Write for God

“Stop writing. You’re not meant to be doing this. Plenty more where you came from.”

(Author Gore Vidal, to those who have writer’s block)

Sometimes, for various reasons, I’ll take a break from blogging for a day or two. Usually, it’s a heavy schedule at work and home, but sometimes it’s the pull of another writing project. This past week, my entries have been thin because of despair over issues related to finances, which have affected my sleep and my ability to approach issues with a rational mind. Better to take a break than to write a bad Dickensian blog post.

I’ve never really had writer’s block, that dread of the blank page or the blank post. I guess being opinionated comes easily to me or perhaps it’s my constant habit of writing in pads and notebooks. For some people I know, a blank page inspires more dread than a bloodied hacksaw in a slasher film. I know intelligent people who turn into zombies when they’re told to write something.

 In one of our favorite goofy comedies, Funny Farm, Chevy Chase plays a big-time sportswriter who retires to write a great novel. He and his wife move to a rustic home where everything goes wrong, especially with his novel. In one funny scene, the ex-sportswriter finally sits at his desk to begin his novel, types The to begin a sentence and then freezes into a terminal state of bad writing and writer’s block. As Vidal suggests, for everyone who can’t write, there are more in the wings who have no trouble creating worlds or music with words.

Here are some ways to avoid writer’s block that always work for me:

• Fill the blank page with something, anything, to begin. Write the lyrics to that song in your head at the moment or your favorite limerick. A white page with something on it fools the eye into thinking you’ve written something.
• Begin writing badly. Rewrite later.
• Play music you enjoy when you sit down to write. It’s amazing how the rhythms of the music will move your fingers to type as it moves your feet to tap out the tempo.
• If you’re on the keyboard, switch to a pad and pen. If writing by hand, go to the computer or typewriter. Mix things up.
• Open a random page in a book you enjoy and retype a paragraph or two. The habit of forming words will move you to begin writing.
• Change location. Our local library has private rooms for study or work where a writer can bring a laptop or pad to write in silence and without interruptions. Each spring in school, we would beg the teacher to have class outside. Sometimes he or she complied and we took our lit books outdoors. It would put our lessons in a different light — literally.
• Surround yourself with the beauty of words. Listen to books on tape, write in a cafe bookstore or find records or CDs of poets reading their work. A teacher once played us an album of Jack Kerouac riffing his poetry with Zoot Sims on sax. For years, I’ve wished for my own copy of that album.
• Do something messy and nasty. Clean the bathroom, plant seedlings, scrub the floor. Your clean keyboard and cushy chair will be all you’ll dream of while you’re removing mildew or scraping baked-on cheese from a pot.
• Pray. A Rosary or two, meditating on the day’s readings or browsing through the works of good Catholic writers like Thomas Merton or Dorothy Day can bring you blessings tenfold.

When the words begin to flow again, you might have a clean bathroom and a richer spiritual life. Either way, you’ll conquer writer’s block without the agita it can bring. Remember the wisdom of Ecclesiastes 3: “There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens.” In God’s time, you can defeat writer’s block.

The Catholic Worker newspaper appeared in May 1933 with 2,500 copies distributed by hand. Circulation grew to 190,000 by 1938, and dropped to 50,000 during World War II, largely because of the paper’s pacifist stand. (Today’s circulation is over 80,000.)

Factoids about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker only hint at the struggle that this courageous woman faced when she turned Catholicism on its ear in the 1930s.

On May 1, 1933, she published a newspaper that sold for a penny. Seventy-six years later, it still sells for a penny. The debut of a paper on a day that was significant to the labor movement caused grief for some conservative elements within the Catholic Church that insisted on labeling the Catholic Worker –and Dorothy Day– as a Communist. (May 1 is really International Workers Day, which was first celebrated in the United States, not in the Soviet Union, as propaganda would have us believe. It began as a protest for the eight-hour workday.)

The Catholic Worker’s newspaper did grow throughout the 1930s, but its readership shrank during World War II. Day’s staunch pacifism during a time when the vox pop called for fighting Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and Tojo further painted the movement as outside the mainstream.

