. It is the ultimate equalizer, and it’s why we so desperately need Christ’s grace and his peace, no matter who we are.

A few days ago, on the day I left Pamiers, my friend and former colleague offered to drop me at the train station, but she got lost on the way to my house. When we got to the station, my train was just leaving, so we sat down to wait for the next one. Two minutes later, one of my former students showed up to say goodbye, a guy I really connected with and who I really value. Two minutes after that, a beaming-with-light English lady showed up, who was vastly in need of English-speaking assistance and a friendly face. Two minutes after that, one of the Little Sisters of the Lamb showed up at the train station to pick up some ladies coming for a retreat. We stood around in a little circle, talking about my upcoming trip to Israel in a strange mixture of French, English, and Spanish, while the English lady gushed about having found some sisters, a sure sign of God’s guidance in her disjointed day. And so, I found myself leaving France with a small entourage that represented the wonderful things I found there – loving students, joyful and generous teachers, strangers who lift your heart and offer you an opportunity to love, and a community of religious who showed me the beauty of poverty and of dedicating your life and love to Christ. And of course the quirky sense of timing that God has, the deliberation with which He weaves things, and the surprises that come when we allow ourselves to be surprised.

And so now I find myself on the way to Israel, to spend six full weeks with a group of people who are actually my own age and Catholic, all at the same time. This is not a demographic I know much about. But I am so excited to discover what they are like in the Promised Land, itself, in contemplation of the Sea of Galilee and in studying Hebrew and in sleeping in the Negev Desert. And surely this is an active experience that will be the complement to my desert time in France. Because I believe more and more that God pays attention to us. Not only to the hairs on our heads, but to our desires for adventure and solitude, for companionship and service, for a life lived fully and not crippled by woundedness. I believe I have been blessed, and that God continues to bless me, and what I am beginning to know in my heart, to my delight, is that life itself is a blessing. So, I’m off for discovery and the beginning of my emergence from this retreat. And also, for a nice, gradual, re-acculturation to Americans.

Having Actually Gone on a Retreat

I recently spent two weeks living with the Community of the Lamb at their “mother house” of St. Pierre, in lovely l’Aude, southwest France. It was a time of retreat, of discovery, of thinking-too-much-about-my-life-and-what-I-shall-someday-become (the usual), surrounded by so many species of butterflies, moths, long grasses, tiny wild orchids, magnificent 9pm sunsets, all day long birdsong, hidden enclosures among the trees, and sweeping views of hilly farmland. One morning I opened the door of my cell to go to the bathroom, and the first thing I saw was two cottontail bunnies playing among the trees opposite. The path down to Mass every day was a fifteen minute walk past two ponds full of night-partying frogs, a “garden of olives,” and a prairie full of wildflowers. About midway through my time there, I (having searched long and hard for some phone service) sent messages to two of the closest people to me to say that, even surrounded by so much beauty, I was having a deeply difficult time, spiritually, emotionally, physically. They both replied, “That sounds great! Can’t wait to hear about it!”

This is a perfect illustration of the path that my life has taken in the last seven or so months. To put it slightly more bluntly (but not more briefly) : when I was a kiddo, I used to listen to the large amount of stuff my Dad said about God with a wrinkled, nostril-scrunched sort of face. His incomprehensible bookshelves full of books about nothing but the spiritual life drove me insane, on principle. I died of boredom at the dinner table for hours with all the much loved but long-winded family friends who had stories to tell about, I don’t know, Margaret’s cousin’s husband’s sister who went away for two weeks to Medjugorje and experienced an inner healing that changed the whole family. On many occasions, I swore that my future self would be far cooler, for ever and always, foreseeing an adult life that would be brilliant because it would revolve around having the money and freedom to buy all the video games.

So, it is with some surprise that I now find myself on the far side of two weeks spent doing nothing but paying attention to my spiritual life : to prayer and to song, to spiritual texts, to simplicity, to working alongside others in silence, to listening to a wise old owl – Frère Jean-Claude – teach over breakfast. And even more surprised than I was to find that this sort of immersion in your spiritual life is, on some level, quite distressing, I am even more astonished to find that I am nothing but joyful and deeply grateful to have experienced it.

I’ve spent the last week wanting to write down so many things, and not knowing where to begin. I don’t know what subject to begin with, and I don’t know which words to choose to express the subjects, and this breakdown of writing ability all seems to be tied up with a feeling I had the other night in the kitchen, chatting with my housemate. I was sitting at the table, leaning against the wood-paneled wall, and she was busying her long frame about, putting things away and boiling water, or something. First I said – I don’t know why it came to mind – that I find Deconstructionist literary analysis very depressing, on principle, along with a lot of contemporary academic thought. And then something else came out, too. From my lips. The same fast-talking-in-case-I-don’t-get-to-finish lips that have argued with my father about the value of modern art for as long as I’ve been old enough to look at a thing and identify a feeling in relation to it. I announced that I find modern art very tragic, and that it somehow seems to me to signify that we human beings have ceased to aspire.

What?

There have been a lot of phases over the last twelve years of my life. There have been wardrobes full of black clothes turned to wardrobes full of sundresses, there has been devastatingly bad poetry turned to confusedly devastating poetry, obsessive cake-making turned to obsessive cake-avoiding, angry journal entries written in caps about the state of the world’s hungry turned to general apathy for all human bullshit and then back again, solid weeks spent playing Elder Scrolls turned to weeks spent excited for the next hike up a real mountain. But I have never ever not once not been in awe and in love with the human impulse to express and create in whatever bizarro means necessary. The search for the perfect word. The ideal medium. The transmission of that thing, the thing that has no word, the fifty-year story told in a single greyscale photograph, the sentence that fills the mind with yellow and makes the tongue water, the smear of red and purple on a canvas and the miles of nuance between and behind them. The glorious marriage of concept and expression, of intellect and design. This stuff really gets me going, as you can see. But then, suddenly, the other night, I looked at it all and it made me sad.

