The Spirit of Cities: The Human Scale

Europe’s contribution to world civilization is the human scale, as seen in the streets of the old quarters of its great cities.

So said Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant'Egidio, at a conference on the future of Europe a few years back. In so saying, in a sentence he made clear how the movement he founded in Rome in 1968 works, and why it works.  Based in cities – cities in sixty countries – they work on a human scale, out of the conviction that religious beliefs are credible only when expressed on a human scale, and that, in our time, what is most needed is a witness to the human scale in a global society where the goal is often to “scale up” every enterprise as much as possible.

Philip Sheldrake has devoted a career to developing the idea of the human dimension of cities and what it means for religion and spirituality.  He spoke at Georgetown last week, and the event couldn’t have been timed better, because the idea of “the spiritual city” – set in opposition to Harvey Cox’s sixties formulation “the secular city” – is an idea full of implications just now, when the majority of the human population lives in cities but many of them in cities (such as the “instant cities” going up in China) that hardly resemble the human-scaled cities of early modern Europe.

As a writer rather than an urban planner, I can’t help but notice that the city as rich an extended metaphor as any we have right now.  This passage about four vital aspects of cities, for example, could just as well apply by analogy to four vital aspects of literature, or of religious practice:

Cities represent and create a climate of values that implicitly defines how we understand ourselves and gather together. There are four aspects of cities that urban planning must take seriously. First, the two Latin concepts of the city as urbs (a physical place, the buildings) and as civitas (people and their life together) are interdependent.  Second, urban issues are never purely practical. For example, transport obviously involves management, investment and strategy. However, the balance of private and public transport also highlights how we relate individual choice to the ‘common good’. Third, cities have always been complex realities. We cannot separate planning technology from people, the local from the global, or a sense of place from increasingly mobile lives. Finally, while there is no way back to the relatively compact city of pre-modern Europe, cities and their development must nevertheless critically embrace their past if human desires for the future are to be effectively grounded.

Reading the passage, I realize that the attachment that many of us have for our cities is something like religious.  Lucky for us, we have Philip Sheldrake to help us to understand what that means.

• 27 Oct 2014
• 3

• #community of sant'egidio#georgetown#philip sheldrake

Poet in a State of Tectonic Tension

Commonweal will mark its 90^th anniversary with a dinner Monday evening, and present its “Catholic in the Public Square Award” to Sen. George Mitchell. (The previous recipient, two years ago, was Georgetown’s president, John J. DeGioia; before him was Tim Shriver.)

There’s so much else to celebrate in the magazine’s history that I hardly know where to start.  (I tried, in a way, with The Life You Save May Be Your Own.)  So why not start with the present – with a poem from the anniversary issue by Lawrence Joseph, one of the most significant contributors to the magazine in recent years.

Like. Sen. Mitchell, Prof. Joseph (law, St. John’s) is a Lebanese Catholic – a Maronite; and like Mitchell, he is concerned with human society in the broadest sense – the common weal, that is.  He has been present at the past few anniversary dinners, and here’s hoping he is asked to give the invocation – in poetry – next time, because his poetry tends toward invocation, a marking of deep time.

Here below is a take-out from “On Nature,“ found in full on Commonweal’s website.  The title is a rare ironic understatement from a poet who tends toward hard-won sincerity and maximal statement.  And the Catholic dimension – if we must search and probe for it – is present in the ongoing assumption, which turns at times into obsession, that all of reality invites us to consider ultimate questions.

Uploaded
 onto one of a half-a-billion or so blogs: “The human


imagination? A relatively paltry thing, a sub-product,


merely, of the neural activity of a species


of terrestrial primate”; and in another, that other


dimension, the Hudson River, black and still,


the day about to open at the Narrows’ edge.


Light on a mountain ash bough, a fresh chill’s


blue sensation felt in the eyes.

Joseph’s essay “The Communion of Saints” is here, and a remarkable poem of his from the London Review of Books is here.  His voice is so distinctive that the thrust of that poem comes through even in the title: “Here in a State of Tectonic Tension.”

