March, 2008

A Reflection on Rosalie G. Riegle, Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her

Convert to Catholicism, unapologetic pacifist, denizen of the Lower East Side, comforter of the poor, journalist by trade, and nay-sayer to secular authority, Dorothy Day is a fascinating person known to many from her autobiography, The Long Loneliness.[1] Indeed, like countless others, I was introduced to her and Peter Maurin’s Catholic Worker movement through that book. In the fall semester of my senior year at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, I read the Harper and Row reissue of The Long Loneliness and she was like no Catholic I had ever encountered in all my many years of Catholic schooling. That edition contained a compelling introduction by Daniel Berrigan, which led me to his other writings, which serendipitously led to a personally decisive encounter with a Catholic priest in Louisville, Kentucky, Jim Flynn, who was also the only person I knew at that time who was reading Berrigan.[2]

In short order, Jim invited me to join him in an experiment in community living and peace-making. By this time, the spring semester of my senior year in 1982, I was all too eager to pass on going to law school and so, after graduation, I chose to live in community in Louisville’s West End. Through Jim, who was like no other priest I’d ever met and for whom the word “prophetic” had a resonant accuracy, I soon met Pat Geier, who became my best friend and who encouraged me to apply for a ministerial position in justice and peace at her parish, the Church of Epiphany.

I was soon hired at that parish as well as Fr. Flynn’s own community at St. William in the city and became involved in the Sanctuary Movement for Salvadoran refugees, Witness for Peace (which maintained a nonviolent presence in Nicaragua war zones between civilians and contra terrorists) and the Pledge of Resistance to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua. In 1985 soon after getting arrested at our Senator’s office to protest the allocation of more aid to the contras, Pat Geier and I took off five weeks to study at Maryknoll’s Summer Program at the Institute of Justice and Peace. There I met the man who became my teacher, Marc Ellis, a Jewish religious thinker then beginning to wrestle with the tangled and tortured histories of the Holocaust, Israel, and Palestine. He had lived at the New York Catholic Worker in the 70s and had published A Year at the Catholic Worker as well as written a biography of Peter Maurin.[3]

(more…)

Saturday 29 March 2008

I am finishing up my manuscript, Why Go to Palestine, and as I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, I am grateful to the following works, which I could not get out of my system as I was creating, composing, redacting, and realizing my almost endless litany:

Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Joe Brainard, I Remember

Bob Dylan, “Brownsville Girl”

Paul Eluard, “Liberté”

T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”

Federico Fellini, 8 ½

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, I, Americus

Lawrene Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art

Allen Ginsberg, Howl

Tuli Kupferberg, 1001 Ways to Make Love

Ed Sanders, Investigative Poetics

George Steiner, “A Pythagorean Genre”

Anne Waldman, “Fast Talking Woman”

Eliot Weinberger, What I Heard about Iraq

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Bob Dylan: “I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward the songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing ‘I Saw the Light.’ I’ve seen the light, too.” –Jonathan Cott, Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, 396.

Like the hundreds of other people who had gathered at Saint Pius V Church for Dan Horkheimer’s funeral last August, I was moving between despair and disbelief in trying to assimilate the fact of his murder. As I walked into the church, I saw at a distance a familiar face—Cece Weinkauff, who was playing violin before the Mass. Eleven and a half years earlier when she was 14, Cece played Massenet’s Meditation at Mev’s funeral in the Saint Francis Xavier College Church.

A few weeks later, she and I visited at Kayak’s on Skinker. She enthusiastically recommended a favorite book of hers by Arnold Steinhardt, Violin Dreams. This captivating memoir details his quest for the perfect violin, the making of a world-class violinist, the musings of this servant to J. S. Bach’s Chaconne, the routines and rituals of the man who carried photos of the greats in his violin case to remind him of the nobility of his calling (like Heifetz). There’s so much in the book he doesn’t address, as it evidently isn’t relevant to his dream life, his real life, that is, his immersion in violins, their power, pedigrees, “personalities,” and magic.

