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The Wilbur Award: Excellent Journalism, Seen Several Ways

It has been said on good authority that you can't serve two masters.    But the Wilbur Awards, presented in New York the other night, suggest otherwise – at least when it comes to the coverage of Pope Francis and his United States visit.

The Wilbur Awards are presented annually by the Religious Communicators Council (founded 1929) to recognize “excellence in communicating religious issues, values and themes in the public media.”    This year the Awards recognized work in twenty-one categories, ranging from an Associated Press story on the Chinese government's crackdown on the public display of crosses to the OWN network's Belief series to a Slate story about a evangelical creationist's change of mind about evolution.  

Three of the awards recognized coverage of Pope Francis: a group of NPR reports about his visit to the U.S. and Cuba; a Religion Dispatches series of posts about Francis's efforts on ecology and climate – and my profile of Francis for Vanity Fair.

That's what put the “two masters” insight in mind.    My professional training, such as it is, was in long-form journalism, and from the beginning it was my wish (and then my aim, and then my strategy) to write articles dealing with religion that would deliver all the satisfactions of the long-form magazine journalism I grew up reading, and would do so in ways that represented religious perspectives credibly, in all their complexity and depth.    

I worked at this for The New Republic, and Lingua Franca, and the Times Magazine, and the Atlantic. Lately I've had the opportunity to do such work for Vanity Fair; and when it came time to undertake a profile of Pope Francis, the two (master) editors I work with there – David Friend, who assigned and edited the piece, and also Cullen Murphy – let me follow a direction I found promising and write a piece in which I would see Pope Francis from multiple  perspectives: face to face; from the point of view of a pilgrim; through his friends and associates; in history and in the Jesuit milieu; in his role as pastor to the people of Rome, and as a spiritual leader initiating a Year of Mercy.

That the piece received a Wilbur Award suggests that it worked for people who know religious perspectives as well as for Vanity Fair and its diverse readers.    

It was an honor to be present at the banquet the other night and receive the award – and to meet some of the several dozen other journalists who have managed to serve two masters in their own ways.

The photograph shows an image from Pope Francis’s new Instagram account.   

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From “Father” to “My God”

      Thanks be for short, tightly written books – books that can be read in a day or two, in a couple of sittings, as the occasion demands.

James Martin's Seven Last Words is such a book.  It emerged out of a set of reflections on the “seven last words of Christ” that Fr. Martin – the well-known Jesuit priest and editor-at-large of America – delivered at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York during Holy Week a couple of years ago.   The “seven last words” devotion emphasizes the extraordinary concision of the Gospel texts, and Fr. Martin responds with a like concision, drawing out of those last words seven insights into aspects of human experience that Jesus understood – understands – because he went through them himself.

I was struck especially by a passage, rooted in the work of the great scripture scholar Raymond Brown, S.S., where Fr. Martin focuses on a single pair of words, and on the way Jesus's turning away from the one word and toward the other suggests the profound abandonment he felt on the cross:

“When Jesus speaks to the Father in the garden, he says, `Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me . . .' Abba is a familiar way of speaking, something like saying, `Dad.'  (Both times I have visited Jerusalem on pilgrimage, I have seen, in the crowded city streets, young children running up to catch up with their fathers shouting, `Abba! Abba!'

“But on the cross, when Jesus says, `My God, my God,' he uses the Aramaic word Eloi (or the Hebrew Eli, depending on the Gospel).   That's a more formal way of speaking to God.   The shift from the familiar Abba in the garden to the more formal Eloi on the cross is heartbreaking.  Jesus's feeling of distance, then, reveals itself not only in the scream and not only in the line of the psalm that he utters,  but also in the word Eloi.”

It really is heartbreaking.  “Abandonment” is the word Fr. Martin and many others use to characterize what Jesus must have feel on the cross just then.  But the shift from one name to the other suggests a more precise emotion.   Just then, Jesus feels “estranged” from his father – feels like a stranger to him.  

The illustration is “The Black Crucifixion” (1963), by Fritz Eichenberg.   

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In Chicago: The American Pilgrimage Project

     A freshly retired pastor who works with the survivors of people killed in gang violence; two men exploring the confluence of Catholic spirituality and the spirituality of the men's movement; the founder of an innovative network of Jesuit high schools for students of severely limited financial means; a Christian theologian and the Muslim chaplain at DePaul, the nation's largest Catholic university; a woman, once homeless, who underwent an Ignatian-style retreat with a woman who has become a retreat master . . .

These are some of the people who told their stories in conversation as the American Pilgrimage Project went to Chicago for two days last week.  They are Susan Johnson; Joe Durepos and Tom McGrath; Fr. John P. Foley; Scott Alexander and Abdul-Malik Ryan; Amanda Asque and Renate Reichs . . .

