(What do these people have in common? I interviewed them recently. (From Left to right: Lisa Brenninkmeyer, John Waters, and Frank Simmonds)
So I realized the other day that should say something about what appears to be my radio silence on my blog. Especially because it is a radio silence. Lately, I've been focusing my creative energy on a show I'm doing for RadioMaria. It's called Conversion Keeps Happening, and basically, I interview converts and cajole them into telling their stories and try to ask them questions that show how their lives are relevant to ours.
I was just trying to get your attention with that title
you didn’t really
think I was going to share something wise and deep with you, did you? And about
fashion? C’mon, now.
I tried to develop this post into something truly useful—you
know, like the Top Ten List of Clothing Every Mom Should Own and so forth. But
I had to let it go because I was too busy and too uncreative and didn’t want to
waste your precious time with “filler” clothing items. But I thus have reduced
it to easy reading so you can enjoy those Mother’s Day more mimosas without the
distractions of lengthy reading.
The Single-Most Overrated Wardrobe Item for Moms:
The crisp white shirt.
Apologies to Anna Wintour. I love the idea of the crisp white shirt. Hell, I
even have several “white” shirts hanging up in my closet (though none were
purchased recently—my learning curve is finally kicking in). The problem is
generally to be found in the whole “crisp” and “white” juxtaposition. For a
white shirt to look that good, it needs to be really white. And keep a white
shirt really white is not so easy in mom life. There are so many things that can happen—spit up,
drool, baby food, Italian or Indian food, spilling the long-awaited glass of
red wine on yourself in sleep-deprived sloppiness. Keeping that shirt white
just can’t be a priority item for most moms. And then there is the whole crisp
part. Even when you’ve done your damnedest and the shirt is actually,
miraculously, white, there is this crisp thing. That involves an iron, and your
using said iron--a very hot object inevitably plugged into a socket with some
level of precariousness--to continuously press said white shirt until it is
crisp.
Need I say more?
The Single Most Underappreciated Wardrobe Item for Moms:
The patterned jersey
dress. Hell, the patterned anything, really.
Being from New York City, black has always been the go-to
color for wardrobe staples (though, truth be told, I’m a color girl at heart
and never fully embraced black the way most of my friends did). But when I became a mother I discovered the deep
dark side of black. As in, it shows an awful lot. Especially spit up. And lint.
And dog hair. But lighter colors have their downside, too (see my comments on
the crisp white shirt. Light, non-white, colors can be even worse since you
cannot bleach them). Enter the patterned article of clothing. When there’s a
pattern, it is *way* more difficult to notice spots of any sort. Especially if
it’s a pattern that involves both light and dark colors. But the patterned
jersey dress is like heaven on earth. If you don’t usually wear dresses, let me
recommend them. Amazingly, they look like you’ve made more effort when you’ve
actually made less. As in: no coordinating top and bottom. No figuring out
appropriate what underwear looks appropriate with the bottom you’ve chosen. It’s
true that nursing moms will need a wrap option. But the jersey dress is really a very
happy-making choice when it comes to the style + comfort equation. It feels
like you’re wearing sweatpants, but it’s a dress. And if it’s patterned, it
will forgive a seemingly endless number of mishaps. What more can you ask for? (OK, telepathy is
not yet available through clothing).
If you have any interest in late-night TV or comedy or SNL
or just good (mostly) clean fun, you
probably know that Jimmy Fallon took over the Tonight Show from Jay Leno
recently (February 17, to be exact). There was some fanfare and, for a few days
after his opening night, there was some particular interest in Catholic
circles, stemming from the fact that Jimmy Fallon was raised Catholic, went to
Catholic schools (included his college experience at St. Rose where he majored
in Communications before dropping out), and (at least according to his
interview with Teri Gross), tried going back to church while he was out in LA
but got discouraged by what he saw there.
(no this video has nothing to do with post. I just like it.)
Teri Gross is a great interviewer and has a wonderfully wide
repertoire and rapport with her guests. But I felt like she couldn’t quite get
what Jimmy Fallon was saying in his interview—there is a real (albeit
surprising) connection between what he does and being a priest. If you look at
Fallon’s comments, he is letting Teri lead him to calling himself the
priest-performer at church, but what he relates most to is the altar boy role. He
loved the way people felt at the end of mass. Either way, what it gets at (and
which Teri, understandably, didn’t seem to get) is the unusual nature of the
priest’s role: he’s central to the mass, he is the principal agent, but the
mass is not really about him: it’s about Someone Else. Fallon is very much like
this as the Tonight Show’s host: he’s funny, but he doesn’t really make the
show about him. This was particularly obvious on his opening night of the
Tonight Show, where there was a lot of very sincere thanking on Fallon’s part
and a sort of glad surprise that he had gotten to this place. Fallon is funny, but
he’s not that witty. He’s a great comic actor and imitator, but he’s not a
verbal jabber. There is a gentleness, a
charity in his dealings that makes the show fun: he wants people to feel good
at the end of a show, just like he saw people feeling good after going to
church. If I were a celebrity, that would be very appealing to me: a show where
I get to have fun and look good to boot. What’s not to like? Jimmy’s years spent as an altar boy must
serve him well: years mirroring the priest at mass, even imitating him, but not
really mocking him. That’s obvious in the funny but somewhat wistful nature of
Fallon’s remarks to Teri Gross, and it’s exactly what makes him such a great
host: he seems to genuinely like and be excited by the people on his show.
