Category: Our Sunday Visitor

Transmitting light: Stained glass and painting by Patrice Schelkun

The thing about stained glass is that the artist doesn’t know how it will look until it’s installed.

“There’s an element of surprise along the whole process,” said Patrice Schelkun, who works in glass and also in paint.

When Schelkun works on stained glass, she pieces her windows together on a huge table and solders it tight, planning out every element, every color, every piece of glass. She must choose between clear or opalescent glass, and sometimes she adds more than one layer to create a sense of depth.

But it’s not until it’s completely done and held up to the light for the first time that she really knows how it came out.

Schelkun likes to add texture and detail to her glass pieces with paint, and this, too, yields unpredictable results. The paint, which is made of pigment mixed with finely ground glass, is applied with oil or water and fused to the glass surface in a kiln, eight hours at a time. Sometimes five or more layers of paint are applied, and fired in between each application. Sometimes the paint changes, and sometimes the color of the glass shifts in the kiln.

Or sometimes a piece turns out as designed, but then it’s not displayed for greatest effect. This was the case with “Adorned,” a panel with a sun-dappled face peering out from a crush of jewel-toned chrysanthemums. The piece was designed to be hung in direct light, but it was displayed too high up in an exhibit in Chicago, and the light didn’t shine through as Schelkun intended. When she retrieved that piece, she opted to install it on a light box, to display it at its best.

But sometimes this variability inherent in glasswork is an asset. Natural light, in particular, brings out the potential of glass to shift in appearance.

“It’s almost like the window is alive,” Schelkun said. “It’s the same thing if you’re walking by a window. It changes as you walk past it. It projects colors onto the floor. It’s kind of a living thing.”

Schelkun, 65, now concentrates more on oil painting and portraiture than she does on glass, but she wasn’t always an artist of any kind. She studied science but soon put that aside to raise her children. The family bought a house in Pennsylvania in the ’90s, and Schelkun got to work decorating it. She began in her oldest daughter’s room, which she festooned with a mural of flowers and bunnies, turning it into a little secret garden.

Friends who saw her work said she was good, good enough to start a business. She began decorating homes, and then businesses, and then a church.

A church bathroom, that is. The pastor gave her free rein to redo the ugly little room in the vestibule.

“I did a stone wall and a little niche, and he was like, ‘Whoa,’” Schelkun said. She was welcomed onto the committee for the parish’s building project and worked on choosing colors and furnishings.

At the same time, she started to study drawing and painting in earnest, taking private classes with artists when she could spare the time. She also took a class on stained glass at a local community college.

“I knew nothing about stained glass. Basically [the class] was teaching you how to cut glass and piece it together, and I said, ‘No, I want to paint on glass,’” she said. “My first love was painting.”

But there is something about glass, and its potential to capture, transmit and refract light in different ways. Her studio, Immanence Fine Art, shows works in both paint and stained glass. What they all have in common is an emphasis on light.

“Immanence is evidence of the divine throughout the material world. We can interact with God’s presence through the beautiful things we see in nature, and the way light strikes things. That’s evidence of God, to me,” Schelkun said.

When she paints portraits, she often composes them with strong lighting from one side, but even more often with “rim light,” light that bleeds out from behind the subject.

“If someone is standing in front of a sunset, the light halos around their head,” she said. “It’s the light I’m attracted to.”

She has seen firsthand how the light can attract other people, too….Read the rest of my latest artist profile in Our Sunday Visitor.

Creative destruction, violent creation: The art of blacksmith Evan Wilson

“I hit, beat, torture, manipulate, crush, squeeze, twist, punch holes in and hammer all those pieces of metal into shape,” said Evan Wilson, artist and blacksmith.

This is how he turns copper, bronze, iron and steel into furniture and firepits, leaves, berries, wings and hands, and, sometimes, the body of Jesus.

“It’s a mixture of brute force and finesse,” he said.

Wilson, 37, said his work is an emotional experience, and sometimes a spiritual revelation.

“For me, it’s become a way of understanding my own, and our universal, coming back to God. Of relating to the God who calls us to suffer and to grow,” he said.

At times he’s focused on being the smith who shapes the metal, but other times he feels more like the thing being shaped.

“I hit this material like I mean it. I really clobber it. But every hammer blow is at just the right angle, just the right amount, the right temperature, the right location,” he said.

