Challenge

I haven't been writing as much as I'd like, so I think I'm going to take on this "7 Posts in 7 Days" challenge.

If you're here for the first time, check out my introduction for what I'm all about.

Healing

Yesterday I went to Cor Jesu, a startlingly cool weekly event organized by the Vocations Director of the archdiocese, some other recently-minted priests, and a gang of Spirit-infused young adults from around Milwaukee.  The concept is perfect in its simplicity: an hour of Eucharistic Adoration, followed by Mass.  The event started small, but over the course of a year or two has outgrown a Newman Center chapel and is now bursting a large church at the seams.

I've been shortchanging my prayer life a little amidst our recent busy-ness, so I was almost viscerally aware of the need for some alone time with Jesus.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you're starving and would eat anything, God sets a gourmet meal in front of you?  That's kind of what this felt like.  For the first time in a pretty spiritually dry few months, He let me feel the intensity of His presence.  Specifically, there seemed to be one word he really wanted me to hear: healing.

I realized that I'd never thought much about what Jesus spent a lot of his time on earth doing: healing people.  I just kept getting hit over the head with how much the world needs this healing right now.  We are individually wounded, and the Body of Christ is wounded by divisions, scandals, and an overall sense of weariness in the face of this age's specific spiritual battles.

This word, healing, just kept coming to the forefront of my meditation all during the hour of Adoration.

Then Mass started, and the Gospel reading was this:

Jesus summoned his Twelve disciples
and gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out
and to cure every disease and every illness.
The names of the Twelve Apostles are these:
first, Simon called Peter, and his brother Andrew;
James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John;
Philip and Bartholomew,
Thomas and Matthew the tax collector;
James, the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus;
Simon the Cananean, and Judas Iscariot
who betrayed Jesus.

Jesus sent out these Twelve after instructing them thus,
“Do not go into pagan territory or enter a Samaritan town.
Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Did you catch that?  I didn't at first, and then Cardinal Harvey started his homily.  And it was ALL about healing.  He must have underscored the word healing dozens of time, reminding us that healing was one of the core components of Christ's mission, and that we as his followers are called to be healers as well.  

Often we get really good at imitating the preaching part of Christ's mission, reminding people of the rules, searching out Pharisees to argue with, finding just the right way to drive home a theological zinger.  And this part is important and good.  But it's easy to stop there, to speak the truth and walk away.

That's not what Christ asks of us.  He didn't wait to make sure people fully understood every beautiful and nuanced part of his teaching.  He reached out and touched them.  And after they were strengthened by his touch of healing, some of them were actually strong enough to listen.

Before we talk and teach and confront the world any more, we need to be healers.  We need to be fully present to the world's wounded and diseased in mind, body and spirit, and lay the hands of Christ on them - because he's given us the power to do that!  We can be his hands and his compassionate heart.  Instead of standing at a distance and telling people how they could have prevented getting sick in the first place, we are actually able - and in fact commanded - to lay down next to them, hold them in our arms, and heal them with Christ's miraculous power, which is love.

There's so much more to be said about this, but I'm still processing, and need some time to ponder how I can personally imitate Christ as healer more deeply. 

Four Hands

Photo courtesy L'Osservatore Romano

Recently I got slightly irritated by the way an article of mine was edited before being published in the local diocesan newspaper.  Some of the more theological language had been watered down, and the snipping of just a couple of sentences seemed to me to destroy the continuity and flow I'd worked so hard to achieve.

(I know...just a few short weeks ago I was all kinds of excited about my freelance work, and now I'm already griping about editors.  That must mean I'm a Real Journalist now!)

On Friday, Pope Francis released his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei.  The Pope has called it a "work of four hands," acknowledging that much of the work was completed by his predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict.

As I started reading it this morning, I was struck by the fact that Benedict, who is known for his rich, dense, beautifully crafted theological writing, allowed someone else to take over his almost-completed work, rewrite it with complete freedom, and then sign his name to it.  The amount of humility this must have taken is beyond my current spiritual maturity to comprehend.