I came away with a radiant and despairing sense of how much great music there remains to be discovered, explored, and savored! (How blessed Cece is to be able to play—day in and day out—such works!) Among the following to listen to again or buy or download: Bach’s six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, Bartok’s First Rhapsody, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Wieniawski’s Scherzo Tarantella, Ernest Bloch’s Baal Shem Suite, Paganini’s Caprices, Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata, Mozart’s Divertimento in B Flat, Mozart’s G Minor two-viola quintet, Schubert’s two cello quintet, the song cycles of Schubert and Schumann, Mendelssohn’s octet, and Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, among others.

Bach is a most potent presence in Steinhardt’s memoir, as revealed in the following passages:

I would realize that Bach had actually provided me with a splendid example of improvisation on the movement’s skeletal frame—a collection of scales, arpeggios, fanciful turns, discreet pauses, and a final little cadenza that any decent Baroque fiddler would have been expected to summon up on the spot but that most modern violinists would not or could not. [80]

My parents had not raised my brother and me with any sense of religion. When I first heard Elman at age eleven, I doubt that I had ever been in a place of worship, and yet that is exactly what the D major section evoked then and now—a private sanctuary where I could commune with the unknown and unnamed. [82]

I also hoped that the Chaconne would stay with me as a companion, a point of orientation, and a source of bedrock wisdom. [112]

Perhaps Bach was a stand-in for the rabbi or protest I never had—a prophet whose music moved me deeply but seemed nonetheless just beyond my grasp. [129]

Bach remained a stubborn constant in my life. If I succeeded in playing the sonatas and partitas flawlessly, my technique in general would inevitably improve. If I began to grasp their overall design, my horizons for all music would broaden. [155]

Bach’s music could be devout, intellectual, complex, but also imaginative, playful, melancholy, daring. [155]

To me the Chaconne is one of the most beautiful, incredible compositions. On one staff, and for a small instrument, this man pours out a world full of the most profound thoughts and powerful emotion. [184]

Was it far-fetched to think that Bach, a devout Christian, might have offered the Chaconne as an expression of the Holy Trinity, its bedrock spiritual principle? [190]

Enough writing! Time to go… and listen.

A Public/Community Reading of
The Book of Mev
by author Mark Chmiel & Creighton University students

Wednesday 2 April 2008
4:00 p.m.

Kenefick Humanities Chair series on the Humane Life
Co-sponsors: Justice and Peace Studies and Cardoner

SC 104
Creighton University
Omaha, Nebraska

For more information, contact:
rbjps@creighton.edu

Roger Bergman, director of Justice and Peace Studies at Creighton University, has been an enthusiastic supporter of The Book of Mev, assigning it in his senior seminar class for the last three years. When he sent me an email in which he commented on the structure of the book, I asked him to elaborate. Here’s what he has to say:

Mark, I’ve attached the handout I give my students outlining something of the cross-connecting or inter-related construction of the chapters. This is to suggest one might read the book in a non-linear fashion, eg, read all the letters, or all the gospels, or all the poems, or all the Human Form Divine chapters, etc. Of course, the whole book is in the gospel pattern in its three parts. More generally, I’ve just been impressed that you found a way to include such diverse sorts of materials that complement and enrich one another. Even a straight-through linear reading turns out not be to strictly linear! 29 ways (or however many) of looking at Mev Puleo. And the three Kerouac epigraphs are perfect. The narrative is certainly clear and compelling but it’s not just a begin here end there affair. I suppose my ultimate compliment is that it’s so obviously a work of love. For Mev, obviously, and all she stood for and wrestled with, but also in the making of the book itself. Construction in that sense.

Repeated chapter titles/themes with # of repetitions (some overlapping)

Writing /4
Face to Face /6
Seeing the World /4
Poverty and Riches /3
Being Present /3
Gratitudes /2
Exchanges /3
Meanwhile, Elsewhere in the World /5 (Haiti, Colombia, East Timor, Chiapas, Iraq)
Dissidents /5
Love Letter /4
Reading /6
Sitting /2
God /5
Accompaniment /6
Poem /4
Crisis /3
The Gospels /4 (According to Ilza, Maria Goreth, Ann, Mev) and The State Department
The Human Form Divine /4
Day in the Life /3
Prayer /4
A School /3
Mutual Aid /3
Uprising /2
Nicknames /2
Community /6
Letting Go /5
Remembering the Dead /6
Bearing Witness /4
Hair /2
Letter /5
Facing the Facts /4

