Friends and Refugees
Spiritual friendship in the Catholic 20th century
Creatures, while I was doing research for my day job, I discovered a book I think many of you will enjoy. It’s by Brenna Moore, whose Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905 – 1944) was an insightful, provocative, and deeply-felt introduction for me to its subject’s work, so I was especially excited to discover that she’d written something knitting the Maritains into a broader story of the role of spiritual friendship in the Catholic intellectual life of the 20th century. Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism is a series of essays on friendship in the life and thought of Catholic figures from South America, North Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the good ol’ U.S.A. It’s a great read with a great thesis.
That thesis is basically that “friendship” was a category of thought that allowed Catholics to resist modernity: to resist the modern idea that sex, marriage, and the nuclear family are the last acceptable havens of real and passionate love; to resist the modern totalitarianisms of fascism, Communism, and American racism; to resist the modern idea that death separates us from the past. Moore traces the use of the term “friendship” from 18th-century antislavery societies (Société des Amis des Noirs) through 20th-century antiracist and anticolonial groups. “Friendship” provided a model not only of resistance to division, but life in communion. Friendship House, “an experimental, interracial community in Harlem” and later Chicago, was an imperfect but real model of that life, and it plays a central role in the later life of the Harlem Renaissance writer and Catholic convert Claude McKay (the reason I picked up this book).
These friendships were often epistolary, but richly sensual. McKay’s an exception here! His emotional style was low-key outside his art, where emotion flourished. But the Maritains, the scholar of Islam Louis Massignon, the French Resistance member and scholar of medieval and comparative mysticism Marie-Magdeleine Davy—these are people whose physical archives are full of the holy cards and photos they exchanged, envelopes spilling out not only words but tokens of deep affection.
Friendship was an act of faith in the Mystical Body of Christ, of which all people are called to be members. This communion could cross lines of nationality. Moore notes that Catholics’ colonizing history plays a role here, Catholicism as imperial religion, though she also highlights the way Catholicism could be “an exilic religion,” a haven and gathering-place for the 20th century’s countless refugees. Friendship could cross lines of religious difference and even the line between this world and the next, as in Massignon’s life-shaping friendships with Muslims both living and dead. Friendship was an intellectual method as well as a personal call: Davy’s scholarship was animated by her friendship with the saints she studied, her belief that they not only were but are real people whose full, imperfect lives continue to matter as they continue to speak and intervene in our hearts. Friendship was inherently political, both in theory (friendship is our call to love and serve one another regardless of race, nationality, ideology, religion) and in practice (friendship is a source of strength in the face of Nazi terror, and against the economic violence of American racism). Friendship was a way of living in the Church, not in the bare present tense. It was mystical and deeply joyful, a site of insight and ecstasy.
Friendship didn’t solve problems, but changed them. Moore is clear and frankly a bit too insistent on these problems of friendship. She notes that the children and parents of these figures often suffered separation from them: friends got the best of them, but you wouldn’t want to have been Dorothy Day’s kid. Or Claude McKay’s, whom he never met. I think Moore sometimes blames her subjects in a way that goes a bit beyond the evidence; and, as in Sacred Dread, she’s got a kind of prejudice against conversion that ends up e.g. blaming a young convert from Islam to Catholicism for the fact that his parents reacted by holding a funeral for their “dead” son. That is an action by his parents, not by him. You’re allowed to disappoint your parents! You’re allowed to follow, and share, the truth to the best of your ability to discern it. Still, I’d rather have Moore’s overemphasis than a boosterish historian who wouldn’t outline the way interracial friendships posed problems for McKay (one of his poems includes the line, “And no white liberal is the Negro’s friend”), the way some of these friendships did compete with the friends’ marriages and family life, the possibility that friendship could be disingenuous or damaging as well as necessary.
Kindred Spirits is a hopeful book; and exceptionally well-suited to our times.
icymi
I paid tribute to the late Dick Button, the golden voice of American figure skating television. This is how I learned just how many of his wonderful words I’d copied down over the years:
Button reached heights of eloquence and emotion when championing artistic, individualistic skaters like Johnny Weir, who won three U.S. National Championships: “He is athletically graceful beyond belief,” Button declared in 2005. “He’s almost like a greyhound…. Look at the way he eases up into the air, just smooth—like a gazelle!” He lavished praise on skaters like Lucinda Ruh, “the Queen of Spin,” a Swiss phenomenon whose jumps were shaky but whose unexpected, breathtaking spins made her look “almost like a bird settling on one leg.” Button taught us to admire the line of a back, to imagine what it would be like to stand on center ice and wait for the music to start: “Such a lonely place to be.”
I’m also quoted in this profile of the artist Gracie Morbitzer, who makes friendship with the saints a real and vivid invitation in our own day.
links between worlds
The Pillar: “We consistently urge obedience to ecclesiastical authority, even as we urge better governance where it’s needed.” Good & necessary work.
Radley Balko, “Q&A with immigration attorneys on the ground.” Again I’ll suggest calling your local Catholic Charities’ legal clinic.
A Venus de Milo out of snow. Mount Pleasant represent
Now Playing
Klezmatics, “Ale Brider.” Un mir zaynen ale shvester, oy oy, ale shvester,
Azoy vi Rokhl, Rut, un Ester, oy, oy, oy.
Un mir zaynen ale freylekh, oy, oy, ale freylekh
Vi Yoynoson un Dovid HaMelekh, oy, oy, oy
And we are all sisters, oh, oh, all are sisters
Just like Rachel, Ruth, and Esther, oh, oh, oh.
And we are all joyful
With Jonathan and David the King, oh, oh, oh!
From their 1989 album Shvaygn = toyt (Silence = Death).
Flowers on the tomb of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, photographed by “Paralacre” and used under a Creative Commons license.