Category: Our Sunday Visitor

Blessed are the amateurs

In the last few decades, it’s become easier and easier for folks to turn a little talent or skill into a business. You like baking or decorating cakes? You can sell those! You enjoy woodworking? Take it on down to the Saturday market! You have a knack for knitting? We can whip up a website in no time, and you can turn that into a full-time job.

For some people, especially moms, this has been a godsend. It allows them to make a little money, or a lot of money, doing something they love, and it means they have flexibility and satisfaction that they’d never find in some workaday office job.

But for some people, it just turned into yet another ball and chain. Monetizing their talents just sucked all the joy out of it and made the thing they used to love into a slog. The activity that once relaxed their frazzled nerves and restored their psyches turned into a new source of anxiety and frustration, and robbed them of anything to fall back on in their free time.

So there is now a well-established backlash against turning everything you love into a side gig. This is a good and healthy thing, and it’s gratifying to see talented people making beautiful things simply because they want to, without hoping to turn it into a profitable empire.

However! (There’s always a “however.”) Maybe it’s a 21st-century disease, or maybe it’s a specifically American thing, but I’ve noticed that the “you can monetize that” pressure has given way to something superficially different, but just as insidious: The pressure to become super knowledgeable about anything you happen to like. You can be an amateur, but you have to be an expert amateur, or you will pay.

This is undoubtedly a fruit of the internet and social media (and maybe mostly a problem for people who are very active on social media; but it’s bled into “real life” as well.). Folks like to share little scenes from their everyday life, and other folks like to chip in bits and pieces of knowledge they happen to have (or think they have) about it. Sometimes they’re right; sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes they’re helpful, sometimes they’re interesting, sometimes they’re just trying to show off. But it has become standard to know a lot about just about anything you share about your life, even casually.

If you mention there’s a bird at your feeder, you better know the exact species and subvariant, and whether it’s acting normally or unusually, and whether it’s common in your area, and if that’s good for your environment or bad; and if there is any bird seed included in the photo, it’s almost certainly going to be the wrong kind, and you’re going to hear about it. These days, you can no longer buy a packet of seeds, dig a hole, and put them in the ground. It’s not that simple! Long before the actual plant ever pokes its shy head above the earth, the discourse about it will flower, including hot debates about native vs. endemic vs. indigenous vs. invasive species, diatomaceous earth vs. natural zeolites, and whether or not you’re doing enough to support your local bees.

It’s gotten to the point where people are genuinely afraid to share anything at all, because they know that someone, somewhere, is going to be more of an expert about it than they are, and they are going to get yelled at. … Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

Photo of “Image of Smiling Man Looking Up” by Homer page, from The Family of Man by Edward Steichen 

Baritus Illustration: A war cry in stickers and T-shirts

Chris Lewis believes in preserving tradition, up to a point.

It was the ages-old, rock-solid history of the Catholic Church that first grabbed his attention and made him take his adopted faith seriously. The Georgia-based graphic artist and illustrator at Baritus Catholic Illustration had joined the Church as an adult. He was raised a Bible Christian and drifted into functional atheism; but when he met his wife and her Catholic family, he had to take another look.

“If you love somebody, you’re going to be interested in what they’re interested in,” Lewis said.

So he began asking questions and was astonished to find out that Catholics had answers.

The first thing he wanted to know was who the first pope was. When his mother-in-law told him it was Peter in the Bible, he said it was a “wake-up slap in the face.”

“Within one question, I had a connection to history in Jesus’ time, and that led to all kinds of subsequent questions. So I picked up the Bible and started reading again,” he said.

He also spent time just staring at the massive, soaring, overwhelming architecture and stained-glass windows of the church he and his new wife attended, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

He internalized the lesson: You can teach with images.

At the time, Lewis was making his living as a graphic designer. Like so many Americans, he had begun his artistic life as a kid producing copious comic book superheroes and then shifted to crafting pixel art, square by square. These were both decent training for his eventual career in corporate branding, producing polished images and logos to sell products for his clients.