Perhaps it has to do with my definition of art, which is perhaps way more my own definition than anybody else’s, but I have always understood a close connection between art and suffering. Part of what has always been beautiful to me in art is how often it involves the transformation of something distressing and incomprehensible into something exterior, tangible, often beautiful, and hopefully relateable. A lot of the time there is a movement from something deeply individual into something that can be acknowledged and carried by a community. I don’t think this the same definition my housemate has, and I know it isn’t the same definition my Dad has, and I don’t think it’s the same definition the Catholic Church has, but it’s been my understanding. We know that mental illness and artistic genius have high rates of concurrence, and that makes sense to me. And I think that modern art, since the early 20^th century, has been primarily about this sort of connection. A multiformed, multicoloured, multigenerational, very-wounded screaming of the question : “Who are we?” I think that as the need for the response has gotten more urgent, the question has been steadily losing the need for beauty or for sense, and this divides people’s opinions on the subject.

And so, over the last year and a half, something has been changing in my perception of people and of the world. A something that reached a, I don’t know, a transformational apex, while I was lost in that short but somehow eternal time of abandon to prayer and routine. You know that final moment of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, when Jen Yu throws herself off a mountain? And I cry rivers of tears every time, because it’s very sad and what about poor lovestruck Lo?, but mostly because of how much beautiful truth is in that gesture of abandon. One morning at St. Pierre, I expressed a thought to Frère Jean-Claude about how I hadn’t understood this certain aspect of our faith, and he talked to me about it for a few moments. I didn’t come away with a better understanding of what it was I was missing, but what marked me was a moment when he put his hands out in front of him, palms upward, and said to me something like, “we have to come to Jesus like this. We have to.” A gesture of surrender, and one of receptivity.

It’s not so much that I don’t find the urgency and the ardency of modern art beautiful anymore. I’m still romanticized by it. I love it. I love us, and the stupid shit we come up with, and I love the poetry of the circles we turn ourselves in while looking at the ground, because it hasn’t occurred to us that there might be something up above. I especially love all of the brilliant, beautiful things we do without believing we have had any help from grace or any kind of deity. I also don’t want to say that no piece of modern art is beautiful, because that isn’t true either. And it’s not so much that it’s because I believe I’ve found some part of the answer to the question that I have less interest in how we try to work our way to the answer. It’s just that, somehow, by grace if not by effort, I’ve let go of the question. My heart has stepped outside of the sphere.

There is a Catholic tradition of praying a part of Psalm 141 in the evening, at the beginning of Vespers :

Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; / and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.

It is traditional too, to physically raise your hands upward while praying or singing this, in a gesture not only of praise, but of trust. And it does something. I can’t explain why, but it feels vulnerable and exhilarating to put your hands out like that, sensitive side exposed – a faint echo of what it must be like to fling yourself from a mountain, in faith that you will reach a more perfect place.

I distinctly remember, before and after making the very me-oriented decision to try God on for size, being afraid of what would happen to my appreciation for the human tragic. I mean, I didn’t put those words on it, but I had a certain way of approaching my life that I was comfortable with. Many many deeply melancholy moments shaped me to make the most of sadness, and to continue to express and to search throughout it. I found value there, a true value. I found friends there, I found an identity there, and I resigned myself to making the most of the hardest experiences as poetically as I could manage. The thought of something bigger than that, something that could put the melancholy in its place as a part of life, rather than an encompassing force, was not only unlikely, but it was frightening. The overwhelming experience of the Void, as my housemate calls it, of long nights spent staring at the darkened ceiling, mind full of anxious thoughts and deep emotions – these were artistic inspiration, and all I knew to measure myself by.

I spent a long time trying to find Catholic literature on this subject of art and human experience, and I couldn’t find anything that spoke to me, where I was. Nothing was comforting. Everything had to do with how art is meant to raise us up, to be beautiful, to glorify, to aspire to Sistine Chapel heights or nothing. It took a few hops of faith at the beginning, to be honest, to let this question lie and to admit that maybe it wasn’t the most important thing. That in the realm of things there are to know, I know basically nothing, and that’s part of the point. (But still, if anybody has any interesting literature on the subject, really, please do tell me).

About seven or eight months ago, when I left for Europe, this question began to stop burning a hole in my head, I think because of a new environment and a lot of distracting things, and, frankly, less-frequent occurrences of melancholy / torment / fuel for the fire. In fact, other than a conversation about art a few months ago, I haven’t thought about it at all, until Monday night when I announced, without premeditation, a position that I didn’t know I suddenly had. This new awareness that on some level, though it is admirable, our desire to explain ourselves is also futile. That though it is sometimes beautiful, it often takes an ugly appearance that is so content in itself to be ugly that it loses, in my opinion, any redemption for having a concept behind it. That we have lost something of the great aspiration behind works of art from antiquity til about 1900, which is to say the aspiration to create a thing of beauty. The sort of aspiration you can see behind this Earth – if indeed you believe it is a creation – while watching a crimson sun slip slowly past the world, beyond dusky green hills, as distant frogs begin to sing.

So, maybe it is in part the importance of beauty, then, that has so changed my view of art and of why and how we humans choose to create. At St. Pierre, they live a very simple life. The charism of this community focuses particularly on poverty – on our spiritual poverty before God, first of all, and our poverty in relation to one another in fraternal life. But just as at the very heart of Catholicism is a meeting of the theological and the tangible, they also choose to live a life of material poverty. They have no showers or running hot water. Everything they receive to eat is given to them through providence, and they spend long days building their own simple furniture. After only a few days living so simply, in such a poor but deeply dignified way, I began to see how truly valuable are the things we receive for free in this life. Things both as simple and as magnificently complex as the planet we live on. As our song – is there anything else on Earth as simultaneously beautiful and ordered as human song? (Sidenote : If we were a species of animal underneath the scrutiny of some highly intelligent race of, say, penguins, I think they would make a big deal out of our singing.) The love of one human for another. Putting those two together – the ability of one person to sing to another. And finally, though this will be more contested, though I firmly believe the other things I’ve thought of point to it, the love of God for his creation, for us.

