Welcome, creatures! I wonder which of you all have the thing I have, of constantly resorting to the same few personal proverbs: things I picked up here and there which expressed something I needed to hear. Most of mine are cautionary, even fatalistic, which I need because I tend toward the optimistic American “if we just get the ideas right, it’ll all work out!” So these are mine & I’d be interested to hear the weirder ones of yours….
“[W]ith the inevitable forward march of progress come new ways of hiding things, and new things to hide.” From Chris Ware’s sad comic, Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Boy on Earth!, and I think I’ve used this as an epigraph for multiple articles.
“I want a fur coat and a villa and a cat.” Somewhat compressed iirc, from a survey of post-WWII British people—basically I always want to talk about new ways of organizing kinship, and the need for community, and the joys of downward mobility, and the goodness of living with your parents etc etc, but actual people carefully stacking up their ration cards knew what they wanted and it was a fur coat and a villa and a cat.
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” John Gilmore, and applicable to literally everything. The everybody interprets everything as damage and routes around it! All good things have off-label uses; all good things can become bad things, all truths can become lies, the moral law is a handbook for carving out creepy little moral hiding-places. (One of the many reasons I love Alan Bray’s The Friend is that he is clearly thrilled and astonished by the publicly-honored, vowed friendships he discovered, and also keenly aware of the ways they could create division and enmity rather than healing them.)
“It is the poor, children, who help the poor.” Tom Anderson, from a socialist children’s story. There’s much evidence for this and it’s also a good rebuke when you think that you, a rich person (or isolated in some other carapace of privilege), are going to have good ideas.
“It’s up to the pig now.” An Anglo-Saxon proverb! Lol we don’t quite know what it means, but I imagine it’s similar to the lyrics to this Wyclef Jean song, which I also think about all the time: “When you step into the carnival, anything can happen.” There are no guarantees and no safety bars, and once you’re on the pig’s back, you’re gonna go where the pig goes.
Drop yours in the comments if you like!
A Bestiary for the Restiary
Ross Douthat has this essay doing two things. The big thing is just pointing out how harrowed the situation of the Catholic Church in America really is. The smaller thing, which he puts up front I think in part because it’s sexier, is a taxonomy of postliberal Catholic intellectual life, such as it is: “But among Catholic writers there has been substantial fracture, experimentation, realignment, and division. The older categories certainly persist. ...But there are also new categories, revived and reinvented movements and tendencies, which matter more to intellectual debate than they did in years past and may eventually matter to Catholic politics as well.”
He names the categories as populists, which is not the term I would use for it but I don’t cuss in the newsletter; integralists; benedictines (after the Rod Dreher book, not the monks nor, sadly, the liqueur); and tradinistas, which I agree with everybody who says it’s just LeftCaths really.
Tbh I was not heartened by this bestiary! For a few reasons. One is that I encounter these people basically only among the excessively-online. Half the stuff they say comes across like Patricia Lockwood’s brilliant heroine asking Twitter, “Can a dog be twins?”
So much of this stuff is just people sitting around at the bar, “putting the world to rights.” I have specific problems with all of these intellectual tendencies. The one I’ve written about a tiny bit is integralism—I think this post holds up. But the biggest issue, I think, is how disconnected all of this feels from actual IRL communities. It’s in communities, in new ways of living, that theology and philosophy flourish. The life of communities is their soil. No Gertrude without Helfta, no Little Flowers of St. Francis (for my money some of the highest-proof theology out there) without Franciscans. The theory of the intertwining of peace and penitence comes from the experience of violence, penance, and peace. Not the other way around! Imho!!