There is nothing wrong with taking joy in our achievements, or even with the desire to be recognized for the good work we do.  But it's so easy for this desire to go a step too far and become possessiveness, a sense that if our work can't be on our own terms, we'll just sit on our hands.

Here in the 21st century West, we're culturally conditioned to believe that our work belongs to us and even defines us.  And this doesn't just apply to copyright laws and patents.  We're trained to think in terms of whether our work "fulfills" and "actualizes" us and if it doesn't, we deserve a change.

Obviously there is some truth in that, like in a lot of things that can be misleading.  We should use our gifts, and happiness found in our work is one way that God communicates with us that we've found a good way to do that.

However, if we're only asking how our work fulfills us or makes us feel, we might be forgetting the more important questions, like whether our daily work is fulfilling the duties of our primary vocation and is oriented toward the good of others.

Pope Emeritus Benedict has a vastly different set of obligations than us in terms of the scope of his work, but the principle is the same.  None of our work, even the work we are most proud of, is ultimately our own.

Like Niggle's tree, our work can only reach completion and fulfill its true purpose when surrendered to God for the service of His people.

Milwaukee, Listen Up

I'm giving us five years to make something like this happen.

And the timer starts in three, two, one...

Stepping Outside

Following, accompanying Christ, remaining with Him requires a "stepping outside," a stepping beyond. Stepping outside of ourselves, of a tired and routine way of living the faith, of the temptation to withdraw into pre-established patterns that end up closing our horizon to the creative action of God.

-- Pope Francis, First General Audience, March 2013

Some people have a deep urge to help the poor and are tirelessly joyful in that work. For me, this urge is definitely present, but I often don't feel like I have the internal resources to back it up.  A strong tendency to "feel with" people in their pain can sometimes spur me on, but empathy mixed with introversion also means that close proximity to suffering can wear me out.   More often than not, this combo takes me in the wrong direction and makes me reluctant to seek out direct contact with the suffering and needy.

This, of course, is what Pope Francis has been warning us about with all this talk about "stepping outside of ourselves," which is part of the reason I bit the bullet and volunteered at our parish food pantry for the first time this past Saturday.   It's the "fake it 'til you make it" principle - do the things you know to be virtuous even if they don't come naturally, and eventually those actions will transform you into the kind of person who naturally does those things.  As Screwtape so accurately points out, "All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be."

As it turned out, God decided to let me have some training wheels this time around - because I loved it. I felt way more comfortable than I thought I would, and relished the tiny moments of connection as each person came to my station to collect their allotted canned goods.  I realized how much I miss having a job that puts me in contact with people from all the different racial and socio-economic strata of our radically compartmentalized city.

At one point during a brief lull, a little girl came scampering up to me and presented me with a dog-eared deck of cards.  "Do you want to play cards with me?" she asked, grinning shyly.  "I'm sorry, I can't play cards with you right now - I have to work," I said, and then wished I hadn't, because I realized how often she probably hears variations of that.  So many low-wage workers, especially single parents, have to take on multiple jobs just to keep their debts at bay. Kids get stuck at neighborhood day-cares of often questionable legitimacy, or are just left to their own devices.  

So-called "social justice" issues and so-called "family values" issues are so often falsely placed at loggerheads.  Really, they are inextricably linked. The right of the worker to a just wage is, as the Church teaches, a family issue.  A just wage is a family-supporting wage.  If wages are determined by what's best for a corporation instead of what's best for the the family, the family and society suffer.

These, of course, are deep-seated political and societal problems that can only be addressed over time.  In the meanwhile, I'm grateful that my parish offers me the opportunity to "step outside" and serve the poor in direct and concrete ways.