So, what do art, suffering, a larger appreciation for beauty, and the terrifying exhilaration of surrender have to do with one another, in this meandering tributary stemming from my two weeks in the countryside, you may well be asking, if you have, in fact, made it this far?

I believe that by surrendering to a simpler life, we gain access to the knowledge of what we have already. And I think that what have already is so incredible that it fills all sorts of the voids and gaps and holes that keep our heads down and prevent us from seeing glory for what it is. A range of experiences, hurts, ponderings, desires that keep us aspiring to touch a ceiling, when we don’t realise there is a whole wide sky above the house. Once you’ve caught a glimpse of the sky, though, the activities going on in the room seem a little less important – and I think that’s where I am now. It takes courage, though, to allow that perhaps your way of experiencing life is not the best way – though it might be the most comfortable – and to stare it down, to cause yourself some pain, so that afterward you can breathe a fresher air.

For me, the catalyst of this experience was a prayer for humility, and a surrender of myself to God’s love for me. So far, I’ve written all of this as though I climbed up onto the roof of the house and saw the sky for myself. In reality, it’s more like I was afraid to go out the front door and so I stayed inside and shut my eyes, and months later when I opened them, it turned out God had removed the whole building from around me. There’s a whole story of grace, and what work God does inside your heart when you’re not paying attention. I’m making sure to say it, because it isn’t in the name of self-surrender itself that three weeks ago I witnessed a woman begin to cry when a group of poor little sisters in blue sang a blessing to her in the heart of Toulouse. But if you ever feel like nothing is beautiful anymore, or like life is only worth deconstructing, or if you’re even just a little dissatisfied with the circles you spin, or the ground you’re looking at, I highly recommend that you go to a beautiful and silent place, remove from around you everything that is keeping your heart from being open. And look. And listen.

Little Miss Skeptic Goes to the Fair

Earlier this afternoon I found myself sitting at the kitchen table, staring moodily out the window and posing existential questions out loud, while my housemate answered them all using the hoard of scientific facts she has collected from years of reading science magazines. And then my tea was all gone, and I came back to reality and immediately understood the urgency of how little I’ve been writing lately. Where should I even start?

Technically speaking, I finished my contract here at the lycée on April 30th, but I was also just given the opportunity to go to Milan with a group of students and one of the English teachers for a school trip. They’ve been working on this project with groups of students from four other schools around Europe for the past two years, and last week was the culminating three days of get-together-and-present-your-stuff-so-we-can-justify-the-EU-having given-us-this-money. Okay, that’s cynical of me – the students actually did have a brilliant time, and they were obliged to speak in English since it’s the only language they have in common. It’s given them a practical understanding of English as a tool, and some solid, pan-EU friendships, and – in this case anyway, since it’s the only session I saw – the opportunity to flirt without constraint while roaming around Milan. Adorable.

Part of the trip involved a day spent exploring Expo 2015. We went last Thursday, when it was realistically a bit too hot to wander around several kilometres of ostentation among thousands of noisy people. But on the bright side, it is all the more gratifying to eat gelato when it’s sunny out. And there were these neat water machines all over the place, offering both still and sparkling water with the touch of a button! The Italian touch.

It was appropriate that so much clean and refreshing water was available all over the place, since the theme for this year’s Expo is “Feed the World.” Ostensibly, that includes hydration. What was apparently not so obvious to everyone gawking at the giant bananas and apples that danced along to peppy marching bands, was the absurdity of the luxury of it. It’s true that I have a highly active skeptical streak for a Christian, and am adept at shitting all over what would otherwise be an obliviously good time, but here is how Expo 2015 struck me : A lot of wealthy corporations and nations selling themselves to a very popular tune that is sure to get people interested. A lot of developing nations selling literal objects, because WHAT an opportunity to make money. An enormous amount of money spent on a spectacle that is not informative enough or generative enough to justify it. And, using my most reductive reasoning skills, a headache.

The Irish pavilion was all about the wild west Atlantic coast, and vague claims of dedication to sustainability. The elongated and fun! Israeli pavilion was first a tourist spot (scan the barcode to win a trip!) and then an extended series of videos about how Israel revolutionized agriculture with the drip irrigation system. Based on the very past tense nature of the videos, there was a lot of boasting and not much suggestion of future effort. The French pavilion was well thought out – a short walk through an area planted with wheat and corn and other crops led to an airy, swooping sort of building full of pots and pans and glass bottles swinging above ecological achievements, hopes, dreams. But, on the other hand, France derives over 75% of its energy from nuclear sources. Nobody’s perfect.

Less wealthy countries kept with the food theme, of course, but were restrained to small, square buildings for their exhibitions. Sri Lanka’s pavilion was a tea boutique / tourism office, full of Sri Lankan delegates in nice suits, and hardly any visitors. Cameroon, Ghana and the Ivory Coast brought cocoa beans and pictures of cocoa plantations. Haiti displayed posters of smiling women and coloured sacks of different grains and beans (yes, I did fully immerse my hand in a bag of rice). Afghanistan came along tastefully, decorating the pavilion walls with Persian rugs, and glass vessels filled with lapis lazuli and dried fruits. Sudan brought some statues and a gift shop. Expo 2015 makes it abundantly clear that while part of the world is taking up a lot of space and making a lot of noise about sustainable development and efficiency, the majority of it is quietly concerned with making enough money to get along.

I’ll quickly drop that Lindt had its own pavilion (shop), and so did McDonalds. Make whatever you like of that.