Singular titles/themes: Life without Mozart, A Few Words with the Pope, Peril, Perspicacity, Good-bye, Love’s Mansion, Powerless, Fortitude, Lamentation, New Life

Part One: July 1988—February 1994 [discernment of vocation and ministry]

Part Two: Spring 1994—January 12, 1996 [the passion and crucifixion of cancer]

Part Three (and Prologue): January 1996—March 2003 [life after Mev]

As I indicate in the first page of The Book of Mev, I owe a great debt to Natalie Goldberg, whose Writing down the Bones, was so ultimately helpful when it came to beginning and finishing my book of Mevmemory. In her later book, Thunder and Lightning, Natalie has several enthusiastic passages that speak to her practice of reading:

“But when I’m reading and I love what I’m reading, I’m totally connected, whole. Me and Shakespeare, me and Milton — no time or space between us. We are one–not two, not split.” [78]

“As a writer you should go to a book thirsty and suck it dry.” [91]

“I’ve been trying to tell you all year — reading is the hottest thing going.” [99]

“I’m never ashamed to read a book twice or as many times as I want. We never expect to drink a glass of water just once in our lives. A book can be that essential, too.” [115]

“With a mate we love to recall ‘how it happened’ — how the connection was made. A lover is charged with passion, so we are more aware of the passage into intimacy, but it’s no different from the development of friendship or the final bond with a good book.” [144]

Saturday 29 March 2008

Last Saturday I joined a hundred other people at Forest Park Community College to see new works by the International Play Ground. IPG is a project of the Center for Survivors of Torture and War Trauma, whose staff includes Jean Abbott and Anne Farina. (The devotion they give to the adults and youth, respectively, is, for me a never-ending source of awe.)

Young students from Afghanistan, Cuba, Colombia, Somalia, and Liberia wrote the script for and acted in two plays: first, “Where You From,” by the TAP (Teen Age Players) and “Everyday Oppression” by IPG. The brilliant, daring, and vivacious Magan Wiles (Social Justice alum, 2004) ably directed the students as they told their stories in the spirit of Martin Luther King’s famous remark, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

I was delighted to see three of my current SLU students helping out in various ways throughout the evening: Miranda Portwine, Annie James, and Carrie Neill, who are doing their Social Justice “insertion” with CSTWT. Before the event, Carrie sent me the following reflection, which I am pleased to share here…

There are injustices occurring every moment and I did not even notice until this semester. This may be a bit of an exaggeration. Maybe what I should say instead is that deep down I was aware that there was injustice in the world. I knew at any time there were millions, or billions, of people in poverty while the rich sat back and watched. I knew that, but, until this semester, I had been doing a very good job of pretending those things did not exist or were not as bad as they truly are.

It was easy, really. All I had to do was load my days so completely with activities and studying that I did not have time to breathe – let alone educate myself on the many social injustices occurring in St. Louis and around the globe. This semester has been different though. You could say I have been taking a breather. I chose to lessen my load for my last semester at SLU. In making this decision, I thought I was giving myself a gift – a pre-graduation celebration. But in reflection, I see that this little gift has been one of the most beautiful and necessary challenges of my college career. I can honestly say that I have been challenged more in the last half of this semester than in my first three years of college combined. I feel that have discovered a fire and a thirst for knowledge – especially about social issues and those people throughout the world who have made it their life’s work to change them. I would be lying if I said it did not scare me. It does. A lot. I was comfortable before. But then I see people like Anne Farina and Megan Heeny, strong women with a burning passion for those people who suffer right here in St. Louis, and I would never want to be back in that false sense of security.

This semester, the issue that I have chosen to work with has been victims of torture and war trauma. Miranda Portwine and I are both doing insertions at the Center for Survivors of Torture and War Trauma and have been spending time together, and separately, putting into action the advertising and ticket sales for the upcoming International Playground production. This endeavor has impacted me because of a few different reasons. First of all, I am growing attached to this cause. Each day that I try to find ways to advertise I am thinking about these children and adults who have been through such horrible injustice. I really have no concept of the pain and suffering that they have been through and the many challenges they now face after being uprooted from their home and moving to America. It is overwhelming at times just to think of what they have been through. Honestly, I try to not think about that past part of their life and just try to help with what I can now. I feel so selfish for getting sad about their experience. It is theirs for eternity, and all I can do is try to ease their induction into the life and society I have grown up in.