And when I look for American Catholic communities which are knitting together in new ways, or raising voices which get us beyond the miserable grinding conflicts of the post-1970s Church, I find at least two. I’m sure there are more! But if you want a taxonomy of the intellectual currents in Catholic America, I think you’ve gotta talk about a) Black Catholics and b) abuse survivors. These are the people who are offering necessary, innovative, grounded perspectives, doing intellectual work that flows directly from their most intense spiritual needs and suffering. I am in neither of these communities myself so I will just point you to a few places: The Black Catholic Messenger, Gloria Purvis obvi, Leticia Ochoa Adams’s Catholics of Color speakers’ registry. These people are reinterpreting history and reading the “signs of the times” in an orthodox, politically-insubordinate, fearless spirit.
(Serge made a related point, which is what got me thinking about it: “Douthat ignores how much racial/Immigration/Violence carried out by the state is considered a pretty good dividing line into figuring out what camp ppl fall into.” Gay Catholic communities are another possible example—we do genuinely have revivals and reshapings of tradition and community to point to. But lol there are dozens of us!!!!, it’s just still a very small community, although I think its forms of ecumenism have a lot to teach us about the opportunities and challenges of partnering across the divides of Schism and Reformation.)
And I didn’t edit Christ’s Body, Christ’s Wounds expecting that it would reshape my own theology, but it did. The essay I return to again and again from that book is Elena’s “Jesus Is Not an Abusive Boyfriend” (I quote it in Tenderness), but I’d also point to Catherine Addington’s “A new name given,” as offering a genuinely distinctive, beautiful, at once critical and humble way of relating to the saints. As with many Black Catholic voices, Addington turns to our long history knowing both that she needs precedents, guideposts, friends… and that the way we tell our history has distorted it. The saints reveal Christ’s Face, the face of Love. Our hagiographies so often hide Him.
(For a rediscovered voice who unites these two movements let me suggest the visionary Ursula de Jesús, whose enslavement by Franciscans was a form of abuse.)
These are communities who propose not so much a renewal as a reckoning. They trust that from a genuine reckoning with evil and complicity within the Church, a way of being Catholic and living in Catholic community will arise which is more honest, more loving, more truly guided by humility and not by power.
I suspect that any political philosophy not grounded in a marginalized community will just become another intellectuals’ toy. Something for the rich young man of the Gospels to talk about with his friends, as he calls for the slaves to bring more wine.“It is the poor, children, who help the poor.”
icymi
I did a long interview with the Catholic News Agency about conversion therapy, my forthcoming book, and various other Gay Catholic Whatnot agenda items.
Now Playing
Farin Urlaub, “Sumisu.” Manchmal auch The Cure oder New Order—
aber größtenteils die Smiths….
"Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then." Not only is this a weird proverb, but it has a moderately weird story to go with it. I grew up in rural Arkansas, and one evening my family attended a presentation in the auditorium on the local college campus. (being only 13 miles away from a "college town") I imagine my sister and I were pushing the seats up and down the way they go, (or that she was pushing it up and down and I was trying hard to maintain my good-girl exterior) when at some point we find out what the presentation is going to be... and it's a hypnosis demonstration. Eventually, he called for volunteers... a young woman chose to be hypnotized, and I believe the presenter also took requests for what brief phrase or sentence he would get the woman to say at various points in the interaction. Expressing the local spirit, the person called upon absolutely chose "Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then!" The demonstration took place, progressing like a strange yet fascinating sort of game of "Simon Says," with regular interjections of "Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then!" I'm not sure if everyone else will find the phrase as appropriate to the incident as I do.
"Everything happens for a reason; but it's not necessarily a GOOD reason." (I came up with this one, and dropped it. I only tell it to myself on rare occasions.)
Once, while going through health problems that severely brought up Awareness Of My Mortality, (tm) I decided that "Life's a b%^&h, and then you die" should be re-written to "Life's a b%^&h, but then you LIVE." (hopes of a future beyond death being very much in the focus of my mind's-eye.)
Enjoyed the ones you listed: The "and routes around" sounds very engineering-y-mindset. "It's up to the pig now," sounds similar to ones that get good mileage in this house!
Thanks for the shout out, friend. <3 Another place I recommend re: abuse survivors in the Church is In Spirit and In Truth: https://inspiritandtruth.substack.com/