• 26 Oct 2014

• #literature and belief#commonweal

Contact Highs, Literature Style

Gone to see Flannery O'Connor’s notebooks and got to see Seamus Heaney’s desk as a bonus.

Yes, that’s the woolly Nobel laureate’s coffee- and ink-stained writing surface above: two oak planks, long part of the site-specific furniture at the Belfast school where he once taught, that he repurposed as a desk in the Eighties and then stuck with all through the stormwinds of fame and eminence out of “a superstitious fear of making a designer study, a film set rather than a bolt-hole” and finding that his poetry had “absconded.”

The desk is part of an extraordinary exhibit of Heaney’s books, papers, fine-press editions, and ephemera, all drawn from Emory’s special collections, which include huge caches of manuscripts by Heaney, Ted Hughes, Paul Muldoon, Salman Rushdie, and others.

A few floors upstairs is the university’s newly acquired deposit of Flannery O'Connor materials: letters, manuscripts, cartoons, photographs, notebooks, report cards, birthday cards, even a luggage tag from her 1958 pilgrimage to Lourdes.  It was a privilege to see them; more soon.

Emory’s director of special collections, Rosemary Magee, is an O'Connor scholar, and when I asked if it would be possible for her to arrange a loan of materials to Georgetown – where O'Connor spoke powerfully and memorably fifty years ago, and where a chapel now under renovation will showcase religious art – she was intrigued.  We are discussing.

With that prospect in mind, I concluded a long and absorbing day in the O'Connor archive by reading a typescript or two about mystery and manners.  And then went downstairs for some field work.

• 24 Oct 2014
• 4

• #flannery o'connor#Seamus Heaney

Wanted (Needed): Spiritual Strenuousness

What do you know: the very week I am rereading Pankaj Mishra’s An End to Suffering – it figures into my Georgetown course on world literature with a religious dimension – the Times Book Review runs a piece about Pankaj’s experience rereading Kierkegaard’s Two Ages twenty years after he first read it.  Where his back-page-essay counterpart Daniel Mendelsohn was let down by The Catcher in the Rye the second time through, Pankaj was more taken with the Kierkegaard book the second time than the first – an outcome that likely would have delighted Kierkegaard, a grandmaster of the twice-told redoubled text.

What accounts for the change?  Partly, Pankaj explains, he has changed, from a writer suspicious of inwardness and withdrawal to one who sees inwardness under threat. And partly (here’s the threat) the world has changed in ways that make Kierkegaard’s warnings about the corrosive effects of mass society and mass media circa 1845 awfully prescient:

Kierkegaard anticipated the confining fun-house mirrors of Facebook and Twitter when he wrote that the seeker of true freedom must “break out of the prison in which his own reflection holds him,” and then out of “the vast penitentiary built by the reflection of his associates.” And though I am as far from being a Christian as ever, I am better prepared to comprehend Kierkegaard’s insistence that a genuine union of human beings required a greater spiritual strenuousness from “the single individual”: that he or she establish “an ethical stance” regardless of general opinion. “Otherwise,” he warned, with steely accuracy, “it gets to be a union of people who separately are weak, a union as unbeautiful and depraved as a child-marriage.”

Win Butler of the Arcade Fire read Two Ages a couple of years ago – and incorporated it into the band’s most recent record, Reflektor.  

Rereading An End to Suffering, meanwhile, makes clear that young Pankaj was in no way as naïve or shallow in his perceptions as he makes himself out to be in the Times piece.  And it makes vivid the place that I figure was the site of his first encounter with the Kierkegaard book: a simple cottage in the Himalayan village of Mashobra, where he had gone from Delhi after university to live simply and cheaply and put his writerly yearnings to the test.

For years, I had felt a small thrill at the sight of the sentence, “I read all morning.” The simple words spoke of the purest and most rewarding kind of leisure. It was what I did now: I read all morning, sitting out on the balcony, and then, in the early afternoon, with the sun roughly overhead, I walked up the hill, through a dappled pine wood, for lunch at a roadside food shack called Montu’s dhaba.