What he’s doing is bringing about a “loving transformation.”

“But from the perspective of the metal, it’s like ‘Oh my God, stop beating me!’” he said.

Wilson isn’t just using his artistic imagination; he has lived it.

Wilson was received into the Eastern Orthodox church in 2023, but was raised evangelical Protestant. Wilson was all of 7 years old when he began to note the logical inconsistencies of a “sola scriptura” approach to doctrine. As he grew, he kept finding more questions than anyone in his community could answer, and the faith of his childhood had less and less of a grip on him.

“It left me with a lot of angst,” he said. “I never threw away Christ, but I always wanted to figure out what the deeper value of this story was.”

As an adult, seeking a life of meaning, he spent time in Afghanistan working for a nonprofit that taught literacy and offered pregnancy care.

“I lived in a mud hut with an ex-Taliban member, had a dog, rode my bike to work. It was an awesome time, but very difficult to reconcile the God I was told about as a child with what was occurring there,” he said.

He saw so many people, especially women and children, who seemed trapped and forgotten.

When Wilson returned to the United States, he took up with Mobile Loaves and Fishes, a nonprofit that serves the homeless in Austin, Texas.

“I could tell there was something embodied or incarnate in the faith that was in action there,” he said.

That something wasn’t picturesque. He recalls working surrounded with what founder Alan Graham called “the bouquet of Christ,” the aroma of incontinent and unbathed bodies, and crack smoke.

“We served them as we serve Christ,” he said.

Wilson still struggled with his faith, but Loaves and Fishes is where he began to use his hands. He ran a workshop teaching the homeless to build wooden bird houses and tree swings, so they could have some shot at supporting themselves. His program invited journeymen to come and host workshops, and this included a dozen master blacksmiths from around the world.

“They were super generous, and I learned a ton,” he said.

That is when blacksmithing began to compel him, and it eventually became his main focus. It was not a smooth or graceful transition.

“My wife and I had our first son in 2020, I lost my job, and I got my first commission all in the same year,” he said.

That first commission was a Stations of the Cross. He calls it the beginning of his salvation, as he carefully crafted the tiny bodies acting out the suffering and death of Christ.

He first made the figures out of plasticine clay and shaped them with wooden replicas of his smith tools, to make sure he’d be able to form them from metal without using his hands. He literally wrestled with the little bodies as he worked.

“Pushing Christ’s arm just so, not thinking but feeling that; the tilt of the head here, the Roman soldier hammering the nails in. That’s how I was converted,” he said…. Read the rest of my latest artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image: Evan Wilson in his studio with the Face of Christ (Mandylion) in chased bronze

Note: I’m expanding the scope of this monthly artist feature! If you know of a Catholic musician, composer, dancer, or other contributor to the arts who has an interesting story to tell, let me know. Shoot an email to simchafisher at gmail dot com. Thanks!

 

 

Look up!

One day, I was pushing my then-toddler on a swing while we waited for her big sister to get out of school. One of the dads was doing the same thing, idly pushing a swing and waiting for the bell to ring. As he pushed, he looked up at the sky.

“Look at the clouds,” he said. “They’re so cool! I never really looked at clouds before.”

I didn’t know such a thing was possible, to never look at clouds.

Clouds are some of my favorite things in the whole world to look at and think about. I sometimes tell my kids that God could have come up with so many ways of making the world function, but he seems to have chosen the beautiful and interesting and dramatic way, over and over and over again. He could have designed some other mechanism to move water up and down and around the water cycle — something dull or unchanging or even invisible — but he chose to design this system that’s so elegant, beguiling, ever-changing and recklessly beautiful. Clouds! And all we have to do is look up.

The same is true for so much of the natural world: the way seeds turn from tightly closed secret chambers into brave, tender little beings standing on their own; the way rocks and soil are ceaselessly churned up through the relentless jaws of continental plates. Heck, God could have made the world colorless. Soundless. Scentless. He could have organized the food chain so that birds are not necessary, but he chose to fill the world with strange, beautiful, sometimes nutty and hilarious creatures who not only hop and fly and swoop around, they make music as they go. Are you kidding me? And all we have to do is look up!