And that was just day one, held in the StoryCorps booth in the Chicago Cultural Center – a grand building, once the city's public library, at the corner of Michigan and Washington.  

The American Pilgrimage Project is a Georgetown partnership with StoryCorps – the acclaimed Brooklyn-based documentary outfit – devoted to gathering, archiving, and sharing everyday Americans' stories of the ways their religious beliefs have shaped their lives at crucial moments.   The Project will go to Charleston, West Virginia, and to Baltimore before returning to Chicago in May.  

For day two in Chicago, we were hosted by the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in its gorgeous building on Michigan Avenue.  The “fit” between the American Pilgrimage Project and Spertus is such that Spertus's Mark Akgulian and I found ourselves discussing the prospect of holding another day of conversations at the Institute during the May visit.  

I spent all day Friday there, and it was really something to sit in one of the Institute's media centers and see the people come in to tell their stories:

Peter Bensinger, a Spertus trustee, and CEO Hal Lewis; Pat Murphy and JoAnn Persch, Sisters of Charity – and friends for sixty years – who lead a weekly vigil for immigrants without documents who are facing deportation; Mark Vargas and Jazmin Fermin, graduates of Cristo Rey – that Jesuit high school network; Bill Creed and Marty Kelliher – partners an Ignatian retreat designed for people struggling with homelessness or addiction; Olga Weiss, a Holocaust survivor, and Arielle Weininger, a curator at Spertus; Rev. Neichelle Guidry, a prominent young African-American pastor, and Sarah Thompson, director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, who does strategic non-violent intervention in areas of lethal conflict and structural violence.  

A first principle of the StoryCorps approach is that the conversation “booth” is protected space, with only a StoryCorps facilitator present alongside the conversation partners.  So I had the strange experience of meeting all those amazing people and learning more about them without actually getting to hear the stories they told at the microphones.

I'll hear those stories digitally in the coming days – and then share them through StoryCorps, the Berkley Center website, and other media.

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Waiting, and Asking Why

       I haven't posted a piece of writing to this site in a while, in a little more than three weeks to be precise, and I have been asking myself why.

Asking why because I didn't make any decision to stop writing and posting – just found that I wasn't doing it.

Asking why because the site, in my view, has been a focal point for my writing these past three years.   Sure, there are questions about who is reading it and how, and about whether the ubiquity of Twitter as the conduit to everything else means you might as well tweet your thoughts instead of essaying them.  (The news that Twitter is questioning its own effectiveness suggests that these questions go with the digital territory.)

Asking why because, without fail, I've enjoyed writing and posting pieces to the site, and because by now the mental act is habitual, so that short essays take shape in my mind without any effort on my part.  This morning, for example, obituaries on successive days for George Martin and Robert Palladino – one the Beatles' producer, the other a Trappist calligrapher whose love of beautiful typography was passed on to his student Steve Jobs – prompted a mental mini-essay on the unlikelihood of these two men becoming major figures in the confluence of the arts and technology, an essay that (had I written it) would also have taken into account Google's home page today, which is dedicated to the theramin, one of the first and most original electric musical instruments.

Asking why because all signs have been that the site fits aptly into the community of thought and feeling that is Georgetown.

So: why?  I didn't have an answer until I looked at the date of my post recent – now not so recent – post, about a Faith & Culture conversation with David Gregory.  

It was Tuesday, February 9.  It was Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday.

In the religion-and-culture field, where I till the soil from time to time, it's an article of faith that the liturgical calendar is something like a substratum to the ordinary calendar, and that the movement from Annunciation to Christmas and Epiphany to Ash Wednesday to Palm Sunday and Easter to Pentecost and on into ordinary time is a pattern natural to human experience.

I am generally suspicious of such a view.  It's too easy, too smug; it takes as givens the patterns that must be reinstilled, and then renewed and reinterpreted -- reinvented -- from one generation to the next.

And yet there it is: as the season of self-emptying and purgation began, I instinctive set aside one of my self-preoccupations without understanding why.

Following Lutheran custom, during Lent J.S. Bach led no “figured music” in the churches where he worked.  One year, he seized the opportunity – seven weeks without a need to compose fresh music for each Sunday – to compose the St. John Passion, truly an amazing Lenten feat.

I wish I could say I have been painting my masterpiece.  I haven't, quite.  But I have been taking a step in that direction – so I hope, anyway.  

Lewis Hyde in The Gift characterizes the life of an artist in terms of two impulses, or modes, which succeed each other, going in and out of phase: the receptive mode, in which the artist waits to receive the gift of inspiration, and the making mode, in which the artist makes art as “the gift that is given back.”

Usually we think of Advent as the time of waiting, of preparation for the reception of a gift.  But of course the notion of receptive preparation for a gift fits the Lenten season aptly, too – and helps to clarify the purposes of silence and renunciation and reflection that we associate with Lent.  

