The Longest Loneliness

On November 29, 1980, thirty years ago yesterday, Dorothy Day died, just a few weeks after the election of Ronald Reagan. Day was one of the twentieth-century architects of the Catholic Left, which in 1980 was not yet implicated in its current ménage à trois with the pro-choice movement and the Democratic Party.

Day's 1955 autobiography, The Long Loneliness, is a classic to those who still love her, and a quite respectable feature film based on the book was released in 1996, under the title Entertaining Angels. By "long loneliness" Day meant the basic but often unsatisfied human need for community. Her own long loneliness was remedied by a life of service to the poor and membership in the Catholic Church, which, not coincidentally, she considered the church of the poor.

But that solution had not come quickly to her. She experienced inklings of religious belief in childhood, but by her early 20s Day lived a Bohemian, free lover's existence, inspired by the message of the early birth control movement and predisposed to embrace the causes of the unbelieving radical left. She quickly demonstrated painfully bad taste in men. Compelled by a sharp, acquisitive love for a writer, Lionel Moise, she practically forced her way into his life—into his apartment, into his bed. He forewarned her that if she became pregnant, he would abandon her. When they conceived, she aborted the child to keep the man, but lost both. She then married a strange loser on the rebound, dumped him after a year, and pursued Lionel to Chicago, where she failed to recapture him.

Only later did Day find familial happiness when she settled into a common-law marriage with Forster Batterham, a man of no particular distinction except to be the undeserving recipient of her love. She conceived again and this time her unborn child brought her great happiness. She began to return to thoughts of God and to pray. As a leftist, she wondered whether she was simply swallowing the opiate of the people. But Marxist theory, she realized, did not fit her situation. She turned to God not as one oppressed but as one who, like C.S. Lewis, had been "surprised by joy." She had her infant daughter baptized into the Catholic Church and then became a Catholic herself. Forster, an atheist and anarchist who had rejected even a mere licensed union, could never accept sacramental marriage with a Catholic. They broke up. Shortly thereafter, at the height of the Great Depression, Day found her calling when she began offering food and shelter to the poor of New York City. The ministry was quickly imitated elsewhere and persists to the present day, in one form or another.

Almost seamlessly, Day integrated her secular political philosophy with Catholic social teaching. She absorbed the Catholic esteem for distributism—widespread ownership of the means of production—and united it with her pre-existing taste for anarchism. For Day, anarchism was not the absence of all government. It was local self-government. She envisioned a society of small businesses and farms directed by individuals in small communities. She was opposed to the dominance of both large corporations and expansive centralized governments. She appealed to the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which states that the most local unit of society capable of handling a matter should do so. She had a Franciscan regard for instantaneous, unmediated aid to the poor. She had far too little faith in the state to keep easy company with American liberals.

Sometimes Day seems caught in an ideological time warp. Is she conservative? Is she liberal? Today it is hard to peg someone who distrusts both the state and the corporation, and who does so in resolutely Catholic language. Our vision sharpens somewhat when we follow her into the 1960s. As the Sexual Revolution unfolded, Day refused to go along with it. She was now too steeped in the full range of Catholic teaching to be enticed by calls for a loosening of Catholic moral strictures on birth control, divorce, premarital sex, and abortion. She set herself firmly against the claims of homosexuality. She instinctively recognized that the openness to human life represented by concern for the poor was equally represented by respect for the procreative power of sex. Despite her own libertine past, she does not seem to have feared the charge of hypocrisy. She viewed her own history with shame and sorrow. She believed the youth of the '60s were sinking into the same sexual mistakes she and her peers had made in the '20s. Some of the young liberated volunteers in her ministry began to see her as something of an old hag.

Although Dorothy Day lived a long, full life, I still think it worthwhile to ask what would have become of her had she survived beyond 1980. Her traditionalism on sexual morality would have left her with few ardent friends on the Catholic Left, which has tacitly agreed with the Secular Left not to make too much of a fuss about such things as abortion and homosexuality. The Right, meanwhile, would have penalized her for her anti-capitalism. She would have been isolated, intellectually and perhaps socially. For a woman intent on merging ideas with action in a community of true believers and doers, this would have been the longest loneliness of all.