And that’s just the stuff we know about! That’s just the stuff we can see with a quick glance around us as we hustle from the car to wherever our next appointment is. There is also an immense natural world that is hidden from us, unfathomably busy with its own designs, that we don’t even know about: things working under the surface of the ground, things too small for us to see, things hidden within our own cells; secret signals between trees, arcane signs passed from species to species and generation to generation. Fungal kingdoms, pheromones, neural memories. Things under the sea; things under the ice; things beyond our atmosphere. The sheer liveliness of the world is too much to comprehend.

I’m lucky that both my parents taught me it was normal and rational to look at the natural world with fascination and delight, because it is fascinating and delightful. To have been raised this way is a gift, and for a moment, on the playground that day, I was crushed by the thought this man had been denied that gift for decades. In maybe 40 years, no one had taught him to look up.

But then I thought: How wonderful that it’s not too late. …Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Artist and teacher Monica Dix walks the walk.

Monica Dix believes that if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

That’s why the 53-year-old artist and teacher will sometimes tack up one of her in-progress drawings where her room full of eighth-graders can see it, saying, “Okay, five things. Critique my work.”

At first, they praise her art, and tell her she’s the best artist ever.

“Then they dig in,” she said.

They always find mistakes she didn’t see, and they’re not shy about letting her know she didn’t properly measure the space between the nose and the upper lip, or that something was off about the eyes.

“It’s great for my pride,” she said.

It’s also great for her students, because it shows them not only how to look critically at the objective elements that make or break a piece of art, but it shows them what it’s like to be an artist. Sometimes you can fix a mistake, but sometimes you have to start over.

“It’s that whole ‘walk the walk.’ I let them see that,” she said.

Sometimes, a kid will point out an error she’s made, and she realizes she’s not only executed something wrong, she’s been teaching it wrong. It’s like when one person raises his hand and asks a question, and it turns out there are ten people who also had that question, but were too self-conscious to ask.

“It helps everybody,” she said.

Dix has been teaching art to teenagers at Naples Classical Academy, a charter school in Naples, Florida, since 2021. In many ways, it’s an extraordinary school, where kids leave their cell phones behind and nobody aspires to be a TikTok star. The classical curriculum, provided by Hillsdale College, tends to attract families with a certain mindset, she said.

But in other ways, they bring the same attitudes and assumptions to her class that many Americans bring to art in general. Part of the curriculum includes modern art, and every year when she introduces abstract expressionism, someone will say, “I could do that!” or “A kindergartener could do that!”

She responds, “Then why didn’t they?”

She asks her students to learn what was going on in the artist’s life and what was going on in the world. They study art on the same timeline as they study history, so they begin to make connections and understand why some artists chose to break with tradition, and why we still remember their work today.

“I come at it from a historical standpoint, from a cultural history standpoint. (These things are) worth looking at,” she said.

She also gets her students to do more than just look. If they have time, she invites them to re-create art that baffles them — for instance, the intricate, dynamic layers of drips and splashes in a Jackson Pollock action painting.

It’s harder than it looks. Her students are allowed to say whether they like or dislike a piece of art, but first they should know what they’re talking about.

Dix makes herself walk the walk, too. …

Read the rest of my latest artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor.

Image: Sunday Afternoon At the Porch House Pub by Monica Dix (image courtesy of the artist) 

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Also, a note: I’m expanding the scope of this monthly artist feature! If you know of a Catholic musician, composer, dancer, or other contributor to the arts who has an interesting story to tell, let me know! Shoot an email to simchafisher at gmail dot com. Thanks!

Matthew Alderman finds ancient answers to new questions in church architecture

Matthew Alderman has a surprising weakness for neon haloes, the kind you might find lighting up the heads of stone saints in 1,000-year-old Italian churches.

“It can be quaint. I will take old, interesting kitsch over ’60s clip art,” he said. “At least it has honesty.”

But when Alderman works on church design, he tries to aim a little higher than honesty. Clients, weary of bland and barren sacred art and architecture, are ready for more.

“They want something transcendent that speaks to a higher order,” he said.

Alderman, 41, is a popular illustrator and heraldry expert, but his day job is with the venerable church architecture firm Cram and Ferguson, where he is the day-to-day design manager, working together with several other team members. The firm is known for its role in spearheading the revival of Gothic and other traditional styles. Its hallmark style provides a lively relief from the dreary errors of the past several decades. So much modern design is cold and sterile, bleak or banal.