I hope I am in receptive mode, and not just saying so.  In any case, to see the season in this way, to feel it in this way, has been a gift in itself.

The photograph shows the Moon over Lazio: my home page these past few weeks.    

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Another Side of David Gregory

Today David Gregory is in New Hampshire, naturally: as NBC's chief White House correspondent during George W. Bush's administration, and then as host of Meet the Press, he gained an up-close knowledge of the presidency such as few people (even people in Washington) possess, and he is putting it to use in election-year commentary for Fox and CNN.

The other day Gregory was in Riggs Library at Georgetown, taking part in our Faith & Culture conversation series.  He's the author, this past year, of How's Your Faith? – a book that is as candid an account of a public figure's religious journey as any I've read lately, and a book that gives insight into the whys and wherefores of his deepening Jewish faith.  

He told us about his study group of brilliant Jewish journalists (Jeffrey Goldberg, David Brooks, and Franklin Foer, among others); the creative form of Sabbath observance in his household (youth sports schedules are consulted; a martini is involved); the role of Psalm 27 in his spiritual journey – and especially about his experience of the presence of God, an experience that seldom figures into discussions of Jewish identity and affinity and is rarely described with the term “faith.”  

He was so steadily on point that, there on stage in conversation with him, I forgot for a moment that he's not an accredited expert in this stuff – that his world-class achievements are in political journalism.

And that was the appeal of the conversation.   His presence wasn't inevitable, or professionally apt: he was opening up an aspect of his adult life that many of us wouldn't have known about otherwise.

Introducing Gregory, I noted that he was the series' first Jewish guest, our first journalist, and our first author to take his book title from a remark made to him by the president of the United States.  But he was a first in this way, too: our first guest whose religious commitment isn't front and center in his public life – but is what Flannery O'Connor called a “dimension added.”

Now the door is open for other such guests to tell us about the added dimension.    

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The Lesson of “Silence”: No Humility Without Humiliation

     Shusaku Endo's novel Silence is one of the great contemporary novels about religious faith, and one that seems more complex and profound – at the level of Dostoevsky – each time I reread it.   The novel tells the story of three Jesuit missionaries in 17th century Japan, and of the ways they are encouraged, through torture and other forms of violence, to apostasize – to renounce their faith by defacing an image of Christ prepared for the express purpose of inducing apostasy.  

I've taught the novel the past three years at Georgetown, each time in anticipation of Martin Scorsese's film adaptation, which has been in the pipeline for years.  Well, this year the movie is imminent: it is due to have its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.    The three Jesuits are played by Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield, and Adam Driver.   From Taken and Spider-Man and Star Wars to Silence: here they are action heroes of a very different kind.  

This year – by coincidence – I taught the book during Georgetown’s Jesuit Heritage Week, whereby the university affirms its Jesuit identity and expresses it through a dozen events, ranging from lectures to evening prayer to a sportive Jesuit Trivia contest in the Bulldog Tavern.  There could be no better context for the novel, for it represents the Jesuit sensibility past and present: the sensibility of the missionaries in the novel, and the sensibility of Shusaku Endo – given an honorary degree by Georgetown in 1987 – who tells their story with maximum attention to its paradoxes: God's seeming silence in response to human violence, and the anguish felt by the apostate, who is urged to humiliate Christ but who feels the act as a personal humiliation.  

As it happened, the aptest context for the novel this week came from a certain Jesuit in Rome.  Pope Francis, speaking on the story of King David in a morning homily at the Casa Santa Marta, explained that David's early humiliation was a precondition of his leadership of the people of Israel.  His remark could be a gloss on Silence:

Humility . . . can only get into the heart via humiliation. There is no humility without humiliation, and if you are not able to put up with some humiliations in your life, you are not humble.

 The only way to humility is through humiliation. David’s destiny, which is holiness, comes through humiliation. The destiny of that holiness which God gives to his children, gives to the Church, comes through the humiliation of his Son, who allows himself to be insulted, who allows himself to be placed on the cross - unjustly ... And this Son of God who humbles himself, this is the way of holiness. And David, through his behavior, prophesizes  this humiliation of Jesus.

“Humility cannot be achieved without humiliation.”  It's “mathematical,” Francis says.   I suppose it is, right down to the root the two words share.  And yet the point strikes me as profoundly countercultural – and it opens a whole other area of insight into Shusaku Endo's extraordinary novel.    

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Through Long-Game Journalism, a Change Comes

     One December evening close to twenty years ago, Lenora and I were en route to the Harper's Christmas party, at the Housing Works bookstore on Crosby Street, and Jennifer Gonnerman came with us.  One reason was that Jen, who was reporting on prisons for the Village Voice, had glimpsed an opportunity to write about Rikers Island, the offshore New York holding facility for accused men awaiting trial – a place proverbially off limits to journalists -- and she hoped to turn the access into a prominent story, say, for Harper's, about the abuses of human rights at the Rikers Island penal colony.