Mothering

This past Sunday, we went to an epic Mass at the Basilica of St. Josephat.  Okay, so all Masses are epic - as the Franciscan provincial who was there so mind-blowingly reminded us, the One who placed the stars in the sky makes himself present at every Mass through the hands of the priest.  But this one was of the no-holds-barred, chant-and-polyphony, choking-on-incense variety that hits you in the face with Heaven.

It was particularly special because it was the first Mass of Thanksgiving for a newly ordained priest.  He had apparently been a Franciscan friar serving at the Basilica for many years prior to receiving the priestly calling, and the joy of his parish family at seeing him offer Mass for the first time was palpable.

The priest who gave the homily was elderly and in a wheelchair, apparently as a result of some long-term, chronic illness.  His topic was the sacrificial nature of the priesthood.  He told the story of the time when he was first struggling to accept this illness and was visited by then-Archbishop Dolan in the hospital.  The Archbishop asked him, "Will you offer this up for me?"  This personal request helped him gain perspective on his suffering, and to understand that suffering as a vital part of his vocation as a priest called to participate in a particular way in Christ's sacrifice.

I've felt for a long time a specific prompting to pray for seminarians and for an increase in holy vocations.  At this Mass, I was struck with the realization that my recent health struggles could be part of that prayer.  Archbishop Dolan asked his question on behalf of Christ, and it is the same question asked of me.

This also fits in with my call to live out my feminine vocation, as described in the work of St. Edith Stein and Blessed John Paul II, especially until God chooses to bless me with biological motherhood.  At the end of the Mass of Thanksgiving, the new priest presented his own mother with the maniturgium, the white cloth wrapped around the new priest's hands during the ordination rite to symbolize the burial cloths of Christ.  The priest's mother takes part in the priest's sacrificial self-gift, offering her son much as the Blessed Mother did.  Through the spiritual motherhood that all women are called to, I can offer my own small sacrifice in unity with the men Christ is calling to renew his Church. 

Ignorance or Bliss

 The Archdiocese of Milwaukee has been going through a...let's say...challenging time in its history.  I won't dwell on why, because I don't trust myself to be charitable.  Regardless, it's hard to ignore what resulted: a confused, divided and disaffected local church. 

At this point, although we are still in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings, it would seem that the pastoral strengths of now-Cardinal Dolan followed up by the administrative strengths of Archbishop Listecki have enabled us to begin the process of healing and revitalization.  People are flocking to events like this one, which I'll write more about at some point.  There are also great signs of the Holy Spirit at work through our new Vocations Director, including a men's discernment house and an influx of new seminarians who are in love with Christ and can't wait to get into parishes to share the authentic Faith with our demoralized local flock.

But the damage has been done to a certain extent, and it's not going to be an overnight process of renewal.  I was confronted with this reality recently when my boss asked if I would give some administrative help to the pastoral council at his large suburban parish.  I knew I would probably run into some people I didn't agree with, but thought it would at least be interesting to learn a bit about the inner workings of a parish.  So I agreed.

As it turned out, it was one of the most frustrating and disheartening experiences I've ever had in my years of parish involvement. 

Through a lethal combination of misinformation and faulty ideas, the pastor and council seemed hellbent on isolating themselves and their parish from the resources, structures and community of the greater Archdiocese.  The amazing ways in which other parishes are being renewed - through the full and potent realities of the Faith - weren't even on their radar screens.  Instead, their conversation about how to keep parish membership from continuing to slip revolved around empty theological and corporate buzzwords.

One of the most discouraging things I observed involved the different generations present at the meetings. I was unsurprised by the older contingent - those who lived through Vatican II and embraced many aspects of the misinterpretation that followed.  I expected them and know their rhetoric inside-out.

What was really disappointing was the next generation down.  Many members of this group seemed genuinely interested in serving the Church in some way, and didn't have a chip on their shoulder or an axe to grind.  However, their catechesis in the faith had clearly been so saccharine, substance-less and vague that they had no firm footing to even understand, let alone engage with, the doctrinal confusion on display.