Say A Prayer...For the Pretenders

It is an undeniable fact of life that pretenders succeed. Pretenders create the impression that they know more than they do know, and that they have achieved more than they have. A long chain of such impressions, crafted for small cliques as much as large audiences, and fortified among persons who count, creates a reputation, which results in job offers, promotions, awards, and opportunities for genuine achievement, which, to be fair, pretenders use to actually become the persons they have pretended to be. If all goes well, the pretense eventually diminishes, the smoke and mirrors are stored away, and something authentic emerges.

Meanwhile, however, the honest, naive ones who never claimed to know what they did not know, who as freely revealed their failures as their triumphs, who never confidently proferred a dubious answer in the expectation that it would do no harm, or that it could be corrected easily enough later---the fate of such innocent souls is to fill out the lower reaches of their chosen occupations and courses of life.

On the whole, I have no quarrel with the pretenders. Perhaps nine-tenths of the practical good done in this world is done by them. And I may be a pretender myself. In the spiritual realm, however, the pretender's course does give me pause. For God cannot be impressed as humans can. His view of us will never be molded by the quiet little press releases we launch heavenward. He will not spread word of our faux excellence to His angels and His saints, there or here below. The pretender, being too-practiced in his arts, is in constant danger of getting ahead of himself, and of being painfully drawn back to who he truly is, by the one true God.

In the end, of course, all shall be well. In God's kingdom, the first shall be last, and the last first. This prophecy is often misunderstood. It does not mean that the last shall replace the first and that the first will be relegated to the back of the pack. It means that the very ordering of first and last shall be obliterated. All will stand and thrive together on a single, happy plain.

In the meantime, though, say a prayer...for the pretenders.

Two Rivers

Many of my thousands of readers have asked about the title of this blog.

The River Floss is the topographical center of George Eliot's classic English novel, The Mill On the Floss.

The central characters of this story are Maggie and Tom, children of a mill owner who loses his mill in a legal dispute. Tom vows to regain the lost mill (he succeeds) and remain forever the enemy of the family that took it away. After their father's death, Maggie, in disturbing contrast, renews and deepens her long friendship with the son of that very family.

Imaginatively, the River Floss is a place of unresolved tensions. Tom's purely utilitarian approach to education confronts Maggie's authentic love of learning. Tom's unyielding regard for a merely conventional morality, which compels his hatreds as much as it restrains his vices, confronts Maggie's desire for true moral virtue, for the "more excellent way." As the story approaches its climax, brother and sister are deeply alienated from each other.

In the end, the tensions between Tom and Maggie are resolved only by death. They drown during a flood, swept away in the engorged Floss. There is an implied reconciliation, as they die in each other's arms. But Eliot was unable to imagine a fuller resolution. In this respect the moral imagination of Mill on the Floss, for all its poignancy and richness of expression, has a kind of quiet poverty at its core. Human lives not only turn out imperfectly, but the imperfection defines the outcome rather than qualifies it. It is the difference between wearing a somewhat worn shirt and wearing that shirt inside-out.

I can recommend Mill on the Floss for showing that the desire to be authentically human inevitably leads to conflict. But Eliot does not show a way through that conflict. Ultimately, the river does not give the victory to those who struggle; it only ends their struggle. The river neither forgives nor redeems. It merely terminates. It is the River Floss, not the River Jordan.

Our prayer can only be that the river running through this vale of tears is the Jordan, not the Floss.

My Two Mothers

Yesterday the Catholic Church celebrated the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, mother of the Church. When Mary's life on this earth ended, her soul was not separated from her body, nor did her body begin to decay. Rather, she was taken up to heaven, body and soul. So the Church believes.

The Assumption of Mary is a fitting complement to the teaching that Mary was sinless from the moment of her "immaculate" conception. The unbelieving will quarrel as to which teaching is the more incredible.

I myself do not find the sinlessness of Mary so difficult to believe. Certainly the God who created the universe can lead a single human being through her short run on earth without a single moral misstep. And I need not believe that Mary never made a mistake, only that she never sinned. For there are many mistakes that are not sins, and Mary may have made them. Perhaps she accidentally slammed the door on Jesus' finger when he was a toddler. Perhaps she burned Joseph's supper and, with no choice but to eat it, he became ill. Perhaps she then resorted to the treatment of bleeding to cure him. Such actions would have been flawed and harmful but not sinful. I grant that true moral virtue strives for due care and correct judgment. And one can often bore down from a "mistake" to a sinful intent that gave rise to it. But errors resulting from unavoidable imperfections of body and mind are not sins.