That story didn't run in Harper's (it ran in the Voice), and Gonnerman stayed with the story afterward.   Over the next twelve years, as she reported and wrote a series of stories about New York's onerous sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenders; and wrote Life on the Outside, a National Book Award-nominated book about Elaine Barrett, a woman so sentenced; and wrote a series of stylistically groundbreaking stories about “lives out the outside” of financial-boomtown New York – all through this, she kept her eye on the story of Rikers Island.  

She told a Rikers story last year in The New Yorker, where she is now a staff writer.   It was the story of Kalief Browder, a teenager accused of stealing a backpack and then forced to endure a frankly unendurable series of trial delays, physical abuses, and stints in solitary confinement on Rikers Island, all because he refused to plead guilty to a minor crime he maintained he didn't do.  

The story came out, to extraordinary effect.   The abuses at Rikers Island, now in the bright light of The New Yorker, were condemned by New York's mayor and other politicians.    

Then Browder – finally out of Rikers and at home in the Bronx  – committed suicide.  Even free and back with his family, he was damaged and haunted by the torture (there is no other word for it) of his periods of solitary confinement.

There is no happy ending to such a story.   There cannot be.   But out of such a story change can come; and change came this week when the Justice Department banned the practice of solitary confinement of juveniles in the federal prison system.   President Obama himself explained the ban in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, and he began by telling the story of Kalief Browder – which he doubtless read in The New Yorker.   

The president who likes to play the long game did so on solitary confinement, prompted by Jennifer Gonnerman, the journalist who plays the long game better than any other I know.   For her part, she wrote a piece attributing the power of the story to the training she got from James Ridgeway and others in an older generation of reporters on abuse in government.   

“What it's all about,” a friend etched above the link to Obama's opinion piece when he sent it along.  Truly, this is what long-form journalism of a certain kind ought to be all about: changing people's lives and society for the better by telling stories of justice and its violation.      

It's a challenge to the rest of us – I feel it as a challenge, at any rate – to do more, and do better, with our own writing.  

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Will Mike Bloomberg Walk Through the Door Bernie Sanders Opened?

     Over the weekend Michael Bloomberg's people floated a trial balloon in the form of a long  New York Times piece setting out the efforts he is making to explore an independent candidacy for president.

If the piece's opaque sourcing and strategically placed quotes from Ed Rendell – a longtime Clinton supporter who favors a Bloomberg candidacy – didn't mark it as a Bloomberg-prompted effort, something else did.   The piece passed without a mention over the idea (invariably mentioned in connection with the prospect of a Bloomberg run in 2008) that Bloomberg's identity as a self-described divorced Jewish New Yorker is an obstacle to him in national politics.

It's as if with Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish and speaks in a distinct Brooklyn accent, polling strongly in Iowa and New Hampshire, somebody in Bloomberg’s office said: Hey, maybe Sanders has shown that at long last it's a non-issue.  

In the scenario set out in the Times, Bloomberg would be prompted to enter the race if Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

Were that to happen, and were Bloomberg to enter the presidential campaign, it would unfold in a way out of a Michel Houllebecq novel. You'd have not one but two Jewish candidates (the Democrat Sanders and the independent Bloomberg) running against a Latino evangelical (Ted Cruz) and a nominal Christian (Donald Trump) who has proposed a ban on Muslim immigrants to the United States.   You'd have a New York billionaire real estate titan running against a New York billionaire media titan who is (as Seth Lipsky points out in Ha'aretz) ten times as rich.   You'd have a Democratic-minded Jewish independent who champions the money culture running against an independent-minded Jewish Democrat who excoriates the money culture.  

Which would be more historic: the first female president, or the first Jewish president?  It's hard to say.   But it can be said that the prospect of the two Jewish presidential candidates stepping up to oppose the frank anti-Muslim, anti-minority rhetoric of Trump's campaign is very, very appealing.

Here (via Ha'aretz) is Bloomberg speaking on a New York City subway platform in 2008:

“To those who are wailing against immigration, to those politicians who, all of a sudden, have embraced xenophobia, I say: open your eyes,” the mayor said. “Take a look behind me. This is what makes America great. This is New York City. This is freedom. This is compassion, and democracy, and opportunity.”

The photograph shows Michael Bloomberg leaving the White House after meeting President Obama about gun control in 2013. 

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Lawrence Joseph, Surging

     In a recent piece on Commonweal's website, Anthony Domestico proposed that the work of the New York poet Lawrence Joseph “bridges the gap between two very different conceptions of modern poetry: the meditative, self-interrogating poetry of Stevens and the fractured, history-interrogating poetry of Pound.”

