2023, The Year I Discovered Sunrise
A somewhat more reflective year-end roundup. Still some dumb jokes though.
There are a lot of ways to talk about the things in my life that are changing as I move across the country, start a nonprofit, begin a life with my partner, etc. I’ve said that I’m speedrunning adulthood (in 2024 I plan to learn to drive :/ :/ the present beware, the future beware). I’ve repeated something a friend told me, that learning to be in a covenant friendship is exposing all the defects of character I still need to address; in the past year I’ve been challenged to love in ways that have sometimes felt as though they’re beyond my strength, and maybe they are, but they aren’t beyond God’s strength to carry me.
And I am making decisions, but those decisions are taking place in a totally unexpected context, where what God wants for me, as best I can tell, is totally different from what I had planned. So I keep returning to these personal proverbs about all that’s out of our control in life: You have to go where life takes you; when you step into the carnival, anything can happen; river goes where the water flows.
There are good plans I’ve set aside, at least for the moment. (I intended to spend Christmas vacation working on that novel draft, but then both love and work happened.) l read fewer books and watched fewer movies; I adjusted my expectations and I’ll have to adjust them further. I sometimes feel like Yosemite Sam bouncing along the dragon’s back, yelling, “Whoa, mule! Whooooooooa mule!!!” But, you know, that mule won’t whoa.
So I did a very brisk round-up of my reading, writing etc for the year, but below are a few extra categories that maybe reflect better the character the old year had for me.
Five Feasts
January 2: Sts Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzus. Sort of an anniversary for us.
January 3: Elizabeth Ann Seton. This lady has done us some real solids in the past couple years. Also, here is a truly beautiful passage about her beloved sister-in-law, who died with the promises of Ruth to Naomi on her lips.
October 4: Francis of Assisi. We got to visit the replica of the Porciuncula in San Francisco. Francis is everywhere here, although he seems to have little impact on housing policy, I tell you what.
October 9: John Newman. It turns out that my partner and I attended Mass together at the Brompton Oratory a year before either of us knew the other existed.
December 27: John the Beloved. Our anniversary insofar as this is when we both realized we needed to be discerning what our future together might be. “The third day belongeth to Saint John/Who was Christ’s darling, dearer none.”
It’s kind of amazing how many feasts there are that help guide our love. What we are doing is new, because our context is new, but it’s not unprecedented.
A Substack
I keep telling you people to check out Grant Hartley, lol. Here he is on St Gregory of Nyssa’s life of Moses, and endless longing.
Best Northern California nature
The fog. The fog, in a park, moving between the trees like a great animal.
Zopilotes! A squirrel got run over on our street and I got to see the vulture spread its majestic wings. Did not smell them, thank God.
The electric-blue sky—a different timbre in the blue, like the veil between us and the sky is thinner. Like the sky is louder.
Palm trees. Old short bearded ones; soaring skinny fireworks ones.
Jasmine in the night; California poppies; the shaggy rags of the eucalyptus
An Initiative
“So Deborah worked with the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, where she lives, to launch a new ministry in which sexual abuse survivors who struggle with attending Mass can receive Communion in their home from another abuse survivor.”
Five Projects
This is a sample of the kind of thing Building Catholic Futures is creating. All of these projects are at least at some stage of “beta testing,” so if you want to know more, email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com !
An English/Language Arts curriculum on spiritual friendship.
Short biographical sketches of real non-straight Catholics, focusing on universal questions of vocation, theosis, and learning how to love, intended for use in catechism or religious ed—with, eventually, a matching poster series for classroom use.
A workshop for spiritual directors and lay mentors, focused on helping even struggling or ambivalent non-straight Catholics become missionary disciples.
Parents’ guide. There are a few good resources out there for Christian parents whose kids come out. But what about parents who just want to know how to handle kids’ questions—about things they see online, about same-sex parents at their Catholic school?
Mission Week. A full week of events, from private workshops for priests to devotional events for the LGBT+ community. Parish testimonial talks from a diverse panel of orthodox queer Catholics, retreats mapping gay spiritual journeys onto the life of Jesus, pizza lunches with high school “affinity groups”—if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to have non-straight people visibly involved in every aspect of Catholic life, consider whether your diocese can host a BCF Mission Week.
Three quotes or dumb jokes I enjoyed from my own newsletter (aka: the hog in her wallow)
There was a way of being queer, once, in which it meant or could be thought to require being lovelorn. Pope St. John Paul II got quite intense about the way our “original loneliness” reveals to us the nature of eros as lack—love’s earthly satisfactions become most important for your soul when they reveal their limits. Or to put it more churlishly, the more unfulfilled your desire, the greater the space carved within you for God to fill! (The more you suffer, the more it shows you really care—right?)
I know why everybody who survived it eventually left that 1990s queerness behind. It is good to be out in the world, eating cream puffs, without anybody checking you for your hardened and threatening scales. But there is something elusively appealing, too—isn’t there?—in this idea that maybe someday the whole of humanity will know itself to be Hula-Hoops optimized for pining.
The blonde had a face as proud and forbidding as the Treasury Building, and her thighs under that eyeshade-green dress were thicker than the federal budget. When she moved, my mind went on a sanitation strike.
What I’m looking forward to reading in 2024
Who knows! That mule won’t whoa just because I want to reread The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. What I would really love, though, is a recommendation for something (it can be an essay, an introduction, whatever) on the life of Fr Henri Nouwen. I loved Return of the Prodigal but bounced off Love, Henri real hard.
Just because I think about the Roman Empire every day doesn’t mean I can’t cook dinner: Four recipes
I mostly cook by memory but these are good.
Ina Garten’s whole roast chicken
Serious Eats roasted potatoes (I make these with curry spices instead of what they suggest and they are always a huge hit)
Smitten Kitchen meatballs (I make these sometimes by the recipe and sometimes with pork + chopped artichoke hearts, with extra hearts in the sauce)
The Kitchn honey-poached pears (nb: these do need to rest overnight or they’ll be bland; the poaching liquid makes an amazing “quencher” or mocktail)
2023 summarized in a single headline
“Mexico’s president claimed he had photo proof of a mythical elf. Why?”
(My partner just finished the first book of Kristin Lavransdatter, and loved it btw, you should read it too, but my point is just: I would read a Mexican Kristin, where the elf is this elf and not a Norwegian one, one million times a day.)
Flame skimmer photographed by “Monkeystyle3000,” found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.
And here's an essay by Robert Ellsberg about Nouwen that focuses on Adam & that book. I haven't read "Adam: God's Beloved"and slightly dread doing so--it seems to break the "nothing about us without us" principle that objectifies people w/ intellectual disabilities--but who knows, maybe it is great.
https://merton.org/itms/annual/19/Ellsberg340-354.pdf
The only other Nouwen I've read was “Adam: God’s Beloved,” which is ostensibly about a multiply disabled friend of his, but which does also reveal more about Nouwen than “Return of the Prodigal Son” does.