Feeding the world is an important subject. Full of science and research and passion and pathos. And I’m glad it’s trendy – God knows, it’s a better trend than neon-coloured spandex and pigtails. But I think there’s something fundamentally wrong about putting such a serious subject at the heart of an event that has always been about showing off. Part of the world hunger problem is just that : pride. Sure, there’s the absurd way we truck food around for miles and miles so you can eat avocados in December in Great Britain, if you like, and there’s the fact that certain areas are more fertile than others, and there’s drought and disaster and all of these things. But most of all, there is greed and pride. There is a minority of the world’s population that can eat as much as it wants, whenever it wants, to catastrophic effect. And the rest of the world struggles to get enough to eat, to even more catastrophic consequences. At its heart, the problem has nothing to do with a lack of sustainable development or with overpopulation or with insufficient technology. It has to do with politics and financial decisions and abstraction spouted by men in suits who never learned to share, or forgot, or don’t care. It has to do with human beings who do not care about other human beings. I’m not saying that there is no concerned heart behind Expo 2015. I’m just saying that, if it exists, it’s hidden beneath so much shiny, compostable, corn-based wrapping that I couldn’t see it beating.

Which is where the pavilion of the Holy See comes in. I hadn’t thought for two seconds that the Vatican would have a display, but it is a nation state and it does have a mission to evangelize, so in retrospect it isn’t a surprise. At any rate, there wasn’t any line to get in (also not a surprise). The outside was white and yellow, decorated with “Man does not live by bread alone” in various languages on the outside. Inside, there were photographs and videos relating to human hunger, but in all the senses : the literal, but also that of poverty, isolation, spiritual starvation. A long table stretched across the pavilion, with videos projected onto it from above that began playing when you put your hands on the table. There were videos of all sorts of things : hands kneading bread, eating a meal, a child colouring, hands typing on a typewriter, a priest saying Mass. The table acted, simply, as a symbol for nurturing, in every way. On the way out, there was a donation box to give to the poor. The whole thing was very well done, very Pope Francis, and it made me feel reassured, in some way, to know that I wasn’t at the Expo alone, stinging with my sensitivities to the human suffering that continues behind all of the shiny so-called problem-solving, and the sparkling water on tap.

My roomie is a wonderful woman. She is generous, she’s open, she’s a humanist, she’s very sensitive to human suffering, and to animal suffering. She’s curious about the world and how it works, and how science can explain things that seem so bizarre at first glance, and how science and education can solve our problems. All of these qualities together make for a beautiful person, a person who just today told me that I might assume that more goes on in the average person’s head than actually does. Which is fair, maybe, but I think that idea goes both ways. What I felt most, after visiting Expo, is that if you tackle a problem like world hunger from a logical perspective, full of scientific, political, and financial solutions, but you do it without your heart, it risks being overwhelmed by pride and money and a million other sidetracks. Her belief in a world that can be fully explained and fixed through scientific innovation is tempered by her sensitivity to humanity. But not everybody has this same sensitivity whispering in their mind. In fact, I would say very few people do. And the beautiful thing about following the example of Christ is that you will always stand tall, singing a clear message, in the middle of misdirection and glimmer.

Dignity

I spent this past weekend, happy as anything, tramping around in the mud in l’Aude – the département to the east of Ariège – with over a hundred young people from the student parish in Toulouse. The parish had organized a little pilgrimage in the region where St. Dominic spent many years preaching, and where he founded the Dominican Order. In case you were curious, this year is the 800th anniversary of the Dominicans. They’re kind of particular, because a community of sisters existed before the brothers. This, in the 13th century, in the middle of a dangerous and isolated countryside. Brilliant.

Anyway, we set out on Saturday morning, walking east from a village called La Cassaigne, and in the evening stopped at another village, Villesavary, that is home to the bluest house I have ever seen. And a very most modest gymnasium, in which we spent a chilly night spread out on the concrete floor. Before everyone got to eskimoing themselves and their very be-socked feet inside sleeping bags, we crowded into the village’s church to celebrate a vigil with praise and adoration, and we heard a short testimony that really touched me.

It was given by Carolina, a 28 year old woman who had joined us on the pilgrimage, and who has a disability that affects her body. She’s a very small lady, with fluffy brown hair and a peaceful face, who gets around just fine in a wheelchair. She described herself as being very close to the Carmelites in spirituality, and maybe overactive in the number of prayer groups she attends during the week. The theme of the weekend was the beatitude that Pope Francis has stressed in addressing young people – “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God” – and I had the idea that maybe they had asked her to give her testimony because there was something beautiful and simple that shone from her, a purity and a peace that rang true, and a confidence that inspired me, particularly considering she has only been practicing her faith for two years.

To be entirely honest, I was exhausted by the time the vigil rolled around and I can’t actually remember many of the details of what she said, other than that she spoke about her spiritual life and the importance of integrity and community. Instead, what stuck with me was her dignity. I had expected her to say something about the difficulties of living with her condition, of a struggle against social norms that don’t include her, maybe of how a relationship with Jesus had brought her to a place of acceptance. But nope. She gave her testimony with almost no mention of her difference, as though she had been pacing up there, talking into the microphone, on two long and fully formed legs. She was confident. Her words were bright, and firm, and smooth, and they described a spiritual experience that is absolutely universal to every human being, whether they have a disability or not, whatever their neuroses are, their financial situation, their marital situation, their housing situation. She seemed to me to be an example of someone who has surrendered, has embraced the place she has been given among humanity, and, through this, has found tremendous dignity.

I had thought she would talk about her disability, because I am still the sort of person who begins the majority of interactions with something like, “Now, you have to understand that I am the sort of person who blahbeblahblahnegativethingsbeblah,” excusing myself before presenting anything else, anything good about me. Part of this is Irish – the path to learning to take a compliment has been windy and full of cliffs – and another part is perfectly fine, because I think that you need to be open about your faults or they start to fester. The largest part of it, however, is that I honestly don’t feel like a valuable piece of the human story. At least, never as I am. Maybe at a lower weight, with thinner cheeks, when I’ve learned to be more spontaneous, creative, enthusiastic, artistic, considerate, and, of course, funnier. Which is to say, never. Which is to say, no, I don’t spend much time thinking about the useful and enjoyable things I do bring to this life.