Happy is the senior fellow who will get to spend a couple of mornings this weekend standing on a soccer sideline rereading An End to Suffering.

• 22 Oct 2014
• 3

• #books#pankaj mishra#georgetown

Marilynne Robinson: A Question Answered

John Calvin wrote somewhere that for the human person every encounter with another person presents each of them with a question to be answered.

That (or words to that effect) is what Marilynne Robinson said from the stage at the 92^nd Street Y in New York last night, where she read from her new novel, Lila, and joined in a conversation with Colm Tóibín, who read from his new novel, Nora Webster.  I introduced the two authors and moderated the conversation.

Every encounter presents a question to be answered.  Well, if that is true, then that – I proposed during the conversation – is why Rev. John Ames, narrator and protagonist of Robinson’s novel Gilead, sometimes cogitates for half a day before paying a visit to his friend and neighbor Rev. Robert Boughton, even though the two of them have been best friends in rural Iowa for more than sixty years.

And that is why I paused to think long and hard before posing questions to Robinson and Tóibín.

At its best moments the onstage conversation was a full-on conversation – free and open to the unexpected.  The takeaway (so the producer, Bernard Schwartz, told me afterward): The character of Rev. Boughton in Gilead is based squarely on a man the author watched from long range during her girlhood.  A Judge Boughton was a acquaintance of her grandfather’s.  He wore a toupée, and he went about accompanied by a poodle whose fur was the color of his toupee.  Both of them – the judge, and the poodle – had once been tall but were tall no longer, and they were quite a sight out in town, the two of them bent over and matching up top.

Here’s the question I wish I’d asked onstage: Why is it that poodle didn’t make it into Gilead along with Boughton?  And what happened to Boughton’s toupée?

The photograph is by the Y’s longtime photographer for literary events, Nancy Crampton, who surely has taken more photographs of writers than any other photographer alive.  

• 21 Oct 2014
• 1

• #literature and belief#marilynne robinson#colm toibin

At the Vatican: First the Windows, Now the Doors

It’s already late to be posting a piece about the synod, I guess.  Almost forty-eight hours have passed since it concluded!  One of the synod’s bishops posted about it right as it wrapped up!

Bishops blogging; the media following synodal developments in real time – as the Jesuit priest James Martin pointed out in America (a full thirty-six hours ago now), these new developments go further than we might realize in pointing up just how different this synod was from previous ones.

What happened at the synod?  Well, it seems to me that what happened is what has been happening ever since Francis was elected pope.  And what is that?  The pope has been working against the tremendous bulwark-building efforts of John Paul II and Benedict XVI “in the service of a more open, flexible church” – and is meeting considerable opposition.    

When Bergoglio the Jesuit cardinal was elected pope – and elected to live in the guesthouse rather than the papal apartments – he made clear that he would occupy the papal office differently than his immediate predecessors did.  And so he has.  With his public gestures and off-script remarks (“Who am I to judge?” is just one) he has taken a sharp turn away from Benedict’s view that the role of the Church is to render judgment in a world in thrall to “a dictatorship of relativism” – and back toward John XXIII’s aggiornamento, a k a “the opening of the windows."  By appointing a group of eight cardinal advisors, he made clear that

… the bishop of Rome now consults with his fellow bishops from around the world. And by making clear that the Church—and the papacy—must change with the times, he is putting a stop to John Paul and Benedict’s long effort to make Church doctrine an adamantine bulwark against relativism.

… For the past 35 years, progressive Catholics have felt thwarted. Now it’s the traditionalists’ turn. “Benedict was like a father to them,” the well-placed Jesuit at the Vatican told me. “No, he was a father to them. Now they are fatherless.” Benedict’s courageous act of renunciation, they feel, wasn’t supposed to turn out this way—not when the fight for the Church had finally been won. They are vexed by the thought that the change is irreversible, that the doors John Paul and Benedict strove to push closed—on sexuality, the ordination of women, the authority of the pope—will now stay open.