I started this blog partly with the intention of drawing attention to signs of hope and renewal among the next generation of Catholics.  But we can't fix problems that we don't acknowledge, and I think poor catechesis is one of the significant barriers standing between enthusiastic young Catholics and what their hearts are truly longing for.

People tend to think of theology as being of secondary importance.  After all, what does it really matter if we understand all those complicated doctrinal ins and outs as long as we love as Jesus loved?  But the catch is that without deep knowledge of who Jesus has revealed himself to be through his Church, we can't enter into an authentic relationship with him and encourage others to do the same.  The New Evangelization has to start within.

Review in Five Bullets: From Up On Poppy Hill

In general, I don't really like cartoons.  Not sure why - as an art form, animated story-telling just doesn't speak to me much.

There are different types of cartoons, of course.  I can't sit through even forty-five seconds of an "adult" cartoon like The Simpsons or Family Guy without feeling inclined to throw a shoe at the TV and curl up in a fetal position mourning the death of Western civilization.  I do like a lot of Pixar films: the animation is clever and skillful and the stories are well-developed and often meaningful.

As for anime, I was first exposed to it in a whole series of negative contexts.  My least favorite English professor at Marquette, a self-professed deconstructionist, made us watch a well-known anime film as part of a first year honors intro to lit class.  I also had a roommate my sophomore year who watched anime on our shared TV almost ceaselessly, including at 4 in the morning when I was trying to sleep.  My dislike for it might be related to these first experiences, or it might be partly cultural - my sensibilities are pretty exclusively Western.

So, the recent Japanese animated film Up On Poppy Hill isn't something I would have anticipated seeing, let alone enjoying.  But enjoy it I did.

The story has two intertwining plot lines: one about a group of students who want to save their dilapidated but historic clubhouse from being demolished, and one about a romance that develops between two of the students against the backdrop of some complicated family history.  Both are very moving in their own right, and are woven together beautifully.

Here are five bullets, in no particular order:

• I really ended up liking the animation itself - the backgrounds were exquisite and rich in detail and color, while the foreground figures were done in a much simpler style.  It kind of reminded me of puppets against a painted backdrop.  Like skilled puppeteers, the animators were able to convey an incredible amount of emotion and character development with simple figures.  There was an occasionally moment of cartoonish-ness, like the chorus of high school students that started weeping loudly over the possible loss of their club house, tears spouting in fountain-like jets from their eyes, or the president of the philosophy club with his gigantic head to match his larger-than-life personality. These moments seemed a little jarring and out of keeping with the overall aesthetic, but were pretty minimal.
• The cultural and historical details of 1963 Japan were also cool - there were extended scenes just showing the central character, a young woman of high school age, going about her daily business: getting up, rolling up her sleeping mat, preparing rice and fresh fish for breakfast.  It made me kind of covetous of the clutter-free, simple and elegant functionality that seemed to be typical of a Japanese home of that period.
• We tend to associate youthful rebellion with a throwing out of traditional values and ways of doing things.  It was interesting that in this story it was the new, post-war, pro-Western government that was looking to leave behind Japan's intellectual and historical heritage, and it was the activist students trying to retrieve and protect this heritage.
• Despite the fact that the high school itself seemed to be co-ed, the clubhouse that formed the hub of political and intellectual life for its students was boys-only when the story opened.  The girls got involved later, but their energies were focused on getting the place cleaned up rather than participating in the student organizations that were housed there.  It was the 60s, I guess - but I sure hope things are different now. 
• The story had a striking innocence about it, which made me realize just how rare that sort of story is in our current cultural climate.  There was no snark, no melodrama, no irony.  At one point a character quotes this from Diogenes: "Humans have complicated every simple gift of the gods."  Something to think about.

Blair on Suburbs and Other Good Stuff

At the endlessly worthwhile Patheos web forum, Peter Blair has an interesting article about my favorite hobbyhorse: The Real Case Against the Suburbs, or, How Ought Christians to Think About the Common Good?

