Every Catholic feels like they’re a strange kind of Catholic, I think. No one is a “good” Catholic, anyway. We’re all just a bunch of people trying, and sometimes we’re not even trying to be good. We’re just trying, at all. I always feel a bit tribal. That is my strange way of thinking about it: I am a tribal Catholic. Catholicism is my native culture, something I grew up with, whose many various dialects I’m familiar with and that... Read more
Something I loved about Rogue One was how haunted by the Jedi that universe is, how the ghosts of the Jedi seem to follow the characters around. Even if the most powerful living embodiment of religion had been eradicated, still no one could quite rid themselves of its ghost. We also get to see non-Jedi be religious, get to see them be devoted to the Force in their own ways. Jyn, the central protagonist, has a mother who gives her... Read more
The other day, I saw a brief .gif of a little hedgehog lying on his back on a soft blanket. They’re small creatures often confused with porcupines because they’ve got spikes all along their backs that they hide underneath when they’re threatened. This little guy, though, had let himself be turned over. Everything soft and vulnerable about him was totally exposed, and he lay stretched out in complete bliss as his owner rubbed his tummy. I am, of course, a... Read more
We like victors. We like survivors. We like those who have endured darkness, and came out of it alive. It is important to us to brush against the deep, vertiginous underneath of the world with someone who assures us that it can be overcome. Christ goes before us in all things, including what terrifies us. It’s not so much that we don’t have to go into the dark anymore – oh, we definitely do – as it is that Someone is... Read more
One of the cases that broke open the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in the United States took place in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. A priest, working at a school for the deaf in the 1950s through the 1970s, abused the boys there. He later admitted that he abused them even during the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Now let me repeat this, so it properly twists us apart: a priest abused deaf boys in the midst of confession. You must know by... Read more
Much of my work in the scholarly world lately has focused on the theme of memory, especially on tradition as a kind of “remembering.” The analogy is this: tradition is not the same as history, but it draws upon it, which is like how my memory is based in my history, but is not the same as it. That is to say, my memory is in fact a complex portrait of who I understand myself to be, and it is not just... Read more
“We are the hollow men,” writes T.S. Eliot. “We are the hollow men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” His poem has been hammering through my head all morning. We are the hollow men. The stuffed men. This picture he draws emerges from Guy Fawkes Day, a strange day of celebration in England, when effigies of Guy Fawkes, the Catholic who tried to blow up Parliament, are burned. Eliot turns his eyes to this day, watching as empty human... Read more
What I resent most deeply about the “right to die” movement is that it sounds exactly like the voice in my head always whispering that I should die. This is not, and could never be, a formal argument against the so-called right to die. But still: it sounds just like the part of my brain that is suicidal. You can imagine my confusion. There is a part of me that always wants to die. Since my mental breakdown and even after... Read more
“I’m just not getting anything out of this class.” I’ve seen the thought on students’ faces, of course. I’ve seen it in the many varieties of bored resentment that can somehow occupy young eyes. I’ve just never been told it to my face. By a student I trust, no less. Of the two of us, I’m not sure which of us felt more betrayed by the experience. Had we been in a movie, I’d have stood there for a breathless moment and... Read more
I have no memory of what it is like to be unaware of my own mortality. This – along with basically no recollection of high school – is one of the lack of experiences that divides me most sharply from my students. I don’t know what it is to be young and invincible. I never knew this feeling, not even when I was young like them. It divided me from my peers when I was their age. So I simply accept... Read more
The Rule and the Raven
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