Somerset, NJ: Bless the Lord in a Strip Shopping Mall

One of my wonderful parish priests gigged me about my morning tweet, which was this:

"Parking lots and strip malls bless the Lord? LOL! " he tweeted back. 

Yearning: Shakespeare and the Rest of Us

Tomorrow, I will teach my high school students Sonnet 18, which is perhaps the most famous of William Shakespeare's intricate love poems. As I was preparing the lesson this afternoon, I was struck by how Shakespeare's words call out across cultures and centuries to our own hearts. This happened when I listened to this reading of the sonnet by David Tenant, the Scottish actor best known in this house as the tenth embodiment of Dr. Who. 

"Pied Beauty:" Noticing the Dappled Things

With all our focus on Hurricane Sandy and the destructive power of nature, I hadn't noticed in these days that fall, my favorite season of all, is passing by. Today I took a walk around our neighborhood and collected leaves that had fallen. It was hard to find the kind of leaves I wanted: colorful and dry. I am planning to dip them in beeswax and make a garland. But many leaves now are brown and wet and sitting in big piles beside fallen trees. I'm grateful for the ones I did find.  It's been a long time since I took a walk like this, a slow walk where I stop to notice all the dappled things around me. When our teens were toddlers we took walks in our neighborhood all the time, slow walks, where they helped me to notice everything. My thoughts turned to poet Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. and his magnificent "Pied Beauty."

Do Not Avert Your Gaze: On Teen Motherhood

Do you believe, as I do, that we are summoned into being by a Presence and that our lives begin at conception?

Then you are what our culture calls "prolife." But supporting "life" in the abstract and supporting, really supporting, life as lived and experienced by real human beings is very different. Our lives can be messy, vulgar, joyful, unfair and pocketed by violence. To support those lives - from conception to their natural deaths - is radical, counter-cultural, and, some might say, nonsensical.

Our culture is full of ugly messages about  girls and the consequences of teenaged sex. How can you knit a baby blanket for a teenager? Isn't that just supporting her poor decision making? How can you accommodate pregnant teens at a high school? Won't that make more young ladies pregnant? Why didn't she use a condom? What was she thinking? Why did she let this happen? Isn't her mother angry?  If she had had an abortion, none of us would have to deal with this scandal. ACCIDENTS HAPPEN: call your local Planned Parenthood and we will give you a morning-after pill, no questions asked.

In these days, I am praying for a young lady I know. She is mentally ill and the victim of violence by boyfriend. She is 17. She is pregnant. She is making a brave and difficult choice to carry and raise their child.

I am remembering a story from years ago, when I was living in Raleigh, NC and a high school student became pregnant. Her private Episcopal school kicked her out : not because she was pregnant but because she chose to carry the child. You see, her pregnant belly was causing a scandal. And I wondered then how a church-affiliated school averted its gaze when their students got abortions. Noone had to know about that, you see. No reputations lost, was the thinking.

I stumbled across a poem from a website I love called "Fried Chicken and Coffee." The writer is 29 (pictured here ) and writes with heartbreaking clarity about another mom in another difficult circumstance.

We must not avert our gaze from what is real, what is true, what is life. Only Beauty can save us.

Read Misty Skaggs' poem here.

Bigger Picture Moments: From the School Cafeteria, Snow Out the Window and Thinking about Wordsworth's Lucy Gray

My students told me yesterday morning that life is supposed to take an ironic turn on Leap Day.

Well, that afternoon, hours before March, it started snowing. At the high school, the classrooms have small windows to the outside. We could see the snow. I raised the blinds in class to watch and let my students watch.

It is mesmerizing, this snow after a long winter with few flakes.

In the cafeteria, a colleague told me he is heading north as soon as he can; he lives in the mountains and worries about getting home.

On Paula Deen, Newt Gingrich and Our Inevitable Hour

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,

Awaits alike the inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

An Anti Catholic Poet Who Inadvertently Penned a Lament to Our Holy Mother

Not until my pastor suggested today during the Sacrament of Reconciliation that I take my troubles to the Holy Mother did I find out the Church has devoted the month of October to Mary. Several Marian feasts are celebrated this month, which also is the Month of the Holy Rosary. (the rosary here is from www.clayrosaries.com)

So I went in search of a poem devoted to Mary. I found one in a most unexpected place: the writings of John Clare, a virulent anti Catholic who died in 1864 after a twenty-year struggle with severe depression. He is a fascinating man, who wrote some of the world's most beautiful descriptions of nature. (Pictured here are John Clare roses, small, translucent pink roses that bloom into winter) He now is considered one of the most important 19th century poets writing in English. I hope to devote more space to him at a later date.

For now, I would like to introduce this lovely lament, "To Mary: It is the Evening Hour."