But as his new faith started taking root, it became more insistent, and he began to think, “If this is what I’m staking my belief on, I’m going to take it and put it in my art.”

“I kind of took the very formal polished approach of graphic design, but the more storytelling approach of comic books, and the simplicity and limited color palettes of pixel work and made the style that fused all my beginnings,” Lewis said.

The result is a look that’s dynamic and accessible like comic books, but with more heft and dignity; it’s polished like graphic design, but infused with authentic emotion; and yes, it’s designed to fit into a square with only a few colors, so it prints well.

So along with doing design and illustration work for various authors, publishers, archdioceses and more, Lewis also has a thriving retail business for stickers, T-shirts, cards, posters and phone cases. Some of them are iridescent; some of them glow in the dark.

How does this popular, accessible work jibe with the history and tradition he found so compelling in his own faith journey? Read the rest of my latest Catholic artist interview at Our Sunday Visitor. 

Previous artists featured in this series:
Kreg Yingst
Sarah Breisch
Charles Rohrbacher

If you know of (or are) a Catholic or Catholic-friendly artist you think should be featured, please drop me a line! simchafisher at gmail dot com. I’m not excellent about responding, but I always check out every suggestion. 

 

God, like any good mother, won’t let you disappear into the crowd

Big families look really loony to me. I have caught myself thinking, “Holy cow, how does she DO it?” when I see a young mom surrounded by little kids on all sides, all of them bopping up and down and squawking and demanding attention. Sometimes I stop and discreetly do a head count of all the little heads that belong together, and I have a little revelation. Five, six, seven ….

… Oh. I had even more kids than that.

But it does look like a lot, from the outside. It is a lot. ANY amount of kids is a lot! One kid is a lot! But I had 10, after all. No wonder people were always staring at us. I get it now. Some of my kids have moved out, and none of them are really little, and while I’m not an empty nester yet, I’m out of the woods enough that I can see it from the other side. I see how we looked to other people when we were really in the thick of it: Beautiful, but undeniably loony.

Part of the reason for this is that, from the outside, a big family looks just like that: a big family. A unit. If you know a few big families only by sight, and not personally, you probably think of them as “the one with all the loud, redheaded kids” or “the one where they all look like farmers.” More than one person has told us we’re “that family with all the hair,” which I fully recognize is not the worst way we could be identified.

The point is, when there are a lot of kids in a family, it’s kind of a blur from the outside. Outsiders see that everyone in the family kind of resembles each other, and they’re sort of milling around the parents, and maybe you can recognize the oldest and the current baby, but in the middle — who knows? They’re just part of the bunch.

But believe me when I say that this is not how the parents see it, not unless something has gone very wrong in the family. Sometimes the wrong name comes out of my mouth when I’m calling a child, but this is just the general confusion of my brain, and it doesn’t mean I don’t know who they are. They are all unambiguously themselves and have been since day one.

I, like every decent mother of a large family that I know, take my children’s individuality extremely seriously, and they don’t seem like an undifferentiated mass to me, and they never have. They don’t even really look alike to me, except in little fleeting flashes here and there. I made them all individually, one at a time, and even when they were born very close together and raised under more or less the same circumstances, they have all always been so very different and distinct from each other. It has always been startling and bizarre to realize that, to people outside the family, we are just some kind of indeterminate welter of humanity, just a sort of Fisher borg.

The domestic church

We do have to treat our large family as a unit in some ways, buying large amounts of food and giant vehicles and sharing clothing and making plans based on the reality that parents cannot bilocate, and simply cannot accommodate every possible thing 10 individual children, no matter how cherished, would like to do. But in other ways, we tried (with varying success) to think of them as, and to convey to them that they are, distinct, and distinctly important; unique, and uniquely valuable.

Well, there is a reason we refer to the family as “the domestic church”… Read the rest of my latest column for Our Sunday Visitor. 