The piece is apt and instructive; in 1500 words, a third of them words from Joseph's own poetry and prose, Domestico sketches the running conflict between Team Stevens and Team Pound – a key divide in contemporary poetry – and plausibly presents Joseph as a poet who belongs prominently to both.

It's a measure of the strength of Joseph's poetry that it can bear the weight of such an analysis; and it's a further measure that the poetry can suggest to me a wholly different pair of terms and seems to reconcile those as well – the poetry of modern cities, pulsing with the yearnings and ill-gotten gains of their large populations, and the poetry of inwardness we associate with religious devotion, the poet as a person intentionally set apart from the crowd.  

Joseph's poem “A Fable,” in the current New Yorker, passes movingly from one to the other.   The first part of the poem is a streetscape, data and capital surging through the crooked streets of old New York.   The second part, announcing the whole as a fable, is (like many New Yorker poems) a work of art about art – but it calls out the artistry of the first part, the streets gathering “the light in majestic degrees.”

For several years now Joseph has been constructing an extraordinary new book poem by poem – poems published in Granta, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Commonweal right now is as well stocked with writers attuned to literature as at any time in its history: Domestico, Matthew Sitman, and Matthew Boudway, joining Celia Wren and Rand Richards Cooper.  

It suggests that the hoped-for state of things is actual just now -- that great poetry and great criticism are calling one another forth.

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Martin Luther King, Trending Downward?

This year Google searches for “black lives matter” surpassed searches for “civil rights movement.”

That factoid, posted on screen during Sunday's debate among the Democratic primary candidates, isn't surprising – but it strikes me as apt and telling.  

Martin Luther King seems far away this year, even as concern about race relations and everyday circumstances for African-Americans seems near at hand.

On the face of it, Dr. King is still right in the center of things.   Selma is a new release on Netflix and as an Amazon download.  In his address to Congress, Pope Francis cited Dr. King as one of four “representative Americans,” along with Abraham Lincoln, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton.  The year just past was a year distinguished by nonviolent protest more than any year since Dr. King's death: in Baltimore, in St. Louis, in Chicago, and especially in Charleston, where the families of the people who died in the mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church openly forgave the man who killed them.   And the first black president – who has distinguished himself in all sorts of ways – did so especially with his remarks on the Charleston shooting and its aftermath.  

My own feeling for Dr. King is undiminished: he is, if not the greatest American, then the American whose greatness appeals to me most powerfully.  And if Georgetown's slate of events surrounding Martin Luther King Day is any indication, he is undiminished culturally, too.  There will be a dozen events across ten days, from a concert at the Kennedy Center to a teach-in on nonviolence to a ceremony that joins remembrace of Dr. King to the church's Year of Mercy and to a reflection on Georgetown's participation in the practices of slavery and racial discrimination in decades past.    

Dr. King’s book title Why We Can’t Wait is now a hashtag to reckon with.   And yet Dr. King himself seems to be at a distance this year.  Why is that?  It may be that, after half a century, and the natural deaths of many in the civil rights movement, the link between his legacy and one’s personal association with him has been broken, and now Martin Luther King belongs to all of us, free at last.  It may be that with Black Lives Matter, the movement for equal rights for African Americans has a fresh outlook – a fresh set of arguments and imagery – for the first time in a generation. 

In those respects, the diminishing of Martin Luther King's legacy – if it is true – may be a good thing, a chance for other people to lead, challenge, and inspire.   And yet I worry that much of what he represented is easily lost and not so easily regained.  His rock-solid identification of racial justice with religious faith; his conviction that nonviolence is not a tactic but a way of life; his affirmation of patience as a virtue and a strategy, not as a form of weakness or a failure of nerve: his recognition that even collective and egalitaritarian mass movements need individual leaders who are willing to stick out from the group: as Black Lives Matter takes the movement for racial justice forward, there's a risk that these things will be underestimated.

Lest we forget, #MLKMatters.  

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David Bowie: Ashes to Ashes

     That David Bowie went through so many changes meant that you could have “your” David Bowie even if you didn't keep up with all the ins and outs of his long career.

The David Bowie who hooked me was the Bowie of Lodger, looking back to Low and forward to Let's Dance. This was the male, sober, sensible-artist Bowie, a trim man in a good suit or jeans and a bomber jacket; the Bowie who skipped London for Berlin and New York; the Bowie who brought Lou Reed into the mainstream  and then coaxed John Lennon back into the public eye through “Fame” and “Heroes” and through his model of rock-star-as-adult (that bomber jacket); the Bowie who, a little later, rolled through the nightclubs of lower Manhattan with David Byrne and Brian Eno; the Bowie who, earlier and better than anybody else, made the vital connection between art music and dance music, between the gallery and the the disco – and yet who was rock-and-roll enough to hire Stevie Ray Vaughan as his guitarist for Let's Dance.

David Bowie was the first rock star who belonged to the Seventies and not the Sixties – and so who belonged to people our age, not the people older than us who made the Sixties seem the be-all and end-all.