Talking with Teens about Beowulf, Fate and Their Futures

Today my juniors spent the whole class period writing and talking about whether fate rules us or whether we rule our own destiny. The subject relates to the poem we are reading together in class: "Beowulf." I was touched to see so many of them, despite the wounds they might carry, still see what is possible; still see themselves as unfolding and not as victims of the hand of Fate.

Encouraging Summer Reading That Speaks to Teens' Souls

Our 14-year-old son returned from a vacation with the youth group of Communion and Liberation this week, eager to buy a copy of the latest translation of Giacomo Leopardi's "Canti" as well as a good translation of Fyodor Doystoevsky's "Crime and Punishment." His emerging interest in fine literature is yet another reason my husband and I are so grateful for CL, a lay ecclesiastical movement within the Catholic Church. Our son is learning that faith is a living entity and that the beauty expressed by poets, and musicians is one way we can gaze upon the Infinite. My conversation with him also is a reminder we parents have an obligation to continue to nurture our children's souls as they navigate adolescence.

Here is what Leopardi, a poet, essayist and philosopher of the early 19th century, has to say about the Infinite:

These solitary hills have always been dear to me.
Seated here, this sweet hedge, which blocks the distant horizon opening inner silences and interminable distances.
I plunge in thought to where my heart, frightened, pulls back.
Like the wind which I hear tossing the trembling plants which surround me, a voice from the inner depths of spirit shakes the certitudes of thought.
Eternity breaks through time, past and present intermingle in her image.
In the inner shadows I lose myself,
drowning in the sea-depths of timeless love.

"A Morning Prayer To You Containing With Precision Everything That Most Matters"

I love reading poetry and at one point in my life, wrote it constantly. I still have my well-thumbed Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry from my undergraduate years. I often read it and recently wondered how many of the poets within are Catholic. John Berryman is one. Born in Oklahoma in 1914, he was raised Catholic.

I always liked his name. I tried to read his poetry the other day, but found most of it so despairing I could not. His work reflects his troubled soul. The Pulitzer Prize winning poet survived his own father's suicide when he was 12 and spent his life struggling with  depression and alcoholism. He returned to the faith of his childhood as a middle-aged man.

A Boy from Barcelona Watches His First Baseball Game (A poem)

Considering the view the bleachers,
he could be in Nebraska. 

He watches the 11-year-olds play ball, 

Little Leaguers who made the B team of summer travel. 

As they round the bases, catch fly balls and strike out, 

the sun is dipping into the horizon, 

forming long shadows across the artificial turf. 

In the distance sprawls acre after acre of farmland preserved 

forever by the Great Garden State of New Jersey.

Imagine Receiving Such a Luminous Letter

I was so intrigued by researching the life of Saint Paulinus of Nola for his feast day. He is beloved, in part, because of his correspondence with such heavy hitters as Jerome and Augustine. I just had to find some of the poems and letters he wrote.

Among the jewels I encountered were letters Paulinus wrote to Sulpicius Severus. The men had much in common; both were from wealthy families, grew up in France and converted to Christianity and a life of ascetism after enduring losses. In fact, they converted the same year - 389. As Paulinus found solace in the Church after the loss of his newborn son, Sulpicius was drawn to the faith after the death of his wife shortly after their marriage. The Church later recognized both men as saints. Here are two excerpts from a letter.

Summer Specters (A poem)

School's over. They visit me now on summer nights, these children I taught. They come one at a time into the haze of my dreams. They talk to me.

In the morning, they vanish.

The boy tells me he liked the taste of paint so much it molders his memories. That might not be a bad thing. He spent his early years in motels, waiting for a real home. The man he thought was his father turned out to be just mom's boyfriend. He told him that when he washed his hands of them both, and the new baby.

The girl longs for the day her parents, divorced many years, reunite. Life will go back to what it once was, she says. For now, it feels better to sleep.

Another girl is begging me to leave her alone so she can fail in peace. Why bother with learning? Her parents never did and they live in a $500,000 home.

The smallest child visits me most. 

Maybe he likes the sound of the crickets or the cool summer breeze in my neighborhood. My house is still. His never is. 

His father left his mother and him and four other brothers. The youngest is slow. That's why his father left. A month ago, a drunk driver hit his father's sedan on the New Jersey Turnpike. On Father's Day, his mother will load him and his brothers in the van to visit his grave on Staten Island. 

Somehow, he tells me, he feels closer to his father now than he ever did. 

In Which I Try to Cultivate Poetry Readers

First, love changes us. Then, time changes love. 

Together we read "Come with me and be my love,"

written long ago by a passionate shepherd. 

Heaven As Our Roof: Discovering A Monk-Poet

One joy of my job as an English teacher is discovering beauty. Today, as I was preparing a review packet for my eleventh-graders on the Anglo-Saxon era, I stumbled upon this poem by St. Caedmon, an illiterate seventh century British monk.