The only person I have known who seems to come close to the sinless state of Mary was my other mother, Virginia Cerna Joseph, who died in 1982 at the age of 54.

The effort to find fault with this mother might yield some results. She was not much of a disciplinarian. Her efforts to spank her seven children with the wooden paddle my father had made were greeted with laughter. Perhaps there was some sinful laxity at work there, and we would have turned out better had she kept us on a tighter leash. She worried a lot. Perhaps that could have been the result of a lack of complete trust in God's providence.

On matters of sex and marriage, her judgments could be exacting. When a female friend of my brother's asked to stay a night at our house as she hitchhiked across the region, my mother resisted the prospect of a girl of such evident loose morals setting foot in our home. She had a low view of Martin Luther King, Jr., solely on account of his sexual dalliances as reported by J. Edgar Hoover. In the days before annulments became common, she did not support divorce as a solution to the problem of a spouse who seemed incapable of fulfilling the basic obligations of married life.

But that's all I can think of in the way of possible wrongs. And it's just the stringy backside of the tapestry. On the front lies her good cheer; her openness and sympathy towards others (she softened toward the hitchhiker); the impossibility of imagining her deliberately harming anyone; her abiding faith in God and her love for the Church. A priest who knew us both once said he saw some of her qualities in me. This is the highest compliment I have ever received. I am grateful to him for seeing things as they aren't.

When I think of my two mothers, I must confess that the image of one merges with the other.

If, meanwhile, there is a Mary-shortage among the rest of us, I am comforted in the knowledge that nearly everyone I have known possesses at least one virtue that is truly noble and excellent. Most of us are probably closer to becoming like Mary than we imagine.

Guest Blog: Two Singers

I'm 8 so it's kind of embarrassing writing a blog. I wanted to clear that up. Anyways...I want to tell you about my favorite singers, Ingrid Michaelson and Regina Spektor.

I think that Regina Spektor is just a little bit better than Ingrid Michaelson, but that may be because Ingrid Michaelson is less, kind of, experienced, I should say. I think that I like Regina Spektor a little bit better because she is more creative with her songs.

But Ingrid Michaelson is good, too, because I like how she puts the very few instruments she has into very good work.

Whenever I go to the stereo I have to really think a long time about which one I'm going to play. I like hearing the songs and singing them to myself while doing hand and body gestures that match the song. Also, the way I memorize songs is by hearing them a lot of times while I'm cleaning the table or I'm just getting bored. I have to listen to them a couple times before I memorize them but it's very fun to memorize them because I feel like I helped the writer of the songs write the songs. I feel I have something special to do with them.

-Cecilia Joseph

Friday Night Slights

Friday Night Lights, an NBC drama that airs, cutely, on Friday nights, has been a favorite of mine since my wife and I discovered it on Hulu a few years ago. In fact, FNL is the only TV show I watch regularly. I am not sure FNL merits this singular honor, but perhaps in some mysterious way the show and I are about made for each other.

FNL depicts a small, hard-livin', football-lovin' fictional Texas town called Dillon. The central characters are high school football coach Eric Taylor and his wife Tami, high school principal. A small set of appealing characters surround the mostly loving and sensible couple. Many of the student characters from the show's first seasons are now gone. They graduated and left Dillon. Few shows have dispatched central characters with such aplomb.

FNL insists on that kind of realism. For unlike so much else on TV, FNL actually believes in realism as a mode of artistic expression. The outlandish plots of the crime and doctor shows, the far-out intrigues of the superpower dramas, the absurd scenarios and extreme characters of the situation comedies--you will find no attempt at such things here. Scenes are filmed documentary style, and the actors are permitted to ad lib lines as they see fit. Cast and crew work on location in the Austin area. Even the football team at fictional Dillon High, the Panthers, suit up in imitation of the real-life Pflugerville Panthers nearby.

Of course, such techniques are no guarantee of realism. The producers of FNL seem to believe that small town life in Texas consists of a thin, tepid religious conservatism laced with heavy dosages of moral transgression. I cannot pronounce them to be definitely wrong, but realism would seem to favor the depiction of at least one reasonable, thoughtful Christian on the show, at some point.