Just last week, he still did belong to us.   When Lenora and I were married in 2000, we reached out to some music people, asking them to recommend a pianist whom we could ask to play at our wedding reception – a real musician who would play real music, stuff he liked, and not wedding-reception stuff.    

Jason Lindner played piano in Tribeca that hundred-degree day.   Years and years passed, as he furthered his career as a pianist and bandleader around New York – in such a way that when David Bowie walked into the 55 Bar on Houston Street one night last year, Jason and his bandmates were playing.    One thing led to another, and they wound up playing on Blackstar, Bowie's new and last record.  

“Ashes to ashes / funk to funky”: there's the career in a few words.   A verse from the same song is a text-message before the fact:

They got a message from the Action Man

"I'm happy. Hope you're happy, too.

I've loved. All I've needed: love.

Sordid details following.

Bowie was the first rock star who didn't grow up in public: through all his changes, he was an adult all along.  

He wasn't one of us, that man from Mars; but he belonged to us -- still does.

The photograph shows Bowie with Brian Eno and Robert Fripp during the recording of “Heroes” in 1977.     

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Use Your Imagination --  “Lend” Your Imagination

The magi follow a star in the night and arrive at the stable where the Christ child is.  And yet we don't picture them arriving in the morning.   We picture them looking in on the manger at night.

That at any rate is my rationale for writing a piece about the Epiphany in the overnight, not in anticipation.   I moved through the day, a remarkable day in many ways – and it was in the dark of night that I had the epiphany I'd looked for.  

It involved a book called Seeing Things, by James P.M. Walsh, a Jesuit who taught Old Testament at Georgetown and served as an advisor to the Chimes, an a cappella singing group at the university.   

Seeing Things carries the subtitle “How the Imagination Shapes You and Your World,” and the subtitle is accurate enough – but the book is in many ways a strong polemic against the sort of literalism the subtitle implies.   For Fr. Walsh – who died last summer – “seeing things” meant seeing them with the imagination, whether in everyday life, in the consideration of literature and history, or through a religious discipline such as the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.  

Fr. Walsh naturally finds an imaginative way of characterizing this process.  He shows how we “lend our imagination” to different situations.   In the Ignatian retreat set out in the Exercises, he explains, the individual is enjoined to “lend one's imagination to God on the retreat.”  

The realization of one's own spiritual need, because it is centered in the imagination and therefore bypasses our rational defenses, is a vivid, powerful experience but (perhaps not surprisingly) in no way depressing . . . It is God lifting the veil, leading us to the heart of things, sharing with us his knowledge of us.

In a similar way, Fr. Walsh explains, we “lend” our imagination in the act of putting ourselves in another person's place – the beginning of the process (often called empathy or compassion) that leads us to love our neighbor and our enemy.

Fr. Walsh doesn't say so, but the strong implication is that act of “lending” one's imagination is central to the experience of artistic creation, too.  In this, his line of argument is strongly consonant with the argument of The Gift, by Lewis Hyde.  Hyde characterizes art as “the gift that is given back,” and he sets out the process whereby the artist must place herself in a “receptive” mode in order to receive art in the manner of a gift.   In Fr. Walsh's terms, the artist must “lend her imagination” to the creative process, or to the work itself, in order to be open and receptive to its full possibilities.

And that sense of the artistic process is akin to James Joyce's idea of literary “epiphany.”

I never got to know James Walsh, who taught at Georgetown's campus in Qatar in his last years; but as I read this pointed, vivid, effortlessly personal book, I felt that I have known him.   The gift economy – as Hyde and others call it – will receive sustained attention at Georgetown in the coming years, and I wish Fr. Walsh were still with us to help us to lend our imagination to the effort.

Of course, in important ways he has done so already.

The painting, by the Italian Renaissance artist known as Sassetta, is the image of the Epiphany I know and love more than any other.  It's in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Plough Monday It Isn’t, But a New Beginning It Is

      January 4 is the eleventh day of Christmas, but it feels like Plough Monday – traditionally the Monday after the twelve days of Christmas when farmers in the British Isles got back behind the plough.

There are all sorts of rubrics regarding the history and significance of the twelve days of Christmas – the days from Christmas Day to the Epiphany on January 6.    Whatever its significance, the celebration of Christmas across twelve days is an instance of tradition getting it right.

Even now, two thousand and sixteen years in, twelve days feels just right. It's a span of time that takes in Christmas and New Year's, and so allow's New Year's to be the beginning of the calendar year rather than the end of the holiday.   It allows for some days of feasting and some days of traveling and some days of nothing in particular. Mathematically set slightly at odds with the seven-day week, it's a reminder – as Judith Schulevitz said of the Sabbath – of “a different order of time.”