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Image: Bianca degli Utili Maselli, holding a dog and surrounded by six of her children (c. 1565–1614) Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How do we keep kids safe in confession (and everywhere else)?

I made my first confession in a parking lot. It was the early ’80s, and that was how they arranged things — lined up in a parking lot across from the church, with a couple of folding chairs set up on the hot asphalt, parents clustered around just out of hearing distance.

Everything was done as casually as possible at this time, as part of an overall effort to demystify and desanctify the Church. I also remember them painting over the midnight blue sanctuary with the gold stars, and making it beige instead.

As foolish and unpleasant as their likely motivation was, it wasn’t actually a terrible system for first confession. I thought of it the other day when Chris Damian asked on Twitter: “How can Catholic parents responsibly send children to confession, knowing that for half of the last century about 1 in 25 priests was a sexual abuser? And that the Church structured itself to hide this?”

You can quibble about his numbers, which he says are based on the John Jay Report; but I believe it was a good-faith question.

It is undeniable that some priests, just like some men in every profession, are sexual abusers, and that they use their spiritual authority and the privacy of the confessional to prey on vulnerable people.

So here’s my answer:

I thought first of what I taught a class of 8-year-olds when I led a confession preparation class. We learned four basic things about safety in general and not just confession. It occurred to me that these rules didn’t change for older kids. They just need elaboration.

One: My body is made by God, and I’m in charge of it….Read the rest of my latest for OSV.

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Photo by cottonbro studio via Pexels

The art of presence: Iconographer Charles Henri Rohrbacher

“An icon isn’t really an icon without a viewer,” Charles Rohrbacher said.

“Icons are looking out at us, and we complete the circuit, as it were.”

From his small, crowded workshop in Juneau, Alaska, the 68-year-old deacon and iconographer sends his icons out to be present for any viewer who’s willing to see and to be seen, whether in churches, in private homes or in books.

He painted his first icon for his grandmother when he was 8 years old. She kept the crude watercolor of Jesus by her bedside and prayed her Rosary before it every night.

But although Deacon Rohrbacher kept turning out art from that day forward, and went on to study art history and graphic design, it was not until the 1980s that he rediscovered iconography and began to understand how powerful these sacred pictures, with their ancient tradition of preaching the Gospel through images, could be.

He made friends with Dmitry Shkolnik, a Russian iconographer who brought him to the Easter Vigil at an Eastern church.

“The whole interior was painted in fresco from top to bottom, and I thought I had gone to heaven. I had this realization: This is what I’ve been looking for. This is what I’m called to,” Deacon Rohrbacher said.

It wasn’t just the aesthetic appeal. Around the same time, Deacon Rohrbacher was at a gathering at a Salvadoran church in San Francisco, where Catholics were grieving the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Someone had drawn his picture on a piece of white cardboard, and the people surrounded the image with flowers and candles as they prayed.

“Knowing next to nothing of the theology of the icon, it occurred to me that, when everyone said ‘¡Presente!’ when his name was read [a Latin American invocation signifying that the dead are still with us], these evil people have murdered him, but he is present among them. His image signified his invisible presence, along with Christ and Mary,” he said.

That urgent, undeniable sense of personal presence so many people feel when they spend time before an icon is no accident; it is deliberate, and hard won. When Deacon Rohrbacher is illuminating a manuscript or making a print, he allows himself more artistic license and personal interpretation; but when he’s painting an icon, he follows the age-old rules of the training he received from Shkolnik and from the Byzantine Catholic Jesuit Father Egon Sendler.

“What makes an icon different even from [other] religious painting is that self-expression and creativity are subordinated to the form, which is also the content, of the icon,” Deacon Rohrbacher said.

“It’s the opposite of photography. The stylization works in favor of the icon. It’s not the artist imagining what they look like,” he said.

Personal artistic style and self-expression make way for something more transcendent. It’s similar, he said, to how he serves at Mass as a deacon.

“You don’t make it up,” he said. “Every word I say is in a book. You don’t want to impose your personality on the liturgy.”