But Alderman never wants to make a mere copy, or return to the past simply for the sake of returning. At the same time, he will never reject a design merely because it comes from a certain era, even a modern one.

“The artists who produced (church buildings) in the ’50s and ’60s did have a classical education,” he said.

There was a reason they made the design choices they did, even if the results come across as ugly, theologically dubious, or distasteful. But the generations that followed them were not necessarily educated or thoughtful, and the churches that came next were “copies of copies of copies.”

“They do not speak to us,” Alderman said. “It feels narrow and inauthentic.”

As he and his co-workers at the firm collaborate with painters, wood carvers, sculptors and the clients who commissioned it all, Alderman strives to see what can be learned from the past, and figures out how to make it work for the present. Rather than straining for design so artistically pure it becomes almost legalistic, or merely attempting to copy the work of great architects like Borromini or Gaudi, he tries to get inside their heads, identifying the essential principles that guided them. He asks himself how they would solve whatever problem is bedeviling him now.

“I have this particular style I’m trying to learn from, get behind it, think about what are the ideals, the first principles. It’s a wonderful challenge,” he said.

Alderman didn’t invent the idea of taking ancient principles of design and applying them in new ways. In the 19th century, portrait sculptors of great statesmen wanted to give their subjects the grandeur and nobility of emperors of the past, but they couldn’t show them wearing togas.

“They figured it out: Suits with overcoats wrapped around them,” Alderman said.

He mused that a contemporary artist could do something similar with images of modern holy men and women, like the soon-to-be-canonized Carlo Acutis.

“You have to find an ideal balance between producing something so contemporary it becomes distracting, and something not recognizable as a saint,” he said.

Hoodies have a nice drape to them, or perhaps you could show Acutis wearing the hospital gown he died in.

“The problem with images of modern saints is that we’re going off photographs,” he said, which tempts artists to slavishly recreate the exact details on record.

“They should look like them, but they shouldn’t be the only thing we’re using to recognize them by,” he said.

He’s seen a few portrayals of Acutis holding a laptop, which is a tool he used for evangelization, but he’s not sure if it works.

“Maybe the decoration on the border could look like circuit boards,” he said. “There are so many ways to attack this.”

He takes similar problems under consideration in architecture, trying to find a balance between the wisdom of the past and the actual requirements of the present. Some elements of church architecture are immutable: The overall design should always focus attention on the most important things, the crucifix, the tabernacle, the altar.

“It should be building to that crescendo,” he said.

But while you achieve that goal, there is endless room for variation. The relative newness of the Church in America is fertile ground for creativity, even playfulness — and even a chance to right some wrongs of the past…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. This article can also be found in the most recent print edition of OSV. 

Image: St. Paul Catholic University Center, photo by Father James Bradley. (Courtesy of Matthew Alderman)

Untamed territory: The iconogrphy of Emanuel Burke

“Iconography is not a science, where you follow the formula and someone has an encounter with God,” said artist Emanuel Burke.

“That’s not the way it works.”

Burke ought to know. The 33-year-old artist, who works under the pseudonym Alypius, recently saw one of his icons of Jesus shared on social media.

But far from encountering God, dozens of viewers jeered at his work and called him a fake Christian who was trying to undermine the Church. He had depicted Christ with large eyes and a small head, rather than with the prominent brow that often signifies wisdom in icons.

Burke, who is a convert to and a seminarian in the Eastern Orthodox church, found it especially discouraging to face personal attacks from his fellow believers. But he tried his best to respond with humility and a kind of radical acceptance.

“We long to be right in an argument, not to be perceived a certain way. But there’s a lot to be gained from being a fool, from being slandered and misunderstood,” he said. “I don’t know how that will shake out for me and for others, but in the end, it’ll be blessed.”

An art teacher at Canongate Catholic High School in Arden, North Carolina, Burke knows some of his icons are unusual and don’t conform to every standard of the art form. Though he doesn’t have any formal training in fine art, he’s very familiar with the traditions that dictate the spiritual significance of color, shapes and gestures in Eastern iconography. But he said these traditions have developed over time and are not as inviolable as some might believe.

“They are not dogmatics, in the same way as the Trinity or the hypostatic union or something like that is,” he said.