This particular span of twelve days has felt just right, too.  There was Christmas Day.  There followed the day my son Pietro and I went ice skating together at the newish rink in Prospect Park.  The day the Jets won an overtime thriller against the Patriots.   The day of an indoor soccer tournament in New Jersey.  The day my brother and sister-and-law and aunt came to a second Christmas dinner.   The days when I played lap steel and read Elvis Costello's autobiography and, in the evenings, we settled in as a family and watched the original Star Wars trilogy. There was New Year's eve – with two charades-based parties in Brooklyn – and New Year's day around my mother-in-law's table in the upper reaches of New York City as my mother celebrated her 75th birthday in Florida.  The day our older boys went for interviews at Regis High School on East 85th Street, and the day we did nothing much but turn a few screws around the house and get ready for a run of very full days.  And here we are at the eleventh day of Christmas, with Epiphany ahead – our youngest son's birthday, and so a holiday always and of its own kind.

January fourth it is, as Yoda would say.   Strictly speaking, it isn't Plough Monday, but I am happy to be behind the plough again.

A little rusty I am, but I figure that that’s all right.   

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Yes, Virginia: Christopher Hitchens Loved “A Christmas Carol”

     In his last published essay (in Vanity Fair in 2012), Christopher Hitchens outdid himself, writing about Dickens in a way at once personal, literary, humanely sensitive, and wise.  

Playing against type, he celebrated even the Dickens of A Christmas Carol, albeit on his own redbrick English terms:

By a few brilliant strokes of the pen, he revived and restored a popular festival and made it into a sort of social solidarity: a common defense against the Gradgrinds and the Bounderbys and the men who had been responsible for the misery of the Hungry Forties. For the first time, the downtrodden English people were able to see a celebrity, a man of wealth and fame, who was on their side.

He parsed a complex and “somewhat overpunctuated Victorian sentence” and found in it the key to Dickens' work: a “freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased” that he identified with children, and artists, and good people generally.” Hitch:    

It is all there to emphasize the one central and polar and critical point that Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: whatever you do―hang on to your childhood!

And he took an aspect of Dickens that most of us feel as a weakness -- our weakness -- and showed it to be a Dickensian strength: 

You can forget that sense of guilt you have. The one about being not quite sure which character is from which book. None of us really knows, and there is no shame in it. Probably Dickens himself wasn’t certain much of the time.

These insights were in mind when, on Christmas Eve, my family watched a TV-movie adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol starring George C. Scott as Scrooge.

I've read the story, several times; and I've seen it adapted as a play, as a cartoon, as a stage play, as a movie, and as a school presentation.  But it's always surprising, in the simplest of ways.   Strangely, it seems to me that I manage to forget what happens in the story from one year to the next, so that, year after year, I wind up surprised by the Ghosts of Christmases past and present and future, surprised by the radiant goodness of the Cratchits, and surprised by the wonderfully offhand report of “Tiny Tim, who didn't die.”  

This is another of Dickens' secrets, his artistic magic tricks, and one that he put to perfect use in A Christmas Carol, so that the story manages to surprise us – with that “freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased” – all over again every Christmas.

The Christmas Carol with George C. Scott, from 1984, is outstanding, by the way.  

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If It’s Springsteen, It Must Be Christmas

      Winter now, and still the weather defies the season: the Christmas Eve temperature in New York City = 72 degrees.

Lucky for us, there's Bruce Springsteen, himself season-defying at age sixty-six, here to ring in another Christmas.  

There he was on Saturday Night Live with Paul McCartney (whose ace plastic surgeon he evidently shares), leaving Tina Fey star-struck as he worked through “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” one more time.  

There he is in the artisanal grocery, where the staff member manning the Square register is playing the new box set of alternate takes and outtakes from The River – and releasing a free hour's worth of live tracks from the tour in support of The River through his website.  

There he is on the Concert Vault, performing the Winterland show (San Francisco, December 15, 1978), that is the source of the “Santa Claus” recording still played on the radio.

And on YouTube, where you can see a video of Bruce singing “Santa Claus” at the Capitol Theater in Passaic on September 20, 1978 – more than two months before the day itself.  

Why is it that Springsteen owns Christmas?    

It may be simply that Roy Bittan's glockenspiel sounds Christmasy.

It may be that the release of The River in late October1980 and of Live 1975-1985 in November 1986 sealed the deal, as we asked for, received, and listened to those records at Christmas.  

And it may be simply that the virtues of Springsteen's live shows, and his records too – as all those outtakes make clear – are ones we associate with the holiday: community akin to family, enlightened paternalism, abundance to the point of excess, joy and exultation despite dire circumstances and perilous times.    

Here he is at the Winterland, alongside Miami Steve Van Zandt, looking back on the Christmas they spent together in Asbury Park in the dark ages seven or eight years prior: “We were walking down the boardwalk.  Now, it was snowing like crazy. He was carrying the guitars and somehow, I was carrying the amps.  I dunno how I got to be The Boss but I'm carrying the amps . . .”