There is a warmth and humility and generosity of spirit that in his approach
that might seem just naïve if he weren’t such a natural. He’s not there to
bring them down, he’s there to lift them up. And if he gets to go along for the
ride, that’s even better. No wonder he
is so good at it.
Here is the “Catholic” portion of Fallon’s interview on NPR
in 2010 with Teri Gross. The entire transcript is available at: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=136462013
GROSS: So you went to Catholic school when you were young.
Mr. FALLON: Oh yeah.
GROSS: Did you have..
Mr. FALLON: I wanted to be a priest.
GROSS: Did you really?
Mr. FALLON: Yeah. I loved it.
GROSS: Why?
Mr. FALLON: I just, I loved the church. I loved the idea of it.
I loved the smell of the incense. I loved the feeling you get when you left
church. I loved like how this priest can make people feel this good. I just
thought it was, I loved the whole idea of it. My grandfather was very
religious, so I used to go to mass with him at like 6:45 in the morning serve
mass and then you made money too if you did weddings and funerals. They'd give
you, you'd get like five bucks. And so I go okay, I can make money too. I go
this could be a good deal for me. I thought I had the calling.
GROSS: Do you think part of that calling was really show
business? 'Cause like the priest is the performer at church.
Mr. FALLON: Yeah. You know what - I really Terry, I'm, I
recently thought about this. Again, I've never been to therapy but I guess that
would be, it's being on stage. It's my first experience on stage is as an altar
boy. You're on stage next to the priest, I'm a co-star.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FALLON: I'm, I've got...
GROSS: Also starring Jimmy Fallon.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FALLON: Yeah, I have no lines but I ring bells. I ring bells
and I swing the incense around. But it was my - and you know, you are
performing. You enter through a curtain, you exit through the, I mean you're
backstage. I mean have you ever seen backstage behind an altar? It's kind of
fascinating.
GROSS: Right.
Mr. FALLON: So I think it was, I think it was my first taste of
show business and I think - or acting or something.
GROSS: And there are comparisons, I think, between a theater and
a church. There are just kind of places that are separated from outside
reality.
Mr. FALLON: Yeah. And I remember I had a hard time keeping a
straight face at church as well.
GROSS: Did you?
Mr. FALLON: Which - yeah...
GROSS: Did you do imitations of the priest?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FALLON: Oh, of course. Yeah. I used to do Father McFadden
all the time. He's the fastest talking priest ever. He's be like...
(Soundbite of mumbling)
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FALLON: And then you leave and you go, that - what was that?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FALLON: That guy's the best. I mean that was church? Sign me
up. I'll do church I'll do it 10 times a day if that's church. He was great.
GROSS: Do you still go to church?
Mr. FALLON: I don't go to - I tried to go back. When I was out
in L.A. and I was like kind of struggling for a bit I went to church for a
while, but it's kind of, it's gotten gigantic now for me. It's like too,
there's a band. There's a band there now and you got to, you have to hold hands
with people through the whole mass now, and I don't like doing that. You know,
I mean it used to be the shaking hands piece was the only time you touched each
other.
GROSS: Mm-hmm.
Mr. FALLON: Now I'm holding now I'm lifting people. Like Simba.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FALLON: I'm holding them (Singing) ha nah hey nah ho.
(Speaking) I'm I'm doing too much. I don't want - there's
Frisbees being thrown, there's beach balls going around, people waving
lighters, and I go this is too much for me. I want the old way. I want to hang
out with the, you know, with the nuns, you know, that was my favorite type of
mass, and the Grotto and just like straight up, just mass-mass.
(Embarrassingly, it took this First Things piece to make me realize I'd never posted this blog entry...But honest, I was thinking about that piece of music in mid-February, though not as thoughtfully as Stephen Webb).
