"People were always the limiters of happiness except the very few that were
as good as spring itself."
Hemingway

I am looking forward to visiting moja rodzina this weekend. We leave in just a couple days. I've been spending my days enjoying the loveliness of spring - the sun, the rain, the growing things in and out of the house, and life has been so full I forget I'm neglecting my friends. I'm too full of the spring to notice the days going by, until most of May has passed me by - leaving only it beautiful footprint in my memory.

I'm throwing espresso mugs. The first firing of the year has gone wonderfully and I'm reassured. I will not have to buy a new kiln anytime too soon. Today I glaze my little mugs and finish them off.

I was thrilled to discover, yesterday, that our local Whole Foods does not contribute to Planned Parenthood. I celebrated by buying Cardemom-Ginger gelato and fantastic cheese there, promising to do my shopping there more often, the store itself is so appealing.

"Beauty will save the world"
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This week I have re-immersed myself in Pope John Paul II letter to Artists. I've been disturbed to discover that many of our friends are dismissing art and beauty - keeping it out on the fringes of life instead of at the heart. It's frustrating, and sad, and a very new experience for me because I've always unintentionally surrounded myself with people who love beauty. But this new experience is bring discipline to my reading and writing again, as I try to work out my defense of beauty in a way the will, I hope, speak to them.

The more I read of the Pope's letter, the more I understand the Church's esteem for art, and for the artist. I'm thrilled to discover that even reading only the Polish pope and our new pope, I have ample proof of the Church's passion for beauty. It's a comforting reminder that I am on the right path, at least in this area.

“When I go toward you
it is with my whole life.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

We have been treated to exceptionally good homilies these past couple weeks, directing our attention to our particular responsibilities as individual Christians and as a community. The failings of our own parish tend toward two mistaken attitudes to community, though perhaps the same could be said of most parishes, we American Catholics have a natural tendency to Protestantize our faith, especially in our sense of community, or else to react so strongly against the typically Protestant individualism that we forget we are, in fact individuals called to a personal relationship with a personal God. The first failing, the ever-present, American individualism that separates the parishioner from his parish, declaring that man’s relationship with God is personal, individual, and private; allowing him to compartmentalize his faith, hold it aside for the proper time and place. In this failing, we forget that we are all the body of Christ, that my sins hurt the whole body; the Church worships as one body, and that community is essential in our relationship with Christ. But the second failing takes this essential community too far, forgetting that we must have an individual, person-to-person relationship to God if we are to be able to enter into the community of the Church. Without our personal, individual relationship to Christ, our community worship is only a failed attempt to be lost in the crowd, to hide our individual lack of faith in the faith of others. This failing has a tendency to commandeer the time and activities of the individual, considering as it’s rightful property our evenings, weekends, and talents; which are not theirs, but God’s gift to us, to be used according to our own individual vocations.

At our parish we have both failings, and we often forget when arguing against the one, that we can’t go so far as to defend the other.

Yesterday I got a surprise call from moja siostra to say she was reading a book I didn’t exactly suggest, but mentioned recently: Holy Feast and Holy Fast – the religious significance of food to medieval women. The book is full excellent selections of writing on fasting, feasting, and the Eucharist, written by fascinating medieval women. But the book itself, when the author herself is speaking, is less than thrilling. I’m reading Kierkegaard again, with the firm intention of moving on to a collection of Pablo Neruda’s poems this evening.

“The Church is to transform, improve, “humanize” the world – but how can she do that if at the same time she turns her back on beauty, which is so closely allied to love?”
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI!!)

My ideal grocery store is an indoor/outdoor market-place, like the Eastern Market in Detroit, where exotic and everyday mingle on the streets and in the shops. It needs a meat-market, fresh produce, and a spice shop - where herbs, spices, and teas line the walls floor to ceiling. I’m still waiting for my ideal to come to New England, but Saturday, we took a walk around the local Whole Foods. It isn’t ideal, no smoky spice shop, no outdoor produce stands, but it was lovely. Cleaner than Eastern Market, and less exciting, the store still impressed me: fruit piled in pyramid displays, warm colours, inviting meat and cheese counters; looking and feeling like an upscale indoor market.