Burke rejects the idea, popular in some circles, that “if it doesn’t look like it was painted in the 9th century, it’s not an icon.” In fact, he thinks an icon that strives primarily to look like it is ancient fails in what iconography is intended to do.

“The thing about iconography is it’s always contemporary. It’s not supposed to be stuck in the past,” he said.

Instead, it is intended to speak to, and to be received by, the people who will actually encounter it.

Contemporary — but not modern

There’s a vast divide between the modern understanding and the ancient Christian understanding of art, Burke said, and he didn’t immediately grasp that difference. As a result, his first icons were a clumsy blend of traditional imagery and modern sensibilities. He ended up sanding down his first attempt to show the face of Christ and painting over it.

“The telltale sign (of a modern understanding of art) is the overemphasis on individualism. ‘This is the way I see things or how I feel about it,’” he said.

Then each viewer brings his or her subjective interpretation to the work, and it becomes even more individualized and fragmented in meaning, he said. “Whereas with the approach of a Byzantine or Orthodox iconographer, we do this with the mind of the Church. It’s never about me or another individual in a very rigid sense,” he said.

The artist is involved by necessity because he, too, is venerating the icon even as he paints it. Burke speaks of the work of painting as a work of self-discernment.

“But I don’t see myself as the only participant,” he said.

The viewer is just as important, and in a sense, the work is incomplete until it has been beheld. The face of Christ that got Burke so much unwelcome attention online was the 21st installment in a series he undertook during Advent, which the Orthodox treat as a “Little Lent.” As a discipline, he tried — but did not quite manage — to make an image of the face of Christ every day for the 40 days leading up to Christmas.

Some of the images were painted with egg tempera; some were etchings done while he was experimenting with a cold wax technique, which uses a combination of paste and paint. He also works in ballpoint pen or even with Procreate, the digital painting app. He sees the value in making digital art that’s easy to edit and share, though he’s more drawn to the “very human” natural and tactile materials of egg tempera.

Burke admires some of the new styles of icons being produced in the Eastern Orthodox churches, especially in Ukraine. He likes their bold colors and use of geometric shapes. But he doesn’t like everything new he sees. Some innovations in modern iconography go further afield than he’s comfortable with. However, he doesn’t feel that he’s qualified to say that they’ve gone too far.

“These things get worked out over time. The openness to do something that’s a bit different helps move things away from that sort of robotic, printing-press approach to religious art,” he said.

Journey into untamed territory

Burke recently watched “Stalker,” a 1979 Soviet sci-fi film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It deals with a man who’s gone into “a wilderness that has been taken over with the modern innovations that were brought on by the Soviet Union.” He said that the film suggests that the experience of God is like this: It’s wild and untamed territory, and “not always a pleasant experience,” but sometimes a necessary one.

Burke himself was somewhat shaken when he first encountered the faith he now hopes to serve as a priest. He and his wife were raised Southern Baptist, although his wife, who was born in Thailand, also has early memories of practicing Buddhism. They were “freaked out” when they attended their first Divine Liturgy….Read the rest of my latest artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Memento vivere

At our house, there are no skeletons in the closet. All our skeletons — well, all the decorative ones — are outside, zip-tied to the trees, holding up the mailbox, and popping up between dead sunflower stalks. We are officially One Of Those Skeleton Houses, and they are there year-round, not just during Halloween.

This is hardly an edgy aesthetic these days. Lots of people set up elaborate skeleton displays at this time of year, investing hundreds of dollars in the deluxe 12-foot ones that loom over suburban streets. Lots of people never take their skeletons down and simply add Santa hats or Valentine hearts or Easter bunny ears, as the season demands.

But I’m different. I have a unique personal reason for keeping my skeletons up all the time, and it is this: I like skeletons. I always have. I think they are beautiful, charming and fascinating, tragic and dear. I also have a painting of a skull on our family altar and a painted, tin-winged skeleton Sacred Heart in the dining room, and I’m working on carving a melancholy little skull out of scrap cedar for my cold weather hobby. In elementary school, I obsessively drew skeletons dancing, climbing ladders and raking leaves. In college, I startled the chef by running a load of leftover ham hocks through the industrial dishwasher because I wanted to sketch those elegant bony curves and undulations. I just like skeletons! I think they’re neat.