When the Atlantic piece came out, plenty of readers proposed that I was overstating the extent of Pope Francis’ determination to bring about changes in Catholic life and overstating the extent of the divisions in the curia and in the College of Cardinals.  Well, the synod has made clear that, if anything, the piece understated things.  The church is once again a church on the way.   The doors are open, and they’ll stay open.  

• 20 Oct 2014
• 1

• #pope francis#synod

A Strange Meeting

Twenty years ago, a Benedictine monk from Massachusetts stood in Florence considering an empty cupola on one wall of the Orsanmichele, the old granary in the city.

When he returned to the United States, he found a book his mother had saved for him – a book of essays about the saints by contemporary writers – and turned to an essay about St. Thomas the Apostle, a.k.a. “doubting” Thomas.  It dealt specifically with a particular rendering of the saint by Andrea del Verrocchio, the Florentine master sculptor, freshly restored and on display in the Metropolitan Museum before its return to Florence; and as he read it, the monk realized that this particular St. Thomas was the very sculpture that had been missing from the empty cupola that had caught his eye in Florence.

The monk was Iain MacLellan, OSB.  The book was A Tremor of Bliss, and the essay about St. Thomas was one I’d written – really the first thing I’d written about religion and the arts to show up in a book:

The Lehman wing was brightly lit - and there the two figures loomed up like some medieval prophet’s vision of the Renaissance beyond: Christ and Saint Thomas, a pas de deux in shining bronze, Christ’s right hand raised in blessing and his left one pulling his cloak away from his side so that Thomas, leaning toward him, might see the wound there, and touch it, and know him as the risen Lord. I wasn’t just looking anymore. Something majestic was being enacted in the next room. I went closer to see for myself. But I am getting ahead of my story, and Saint Thomas’s.

Twenty years later – yesterday – Fr. Iain and I finally met, when I joined him at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, to speak in a lecture series based at the college’s impressive Chapel Art Center.  My lecture was called “The Art of Transcendence in the Age of Technology,” but before considering audio recordings, the iPhone, and the like, Iain and I marveled together at the ancient and perennial technology – the book – that put the two of us in conversation twenty years before we met.

Once behind the microphone, I began by telling the story of a different monk’s – a different Thomas’s – engagement with technology:

In the early sixties Thomas Merton, who had written lyrically about his life of silence and solitude as a Trappist monk in Kentucky, erected a hermitage on the monastery grounds: a cinder-block structure with a porch, a stone hearth, and an altar. He read and wrote and prayed there, and he was as happy as he had ever been anywhere. But he found that the place wasn’t complete without a certain technology. “Borrowed a record player,” he wrote in his journal. “Played Joan Baez over and over again… . One record I like more and more is Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61’ …”

A Tremor of Bliss is out of print – for now – but the essay is available in the digital archives of Commonweal, which has made its site open to all at no charge this month to celebrate the journal’s 90th anniversary.    

• 17 Oct 2014
• 9

• #books#iain maclellan#thomas merton

Truly, Things Have Changed

Stephen Dubner’s book is in mind this week.  No, not Freakonomics; I mean Turbulent Souls, the story of (as the subtitle has it) “A Catholic Son’s Return to His Jewish Family.”

Turbulent Souls (I wrote in a review for Commonweal in 1999) is “a classic conversion story … . so solid and recognizable that you forget it is made up of facts he had to coax out of long-lost relatives with a notebook and a tape recorder.”  Fifteen years after publication, one news story after another has brought the book back into view.

One is the Baltimore Orioles’s bid for the American League pennant, their first such run in a couple of decades.  The youngest of eight children, Stephen in the book tells the story of how his father assigned-slash-gave each of the children a team of his or her own to root for.  Stephen got the Orioles, and he became as devoted an Orioles fan as any I know.   Well, the O’s just lost four straight to the Royals; I hope he’s taking the loss well.