Aesthetically, it has a Catholic spirit; I could feel their desire to create a sense of community among the shoppers, to appeal to our senses. I loved it, the only thing that keeps me from making Whole Foods our regular store is the rumor I hear that they are big supporters of Planned Parenthood. I haven’t yet figured out if the rumor is true or not, and until then we’ll stick to our usual store. Visiting Whole Foods made me wish I could make over all aspects of life in the Catholic ideal – cafés, theatres, and all manner of shops. I want that, Catholic aesthetic without all the morally problematic elements that so often go alone with it. Why is it that so many Catholics forget that the ugliness and artlessness we surround ourselves with “constitutes a really grave spiritual problem” (Thomas Merton).

"You my own deep soul
trust me. I will not betray you.
My blood is alive with many voices
telling me I am made of longing."

Rilke

It rained all day long today. We spent the day inside, listening to the wet dripping sounds and enjoying our bright walls. Our seeds are just beinging to sprout in boxes and pots along the windows of the blue room. I can't wait until we can pick our own greens again and eat salad everyday.

I love the Easter season, when everything is growning and the symbolism with which we celebrate the resurrection! As I've been talking more and more about the importance of symbolism and ritual in Catholic living, I've realized how neglected and misunderstood this symbolism is. Easter is the highest feast of the year and we can't abandon its symbolism and celebratory elements simply because they've become popular in the secular world. It saddens me to hear about people who want to take away the eggs, lambs, and candy of Easter to put the focus on Christ. They don't realize that all this things do put the focus on Christ, our sacrificial Lamb.

Booklist:

I have just finished Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Leaf Storm and other stories. Amazing. Read Leaf Storm, The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, and A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. I love Marquez; in college I read One Hundred Year of Solitude and was completely overwhelmed. Recently my husband and I read Love and Other Demons and Memories of my Melancholy Whores. I think I remember seeing A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings on stage once, I can't remember when or where, but it was very familiar to me.

We have also recently discovered some fantastic modern poems, my husband especially is caught up in Claude McKay. It's taken a while for me to be able to appreciate modern poetry, I think in part because poetry professors tend to choose frustrating, disjointed, or angry poems to represent modern poetry, which only encouraged my own prejudice against them.

"For I have known them all already, known them all-
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room."
T.S. Eliot


Recently, a friend of ours sang jazz at a small club downtown. My husband and I went, walked around the city before-hand and enjoyed coffee and good bread at one of the dark little tables near the bar. The coffee was ideal: dark and rich. It came on a small black tray, in a two-cup French Press, with a white cup and saucer. The hot bread came, wrapped in a towel and we dipped large chunks of it into olive oil and devoured it, while C. sang jazz in front of the big café window. Jazz is full of varying sounds that almost become visual they are so alive, sounds that mean nothing on there own but seek only to build the song as a whole. They’re fascinating done well, my fingers tapped only and for a while I thought only of the music and the lovely coffee tray. Later, when the coffee was finished my mind wrote while my fingers sat useless without a pen. I thought of my pots at home waiting for the kiln, and my beautiful home. We had arrived happy, we left happier, with the exhausted happiness that comes after a day of pure enjoyment. We drove home forgetting the details of this late-night inspiration and clinging tighter to the essence, in our new blue car with the moon-roof.

Easter has come and the apartment is suffused with joy. Light is streaming in, making all our colours come alive again. We are living on Easter food: eggs, bread, meat, and cake are continually out for us to enjoy. There is a flower on the table, belonging to St. Joseph, which smells seductively of heaven. It is not a lily, I wish I knew more.

Wesolego Alleluja!