For a while, I tried to persuade myself that this was a good old Catholic memento mori-type fascination. I was keeping all these skulls around as a reminder of my mortality, just like St. Francis or St. Jerome. Do all your work and live all your life as if it’s your last day on earth because you never know: It might be. Make your peace with death while you still have the choice, because it’s coming either way.

I wish this were my motivation, but it’s not. The last time death came to collect someone I cared about, I fell to pieces, as if no one had ever died before, and this was some new, monstrous means of torture designed specifically to make me, in particular, unhappy.

So I can’t claim to be particularly comfortable with death. Instead, I have made my peace with a related concept: not the fleetness of life, but the perseverance of the living, even after death. The tenacity, the sheer, dogged refusal of the human body to go completely away.

The German word sitzfleisch, which translates, as you might guess, “sitting flesh,” means the kind of single-minded persistence you need to, well, sit on your bum until you get the job done. And, in fact, sitzfleisch also means your bodily bottom, your “sit meat.”

Sometimes, it means not so much the meat you park in the chair as the patience you will need to sit in one spot until things resolve themselves, no matter how long it takes.

So here we arrive back at skeletons. There is nothing more patient than a skeleton. Osteogenesis, the process of growing bones, begins in the first few weeks after conception. Tiny little skeleton, bitty little pretty bones, raring to go, gratefully, eagerly borrowing calcium from the mother’s bones and teeth, with no intention of giving it back. Single-mindedly intent on adding to itself and not collapsing back into nothingness, while the mother, knowing or unknowing, steadfastly releases herself into building someone else.

This, too, is sitzfleisch…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

On hearing the word

Do you have a priest with a non-American accent? We’ve had several in our little parish over the years. That’s not surprising, even in our very white, very homogeneous region, because according to a recent study, about a quarter of seminarians in the United States are foreign-born. 

When Catholics hear a thick accent coming from the pulpit, they tend to respond in one of two extremes: either with a cranky dismissal, with undertones of “Why don’t these people go back where they came from?” or else with a warm, self-congratulatory welcome of ethnic diversity — which lasts until the own-back-patterns discover this new priest doesn’t omit the bracketed section for shorter reading. 

But I heard a new take the other day, a rather bracing one for native-born Americans like me.

Father Ryan Hildebrand wrote on X: “‘I can’t understand my foreign priest’s accent!’ Instead of belittling you for not sending your sons to seminary (like I normally would), I’ll give you a helpful tip: Go to YouTube. Pull up BBC [his country of origin]. Watch it for a few minutes each day. That’ll help.”

He’s right, it would! It really is the kind of thing you can get better at with practice.

I loved the advice itself; and I loved the implication that a priest’s hard-to-understand accent is a problem for the listener to solve, and not only for the priest or the pastor or someone else. It’s certainly not something we should be mad about, because a foreign accent is the sign that someone has been brave and persevering, and willing to do hard things to serve God and us. But it’s also not something we should be passively, contentedly tolerant of, without trying to make the situation better. It’s something we should work on, from our end.

The Word — every word, but especially the Word of God — is meant to be heard and understood, and we should do what we can to help that happen.

How many problems in the world actually have a simple, at least partial solution, but it never occurs to us to discover it, because we don’t consider the problem ours to solve? Probably about as many problems as we drive ourselves crazy trying to solve, even though they’re not our responsibility or not under our control.

Sometimes the best way to help the Word be understood is to get out of the way.

Here is another scenario … Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

Image: Christus met sterren in de hand (1899) Odilon Redon, public domain (creative commons)

 

You, on a gondola

This is me, slowly unpacking from our recent trip to a little island off the coast of Maine.

This is me, sheepishly putting away the seven (seven!) books I hoped to read on the beach, and then barely touched all week.

This is me, dolefully discovering that the “all ages” board game I ordered specially for the trip is still in its shrink wrap, after we spent zero evenings moving little plastic pieces around the table in raucous and wholesome family togetherness.

This is me closing the tabs with recipes for seafood dinners that I convinced myself we would not only cook, but also possibly harvest ourselves from the sea; and this is also me, cleaning all the cheeseburger wrappers out of the car.

The kites I packed didn’t even make it out of the trunk.