We receive the papers from the New York, Los Angeles and Houston Catholic Worker houses. They are not affiliated and operate independently because Dorothy Day’s movement was not about top-down leadership. (It was about bottom-up charity toward all. ) These three papers vary in their approach and their scope.  The one from Los Angeles is called the Agitator.

New York’s is still the closest to the paper that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started. It has news from its houses, articles from the archives and very good social justice articles. Los Angeles has longer, more polemical articles and news about protests.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Houston’s paper, which is bilingual because the house serves Latino migrants. The paper has two front pages–one in each language. Half the paper is printed in one language going one way; turn it over and you can read it in the other language. The writings of the Zwick family and its contributors at Casa Juan Diego are always very readable.

If Dorothy Day were alive today, she would still be prodding the church to serve the poor and preach the Gospel. She would be challenging us to speak out against injustice and to have the guts to take unpopular stands in the face of opposition.  She would be publishing a newspaper in a time when newspapers are dying.  If she were with us, Dorothy Day would be burning with a love of God, just as she was until her death in 1980, and she would be asking us why we are not, too.

Contact any or all of these Catholic Worker newspapers and get a subscription to support the movement and to keep her spirit alive.

The Last Supper from Mel Gibson's "The Passion"

I can spend hours writing, reading and sitting at the beach and not notice the passage of time. Psychologist Mihaly Cziksentmihaly calls this peak state of bliss “flow.”

Yesterday evening, I spent about three hours in church and was shocked to find I’d been there that long. It was only when I called home to say I was on my way that I noticed the time. Sitting in front of the Blessed Sacrament and reciting several Rosaries while I waited for Confession made three hours disappear. My husband asked me what had happened to me and I could only say I’d been lost in prayer.

I was conscious that the young woman behind me in line for Confession was fidgety, but I was able to overcome the interruptions. She tapped her feet, exhaled loudly, banged my purse many times and squirmed in her place. As I dove deeper into my prayers, I began to notice her impatience less.

When I asked her if she wanted to stand in front of me, I saw that she was embarassed, although I had not offered my place in order to shame her. I offered her my spot in case she wanted to be one turn ahead in line, which was the only remedy I could offer her.

With my Lent meditations and my Rosary, I spent time with Jesus in silence and with my mind focused on reconciliation. Quieting the heart and soul is one of the fruits of prayer during Lent and especially during Holy Week.

Today is Holy Thursday as well as the beginning of Passover. With our “older brothers,” as Pope John Paul II referred to the Jewish people, we will celebrate the mysteries of our respective faiths. After all, what were Jesus and the Apostles celebrating at the Last Supper but their Passover Seder? The bread and wine were part of the Passover table before Jesus transformed into his Body and Blood.

Hours spent in prayer are never wasted. Dorothy Day once wrote that small acts of mercy are like pebbles cast in a pond to create ever-widening ripples. So it is with prayer. Whether we have the luxury of spending hours or seconds in prayers, this time can always yield spiritual fruits.

Interior of a Madonna House poustinia

I’ve been on an excellent reading streak for the past two weeks; the odd thing is that the books have come from small purchases or from our own bookshelves. Who doesn’t have unread books at home to someday catch up on?

I’m reading Poustinia, a 1975 work by Catherine de Hueck Doherty, one of my favorite religious guides. Discover Catherine’s Eastern Catholicism and reverse fairy tale life at your own leisure, but suffice it to say that she began life wealthy, became destitute, acquired wealth again and then gave it all up to serve God. Like her good friend Dorothy Day, Catherine was a woman in love with God and no-nonsense in her dealings with the world.

Poustinia brings the philosophy of a special kind of spiritual retreat well known in Russia to our continent; the word literally means “desert” in Russian. Poustinikki are men or women who hear a call to live listening to God only. They may be pilgrims or they may be hermits who are engaged in prayer and service. The hallmark of a poustinikii, explains Catherine, is to drop everything — prayer, too — when someone asks for help.

