CLXXXVII

What are you doing, Simon? Here's a man dying in misery and you take fright and pass him by? Have you grown rich, maybe? Do you fear they'll steal your treasures?
Leo Tolstoy, What Men Live By

CLXXXVI

CLXXXV

Happy Thanksgiving and Hanukkah all

 

...
--it was a feast indeed. For once on a holiday, not one of the family circle over-indulged. Usually our Italian neighbors are so neighborly that they offer our weaker brethren hospitality in the way of wine and grappa and the result is maudlin sentimentality if not pugnacity on their part and wrath on mine. But this day was indeed a day of cheer...

Dorothy Day, Thanksgiving Dinner and Other Things

CLXXXIV: a railroad car

Romero got married on the fifth of July
In our Lady of Immaculate Dawn
Could have got married in the revival man's tent
But there ain't no reviving what's gone
Slipped like a shadow from the family he made
In a little white house by the woods
Dropped the kids at the mission, with a rose for the virgin
She knew he was gone for good

It's a long way to Heaven, it's closer to Harrisburg
And that's still a long way from the place where we are
And if evil exists, it's a pair of train tracks
And the devil is a railroad car

Could have stayed somewhere but the train tracks kept going
And it seems like they always left soon
And the wolves that he ran with moaned low and painful
Sang sad miseries to the moon

It's a long way to Heaven, it's closer to Harrisburg
And that's still a long way from the place where we are
And if evil exists, it's a pair of train tracks
And the devil is a railroad car

Rose at the altar withered and wilted
Romero sank into a dream
He didn't make Heaven, he didn't make Harrisburg
He died in a hole in between
Some say that man is the root of all evil
Others say God's a drunkard for pain
Me I believe that the Garden of Eden
Was burned to make way for a train

Josh Ritter, Harrisburg

CLXXXIII

 I hate quotes without a citation, but I was reading an artist interview quoting it, and it stuck with me today. Definitely says something similar in On Fairy Tales, Google fails to yield immediate wisdom...

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . . If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
J.R.R. Tolkien.

CLXXXII

Such is our way of thinking—we find beauty not in the in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, the one thing against another creates. 

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

The Management has Spoken

After last weeks reinforced concrete Marian apparition I was surprised to see myself in the church bulletin today:

The shrine had been cleared out, and honestly looks much more subdued and fall appropriate in the way I envisioned it. Still, the plastic flowers and one handed Mary showed someone else cared. (I checked, one handed Mary is safe and sound in the back.) It made me think of a piece I'd written about the shrine, musing about artistic intention and its collision with real life. Since as far as I know it was never used for the intended purpose no reason not to recycle it.

...

About a year ago I completed a religious commission, a blessed mother outside a church in New Jersey. I built a raw wood shrine housing a life size figure of Mary carved from a dead pine tree that stood on the spot. I’d approached it with a rustic, eco art influenced aesthetic.  It was my own parish, and I thought I understood the context pretty well.  Instead, the emergence of this outdoor shrine, outside the direct control of the priests, provided an outlet for traditions of devotion I am familiar with, but had never seen in my own home parish. I've been disconcerted to find this very intentionally earthy statue constantly festooned with various plastic debris. Metallic tinted Christmas bells, tinsel, plastic rosaries, fake flowers in various unearthly hues have all taken up residence. It would be hard to imagine something further from my original intention.  I’m still constantly adapting the piece, rearranging these offerings, (removing items only on rare occasions) adjusting landscaping (and battling with grounds people with weed whackers).  This works because I’m not an outside consultant, but someone with an ongoing relationship with the space. Maybe more importantly, though it is not my aesthetic, I have some understanding of this form of devotion, powerfully associated for me with childhood memories of Italy and cemetery visits with my grandparents to the graves of my great grandparents and uncle, faded plastic flowers and cracked marble crypts. Experience allows me to respect even what I would rather not have around.  I don’t think any generic virtue whether of talent or open mindedness can replace that kind of experience...