A few weeks ago it was suggested to me that I meditate on Jesus’ love for me during adoration. I’ve been doing that, and it’s been wonderful – I’ve had some beautiful insights, not to mention the overwhelming sensation of being valued and cared for. This question of dignity, it occurred to me today, fits right in with that. It’s not that Jesus loves each one of us because of our dignity as humans, but that we have dignity because He loves us. Which is to say, because we are. I don’t think most people ever manage to love themselves properly, or consider themselves dignified enough. For my part, I know myself far too well for that. But perhaps it can be enough to know that somebody else loves me that much, and affirms my right to exist. Then all I have to do is believe it and run with it, and that’s slightly less difficult of a task.

Socially, generally, speaking, I think we’re making some progress with the idea of dignity. Part of the reason I fell in love with the Boulder Shelter when I started there was their principle of treating every client in a dignified way. Nothing brings me more joy than to approach people who have been cast aside, and to show them the same level of interest and respect that I bring to my friends. And the Boulder Shelter is entirely secular in mission. Some ad campaigns that have gone on – I’m thinking Dove and American Eagle, specifically – to portray women in all their varied, untouched glory are in some (very small) way aimed at restoring the dignity of women in advertising. The vociferous response to the race disparity in US law enforcement and the judicial system also has the question of dignity at its base. The fact that a woman’s bikini photo can go viral because she is proud of her stretch marks is itself a mark of a mentality that is far more attractive than a toned tummy. There was a project carried out by Pro Infirmis, aimed at representing abnormal bodies in a beautiful way, aimed at challenging our purely visual notions of what we mean by normal and beauty, notions that skin the dignity from us all because they are so madly unattainable.

On the other hand, it does trouble me that many of my peers fight so loudly for the dignity of women, for example, that they forget about the dignity of men. And more so, the dignity of babies, whether born or still in the scientific gray area of potential. Or the dignity of those born – or too often not permitted to be born – with birth defects and handicaps, but who are still capable of thought and joy and love and melancholy. Or the dignity of millions of people who remain unseen and enslaved, those responsible for manufacturing the piles of stuff we buy and go through like ferrets, as though we were looking agitatedly for something at the bottom.

Human society is not interested in preserving human dignity. Whatever about the good intentions of many individuals who compose it, I don’t think humans en masse have a brilliant record in considering the individual. I suppose the most relevant example of this, which we just remembered on Sunday, is the crowd who screams for Jesus’ death with one voice before Pontius Pilate. You see it in classrooms as well – when I talk with one or two students at once, they are perfectly respectful and sensitive human beings ; in a classroom of twenty five or thirty they have a tendency to become a collective wall of angst, sometimes hostile. As society has become more globalized and urbanized, I think we’ve sort of lost our respect for people as individuals. I do love cities, and I love many things about the internet, and there are some incomparable advantages to teeming together in this way. But I think, in a world that increasingly thinks of itself as one human society, we need to step up and do better than just value the idea of humanity. We need to value and respect the dignity of each individual human.

That’s why I am, for my part, so fervently in love with Jesus, and with my faith. It’s why the only better thing than a weekend hiking is, in my opinion, a weekend hiking with Christians, when it culminates in a Palm Sunday procession. Or rather, an attempt to sing and wave a tree branch around while walking uphill through the blusteriest part of France. The joy and purity of spirit that resonates among people who have made it their mission to be loved and to love, to respect each other, to self-analyze and adjust accordingly, to surrender, to spread a message of harmony and Resurrection (okay, we’re not quite there yet but still) – it’s catching. It’s addictive. And it dignifies.

Poetic Interlude

A friend asked me to contribute a something – piece of writing, song, poem, whatever – to her project for Burning Man this year, along the subject of shared human experience, and expressing love to total strangers. And here is the little, simple, feel-good something that I’ve come up with!

(…there is no title. Surprise.)

The order of my being is
to love you. As human, my duty,
ingrained as the blossoming
of cherry trees along residential rows.

It is not enough
to love in expectation
of fragrant breezes, forthcoming fruits,
the bloom of your moral support,
or with disappointed sighs
will the world’s decay echo.

It is not enough
to love when it feels good,
enthralled in August abundance.
Love is necessary for the softening
of workdays, rockfalls.
I only feel good forty percent of the time, anyway.
Without you, at what would I succeed?

It is not enough
to reconcile only when it is easy
or when the offense occurred
four times twenty score ago,
the quiet crackle of leaves on a withered stalk.
Otherwise the world would have thrived,
tomorrow.

It is not enough
to love on the best days, when I flourish
at work, bright-eyed.
No mirror can stop me,
all of creation reflects my radiance.
Love should be offered,
rather than bestowed.

It is not enough
to love you because I know you.
To give you a box of chocolates,
when you have already brought me flowers.
If I don’t love you on principle,
I won’t succeed to love, long-term,
my beloveds,
who sometimes, egregious,
put my herbs out on the balcony
only to crystallize in the frost.

If love on principle sounds rigid,
it is because I am merely
a wisteria without
a trellis of my own.
Carefully cultivated proclivities
are all that keep me upright.

It is not constant, growth, at such a task.
I have my weaknesses buried,
skillfully, forgotten, they germinate.
To share with you gives form
to my self-induced optimism.
Microscopic seeds become skyward trees.
I, too, thrive.

Perhaps you will do more
than I ever could. Perhaps
you are the loam,
the sunlight, the water,
the whisper,
my dry grain needs in order to sprout.

Finding Purpose.