Money quote:

I should note, in closing, that the suburbs are really just a cultural symbol of the larger point we were trying to make. That point was: Bradley was right to suggest that we need more ordinary, God-loving, everyday Christianity. We don’t all have to be radically missional in the sense that some evangelicals promote. But we should not mistake the normal cultural standards of 21st century American life for “ordinary” life. By the standards of both grace and nature, ordinary American life, in many ways, falls far short of what ordinary life should look like. Of course, this gap will always be with us, courtesy of the Fall, but that doesn’t mean that certain cultural arrangements can’t make it bigger or smaller.

Blair mentions several of the points that I talked about in one of my first posts about the importance of shared public spaces in creating authentic community.  He brings up some other interesting points too, including the impact of urban/suburban structures on criminal justice policy.

Another important idea he brings up (and one with broader applications) is the tendency among Christians to have a knee-jerk reaction against theories or lines of thinking perceived as "secular" without actually subjecting them to real intellectual scrutiny.

A kind of aversion to Christian adoption of secular thinking is behind a lot of the more harmful facets of American Christian thought (e.g. continued skepticism of evolution). I am not saying Miller himself is a creationist, only that the kind of language he employs here gives comfort to that kind of thinking. All truth is one, and we shouldn’t hesitate to adopt something just because it has a secular provenance.

 I think this is important to consider, though I would snag another of the phrases that Blair uses and note that often Christians and those in the secular arena are speaking two different "cultural languages" even when they seem to be voicing support for the same theory. 

Relatedly, Blair goes on to caution evangelical Christians like himself against thinking that any position worth holding needs to be boiled down to some specific Biblical text.

An ethics grounded in proof-texting the Bible will always be thin, watered-down, and incomplete. Christians need to engage with the breadth of human learning, and an argument can be quite persuasive and intellectually binding on a Christian even if it does not once mention the Bible.

 Catholics ought in theory to find it easier to avoid this pitfall, since our faith recognizes Tradition as a key part of God's revelation to humanity.  Catholic thought has also been in dialogue with secular scientific and philosophical thought for over two thousand years now, which means we should feel confident engaging these systems on their own turf.  Of course, we can and do subject our Tradition to "proof-texting" as well. Catholics would do well to remember that we have nothing to fear from secular scientific or philosophical inquiry pursued in good faith. There's only one Truth, and any true thing pursued honestly will eventually lead there.

May Day

My husband got a call this week about an acting gig taking part in Sunday's re-enactment of the "Bay View Massacre."  Bay View is a Milwaukee neighborhood just south of downtown.  It's gradually changing into a hipster paradise of  trendy restaurants and record shops, but was historically part of the southside industrial corridor of foundries, steel mills and meat packing plants.  It actually started as a company town for workers at a rolling mill called the Milwaukee Iron Company, and became the center of the workers' rights movement in Wisconsin in the late nineteenth century.

In 1886, thousands of striking workers marched from St. Stanislaus Catholic Church to the mill in Bay View, demanding an 8-hour work day. At the governor's orders, state militia fired on the marchers, killing seven. 

A re-enactment of this event has taken place every year since 1986 at a historical marker where the mill used to be.  The theatre piece itself was highly stylized and involved two ten-foot puppets representing the governor and the labor leader.  A small ensemble of actors marched with signs, chanting:  "This is what we want, no matter what our skill:  8 hours to work, 8 hours to rest, 8 hours for what we will!"  Then each actor stepped forward to remember one of the people who died, speaking as a friend or family member, and draped a red scarf over the monument.

I'm not usually one for heavy-handed symbolism, or the over-theatrical, or puppets.  But this seemed like an appropriate use of all three.  It was very much in the tradition of street theatre in the context of social activism, and I felt connected both to local history and to struggles for fair working conditions still taking place worldwide.  It was surprisingly moving, and I am really glad that this event is being remembered.