Earlier this semester Miranda and I met to discuss our tactics for advertising the International Playground event and from this meeting I was given such a warmth and strength. Miranda is a person that I am so glad to work with. She reminds me of the many strong women who run the Center for Survivors. I am so glad to be able to work with and for them during this insertion. I hope that I can learn to have even an ounce of their strength and will.

During this whole process I am learning how to deal about frustration. To say the least, I am a perfectionist. When I want to get something done it will get done. But that has not been working out for me lately. In addition to advertising and ticket sales, Miranda and I are working on finding local businesses to donate food and beverages for the reception following the play. In working to find these donors, I have become extremely frustrated. I am seeing that even when you want to make a contribution, things do not always work out – or at last do not work out easily. My control issues are being tested daily. Part of me wishes I could just provide all that the Center needs and be done with it. Unfortunately, this is not possible and I am just going to have to deal with it.

Working with Miranda and the employees at the Center for Survivors of Torture and War Trauma is allowing me to learn more fully of the bittersweet job we all have. Helping these people better serve the many victims they work with, is something I am so glad that I am able to be a part of. With each little victory I am having there is a constant reminder of the reason behind my dedication. People are being hurt unnecessarily. Children are suffering. This is not okay. I understand that I cannot stop this on my own, but I hope that even through my little contributions at the Center for Survivors I will be able to lessen the pain and fight the injustice occurring throughout the world.

Dear Mark,

Thank you. Thank you, Thank you. Thank you for sharing your life, your heart, and your love with me and the world through The Book of Mev. I finished the book days ago and cannot stop thinking about it. Mev’s story, through your words, gives me so much hope. I am currently living, learning and loving among the people of El Salvador, serving as a community coordinator for la Casa de la Solidaridad Study Abroad program (I have had the immense pleasure of accompanying various students of yours from SLU). In my time here, I have been so blessed to encounter so much hope, but also so much pain. Reading of Mev’s life, struggles, joys and pure humanity calmed me, inspired me, and reminded me time and time again of the grace and beauty of life.

I humbly wanted to let you know that you and Mev have touched my life, brought innumerable smiles and tears to my face and given me renewed hope in the beauty of the broken world in which we live. I will carry Mev with me, and I am eternally grateful for your desire and ability to share her, and yourself, with the world.

May you know all that you have given me through this book.

In immense gratitude,

Megan Raimondi

Megan graduated from Santa Clara University in 2007. See her reflection on Study Abroad here.

Noam Chomsky: “We have every option open to us, and have none of the problems that are faced by intellectuals in Turkey or campesinos in Brazil. We can do anything. But people here are trained to believe that there are easy answers, and it doesn’t work that way. If you want to do something, you have to be dedicated and committed to it day after day. Educational programs, organizing, activism. That’s the way things change. You want a magic key, so you can go back to watching television tomorrow? It doesn’t exist.” From interviews with David Barsamian, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World

Gary Snyder: “Actually, what we want poetry to do is guide lovers toward ecstasy, give witness to the dignity of old people, intensify human bonds, elevate the community, and improve public spirit. And so, it is in just that humanness, that delicate—I’m almost tempted to use the word sweet—appreciation of the details of human life, families, the frustrations of employment with the government, and the frustrations of being a hermit, that we respond to most deeply in Chinese poetry, having a poetry ourselves which is so different in a way, so mythological, so political and so elevated, that it can’t deal with ordinary human affairs often.” Quoted by Eliot Weinberger, in his New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, 213.