The Taylors are churchgoing, and want their daughter to be, too. But neither they nor any of the other characters has ever indicated a more than passing acquaintance with the Christian faith and its possible implications for the travails of daily life. In a previous season, the lovely and talented Lyla Garrity briefly got religion but then collapsed into the arms of a new beau, football star Tim Riggins. She kissed Tim hello and God goodbye. In truth, FNL associates intense Christian commitment most often with emotional pathologies. The sensible people are either not religious at all or discreetly leave their faith on the Church steps after Sunday service.

Dillon is big enough to include a state champion high school football team, cutting-edge educators, a brilliant artist, homosexuals, rich people, and an Applebee's. But for some reason the place cannot quite accommodate even one thinking, committed Christian.

I can't say the omission hurts my feelings, exactly. There is a quaintness and naivete to FNL's secularism that I almost want to leave untouched. But this Texas Christian does claim the right to feel slighted.

The Form Of An Architect

Now showing, one city at a time, and at very select venues, is a documentary film on the life and work of Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), the great Chicago architect of the Gilded Age. The documentary is written, produced, and directed by Mark Richard Smith, of Whitecap Films. A first-edition DVD can be pre-ordered here.

Louis Sullivan is sometimes called architecture’s “father of modernism.” From him came the principle "form follows function," a mantra of twentieth-century modernists. Sullivan believed that design (form) should reflect a building's structure, use, and setting (function). He wanted to stop in its tracks the tendency in America to impose historic architectural styles--classical, Gothic, Italianate, etc--on buildings whose actual functions were alien to them. He called for an aesthetic sensitivity to the unique conditions that characterize each building. He wanted architects to use their heads and hearts, not just their styles.

Sullivan applied his philosophy most famously to the skyscraper. In the late nineteenth century, buildings taller than four or five floors were just beginning to be constructed. The development of steel framing removed the need for enormously thick masonry walls at the ground level and allowed for unprecedented height. But architects considered that height an aesthetic problem, to be solved with one or more styles from Europe, and mainly an old Europe at that. Thus a building devoted to business offices might be adorned like a palace. Portions of these buildings evoke today the silly castle that appears at the beginning of every Disney movie. Height was frequently underplayed through varying the styles of the successive floors and including plenty of horizontal lines, as in the New York World Building below.

NEW YORK WORLD BUILDING, 1890


Sullivan, by contrast, insisted that the problem of the skyscraper, like every problem, “contains and suggests its own solution.” As though dressing a tall woman in high heels, he designed facades that accentuated the skyscraper’s height rather than downplayed it. In his seminal design, the Wainwright Building (St. Louis, 1890), uninterrupted vertical lines draw the eye ever upward. Ornamental flourishes along the way make the eye's journey a pleasant one without slowing it down. The repetition of windows faithfully reflect the interior space, which was dedicated primarily to a host of equally sized offices. Though only ten stories high, the Wainwright Building set the standard of “vertical organization” characteristic of the modern skyscraper. Sullivan's successors, of course, would often abandon the ornamentation he was so fond of. He cannot be blamed for the plain, dull, and cheap boxiness that followed him.

THE WAINWRIGHT BUILDING, 1890


Sullivan quickly achieved recognition, but after the 1890s his career underwent a stunning, progressive financial collapse. He approached his craft with evident dedication, honesty, and brilliance. But while the accolades poured in, the commissions did not. His wife, whom he married when he was 42 and she 20, left him after nine years--exhausted, presumably, by the grinding downward economic spiral which Sullivan had put her on. And by his drinking. His last marital act was to give her $1,000 of the $1,100 he had made selling off his possessions at auction. After that he breathed a sigh of relief to be alone again, and then resumed his downward course. In the years before his death in 1924, Sullivan needed money from friends, including Frank Lloyd Wright, his former draftsman and protege.

History has well known its unrewarded prophets, its impoverished geniuses, its abandoned beautiful minds. But the decline of Louis Sullivan is almost too stark for explanation. Certainly his most damaging trait, as Mark Smith's documentary emphasizes, was his unwillingness to take on clients whose expectations differed substantially from his own artistic vision. Early on, Sullivan's partner, Dangmar Adler, softened the impact of this tendency, but the economic depression of the 1890s led Adler to take a well-paying job with an elevator company, and Sullivan henceforth had to go it alone. With no wife for most of his professional life, and no children for all of it, he was under relatively few pressures to conform to market demands.

For a single man who creates beautiful buildings, there are certainly worse fates than to die broke. At the same time one cannot help but chide this solitary genius with a failure to exemplify his own famous dictum. Sullivan's form as an architect never quite followed the function of his world.