Which is not to say that you can’t tell the difference between different presiders.

“That’s a great thing; we’re not robots,” Deacon Rohrbacher said.

But individual interpretation present in icons, just as with liturgy, come about because their power works through individual human beings, and so some individuality is inevitable.

Icons are images that proclaim the Gospel. And images and the Gospel are meant to go together.

“There is something missing in our proclamation of the Gospel without images,” Deacon Rohrbacher said.

He vividly remembers visiting beautifully decorated churches in the early ’80s, and although they were glittering and grand, he was dismayed to realize that nothing visible made them discernibly Catholic.

“I was in a church where somebody had decided they would literally whitewash over the painted Stations of the Cross,” he said.

These pictures might not have been the highest quality art, he acknowledges, but some kind of imagery has always been vital to our faith. You can’t just do without pictures….Read the rest of my article about Rohrbacher’s work at Our Sunday Visitor.

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I’m so pleased to announce that this is the first in a monthly series I’m writing for OSV featuring Catholic artists. If you have a suggestion for a Catholic visual artist (including yourself!) you think should be featured, please drop me a line at simchafisher at gmail dot com with “Catholic artist feature” in the subject line. I am interested in all styles of art.

The grief of God

I never thought it was strange that Jesus wept when he saw Lazarus dead. Why would he not? You’d have to have a weird notion of some robotic, emotionless Christ to imagine him facing the death of his close friend without feeling grief and anguish.

These tears of Christ are usually explained as evidence that he was truly human, just like us. We see him displaying human emotions many times: Getting angry, being affectionate, getting sarcastic. So this time, the explanation goes, he felt sad, just like us; he felt sorrow and pain, just like anybody.

But I think when he wept at the death of Lazarus, we are seeing something more than that. I think we’re seeing his grief as God.

What I mean is that humans know that death is bad. No one has to teach us this; it’s an innate understanding that death is an ugly, awful, unnatural thing that we hate and fear and do not want, for ourselves or for anyone.

But it is possible for us to get over this knowledge. It’s possible, over time, with repeated exposure, to become comfortable and blasé toward death. Sometimes it’s just a necessary attitude that people must develop so they can do their jobs, as health care workers, as hospice workers, as soldiers, as morticians. Some people who care for the living are repeatedly exposed to death until it no longer provokes strong emotions.

And some people, without good reason, deaden their consciences so that they no longer feel horror and repulsion at the death of other humans. They expose themselves to such violent imagery and exploitative forms of entertainment, or to such utilitarian social thinking, that they don’t feel even baseline human emotions of grief and repulsion around death anymore. They have successfully amputated that emotional organ, and the tears no longer flow.

You might think that God, of all people, has been exposed to death more than anyone. He who has existed from before the dawn of time has been present for every death — every human death, even the ones that no one else in the universe was there to witness, and every other possible kind of death as well — plant death, animal death, bacteria death, planet death. God has seen it all. Talk about overexposed….Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image: Jesus Raising Lazarus From the Dead, Spain, ca. 1120-1140; photo by Sharon Mollerus, CC BY 2.0 <Creative Commons>, via Wikimedia Commons

The thing about having kids

If you are wondering what things are like at our house, here is what you need to know: We have FOUR teenagers. Wasn’t that good planning? Aren’t we smart? It also smells wonderful here, believe me. And whatever the levels of snark and sarcasm you’re imagining, multiply it by 10. The four of them tend to gang up on us and act together like some kind of unholy army of scoffing and scorn.

Sometimes my husband will fuss at them, because they need to be fussed at. I recently learned that, after he leaves the room, one of my daughters will turn to the others and say, with a look of mild astonishment on her face, “I never did catch that man’s name.”

Pandemonium. She has very good comedic timing, just like her father, and she gets away with way too much just because she’s so funny. Just exactly like her father (whatever his name is).

And that’s what it’s like at our house.