Another is the death of David Greenglass, whose testimony – false testimony, Greenglass later said – sent his sister Ethel and her husband, Julius Rosenberg, to the electric chair, convicted of spying for the Soviets and sentenced to death. David and Ethel Greenglass were cousins of Stephen’s mother – Florence Greenglass – and in the book the untold story of the Stephen’s parents’ vestigial Judaism is compounded by the largely untold story of his mother’s cousins’ tabloid-hyped betrayal of one another.

And then there’s the synod on the family in Rome.  Since the mid-synod summary was released a few days ago, plenty of people have been insisting that when it comes to Catholic teaching on the family (as my Georgetown colleague Tom Farr told Newsweek) “there is very little here that is new other than emphasis and tone.”

That’s a debatable point: but what’s not debatable is that in Catholic life, and in the process of change, Catholic-style, much depends on emphasis and tone.

Turbulent Souls makes this clear.  Seventy-five years ago – when the Greenglasses were growing up on the Lower East Side – many Catholics regarded Jews and Judaism with an “emphasis and tone” something like contempt, and strictly observant Jewish families treated their children who became Christians (as Stephen’s parents did) as all but dead.  Then, with the Second Vatican Council, a change in Catholic “emphasis and tone” regarding Jews and Judaism anticipated a change in church teaching, which brought about further changes in the relationships between Catholics and Jews – changes substantial enough that on Good Friday in 1996 John Cardinal O'Connor (who, it turns out, was from a Jewish family) could preach an approving homily about Stephen’s conversion from Catholicism to Judaism from the pulpit at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

It was a change in “emphasis and tone” that at once reflected fundamental changes and called such change forth.   

In the Catholic world, often as not, that’s how change happens.  

Expect a little turbulence.  

• 16 Oct 2014

• #books#media commentary

For the Princes of the Church, Remedial Education

“… the Church, an expert in humanity … “

That phrase from one of the overnight summaries of the Synod on the Family, spotted in a passage of flatfootedly translated Vaticanese, caught my eye as much as any of the frankly remarkable statements coming out of the Synod.  But for me it underscores just what is so significant about the synod, and about where Francis is leading the church – wherever it is that we all wind up together.

Here’s how.  For many of us, the claim of Catholicism – the attraction of it– has to do in large part with its account of human nature.  The Hebrew Bible understands the human person as “born to trouble as the sparks fly up.”  The New Testament, as expressed through the long subsequent history of the church, understands the human person as at once broken and fixed – not made perfect, but made new and something like whole in the effort.

The church’s expertise, such as it is, is rooted in its anthropology, that is.   It’s on this basis that the church has any claim to be “expert in humanity.”   And it’s from the church’s claim to be “expert in humanity” that so many of its other attributes depend, and its blessings (such as they are) flow.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?  But for several decades, if not longer – for the whole lives of those of us who are younger than fifty, at the very least – the church’s claim to be expert in humanity has been belied and undermined by the church leadership’s flagrant indifference to the experience of humanity outside the bounds of the church, as found in the family in particular.  I mean families broken and reconstituted; families envisioned, imagined, fashioned, and maintained on the ground out of necessity; families whose members cherish one another as family first of all, putting the family bond above differences that might divide them.

At the same time, the church’s claim to be “expert in humanity” has been compromised drastically by its leaders’ willingness to use the world’s most cynical expertise to deny their own failure to protect the rights of children entrusted to them by families beyond numbering.

Now all of a sudden in Rome here are the princes of the church willing to learn as well as teach – willing to learn from people with experience of divorce, of companionship outside of marriage, of homosexuality.

For the church, this synod is summer school held a few weeks late, the first course in a remedial education in human nature – a first step on the path toward its becoming something like “expert in humanity” once again.

Responding to the synod, Andrew Sullivan appended to his usual “Know hope” the expression “Know joy.“  And the joy for Andrew, I suspect, is not simply the joy of a gay Catholic who finally hears himself recognized and welcomed rather than censured, but the joy of a Catholic whose own considerable expertise in humanity his church now actively seeks.

Know hope. Know joy, indeed.   

• 14 Oct 2014
• 5

• #pope francis#synod 2014