appreciation<\/a><\/strong> of Corita Kent (h\/t to Fran Rossi Szpylczyn) is well-timed. It\u2019s easy to invoke Corita, as Henneberger does, as a kind of forerunner and patron saint of the sisters who find themselves engaged in conflict with the male hierarchy over Rome\u2019s critique of the LCWR, as she was a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary when that order went through a similar stretch of conflict nearly half a century ago.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s easy to read Corita\u2019s catalog of serigraphs\u2014the joyful oeuvre that the men of the L.A. Archdiocese termed \u201cweird and sinister images\u201d\u2014as a kind of breviary of Vatican II Catholicism, infused with the Spirit, engaged with the culture, speaking peace and justice to power as prophets have always done.<\/p>\n
And so it\u2019s also easy for Henneberger\u2019s combox to accrue comments that dismiss Corita and the LCWR as \u201cembarrassing Marxist buffoons.\u201d<\/p>\n
The truth, though, is never that easy.<\/p>\n
The witness of women religious does not come down to Nuns on the Bus v<\/em> Cloistered Soapmaking Nuns. In her life, both in the order and after she left it to live as a laywoman, Corita was some of both of those things, and neither one. Her art was her activism and her Divine Office. She saw symbols everywhere\u2014\u201ctongues in trees, books in the running brooks,\u00a0sermons in stones and good in every thing,\u201d as Shakespeare put it\u2014but refused to be reduced to any one symbol herself. Corita was herself, an artist, a visionary.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s that vision, irreducible as it is to stereotypes, that I think we are wise to join Henneberger in invoking for the Church. Corita\u2019s charism was looking at the world in new ways, juxtaposing seeming opposites\u2014advertising graphics and Eucharistic theology, for example\u2014into a radical harmony. She earned censure and ridicule for it, as with the 1964 serigraph \u201cthe juiciest tomato of all,\u201d which quotes poet Sam Eisenstein\u2019s recognition of what Corita was up to:<\/p>\n
\u201cIf a canned food company feels justified in saying their tomatoes are the juiciest, it is not desecration to say, \u2018Mother Mary is the juiciest tomato of them all.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
That sounds like the worst New Age crap if you don\u2019t know how deeply rooted Corita\u2019s incarnational spirituality was, if you don\u2019t recognize the long history of devotional references to Mary\u2019s \u201cjuiciness,\u201d including Gerard Manley Hopkins\u2019 \u201cSpring\u201d:<\/p>\n
What is all this juice and all this joy?
\nA strain of the earth\u2019s sweet being in the beginning
\nIn Eden garden. \u2013 Have, get, before it cloy,
\nBefore it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
\nInnocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
\nMost, O maid\u2019s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.<\/p>\n
If Corita were with us today, I don\u2019t think she\u2019d be on the bus\u2014or criticizing those who are. I think she\u2019d be doing what she always did, what God sent her into the world to do: teaching us to see. Henneberger quotes artist Dale Loy, a student of Corita\u2019s, on the value of that lesson for seeing past dead ends.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cShe taught me how to see the wholeness of life \u2014 to draw upside down or see 50 things in your room you\u2019ve never really looked at before \u2014 an incredible way to jostle our closed circuit of doing things the way we\u2019ve always done them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
She\u2019d be making us do what she made us do back in the art room in the catacombs under the old IHM convent building in Hollywood: look at apparent conflicts from a different angle, single out a 1-inch square piece of the puzzle that is the world and recognize that it might be the key to understanding, draw everything 50 times with the opposite hand until there\u2019s no opposition left. She\u2019d shake her head and grin her sharp triangular grin at our intransigence and our giving up on the Church and the world and one another, and she\u2019d put us to work.<\/p>\n
On her classroom wall, Corita posted this:<\/p>\n
The only rule is work.
\nIF YOU WORK IT WILL LEAD TO SOMETHING.
\nIT\u2019S THE PEOPLE WHO DO ALL OF THE WORK ALL THE TIME
\nWHO EVENTUALLY CATCH ON TO THINGS.<\/p>\n
Melinda Henneberger shares her pain and puzzlement at \u201cthe consistency with which the higher-ups insist on crushing some of our juiciest tomatoes.\u201d Corita, having been crushed, might just say you can look at that crushing as oppression. Or you can turn it upside-down and see it as the first step in making the best sauce ever. In any case, the juice is never lost.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Appearing as it does on the day the Nuns on the Bus tour kicked off, Melinda Henneberger\u2019s appreciation of Corita Kent (h\/t to Fran Rossi Szpylczyn) is well-timed. It\u2019s easy to invoke Corita, as Henneberger does, as a kind of forerunner and patron saint of the sisters who find themselves engaged in conflict with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[58,14],"class_list":["post-210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nuns","tag-corita-kent","tag-nuns-on-the-bus"],"yoast_head":"\n
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