A few months ago, I read through Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which is an incredibly interesting little book. It’s divided into two parts ; the first is the most logical – but no less moving – autobiographical account I’ve ever come across of experience in Auschwitz. It is probably also the most optimistic account, as it then serves as an atrociously pertinent foundation for the second part, in which Frankl details his theory on mental well-being. He coins his psycho-therapeutic approach “logotherapy,” and argues that above all else, it is purpose and meaning which give a human being the will to live. Whether in the most devastated of circumstances or in the swankiest, depression and mental imbalance happen when we lack a reason for it all. And in a very meta sort of way, it was in realising that he needed to some day write his theories down – and help other people find purpose – that then gave him the purpose he needed to continue living while imprisoned. Word.

This idea isn’t remarkable to us, I don’t think, and in simple terms, the book seems to just enumerate something rationally that has long been expressed in terms of simple common wisdom. Having said that, though, reading it struck me in a particular way. Even though I could have told you a year ago that it is essential for a human being to have a sense of purpose, I had a hard time identifying in my own life that whatever purpose I had, it wasn’t quite purposeful enough to keep me interested and thriving. All through college – a time when we are socially expected to feel out and follow our purpose with our snuffly inner beagles – I remember expressing jealousy toward those rare few who decided at age five to become a firefighter or a policeman or an antiquarian or whatever, and then stuck to that desire. Nothing seemed so desolate to me as how personally I recognized the hoards of other young people around me who had no better idea than I had how to translate fervent but fleeting interest in Gothic literature, or the physics behind lasers or, in my case, Japanese history and culture and film, into a raison d’être.

These days I have more of an idea of what I want and what motivates me. Because life seems so often to happen according to its own callous and wry rhythm, I figured out one week before graduating college that, in fact, contact with real, live people and their real life problems inspired me more than analyzing and writing about fictional people with real life problems. I took a look at myself and at my talents. I tried to ignore years of being confused by maths, science, and my feeble abilities of taking control in a situation or of keeping clothes in the closet rather than on the floor. What I am best at was never taught to me in a classroom or in a training meeting, and all of the reasons why I am who I am are too close to my heart for me to even see them properly. But, simply put, first and foremost, I’m good with people. I have a talent for optimism, a talent for meeting a person where they’re at, and a talent for encouraging them. And I have found that, little by little, my raison d’être is, tout simplement, to love people. There are too many struggling family trees and consequently rotten apples around – exhibit A of the moment being whatever contented soul vandalized my bike at the train station on Saturday – for me not to put such a gift to use.

But because it would be too simple to say, “oh I’ve figured it out!” and get on with my life – as agonizingly smiley one minute and wanting to talk about profound social problems the next – I’ve run into a difficulty with this particular motivation for living life. As far as goals go, it’s more horizontal than vertical. (And here, I refuse to resist the urge to make a joke about how I was visibly never made for vertical movement anyway). Ahem. As far as social understandings of achievement go, horizontal is not a direction. Helping people is exactly the opposite of stepping on them. A lot of the time what is most loving in a situation is actually just to shut up and resist the urge to be all over it, until you have something good to contribute. It’s about making less of yourself, not more. As a result, I have no idea what to say to half of the people I meet.

When I spent those few days in Chicago last August, something bothered me. Well. Something else besides racial and economic inequality. I spent a lot of time chatting with (and overhearing) young-twenty-somethings, full of energy and motivation, who were oh-so-pumped to talk about their goals. They were people involved in Teach For America, in financial firms, in management. People who were my age, who had faces like mine, but who dress for the office already. Who speak like they’re standing in front of a whiteboard, and who extol their girlfriend’s latest financial accomplishments. I realised for the first time that weekend how well living in Boulder had suited me. During my post-college months, I spent most of my time talking with people who prioritize things like travel and poetry and gardening and faith and – not entirely on the other end of the spectrum, but still – finding a bed to sleep in on any given night. I don’t think I ever realised that there were twenty three year olds out there with financial goals and retirement accounts. Millienials, in full vertical movement.

I ran into the same thing in Dublin, meeting my cousin’s friends who studied things like engineering and are making very grown-up salaries and comment on the thread count of each other’s shirts. And also since I’ve been in France – the system here really encourages people to study a certain thing and then go fit themselves into the social slot for which they have been “formed.” It’s all very practical. Very very practical. Unappealingly practical. But, as an aside, to give the French credit where it’s due, they have it balanced, because nobody I’ve met seems all that attached to their work. Work is what they do in between sitting at the dinner table, to brush a broad stroke over it. But even so. People ask what you do with yourself, and they have this expectant look, and sometimes I just feel like throwing the whole thing to hell and telling them I’m a penniless, unpublished, unloved poet renting a garret in the city, because they would probably make the same incredulous face as when I try to explain the circumstances around how I’ve come to France, but I’m not doing a stage (internship), I work twelve hours a week, and I’m not even working in the field I have now decided I want to work in.

Lately, increasingly, I’ve been feeling confused about other people’s purposes. We are encouraged to find a work we love, and I so want to know if people work at their passions, or if their passions are something else entirely. If they work to fulfill that raison d’être, or if maybe they don’t have one at all. And then, what role do social norms have in forming our relationship to our work? All these happy engineers I’ve been meeting who work for Airbus in Blagnac, and the driven greyscale suit-wearers who talk about contract work, and my own reaction to my students who don’t know what they want to do in the future. I mean, I still haven’t really figured it out, and, though I know it’s essential, I don’t think it needs to be so cut and dry, so I don’t know why I let social expectation train a little disappointment into the “Oh, you don’t know yet?” I throw their way.