I dunno how you got to be Father Christmas, Bruce, but you did.  

Now all you need is a beard like your buddy Jon Stewart's.    

Have a very merry.  

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At Georgetown, Bigotry Is Met with Prayer, Symbolism

Sometimes symbolism is “just” symbolism.  And sometimes symbolism is the thing itself, which gives expression to an insight or a condition or a way of being that can't be expressed any other way.

The latter was the case at Georgetown yesterday, when believers from half a dozen religious traditions took part in an interfaith prayer service convened by the university's president, John J. DeGioia.   

Just weeks past Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino and from Donald Trump's suggestion that Muslims should be banned from entering the country, here were five hundred people whose presence together in Gaston Hall was itself a refutation of the idea that American Muslims are somehow separate and distinct from the American population as a whole.  

Pres. DeGioia – a Roman Catholic – was there.   Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde – an Episcopalian – was there.  Pastor Cheryl Sanders – Church of God – was there. Cardinal Donald Wuerl – a Roman Catholic – was there.   Georgetown student Khadija Mohamud – a Muslim – was there.  Imam Talib M. Shareef – a Muslim – was there.   Rabbi Batya Steinlauf – a Jew – was there.   Rabbi M. Bruce Lustig – a Jew – was there.   Bhai Gurdarshan Singh – a Sikh – was there.   Georgetown student Laila Brothers – a Muslim – was there.  Vice President Joseph Biden – a Roman Catholic – was there.  Metropolitan Tikhon – an Orthodox Christian – was there.

At the reception afterward, I was asked: What difference does it make that they were there?  It made – and will make – all the difference.   

How?   Let me count the ways.   Brought together by adversity, religious people of good will are getting to know each other – and each other's traditions – better.   In public, dressed in their distinctly different religious regalia, these people made plain to the naked eye that they are different from one another, beginning with their apprehension of the divine – but that those differences don't stand in the way of their standing together.   Assembling in the nation's capital, they represented the American people in our ethnic and religious diversity.   Convening for prayer, first of all, rather than for anguished self-defense or aggrieved denunciation, they showed that the way to be together, to stand together, and to stand against violence, bigotry, and discrimination, is to be religious together, sharing what they share: the humbled inclination toward the holy that is prayer.  

Vice President Biden, speaking at the top of his voice, declared that he has absolutely no doubt that the American people will move past the ugly present and affirm the commitment to diversity that characterizes this country.

It seemed to me that he put things too strongly – as if to meet Trump's forceful assertions with some forceful assertions of his own.

I think it is far from assured that the American people will move past this this latest ugly episode of religious nativism and demagoguery.  That is why the prayer service at Georgetown was so vital and so symbolically apt.  It didn't – couldn't – quite say that this is what America looks like.   What it said – turning hope into affirmation – was that this is what the American future looks like.  

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Climate Change = No More Seasons

Advent, proverbially, is the time of waiting – waiting for the decisive moment when a certain child is born and a distinctive something new enters the world.

This year, with the third Sunday of Advent just past, it feels to me as if we are still waiting for Advent to begin.

The reason is simple: the weather, in New York and up and down the East Coast, refuses to change – refuses to become “seasonal.”   Ten days before Christmas, the daytime temperatures are in the sixties and the nighttime ones are hardly cooler.   My bicycle is on the road every day.  On Sunday, the West Side path was as crowded with joggers as it was on the weekend before the marathon – seven weeks ago.   The pine and fir trees stacked at Eighth Avenue and Jane Street looked like stage props.   Folks browsed in hoodies or less. 

It seems to me that something similar is happening with climate change.  That is, the climate is changing – probably irrevocably – but we as a society are still waiting for the season of climate action to begin, figuring that once the season begins we'll get in the spirit of things.

We waited for high gas prices to ring in the season – but gas prices fell.

We waited for endless war in the Middle East to force us to change our ways – but the drawing up of shale gas has given us an escape clause.

We waited for Pope Francis's climate encyclical to commit the church to climate action – and it came, powerfully written, and took its place in the calendar of dramatically rolled-out media events.

We waited for the climate conference in Paris to commit the world's nations to climate action.

Now they've committed, in a small way – a way that, as Bill McKibben puts it in a piece at once balanced and strident in the Times, should be a floor and not a ceiling. But I suspect we're still waiting – still waiting for the season to change.

Unfortunately, that's the thing about climate change: it isn't seasonal, it's at once incremental and spasmodic.  The climate changes oh-so-gradually, and disasters are spasms of evidence.

When it comes to climate change, there's no one day when things change once and for all.    Nor is there a season of waiting.   There are no more seasons, period.  There's just the perilous times we are living in.