I was touched to receive some photographs from James Meinert in Managua. He and his community remembered Mev’s passing in January. In the photos below are Andrea Heyse, who dropped by Nicaragua en route to San Salvador, where she is studying this semester, and Margaret Nuzzolese, like James, a member of Jesuit Volunteer International.

by Rebecca Gorley

Hold the tome
Feel the tremor of yr heart roam
Read it, and the night hours will lap up on you like sea foam
On sand
This book grabs your hand
Heart
Together soaring off the chart
Love never so calm balm Zen and when
A face a place a story an injustice
Dares you into deeper depths underground
Feel the pound pounds
Knocking at the door
Turn the page for more
Mark and Mev (galore !)
Haiti, Brazil, St. Louis, Sicily, Salvador

Breathing, heart beattingling

Requires a reading
Entreating extant for:
Electricity without wires

This book, words chapters conflate fires
burning the tingling trees, crying canopies of my mind
for this rewinding, intertwining heart felt hash
of heavenly heart poundings poking a rash
into every corner in which my sentiments are stashed

lightning bolt hit the tingling tree branch
and fires fetch fungible mélange, fire tree snow storm avalanche
of black and white photos
and here it goes…

every lachrymose, luculent, listless, lamented, lovely, laughable eye lash blink
another second to think, to think, stutter, soften and thank
the roots of life for sinking so deep
in the tears, out loud laughers, heart beats with the words that creep
along in a tome so true so deep

dilatory by design
a plenary palpitation manifestation
this tome a sacrosanct find
a tree, a rhyme a Clementine
sonorous joyous sweet
Book of Mev
Rooting Everything
EvRealthing—

–Rebecca Gorley is a poet who hails from Cincinnati and is currently living in St. Louis. She and her friends were arrested last year in protest of continued Congressional funding for the Iraq war.

Response to Tim Page,Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures, Doubleday, 2002.

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.
– Glenn Gould

This is a book in celebration of what would have been GG’s 70th birthday; it’s a short book, consisting overwhelmingly of photos of the eccentric, the “genius all the time,” the night-owl who worked till dawn, the hater of concerts and touring, the glutton of weak tea, the telephoner san pareil especially at odd early morning hours, the relationship control freak, the one whose Bach keyboard work CDs brought me out of the dark space of Mahler mourning that I had immersed myself in after the death of Mev.

Here is an example of a perfect sentence by Gould fan Tim Page: “No matter how one chooses to define that extra, ur-Gouldian dimension—as expressive urgency, brainy intensity, spiritual seeking, nervous energy or some combination of all these and more—it was ever present in his best performances, which could have been by no other artist.” [14] And this one: “He was witty, kindly, energetic and intensely interested, and extended an instant camaraderie to anybody whose company, telephonic or otherwise, he enjoyed.” [37]

And why not simply appreciate (no judgment!) Gould in all of his ambos: “He was an individualist who prized rectitude and puritanical moral values, yet he considered himself a socialist and was skeptical of religious dogma.” [16] Further, Page notes some of Gould’s characteristics: “profound self-direction, a photographic memory, a marked preference for unbroken routines, extreme discomfort in most social situations, a penchant for isolation, inflexible obstinacy on certain mattes and a generalized, irremediable anxiety that often bordered on panic.” [40] Yes, I’m amazed at such feats of memory, like, by the time GG was 12, he could play the first book of Well-Tempered Clavier by memory. Tureck could do the same but not quite so young, I think.

The book offers some inspiring quotations from others, such as

Leonard Bernstein: I worshipped the way he played. I admired his intellectual approach … his complete dedication to whatever he was doing, his constant inquiry into a new angel or a new possibility of the truth of the score.

Yoyo Ma: While we are bereft of Gould’s inimitable artistry, the legacy of his imagination is a gift we will continue to treasure for many years to come. [13]

Peter Elyakim Taussig: Suddenly you get a sound that no one has ever heard before … it’s boney, it’s taut…it’s very rhythmical, it’s clean, it’s transparent. Here is a skinny scrawny guy from Canada who looks as if he’s about to die by the time he comes on stage—so pale…he sits almost on the floor, he sings while he is playing. We’ve never [heard] anything like this. It’s like, ‘Where did this guy come from?’” [79]

Kevin Bazzana: The most basic premise of Gould’s aesthetic was that music is primarily mental and only secondarily physical….For Gould a musical work was an abstract entity that could be fully comprehended in the mind in the absence of a performer, without even the recollection of sounds or of physical means of production. [147]

Bruno Monsaingeon: [GG] resisted the falsely satisfying temptations of the world: public opinion did not reach him; he did not seek approval…Indeed he thought the artist should be granted anonymity. In this quest, he was reaching back to the status of the Medieval illuminators and cathedral builders who served a purpose Larger than themselves. [169]

Then, of course, there are some Gould-isms which are worth meditating on:

“For every hour you spend in the company of other human beings you need X number of hours alone … isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.”