I suppose all this is to say : I’ve found my purpose. That fact hasn’t quite sunk in yet, and I still feel fluttery and confused a lot of the time, but I’ve identified it. I’ll return to the work that most suits said purpose soon enough, but for the time being I try to be as encouraging and supportive as I can with the students I see, and the people I meet. Still, I grapple with the fact that I seem to be swimming upstream. That I will probably never stop swimming upstream. I came to France for many reasons, and the chief one was to search for a little peace. Maybe if I said that, with confidence, people wouldn’t look at me strangely when I explain how off-track I am. But it isn’t in me to give much of a damn about the track at all, though I do want people to think well of me. In all honesty, I’m happy with what I’ve been given. I’m happy that I have it in me to prioritize making the world around me a more cheerful place, and hopefully a gentler one. I think it’s far more objectively useful than becoming a financial analyst, for example, and I think it’s just as important to work at shining a little on the world we live in, as it is to build a spaceship in hopes of finding a new one. I’m happy to be horizontally motivated.

Choice

Lately, free will has been on my mind. I just finished reading East of Eden, after putting it off for years, and I was enchanted by its preoccupation with this question of will, of “timshel.” Of the things that humans may do or may not do, and the reasons for which we do one thing or another. The subject of choice has been an obsession of mine for years now, since I made the ragged break from living with my parents, and found myself suddenly justifying all my choices to myself. After having experienced the roar of a heart-tearing choice, I realised how many quiet choices are made over the course of just a day, how many decisions we make that don’t feel like decisions because they are simply taken for granted before, during, and after themselves. That same year, I saw this TedTalk during a travel writing class and something about the timing of it really cemented in my mind the importance of owning every choice we make.

But of course, there’s a tension between the choices we can make and the situations that seem to choose us. I was in Lourdes, a pilgrimage site in southern France, with my mother this week, which is where I, suitably, finished reading East of Eden. To be honest, seeing crowds of faithful Christians tends to pull the rug out from under me. Rather than encourage me in my faith, places of pilgrimage tend to make me uneasy, and force me to make real – in five shades of dirt brown – all of the romanticized, fiery ideas I have about Christians. Somebody pointed out to me recently that if God really wanted us to believe in Him, he would make Himself more obvious. In my opinion, the logistics of God making Himself more obvious to us than He does would be unthinkable. People in large numbers are not very pleasant. Nobody likes to wait in lines. Nobody likes crowds, nobody likes to be cramped, nobody likes well-frequented public toilets. So, I spent three days beating away thoughts like “it’s not very Christian the way you just yelled at that man, you Italian cow, and your orange hair clashes with your gold leggings,” and wondering uselessly why everybody, including myself, couldn’t just choose to be more patient, more considerate, more understanding. Some situations are hard, and it’s reassuring to remind yourself – after much agonizing in my case – that it isn’t the emotion that surfaces that makes an agreeable or horrible person, but the choice in how to respond to said emotion.

So it was a tender time for my little faith that is still riding a tricycle, and still wobbly. I realized though, that it isn’t really my faith in God that’s wobbly. It’s more my faith in my choice to follow God. My faith in myself. One evening my mom and I were chatting and the conversation moved around – as it often does – to my adolescence and why it went the way it did. This means, in my family’s sometimes euphemistic codespeak, why I stopped practicing as a Catholic from the age of about 15 to 23 (barring the odd half-hearted attempt here and there). I realised two things as we talked about it. They seem paradoxical but are still both very true. The first is that, as an adolescent and over the first few years of my twenties, I was empty and hurt. Perhaps it was my rebel streak that wouldn’t have listened anyway, but I don’t remember God ever making it clear to me that if I asked it of Him, He would help with that. Without realizing, I looked for help in the places that we are expected to look for it, and there was never a moment where I looked at myself and could identify that I was trying to fix a painful situation. I blundered forward and did what seemed normal ; self-analysis and initiative were what I did the summer I went on a diet.

But by the time God had really opened the door for me and I walked through it, He had opened it so wide I couldn’t have missed it. After years of a frowny introspection and an anxious understanding that something in my heart didn’t work quite right, the option to give that problem to God became an actual option. And when I did walk through the gaping wide door, the time was right. And it was entirely my choice. A little unsure, a lot incredulous, and entirely cerebral. And I knew I was making it. If I ever unmake it, that will be another moment of my free will at work. I think it’s this free will that I am more unsure of than anything – I have never not believed in God, but sometimes I struggle to believe my own belief.

Where my real faith often comes into play is in accepting that I can’t trust myself entirely. Not my faith in God, not my reactions to unforeseen situations, especially not patient forgiveness of any cranky pilgrim I come across. There are inner currents running through us that carry us along without waiting for assent or permission, and it doesn’t always matter how confident we feel about our ability to own our choices and make of our lives what we envision them to be. There are also empty spaces and hurts and prides that make us act in certain ways, that make us feel powerless, and we don’t see the connection until later on. And so, learning to pay attention and learning to forgive myself, and choosing to move forward even when I’m not sure I want to anymore – these allow me to find balance between the forces that move me and the choices I want to control.

On a related note, one of the most valuable things I’m experiencing in France has nothing to do with France at all. Because of a new environment, and a different set of friends, and a different (and chosen) set of norms, I’m learning to get along with men as friends, and as absolutely nothing more than that. Guys always took an odd position in my life, somewhere between friends and lovers. Every guy friend was a potential partner, in my mind, and every past partner was still a friend, and the line never even had to be blurred. It was just splotchy to begin with. This wouldn’t be a big deal, really, if physical manifestations of love – cuddling, sex, snuggles, whatever – didn’t come, as I matured, to take the place of my own love for myself, or of the more subtle love of my (just) friends for me, or the ever complex, sometimes distracted love of my parents. I’m pointing this out, not because I need life to be black and white, or because I don’t want my boyfriends to be my friends first and foremost, but because I very rarely chose what they meant to me, or what their love represented. We often just fell into bed at one point or another and I had sort of expected it all along so, there you go.