Of course the afternoon's program then veered into the political, and I started squirming internally, because I know that many of the politicians who now claim to speak on behalf of workers support laws which are the very definition of injustice. Our political environment in the U.S. tries to force us into one of two boxes, and as Catholics we have an even more difficult time than most resisting this, because of what we know to be at stake.  But, knowing what's at stake, it's all the more important for us to maintain our "both/and" identity - we don't have to choose just one thing to fight for.

St. Joseph the Worker, pray for us.

The New Gnostic

 I have to admit that I struggle with a bit of a Gnostic streak.  I've always appreciated the life of the mind a lot more than the life of the body - I'm the one who used to spend recess hiding behind the maintenance shed with a book while everyone else played kickball.

Lately my body's been letting me down in a pretty significant way, making it even harder to appreciate it.  Of course the thing to do when you have trouble appreciating something as a gift from God is to double down on the thanksgiving - but the most I can muster recently is a sort of sarcastic, eye-roll-y prayer of gratitude: "Gee, thanks, God, for this broken piece of crap that you saddled me with.  I REALLY APPRECIATE IT."

I'm working on it.

Christianity, of course, doesn't just recognize that the physical body has some good and beautiful things about it.  It goes a step beyond, recognizing the Incarnation as the defining moment in human history.  When God became man, that wasn't some kind of drastic violation of the order of things; rather, it was when the true order of things was finally revealed.

In fact, even becoming a physical, bodily man wasn't enough for God.  He wants to actually feed us with his Body and and make us part of it.  The whole yucky mess of human life gets drawn into the whole and perfect Body of Christ.

This, of course, can lead us to Gnosticism on a broader scale.  It can feel easy to acknowledge the Body of Christ as a spiritual reality, but it gets tricky when we're confronted with a coughing, smelly, sweaty manifestation of it sitting uncomfortably close to us on the bus.

Pope Francis has encouraged priests to be "shepherds living with the 'smell of their sheep'" - an incredibly powerful image to remind people that Christian love is not just spiritual but corporal.

Over at her blog, Leah Libresco is facilitating a related discussion about disruptive kids in public places generally and at Mass specifically:

...Babies and children are a part of life, even for people who don’t have their own, and it would seem strange to me to have them excluded from people gathering together to form the Body of Christ.

I don’t claim that anything so sacramental is happening on an airplane, naturally, but it does seem strange to expect that this part of our life and community should be kept out of our way.  It’s bad for the parents, who are isolated, but it seems far from salutary for everyone else to have a norm of kids being mostly invisible, unless you’re in one of their spaces, like a playground.

The contemporary form of Gnosticism looks a little different than the ancient one, but is just as insidious.  Ancient Gnostics demonstrated contempt for the body through strict asceticism - but our contemporary view of the body as a useful or pleasurable tool, separated from its messy fruitfulness, shows just as much contempt for our integrated selves and our shared dignity as participants in the Body of Christ.

Voices

This morning as I bumped pinball-like around our tiny bathroom, trying to get ready for work without sending hairpins and lipstick tubes flying off the edge of the sink, I started thinking about those organizational consultants who write articles on Yahoo News about how to save space, de-clutter your life and become Zen and Feng Shui.  Suddenly I realized that I was actually composing one of these articles in my head, in exact imitation of their usual style.

One of my strengths as a writer is that I'm a bit of a chameleon - I can shape my writing to fit the audience and the style that's needed.  That has served me well in my current job, since I'm asked to do a lot of marketing and PR style writing which is very audience-driven.  Of course the flip side to this ability is that my own writerly "voice" is something that I've never really pinned down.  The uniqueness of a writer's voice has been overemphasized in recent decades (as I talked about here), but it is undeniable that each of the great writers of history, from essayists to poets to novelists, had something distinctively his own in his writing, which was usually then imitated by an admiring horde of also-rans.

I mean...could you read this paragraph and think it was written by anyone but the actual author?