A few years ago, I happened to be sitting next to my
favorite Catholic Communist at a university event. One of the speakers was a
young woman who shared her experience doing service work in Central America and
noted how very, very lucky she felt when she got home and got in her hot
shower—a sharp contrast with the reality of the people she’d met. My friend and
I looked at each other and sighed --and then had a vigorous discussion about
the problem with her attitude. Because it is the thing we both hate about
service work. To be clear: I think service work is a good thing; even a great
thing. I’d dare say even a necessary
thing. Many people do it beautifully and sincerely. But too often, it is
undertaken or encouraged in a spirit that is antithetical to the task: It
easily becomes a sort of Post-Modern neocolonialism. Oh, look at these poor
people! They have nothing. We, on the other hand, are fat and rich and happy.
We will go and help these poor people with all our money and talents: they will
learn from us. And we will remember how good we have it back home when we
return. A win-win: how good we are, and enlightened, too! At the end, we get to
come home and live our regular lives, feeling even more smug and
self-contented. (Though this recent post really took down the voluntourism
phenomenon, in a pretty rough way: http://pippabiddle.com/2014/02/18/the-problem-with-little-white-girls-and-boys/.
She’s on to something, though I’d say Pippa misses something, too).
Another story: When
I was living at home about fifteen years ago, my father got hold of a CD. It’s
Gavin Bryars’ recording of “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” and it features a
recording of a homeless man singing that line repeatedly to instrumentation. It
moves me to sobbing tears every time I listen to it. Music has a power to touch
the soul that is impossible to explain, and I won’t try to penetrate its
mystery fully. But I know that part of what moved me was the fact of this poor
homeless man singing this song of praise and gratitude—a praise and gratitude
that is and was much rarer to find coming out of my lips. This man wasn’t
grateful for his home or his clothes or his accomplishments or his talents. His
gratitude was more elemental: he was grateful for his very being.
This gets to the heart of what service truly is: something I
do because I need it. Selfish me, I need to be reminded of my need to give myself by giving of
myself. I need to see people who are
truly needy and aren’t spending all day faking it so I can remember that I’m needy. Then, I get a chance to understand who I
really am. And my experience with service can become solidarity,
self-realization, and true self-giving, rather than naïve and patronizing work
which may or may not really help the people I set out to serve. The more deeply I realize my need, the more I
can give myself truly.
The most extreme and beautiful case of this awareness is a
place in Kampala, where women afflicted with AIDS live with a tremendous hope:
a hope that is visible in their approach to life. I learned that these women,
sick with HIV and poor themselves, had taken on extra work to make money to
send to the Katrina Victims. And I thought, how lucky these women are! To see
the world through the lens of their own need and their own gratitude without
polluting influences. I’d like to go there and learn to live like that. Because it’s what I need.
Here’s the trailer to a documentary made on the life and
hope of these women in Kampala: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfhAGscOam0
Since what a man seeks in his pleasures is that they should be infinite, and no one would ever give up hope of attaining that infinity, you see why all pleasures end in disgust. It is nature's device for tearing us away from them. (Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living)
The immediate distinction Hoffman makes between happiness and pleasure reminded me of Pavese.
What Hoffman says about acting also echoes Terence's great quote, "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", ("I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.") The greatness of Hoffman's acting seems to come from this tremendous inner humanity and willingness to self-identify with whatever is human, without holding back any of himself. R.I.P.
“Love consists of not looking each other in the eye, but of looking outwardly
in the same direction.”
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Like many people, I first read Seth Adam Smith’s “Marriage
isn’t for you” when it went viral last fall.Every so often, it pops up again as another friend discovers it and
passes it on, admiringly.Every time the
piece surfaces I look a little longer at the comments. Some of the feedback is
surprisingly negative (though I guess that shouldn’t surprise; there are haters
for everything on the Internet it seems—I’m
sure there’s someone out there yelling “Puppies—Boo!!!”
on some site somewhere). But the piece is so positive, so generous, so….sweet
that I haven’t wanted to criticize without thinking things through. It’s taken
me a while to put my finger on the problem as I see it.
Smith’s piece is great because it starts from a selfish
point of view: Smith worries about his own marital satisfaction and hopes his
wife will make him happy—but thanks to his dad’s advice and his wife’s actions,
he realizes that’s not what marriage is about. He concludes that it’s about the
person you marry and her (or his) happiness, that it’s about family, “It’s
about others….”I admire his honestly
and humility in telling his story. I love the way he stresses the kind and
gentle way his wife treated him and the realization and transformation it
prompted in him—and I think he’s totally
right that a loving response often transforms a hardening heart.
But here’s the
problem: you can’t make someone else happy. No, really, you can’t. When you
are first in love you think you can because of the intensely blissful feelings
of new love. But even those feelings aren’t full happiness. And your happiness
is bigger than any person—no matter how spectacularly wonderful and
well-matched—could possibly fill.