This is not me complaining about having been on vacation! It was lovely, and we’re lucky we were able to make it happen. We did swim and wade, clamber around on rocks, and eat ice cream. We came home tired and more or less happy, with pink shoulders and sand in our shoes.

And yes, I came home a little bit disappointed. I can’t help it: I have insanely high hopes every time I plan anything at all. I am who I am, and I know this; but I’m also perpetually disappointed when I don’t turn into someone else.

Right before we left, I saw an old video from Saturday Night Live, where Adam Sandler plays Joe Romano of Romano Tours.

He tells the audience, “Here at Romano Tours, we always remind our customers: If you’re sad now, you might still feel sad there, okay?”

He warns us:

“We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into someone who likes hiking. We can take you to the Italian Riviera. We cannot make you feel comfortable in a bathing suit. We can provide the zip line. We cannot give you the ability to say, ‘Whee’ and mean it.”

I laughed at the video, and then I went right ahead and told myself that, when we got to the island, everything would be different. Through the sheer magic of dipping ourselves in salt water, we’d become joyful, energetic, screen-free types who love spending all our time together. And that did not happen. We had the week we had, because we are the people we are. And it was good! But it was not magically, instantaneously transformative. Of course, it wasn’t.

Like Joe Romano says, “[I]f you don’t like how you look back home, it’s not gonna get any better on a gondola.”

This is not only true for going on vacation: It’s true for everything.

Are you getting ready for a new year of school? Even if you’re enrolling somewhere different or trying a whole fresh program, you’re still going to be who you are as a parent, and your kids are still going to be who they are as kids.

Are you starting a new job? Even if it’s an entirely different situation, you’re still going to be you, doing that job.

Are you perhaps new to the Catholic faith? Welcome, and we’re so glad you’re here! Your life has a very good chance of being transformed, one way or another.

But not magically. Not instantaneously. And not without you deliberately, consciously deciding to make that happen, taking advantage of what the Church has to offer, and putting it into practice day by day, minute by minute.

And also, paradoxically, not without you letting go of control and letting grace work with who you are.

I watched the SNL skit again, and I laughed even harder. It’s not only brilliant and insightful, it’s hopeful, not discouraging…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

 

Don’t listen to thoughts you have when you’re tired

I am a life-long insomniac, and please believe me when I say I have tried everything. I do all the right things, and avoid all the wrong things, to encourage good sleep, but it just seems to be my fate that sometimes I lose the knack, and long periods go by when sleep eludes me, night after night. I just forget how to do it, and the only thing to do is wait until I get the hang of it again. Staying asleep is like trying to stay underwater while clutching a giant beach ball: You can go under for a bit, but pretty soon you’re bobbing around on the surface again, blinking and frustrated, high and dry.

But nighttime is still different from daytime. The thoughts you have when you’re awake, and shouldn’t be, are very different from the thoughts you have when it’s just regular daytime. Nighttime thoughts can take on a certain urgency, even a certain spiritual compulsion.

Not long ago, Catholics on social media were talking about liminality: of “threshold” experiences when we are passing, or trying to pass, from one state or stage to another. We feel a sensation of peculiar and unsettling ambiguity, when we are neither this nor that, here nor there, but maybe we paradoxically feel a sharpened awareness of our in-betweenness.

There are some places on the planet that tend to make people feel this way – mountaintops, caves, very open spaces, heavy fog — and also some experiences: sitting with the dying, having sex, giving birth.

Sometimes insomnia puts us in this state. Eyes wide open in the darkness, body looking for all the world like it’s fully at rest when it’s actually tense and alert. The harder you try to push through from consciousness to unconsciousness, the more stuck you become in this liminal state.

Many people say that, if they can’t sleep, they pray. They say that, if they’re going to be awake anyway, they might as well be sure they’re passing the time well. Someone even told me once that God wouldn’t let her sleep until she said a whole Rosary for me (and I was very grateful when I found out, because I had been in labor, and struggling). And some people freely admit that they just keep on saying Hail Marys until they drop off to sleep. Call it boredom, call it tapping into some kind of mind/body magic, or call it faithfully letting your guardian angel finish the set, but it works for some people.

What I find, more often, is a different kind of spiritual experience…..Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

“Insomnia” photo by Alyssa L. Miller via Flickr (Creative Commons)