“Technology has the capability to create a climate of anonymity and to allow the artist the time and freedom to prepare his conception of a work to the best of his ability. It has the capability of replacing those awful and degrading and humanly damaging uncertainties which the concert brings with it.” [29]

“The Goldberg Variations is music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution….It has, then, unity through intuitive perception, unity born of craft and scrutiny, mellowed by mastery achieved, and revealed to us here, as so rarely in art, in the vision of subconscious design exulting upon a pinnacle of potency.” [80]

“For Bach, the contrapuntal style…was a way in which to define musically the life of the spirit, and that for him, a texture which brought together and unified many diverse elements was best of all able to glorify God.”

“The great thing about the music of Sebastian Bach is that it transcends all of the dogmatic adherences of art… all of the frivolous effete preoccupations of aesthetics. It presents to us an example of a man who makes richer his own time by not being of it….It is an ultimate argument… that man can create his own synthesis of time without being bound by the conformities time imposes.” [131]

With access to 50+ hours of his recorded music, I can say that I will spend the rest of my life, however long that will be, studying Bach and listening to Gould (and, why not add, Proust, what better ways to enliven my mind and expand my spirit?).

Here’s a terse exchange that says it all: “But, Glenn, if we are ‘New’ Music Associates, why are we doing a Bach concert?”

“Bach is ever new,” came the reply. [22]

Sunday 23 March 2008

Translator and essayist Eliot Weinberger on reading poetry: “I’ve read it every day of my life since I was thirteen. It is, among the man-made artifacts, my primary source of knowledge of the stuff of this world and the next. Its limitless archive of tiny and piercing, vast and enveloping perceptions of “the way things work and move” (Keats) has forever altered and continually alters my own. It is my religion, in as much as it is an affirmation of the sacrality of all things; it brings me news from the unknown, beyond my imagination; it is a daily opportunity to talk with the dead. Bursting into sound, running through its cycles of silence and sound, ending as silence: a poem is the Hindu history of the universe.” From Written Reaction: Poetics, Politics, Polemics.

Mark,

I am honored and thrilled to be hearing from you. In fact, I immediately made a call to my dear sister in Nicaragua sharing the exciting news and have been consumed with thoughts ever since… I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. Life has been hectic. And I have so much I want to say and do not even know how…

Here is a start. I want to thank you for being a part of my life and Margaret’s life since this summer. It was Margaret that first introduced me to The Book of Mev. She told me about it and I quickly ordered it… mainly to be in solidarity with her so far away. Distance is never easy. I finished it within days and secretly plotted to try and email you before telling Margaret. Unfortunately, she got to you first. However, I believe The Book of Mev and the contact you have had with Margaret is a true blessing from God. I pray that you continue to inspire her and keep her steadfast in faith and love through her journey. We are counting the days till we see each other again. I thank you, Mark, for already doing what you have done for her.

Moving on…
As I said before, Margaret first introduced me to the beautiful, heart felt, and heart breaking story of you and Mev. I read your book in awe and amazement… your story, your honesty, your beautiful love. The book only took a few days. But it took just a few pages for me to fall in love with you and Mev.

I have marked several pages and have been meaning to collect the thoughts I had when I marked them in a journal. I have yet to do it but I promise myself I will. When I do so, I would be honored to send them to you for your website. The Book of Mev has had a profound and lasting impact on my life that I would be thrilled to share. Unfortunately, life as a senior in college is consuming me… GREs, grad school applications, student teaching, work work work. I miss the days of reading Mev on the beach.

I promise I will collect my thoughts soon… I just wanted to write you while I could.

Thank you, Mark… for letting the Nuzzolese sisters into your life.

Love & peace,

Elizabeth

–Elizabeth is a senior at Providence College.

Under review:
The Violence of Love (reprint). By Oscar Romero. Translated and compiled by James R. Brockman, S.J. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004. Pp. xvii, 214. Notes. $15.00 paper.