He’s engaged to be married to Stiffy Byng, and his long years of football should prove an excellent preparation for setting up house with her. The way I look at it is that when a fellow has had plug-uglies in cleated boots doing a Shuffle-off-to-Buffalo on his face Saturday after Saturday since he was a slip of a boy, he must get to fear nothing, not even marriage with a girl like Stiffy, who from early childhood has seldom let the sun go down without starting some loony enterprise calculated to bleach the hair of one and all.

 Really.

My newest writing venture is freelancing for the local archdiocesan newspaper.  I'm very excited about it, and hope it leads to additional opportunities in the future to write for specifically Catholic news sources.  But of course these assignments are hardly exercises in free-flowing creativity...which I guess is why it's nice to have a somewhat-anonymous blog to take a stab at writing that's a little more personal and exploratory.

The other option is to buckle down and write the next Great American Novel, as my dad has always threatened to do.  I'll keep you posted.

Good News Day

I'm a city kid, and get really excited when I think about what can be created within the context of city life.  A while ago I wrote about the importance of "third places" which can help build authentic community.

My home town of Milwaukee was an industrial center in the Midwest - brewing, manufacturing - and struggled as most such centers did once those industries couldn't sustain it anymore.  It is now going through a slow but unmistakable cultural transformation.  It's not fully there yet, but there are several vibrant pockets of community and cultural life, and lots of possibilities on the horizon.

Here are just a few of the things I've heard about recently:

• The Rotary Club, a service organization for Catholic business people, is collaborating with some foundations and the Urban Ecology Center to revitalize a portion of the post-industrial riverfront area, transforming it into an arboretum and "living forest classroom."  It will include hiking trails, a canoe launch and several distinct outdoor learning areas for kids, and will apparently be the "most significant and biologically diverse native ecosystem in Southeastern Wisconsin."  Its location is great, too - it connects the vibrant east side of the city with the more economically challenged north side. I'm sure there will be lots of programming drawing in central city kids, who would benefit greatly from what they plan to offer.  I think this is a pretty cool thing for a Catholic organization to do to celebrate its centennial - a true gift to the city.

• One of the last great movie palaces of the golden age of cinema is located in downtown Milwaukee, but it's been basically abandoned for years and is in a state of disrepair.  Its shabby former glory has really contributed to the general atmosphere of seediness and decay in the city center, which has continued to struggle even as other neighborhoods are revitalized.  Just recently the downtown tourism board moved into the theatre's old box office and started using it as an information kiosk.  It was nice to see some sign of life, but obviously it is still not being used to its full potential.  Now it sounds like a trust is being created to restore the theatre and re-open it as a performance venue, to be used for community arts programming and even possibly as a second concert space for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

• Downtown Milwaukee is also home to a decrepit shopping mall of sorts.  I believe it must have been built with the intention of bringing some commercial life to our city center, but it seems to have had the opposite effect.  Half the stores are closed, and there are constant rumors that it's being sold, torn down, or converted into condos.  Now arts organizations are staging a quiet coup and moving into to some of the abandoned retail spaces.  The Milwaukee Public Theatre has taken over one large space that has been vacant for years, and has created a spacious new theatre learning venue.  The mission statement of the Milwaukee Public Theatre talks about the arts as a "healing resource," and they do a lot of educational and outreach theatre programming, particularly for public school kids whose education in the arts has been all but eliminated by budget cuts.  It's great to see them with some elbow room and new opportunities.  Across the rotunda, a coalition of small, independent Milwaukee theatre groups has created the Underground Collaborative, a shared theatre workspace which includes an art gallery, administrative offices, a black box theatre and a dance studio.  My husband has gotten involved with one of the companies that shares the space, and they seem to really have their act together - they are energetic, creative and organized, and the space is in constant use.

Cool, huh? 

Review in Five Bullets: NO

I've decided to start a new regular feature on this blog - the Review in Five Bullets.  I read a lot of books and see a lot of movies, so this will be a way to slow down my literary and cinematic voraciousness with a little critical analysis.  Of course, once this feature becomes wildly popular it will be known as R5B and will totally be, like, a meme and stuff.