I set this essay up like I was complaining, but this is actually one of the greatest parts of having children — or two of the greatest parts, I should say.

One is that they are so entertaining. They start out that way when they are first born (all babies are beautiful, and all babies are incredibly ugly, which is hilarious), and they keep it up as they trundle through one developmental stage after another, gracefully or clumsily blossoming into life as if they’re the first ones that ever thought of trying it. These comic firsts — first goofy laugh, first words, first joke, first completely insane knock-knock joke, first pun — they don’t get old when you have a lot of kids. If anything, they get better and better, because you’re relaxed enough to enjoy it.

It’s possible that I’m predisposed to enjoy my kids’ humor because I love them, but I have also heard so many people say that they had kids for various reasons — for duty, or because their wives wanted it, or by accident — and were amazed to discover how entertaining the little buggers turned out to be. I remember seeing a post on Facebook where some hapless young man loaded down with a stroller and diaper bags smiled goofily and told the cameraman, “I never thought I’d be so proud of someone for rolling over.” He knew the kid wasn’t some kind of genius for hitting a basic milestone, and yet that’s what milestones are like: They feel huge. They feel historic, even though trillions of people have done them before.

I suspect this is a large part of why people answered as they did in a recent Pew study…  Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Photo by Naassom Azevedo on Unsplash

This Lent, Die Harder

I read a useful idea on Twitter from Father Cassidy Stinson, who uses the handle @TheHappyPriest. He said: “Pro tip: if you’re not sure what to do for Lent, start by thinking about the themes of your last confession. How can you tailor your penance or practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving to help you grow in the opposing virtues?”

I had to admit, the things that I was considering doing for Lent didn’t have much in common with the things that I tend to bring to confession over and over and over again. There was nothing wrong with the little penitential plan I had come up with, but there wasn’t much overlap between it and the sins I (allegedly) struggle with day to day, year after year.

I say “allegedly” because if I were really struggling with them and trying hard to use the graces of confession to give them up, why would I not seize up on the opportunity of Lent to really focus on those exact sins? HMMM. It’s almost as if I didn’t want to give up … the things I didn’t want to give up.

This is not some brand-new flaw that I invented all by myself. Most of us are very adept at compartmentalizing our lives. I’m describing compartmentalization within my spiritual life — confessing one thing, but then focusing on something else during Lent — but it’s also very common to separate our spiritual life from our life in general. We keep religion tidily sequestered away from our everyday lives, treating our psyches like the two-chambered chemical bomb in “Die Hard with a Vengeance”: Gotta keep the two sides from mixing, or else KABOOM. A catastrophic explosion.

And we’re not wrong. Sometimes, when we let our interior walls start to break down and we realize that the words we hear on Sunday actually apply to us outside the church building, it does feel explosive, and not in the fun way.

My social media groups are full of little explosions like this: Women suddenly discovering that things they’ve been doing in their marriage for years are not actually licit, and now they have to break it to their husbands, or college students reading about the Last Supper in the Gospel and realizing there’s no way Jesus meant all that as a metaphor, and their Baptist parents are going to be very upset. Abigail Favale, in her excellent book “The Genesis of Gender,” describes admitting to herself, right before she’s due to begin teaching a class, that she no longer believed much of what was in her curriculum. Sometimes you just helplessly watch as a moment of honesty shatters the divide, two previously sequestered ideas mix, and everything blows up.

But it’s not always catastrophic. Sometimes this mixing, this integration, is more like something else I saw on Twitter recently…. Read the rest of my latest from Our Sunday Visitor. 

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

The life-changing magic of being yourself

As a lifelong untidy person, Marie Kondo is my hero. I have never read her book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” or seen her Netflix shows. I have no plans to stop being untidy. But I want to be just like her.

Let me back up a bit. When Marie Kondo first made her tasteful splash on the homemaker scene, many of my mom friends swooned at the idea of becoming entirely new people who could whip everything around them into delightful, streamlined, orderly shape. Others raged and fumed at Kondo’s insistence that they throw out most of their cherished belongings, get rid of their books, spend all their precious time fussing over trivialities and strive to live in a sterile museum rather than a comfortable home.