Monsignor Romero: A Bishop for the Third Millennium. By Robert S. Pelton, C.S.C., ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Pp. vii, 128. Notes. Bibliography. $22.50 cloth.

March 24, 2008 marked the 28th anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador. He held that position for only three years, but committed himself with increasing vigor and courage to the defense of the poor masses of his country, precisely in response to the demanding call of the Gospels. Since his death, he has become an icon for many in Latin America, while some others detest his memory. His fellow bishop in Brazil, Pedro Casaldáliga, once observed, “The history of the Church in Latin America divides into two parts: before and after Romero.”

Robert Pelton has collected various essays that attempt to reckon with Romero’s formidable influence. Drawn from lectures given over the years at the University of Notre Dame, the book offers several appreciations of Romero. Romero is regarded as a “legend for generations of Salvadorans and an icon all over the world” (36), “the first human rights ombudsman in the history of El Salvador and its people” (38), and “[a]s a prophet and a martyr, Oscar Romero is the most important figure in recent Christian history” (46).

Writers in this volume—from El Salvadoran political leader Rubén Zamora to U.S. activist Margaret Swedish to Chiapas bishop Samuel Ruiz García—would surely agree with Archbishop Luciano Mendes de Almeida who
points out that, “Romero always spoke the truth about the situation of oppression and repression being lived by the poorest of the poor—even risking his life to do so” (29).

Such commitment to the truth, then, is what makes Romero an exemplary bishop for the third millennium of Christianity. American Jesuit Dean Brackley explains, however, that we ought not expect scores of bishops eager to follow so closely in Romero’s footsteps. In 1997, Brackley averred that “[t]he church’s credibility depends on whether its future leadership will stand by the defenseless in the spirit of Romero and Rutilio [Grande].… Church leaders who opt for the poor are suspected and investigated; those who opt for prestige and personal power are frequently promoted…. Romero is never mentioned in episcopal documents in El Salvador, for example. Nor was he mentioned during the papal Mass there” (96).

Jesuit James Brockman’s compilation of short reflections from Romero’s homilies and statements helps us to understand how and why Romero may be easy to praise and hard to follow. Proceeding chronologically from 1977, the reflections in each chapter are sometimes in paragraph form, other times in Brockman’s free verse rendering, which is reminiscent of the Catholic Worker Movement co-founder Peter Maurin’s “Easy Essays.”

Taken as a whole, the book reveals the various conflicts in which Romero found himself at such a grave time in the life of his country. He insisted that the church had to be engaged in society, reorienting itself by making the option for the poor. When the church makes this option, it will necessarily comfort the poor and denounce the system and its beneficiaries who sacralize the status quo. He realized, that like the prophets of the Scriptures, the church will be maligned and persecuted for challenging the idols of the time. Indeed, Romero had no patience with contemporary forms of idolatry, such as the elites’ obsession with wealth while the masses are exploited and massacred.

Romero did not mince words and his homilies point to a fundamental “either/or” Christians face as to the Kingdom they wish to serve: either the Kingdom of selfishness and death that is a hell on earth or the Kingdom of sharing, solidarity, and the search for justice. He claimed, “A church that suffers no persecution but enjoys the privileges and support of the things of the earth—beware!—is not the true church of Jesus Christ” (125). With humility and hope, Romero called for persecutors to repent of their crucifixion of the poor and join in their struggle.

Pelton’s book clearly does not attempt a critical assessment of Romero. Such encomia have their place. But only if they lead to the reader’s own serious confrontation with Romero’s example and our willingness to denounce unjust power and care for its victims. Romero is well-known for his dramatic insistence to the Salvadoran military that they were not obligated to harm the innocent. One wonders if there is a Romero-like bishop in our midst in the United States, one who would dare to say, in a sober imitatio Romero to the U.S. military: “In the name of God, I beg you, I order you to stop repressing and killing Iraqis!”