And so, thinking of myself as an adolescent, I think I figured out what I would say to my younger self. I think I would let all that dogmatic stuff about chastity and purity lose a little weight. It is important, it is worth saying, and it is even beautiful once you come to understand it all, but it isn’t the only important issue at stake as a girl grows into a woman, and it will certainly be ignored anyway. Nope. What I would tell myself is that I might not realise it yet, but I have a lot of hollow, raw space in my heart. And I would tell myself that whether I like it or not, I am going to try to soothe and fill that space with sex and snuggles and claustrophobic text messaging. I’d tell myself, just so that I know. I’d tell myself to watch out for it, for how quickly and quietly spending Christmas with a boyfriend because you like his company turns into spending Christmas with a boyfriend because you feel disappointed by your parents. And maybe that way, in that alternate running of events, when I reach the end of my teenage years and I’m confused and frustrated as to why I seem to have nowhere to go for Christmas, or why I don’t like my friends that much, or why I can’t stand being alone with myself, the heart plummeting answer will come a little more easily. And so will the choice to do something about it.

Writing letters and receiving love.

For a long time, I understood why my mom wrote letters. Theoretically. She’s a traditional soul, she doesn’t love computers, she is a woman with a personal touch par excellence. On an emotional level, though, I never quite got it. The last letters I wrote – not counting illicit notes snuck across dull classrooms – were to friends in Ireland before I was old enough for my own email address. It was a labor of necessity rather than love, although there was always something exciting about getting a letter from Kildare, sometimes soft and bendy like it had gotten a bit wet on the way and then dried out. But my mom has always chosen to write letters. Sometimes she would write to me, even, when we lived under the same roof, rather than just talk to me over tea at the kitchen table.

Over the last few months, however, I’ve been writing letters to my friends. I haven’t been very disciplined about it, and I haven’t done it for everyone – except a mass mailing of Christmas cards – but it’s been enchanting. And I have to admit, it wasn’t my idea to begin with. Two of my best friends are living in Colorado and California at the moment, and they both wanted to send me letters and asked for my address, and I thought, okay, that sounds neat, and about twenty days later (yes, I am firmly in the middle of nowhere) two letters showed up in the big green boîte à lettres down the driveway, past the fig tree that has lost its leaves and is now baring it’s rheumatoid bumps and gnarls. The letters were written in real, curly handwriting, one with a postcard attached, one on rice paper, both full of love.

I couldn’t wait to sit down and write back. I set up shop on the couch with my writing paper and packet of lavender envelopes that turned out to be just a hair too short for the paper, and as I began to write my responses, I realized the value of it. There was all the time in the world to express myself to my friends. To respond exactly as I wanted to respond without being influenced by surroundings, or circumstances, or the pressure of feeling like I’ve gone on too long and need to wrap up. With the ability to stop and think about how and what and why. It felt like I was communicating the most me possible, a very vulnerable and exciting thing to do. The normal emails and messages and texts are all rushed in some way, constricted by the normal brevity of the form, or by how much of a pain in the ass it can be to write a paragraph on a touchscreen.

This has had me thinking about personal touches, and about friendship. I stayed in Toulouse last weekend, and on Sunday night when I returned, there were both a letter and an enormous package wrapped in brown paper and packing tape sitting on the coffee table for me. Inside the brown paper was a plastic bag, and inside the plastic bag was a plastic garment sack from a dry-cleaner’s in Maynooth, and inside the sack was a brown and white blanket wrapped in a bow, and slipped inside the blanket was a mix CD, and tucked into the case was a handwritten track list and a note from a friend in Ireland who I saw for the first time in eight years over Christmas. While hanging about in her living room, I had commented on the softness of a blanket that was sitting on the couch, and sometime after I left she went out and bought me one just like it, wrapped it like it might be rerouted via the centre of the earth (just in case), and sent it over.

Before I had opened the package or the letter, I stood staring at the coffee table for a minute, and realized how often mail has been coming for me over the last months. I mean, I know Christmas has recently been a thing, but I don’t get this much real-life, in-my-hand mail at home, even at Christmas. My grandmothers are brilliant about it, of course, and there’s always the odd friend or two, showing everybody up by sending out Christmas cards when everyone else is claiming overwork and overstress and hadn’t-even-thought-of-it. But people have been taking time out of their lives to write to me and to send me things. I’ve been to the post office pickup centre twice – it’s down this random little road among warehouses and empty parking lots next to the auto-route. And now a friend who I cherish, but with whom I haven’t even kept in consistent contact with over the past twelve years, had sent me a gift just…because.

I like to think I’m somewhere in the middle of the scale of personal touches. I worried for a while about being a low-level sociopath – it occurred to me once that maybe it wasn’t normal not to miss people when you were separated from them. These days I know better, but I still have to make concerted efforts to show people I love them in concrete ways that don’t just involve telling them how neat they are. I mean, compliments are highly important and I’m pretty good at them. When it comes time to give someone a present, I usually make them something, or I take them out to spend time with them. But in between those tender after-dinner moments and birthdays and Christmases, I slip a bit. My life reverts to the standard “how high above water can I hold my head this week?”

Lately, it’s become obvious how much easier it is to hold my head up when I’ve got people sending me emails and mail and impromptu blankets and music suggestions. It’s also become obvious – one more time, because all the other times I had this epiphany, it didn’t stick – that the more love you send out, the more letters you respond to, the more compliments and encouragement you give, the more love and encouragement comes back to you. It’s been humbling to experience so much generosity, and to realise how important I am to other people.

There’s that brilliant (whatever about being a trope) moment at the end of the film Waking Ned, when Michael hears his own eulogy delivered by his best friend. It’s probably true that his ego is in no need of it, but it’s a touching moment nonetheless. The scene came to mind the other day, in relation to how it feels to have someone drop a line to tell you they miss you, how it’s not only a moment of affirmation but also a moment of responsibility. I find it inspires me to be a better friend, to keep people in mind the way I grew up watching my mom keep them, not only in her mind but in her heart. To take time to tell them my thoughts and be as real as possible with them. In some ways, leaving the people you love for a while is like a mini-death. But it’s one where you do get to hear about how wonderful you are, and you do have to chance to let it affect you.