An Orchestra Against Ignorance

May 15, 2013 By 2 Comments

The alumni magazine of Brown University, my alma mater, begins its article on a unique orchestra like this:

“We are an orchestra against ignorance.” That’s how Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim describes the West-Eastern Divan, which consists of young musicians hailing from Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Picture a teenage violinist from Israel; his name is Ilya. Picture a teenage violinist from Lebanon; his name is Claude. They know nothing of one another’s lives. Or, actually, they think they do know about each other’s lives, because each has been raised on negative stereotypes about the other. [Read more...]

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Luci Shaw’s Poetry of Hope and Humility

April 26, 2013 By 1 Comment

The pale bits—twigs, fibers,
pine needles—sun struck,
fall through the lazy air
as if yearning to be embodied in
my knitting, like gold flecks woven into
a ceremonial robe.

How perfectly Luci, I thought, as I clipped the poem, “Knitting in the Wild,” from the March 6, 2013 issue of Christian Century.

Would I have known this was one of her poems without seeing the poet’s name? I think so. The pinpoint-focused attention on natural phenomena bursting with life—even “yearning.” Then the giveaway (for me): she is knitting. [Read more...]

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More Poetry of Married Love

April 8, 2013 By 14 Comments

In a previous post, I used Richard Wilbur’s poem “for C” to talk about my long marriage with George. Today I want to fill in some of the blanks that got us to this point.

My husband is recovering from open heart surgery. My doctor just informed me that my leukemia has reached a point where I have almost no healthy white cells left to fight infection—so even catching a cold could be the beginning of the end.

Life’s fragility: That’s what George and I are experiencing more than ever now. Of course, life is fragile from the day you’re born. But major illness can bring this reality to the forefront of consciousness. [Read more...]

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Auden’s Love of Neighbor

March 18, 2013 By 7 Comments

This is my one hundredth post for Good Letters. What a privilege it has been to write for these readers (you readers) all this time. I treasure the stimulating conversations we’ve had through the comments, and the cyber-friendships I’ve made among Good Letters writers and readers.

To mark my one hundredth anniversary, I looked back at what I’d written for my very first post in 2008. (Of course I had no idea until I opened the document; I can’t remember what I’ve written—or read—a month ago, let alone five years ago.) Ah, it was on W.H. Auden.

I was curious: what about Auden had interested me then?

In The New York Review of Books, I’d read a review-essay, “Auden and God,” by Auden’s literary executor, Edward Mendelson. The book under review was Arthur Kirsch’s Auden and Christianity.

Mendelson praised Kirsch’s book but (as often in NYRB essays) scarcely referred to it in his own informative overview of Auden’s religious life. Though I’d long known about Auden’s Christianity, something about Mendelson’s presentation of it so stimulated me that I was zinging as if I’d slogged down four cups of coffee (though I’d had none: doctor’s orders). [Read more...]

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Can I Offer Up My Suffering?

March 8, 2013 By 12 Comments

“Pain is an evil, suffering is an evil. We mustn’t desire it. We don’t desire it for others, so why should we for ourselves?”

These were the words of my spiritual director, Fr. Bill Shannon, early in our twenty-five year relationship. (For background on our relationship, see this post.) I’d come to our monthly session after a couple days of a migraine. “I’m not good at accepting pain,” I told him.

“I’m not either,” he said, continuing with the words above, then adding: “We have to admit that there are some things we can’t handle, and accept our inability to accept!”

He went on: “Christ’s suffering on the cross is a mystery. Why is suffering necessary for redemption? And how is suffering redemptive? We don’t know. Jesus’s agony in the garden is passed over too quickly in most theology. Probably Christ prayed ‘let this cup pass’ for a very long time; he didn’t slip right into ‘Thy will be done.’ He didn’t desire this suffering; he didn’t see it as redemptive.”

[Read more...]

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What are You Doing for Lent?

February 13, 2013 By 5 Comments

“So what are you doing for Lent this year, Bill?”

This was my annual question to my spiritual director, Fr. Bill Shannon, for the twenty-five years that I went to him for monthly counsel. (I wrote about our relationship in a previous post.)

When I posed the question in 1995, about ten years into our relationship, Bill’s eyes twinkled in a smile as he answered. “Each day I’m going to write a letter to someone, and then keep that person in my prayers during that day. It’s a way of participating in the Communion of Saints.”

That impish eye-twinkling came from Bill’s knowing that his answer would take me by surprise. A fairly new Catholic, I’d expected that he would be “giving up” something for Lent.

He explained. “You shouldn’t be focusing on the negative for Lent. It’s a positive opportunity—to attend in a special way to one’s relation to God.” [Read more...]

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Beauty Is as Beauty Does

January 29, 2013 By 7 Comments

The current issue of Image (#75) is full of rich mini-essays on some of the key words we rely on when we speak about the intersection of faith and the arts. Among these words is beauty, which novelist Erin McGraw chooses to parse.

McGraw’s main point is that beauty is ever-fleeting. We want to get a grip on it; yet by its very (transcendent) nature, we can’t.

I see what she means, and I delight in her brilliant, breezy prose. But I think there’s something important about beauty that McGraw is leaving out.

As her “rough and ready definition of beauty” she offers: “some display of harmony, intelligence, and genius.” I’d go along with this definition as far as it goes—but I don’t think it goes far enough.

Specifically, it leaves out beauty’s moral dimension: goodness. [Read more...]

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Soul Friends

January 9, 2013 By 5 Comments

“One’s ‘spiritual life’ isn’t apart from the rest of one’s life, something that goes on in the prayer room alone, but it is our life. Life is spiritual.”

My spiritual director, the Merton scholar Fr. William Shannon, said this to me during one of our meetings—after I’d been seeing him for about a year. That was in 1986. He died last spring, at the age of ninety-four. Since then I’ve been slowly reading through the journal entries that I wrote after every one of our quarter century of monthly meetings.

It’s my way of keeping him with me, of continuing to benefit from his guidance.

Bill (as he was soon inviting me to call him) wasn’t trained as a spiritual director. He was a theologian on the faculty of Nazareth College in Rochester, NY, founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph. When he retired, he became the Sisters’ chaplain, living in their Motherhouse.

It was then that people started coming to him for spiritual direction. Word got around that he had gifts of compassion and insight. I was a new Catholic, baptized in my late thirties, in 1983, and I knew I needed wise guidance in my fledgling spiritual life. I asked a mutual friend to fix us up… and that’s how I met the person who has formed my life more than anyone except my husband. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Faith, Peggy Rosenthal, Relationships 5 Comments
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