None of those folks had read her book, either. They had all heard about Kondo and her ideas through sloppy, sensationalistic headlines and snarky memes that misrepresented what she actually suggested in her book and shows. If they had actually read her (according to my friends who actually have), they would know that she’s quite gentle, doesn’t demand or even suggest radical shifts that work against your lifestyle, and never claims that her system or ideas are best, or that they work well for everyone in every circumstance.

Still, when the Washington Post recently quoted Kondo as saying she had pretty much given up tidying because she has three kids now, the internet exploded in a unanimous, rather vicious, “Ha-ha!” Now she’s a slob, just like the rest of us! Now she knows better!

But my friends who actually read her book and considered her advice were not at all surprised. Kondo never claimed that a rigid minimalism is superior. She apparently only offers suggestions for how to make yourself more functional and peaceful if the current state of your house is making you unhappy.

She is perhaps most famous for her advice to question whether some item in your house “sparks joy,” and if not, to consider discarding it. And now?

“Up until now, I was a professional tidier, so I did my best to keep my home tidy at all times. I have kind of given up on that in a good way for me. Now I realize what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home,” she said.

In other words, it is her children, and spending time with them, that sparks joy for Kondo.

And this is why she is my hero. Not necessarily because she clearly enjoys her children (although that’s a wonderful thing, and refreshing to hear someone say in public), but because she is courageously demonstrating something so few people understand: that you can change how you act and still be yourself. In fact, you have to….Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Marie Kondo photo by RISE via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Christmas morning: Are you doing it right?

One of the great mercies of being the mother of a large family is you know one thing for sure: This can’t all be your fault. How could it be? You have raised at least some of your children more or less the same way, at the same time, using the same parenting techniques and the same amount of money in the same house, being the same person the whole time, and yet they all turn out so very different.

If ever I feel sorry for parents of one child, it’s because they might think all their child’s virtues and flaws are the result of their parenting. They’re not. Some are, to be sure, but some is pure witless genetics, and some is environment beyond family, and some of it is luck, some is miscellaneous, and a lot of it is meaningful but completely mysterious, known only to God himself, and he’s not telling.

Let’s take a look at my own kids. Let’s take a look at them on Christmas morning after Midnight Mass, when they’re opening presents, and the secrets that lurk in the hearts of Fishers are revealed. I have tried to teach all my children generosity and gratitude, thrift and any number of other salutary virtues that I think will serve them well in life. How’s that worked out?

Well, one of them will be sitting in a pile of wrapping paper and random things her siblings grabbed off the rack at the dollar store, every single time she opens a present, she will shout, “It’s just what I wanted!” and she will mean it, too.

What a grateful and generous heart, you will think! Yes, up to a point. But that same kid will have carefully wrapped either a 50-cent Walmart cake or a 50-cent Walmart pie for everyone she knows, because it was the cheapest thing she could think of. She figured out long ago that this method allowed her to pocket a good half of her allowance, while the rest of those suckers were blowing the whole thing. But also, she is so extremely delighted with her cleverness, and that delight is so contagious, that everyone who opens a present from her is delighted, too, and we eventually all begin chanting, “Cake or pie? Cake or pie?” as each person opens up yet another tiny, squashy box from her, only to cheer uproariously when it turns out to be either a cake or a pie. And so it became a tradition. The “cake or pie” chant is now my favorite part of Christmas morning.

One of my less favorite parts is when one kid invariably manages to convince themselves that all their carefully curated presents are disappointing, not anywhere near what they wanted, and probably a sign that nobody really knows them or loves them, and then retreats guiltily to their room with their stocking to sulk, and also feel embarrassed about sulking. It’s not the same kid every year, mind you, just to keep us on our toes. Next year, that same kid will spend November earnestly begging us to donate their present budget to the food pantry, because they already have everything they need…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.