Thursday 20 March 2008

“All our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”
–Dorothy Day

The summer conventions of the Republicans and Democrats will be marked by inspiring rhetoric about their party’s commitment to democracy, the American people, and the noblest principles of statecraft. Each convention will have scenes of enthused self-congratulation, while allowing ample time for finding fault with the opponent, for his/her insufficient patriotism and moral fiber. Each party will pledge to win “the war on terror,” and claim that it has the best plan to ensure our security. Each candidate will proclaim a steadfast and proud commitment to be an unrivaled leader for democracy and freedom in the world. From summer till November, candidates for the Presidency will be disputing with each other, vying for dominance in the polls. Commentators will observe how this is what democracy looks like: two candidates and their parties, battling it out, debating issues that matter, all in the effort to represent and serve the American people.

Tune into the radio, read the front pages of the newspaper, watch television news reports, and the official story in the preceding paragraph will be apparent. I contend, however, that there is an operative story also going on, and this is what demands our attention and understanding. The elections are a spectacle drenched in imagery, superficiality, and propaganda. Little substantive debate on serious domestic and international issues will emerge, for a very good reason: Many subjects are simply off the table of discussion and debate.

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Thursday 20 March 2008

In the fall of 2000 I had a couple hundred pages of drafts for a book on Mev, but what I was lacking was a structure: how to tell this story? That September, I began reading a book by Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lighting. For years, I had read for insight and inspiration her 1986 book, Writing down the Bones. In Thunder and Lighting, Goldberg admitted that a book that provided a model for Writing down the Bones was Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Goldberg wrote, “Once I had a strong framework I could pour my wild mind into it, secure that something held it up.” [Thunder and Lightning, 22] About plot, she wrote, “It is what happens. It better be good, it better matter, it better not trail off or give up or wimp out. It better lodge in the heart. It better take up residence and live on in the hearer, the listener, the reader. It better be a living transmission.” [53]

Later that fall and winter, I happened to read Reinaldo Arena’s The Color of Summer. Well, I didn’t just “happen” to read it; I bought the novel after reading a review of it by Lee Siegel in the Sunday Times Book Review, especially the following paragraph: “At the center of this verbal whirlpool, spinning out stories, prayers, lists, tongue twisters, letters, taxonomies, lectures, vignettes, aphorisms, dreams, confessions, diatribes and farces, a manifestation of the real-life author is fragmented into three personalities: ‘I’m not a person, I’m two or three people at the same time. For you, I’m still Gabriel, for those who read what I write but can hardly ever publish, I’m Reinaldo, for the rest of my friends, with whom I escape from time to time in order to be totally myself, I’m Skunk in a Funk.’” There was something in that first sentence that stayed with me. Evidently, Arenas believed as a modus operandi a saying one of my dear friends, Sheri Hostetler, told me years before I read the Cuban: “Hold it all.”

Then, when I began to read Arena’s novel, the table of contents immediately seized my imagination, with examples of chapter titles like the following: A Prayer, A Letter, Some Unsettling Questions, Nouveaux Pensées de Pascal, ou Pensees d’Enfer, The Seven Wonders of Cuban Socialism, A Scream in the Night (Though It Was Bright as Day), and A Tongue Twister (1) through (29).

Soon thereafter, I began reading Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces. I devoured this book because, like Arenas’s The Color of Summer, it exemplified a style and structure that I began to see I could adapt for my second book: short, compressed, packed chapters, thematically linked over the course of the book by numbers, with ample illustrations, mixing autobiography, journalism, theology, history, and lyricism. Here’s one of Galeano’s chapters, The Night/1: “I can’t sleep. There is a woman stuck between my eyelids. I would tell her to get out if I could. But there is a woman stuck in my throat.” [92]

Northrup Frye, in his CBC lectures, The Educated Imagination, writes, “But Shakespeare’s plays weren’t produced by his experience: they were produced by his imagination, and the way to develop the imagination is to read a good book or two. As for us, we can’t speak or think or comprehend even our own experience except within the limits of our own power over words, and those limits have been established for us by our great writers.”

Thus, by the spring 2001, the examples of Arenas and Galeano helped me to comprehend and structure my experiences with and after Mev.

By summer, the draft with its new-found structure was done.

From George Steiner, Language and Silence: “In that great discourse with the living dead which we call reading, our role is not a passive one….A great poem, a classic novel, press in upon us; they assail and occupy the strong places of our consciousness…. To read well is to take great risks. It is to make vulnerable our identity, our self-possession.”