Smith has been married only a year and a half, and I’ve been
married for twelve and a half. He has no kids (yet, anyway); I have five.But I’m not saying this because
I’m old and cynical and tired. I’m saying it because I want love and openness
and goodness like his to last and deepen. I worry
that thinking you can make someone else happy will become just as big a trap as
the focus on your own happiness. Worrying only about your own satisfaction
isn’t good, but it’s dangerous to think you’re going to make someone else
happy. Growing up, my mom would occasionally tell me, “It’s not your job to
make your parents happy.” My grandmother had been the clear favorite in her
family, and had labored under the burden of that for many years, believing
that—as the favorite—it was also her job to do what her parents wanted and
“make them happy.” I know that’s a parent-child relationship, but similar
things can happen to married people.You
start doing all the things you think should
make your spouse happy. You put their needs before yours. And then if they
aren’t satisfied, you get angry. “Why the heck isn’t s/he happy? With all I do
for him/her?” Or, alternately you get depressed, “What’s wrong with me?”
We can, on the other hand, help each other find happiness. We can accompany each other on this long
road; we can love each other madly, passionately, truly. We can walk together,
sustaining each other, encouraging each
other, making the journey much more fun--but we can’t be the road. That way
lies madness, not happiness.
In the words of Rainer Maria Rilke:
“Here is the paradox of the love between man and woman: two
infinites meet two limits: two infinite needs to be loved find two fragile and
limited capacities to love. Only within the horizon of a greater Love will they
not devour themselves in pretension, nor give up, but walk together towards
that fullness of which the other is a sign.”
A year ago today, my brother Dan—who’s in the seminary—got a
phone call very early in the morning.
You see, he was working in a cardinal’s office at the time. “Forgive us for
calling so early,” the caller said, “but it’s not every day that a pope
resigns!” “What?!?!?” my brother sputtered.
We all know what that was about, though at this point in
time, the singularity of Benedict’s
resignation is pretty deeply buried under the media reporting on Pope Francis.
I’ve been wanting to write a post on Pope Francis for a while. He’s blowing me away –and killing me at the
same time (this kind of killing:http://catholicstand.com/pope-francis-is-killing-me/).
I love Pope Francis, and I am deeply inspired by him.
But anyone paying any attention knows that he is usually
contrasted sharply with his predecessor.
Naturally—the narrative is much more
interesting that way. Though I recently saw a great little video on Patheos,
comparing the two men and suggesting that they exemplify two different
traditions within the Church (the priestly and the prophetic respectively : http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2014/02/do-the-pope-benedict-and-francis-clash.html), the
spin is not usually so positive.
Today, Pope Francis asked that we pray for former Pope
Benedict--which seems like a good moment to note some of the surprising
similarities between the two men. Most particularly, their humility. I remember when Benedict was first elected.
Initially, people were all over him, complaining about him being “God’s Rottweiler”
and all that. What was the first encyclical he issued? Deus Caritas Est. All about God’s love and charity, where he even addressed erotic desire, venturing rather substantially into the eros category, and defended erotic love
against some heavy-weight detractors in the Christian tradition--and lingered significantly on social concerns as well. (Note that my
understanding of this is wholly indebted to brilliant theologian friends and
former colleagues. I read papal encyclicals with lots of help). The historical revisionists are already out there
trying to dismantle Benedict’s legacy, but those of us who remember his pontificate
know better. The man was orthodox, yes. But his orthodoxy already was pushing
the limits. He was so confident in his tradition, and so prayerfully certain of
his relationship with Christ, that he did deeply radical things. Like
resigning. I mean, really, who does that?Benedict was not a splashy kind of guy,
and so his dramatic gesturesget
dismissed easily. But let’s remember, this was a man who bucked centuries of
tradition to resign. Yes, yes, now that
we look back we can cite historical precedent and comments that Benedict had
made andin hindsight it’s
understandable and acceptable and what have you-- but it is and was a deeply radical gesture. Benedict was orthodox—but radically so. And so is Francis
(pace Rolling Stone). But while the
emphasis during Benedict’s pontificate was on the orthodox, with Francis it’s
on the radical part of the equation.
Which brings me to what inspires me so much in both popes:
their humility and boldness in listening to the promptings of the Spirit. And man, do they
listen! Benedict, with his entirely
unexpected decision, opened the way for Francis. So to those who would reject
Benedict, I would like to recall that without him there would be no Francis.
And for those who are having a hard time with Francis, it was Benedict’s decision
that made this happen. If we have issues, I think we need to take it straight
to the top.For my part, I feel
radically blessed in both men. And excited about where the Spirit will take us
from here.