(Speaking of memes, my siblings and I drew my dad's attention to that meme that's been circulating since Easter showing an image of the Risen Christ with the caption "YOLO. JK."  My dad intoned, Ent-like, "The world sure is different now."  We were all ROFL.)

So, this film.  My husband and I live near not one but TWO beautiful and historic art-deco style movie theatres that show a lot of art-house and foreign films.  We saw a preview for No a while ago and have been wanting to see it since.  It actually came out last year and was recognized at a number of film festivals, then received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film.  Now it is finally being shown here, in limited release.

It's a Spanish-language film set in Chile in 1988, and is about the TV ad campaigns that led up to the plebiscite that ousted Pinochet from power.

Five bullets, in no particular order:

• The movie has a strong documentary flavor, due in part to the use of a lot of historical footage both of the political ads themselves and news footage of political protests, police violence, etc.  The skillful editing of the ad footage in particular was crucial to creating the tension of ideals between the "Yes" camp who supported another 8-year term for Pinochet and the "No" camp who wanted him out.
• Also lending itself well to the documentary feel was the decision to film with the low-definition equipment and techniques that were in use in TV news at the time.  This meant that historic footage blended in seamlessly with the rest of the movie, and it also contributed to a strong sense of time and place.
• Speaking of the time and place...man, was 80s fashion aggressively ugly. It seems to have been designed to obscure all natural human beauty.
• I was interested by the conflict within the "No" camp about the most effective strategy in using their fifteen minutes per day of state-allotted ad time.  One group wanted to use graphic scenes of violence and police brutality, hammering home the truth about the Pinochet regime.  The other group thought that, though this would reflect the truth of the political situation, it would underscore the fear people were already feeling and keep them home on election day.  Instead, this group wanted to use advertising principles to create an "appealing" and "positive" campaign that would inspire and unite.  I've observed this tension within current political and social justice movements today, particularly the pro-life movement - I'm thinking of the discussion about whether to use graphic images as part of anti-abortion protests.
• Although Rene, the ad man in the "No" camp, is the obvious protagonist, there is a secondary protagonist who adds an extra layer of depth: his young son Simon.  Simon is a constant presence by his father's side but has a bare handful of lines.  He accompanies his parents to a protest march which turns violent;  his father leaves him in the car while trying to intervene in his mother's arrest; he sits and watches the ads being filmed.   At one point his parents have an exchange about how much he understands about what's going on around him, and can't agree.  It is never made clear what he thinks about the historic events taking place, but the viewer is occasionally pulled into his point of view as he silently absorbs them.  One of the film's final scenes is Rene marching in the street with a huge crowd celebrating the results of the election.  Simon clings to his neck, ticker tape in his hair,  and watches as his father's face slowly changes from its habitual stoic mask to tears of joy.  This scene is long and there's no commentary: the viewer experiences it like Simon, as a series of images to be slowly processed over a lifetime.

Christos anesti

Happy Easter, everyone!

It was a weekend full of choral singing, ham, and an epic game of Monopoly.  

And, underlying everything, that joy, always old and always new, the Deeper Magic from before the Dawn of Time.

The liturgical year is such a gift and source of consolation to me.  Somehow each season and each great feast seems to come along just when I need it most, and often some aspect of the mystery being celebrated will come into special focus and bring clarity to whatever challenges I am facing.  This year, just before the Easter Vigil started, our pastor must have accidentally turned on his microphone, so we could hear his words clearly from the front steps of the church.  "Okay, we need to light the fire now, because it's really raining!"

Yes, of course - that should be our response to the rain. Not to huddle inside, not to wait and hope it might be clearer in an hour, but to light the fire.  NOW.

As God’s co-workers we urge you not to receive God’s grace in vain.  For he says,

     “In the time of my favor I heard you,

      and in the day of salvation I helped you.”

I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation.

2 Cor 6:1-2