Catherine’s Madonna House Apostolate in Canada continues her work and still has poustinias. I would love to spend time fasting alone with God at one of their poustinias, which are furnished with a table, chair, icon of Our Lady and a candle, Bible, bed and large crucifix without a corpus. The object is to leave the crucifix bare so that we may crucify ourselves on it in prayer.

Here’s how Catherine explains why we go into the desert of the poustinia:

To fast

To live in silence

To pray

So that you might die to yourself

quicker, so that Christ might grow in

you faster. So that you might give

him to the world faster too …this

world that is so hungry for him.

To atone for your sins and those of others

To pray for mankind

To pray for peace

To pray for the missions and unity

among Christians in the Catholic Church

To become saints faster i.e. lovers of

Christ in truth and in deed

To imitate Christ

To save your soul and that of others

To learn total surrender to God quicker

We have made Christ wait long enough.

Our own poustinia may be in our hearts, in a closet or at Madonna House. The goal is to silence ourselves long enough to hear the voice of God within us.

St. Pio of Pietrelcina's stigmata

Time is relative–thank you, Albert Einstein. In the past six months, our family has lived a century. Moments have become weeks, weeks have become years.

Six months ago today, my 13-year-old twins and I were in a serious car accident. My son and I had minor seatbelt injuries, but our daughter, Tally, took the brunt of the car that smashed into us. For five weeks, we were at her bedside at the pediatric intensive care unit and, for another five weeks, my husband and I took turns staying at the rehab hospital with her. The six months since September 17, 2008 have been the worst time of our lives; our darkest night of the soul began when we thought we had lost our daughter.

Through prayer and the intercession of St. Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio), St. Therese of Lisieux and Servant of God Dorothy Day, our daughter has been regaining her health daily. She is in homebound school eagerly awaiting a return to “real school” in the classroom. After a Gethsemane-like night of prayer, our daughter opened her eyes for the first time in the intensive care unit on the anniversary of Padre Pio’s stigmata. (God had given and taken away the stigmata on September 20 fifty years apart.)

Six months later, I was dismayed to read that actress Natasha Richardson, daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and wife of Liam Neeson, was in critical condition after a skiing accident yesterday. Her injury sounds very similar to our daughter’s.

I don’t know the Richardson/Redgrave/Neeson family, of course, but I’ve been praying for them. Only families who have been through an ordeal like ours know the bitter pain of seeing a loved one in an intensive care unit–intubated, in a coma and hanging in the balance. It’s the worst hell on earth for those who vigil by the bedside of a family member with a traumatic brain injury.

About a month ago, my daughter and I had a mother/daughter movie night with The Parent Trap, a charming family film in which Ms. Richardson plays the mother of twin girls who want to reunite their divorced parents. My daughter and I laughed and enjoyed the movie, but my real joy came in being able to share a simple gift like movie night with her.

Movie night, laughter, a hug, a text message: all of those little things are so precious when they come from Tally. May Natasha Richardson’s family know the same simple joys again. Please pray for her recovery.

NOTE: Natasha Richardson died on March 18 at the age of 45. She leaves a husband, actor Liam Neeson, and two boys as well as her celebrated mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and sister, Joely Richardson. May Ms. Richardson rest in peace.

In typical Facebook fashion, a friend sent me a list to amend and then forward to more friends on my list. Usually, the lists run along the lines of “what do you like to do on a day off” or “name your 15 favorite CDs.” Today’s list was more interesting.

The list I received today asked for 10 items on my “bucket list,” meaning things I’d like to do before I die. (The name comes from the expression “kicking the bucket” and was also the title of a recent Jack Nicholson movie about the same subject.) It didn’t take me long to think of things I may one day tick off my list. There’s altruism, self-development and a little selfishness in my 10 items:

1. See my three grandchildren graduate from high school, at least.
2. Travel to Europe with my husband.
3. Spend time in a really nice spa just getting pampered.
4. Publish a book.
5. See the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel.
6. Live on the beach permanently.
7. Run another marathon.
8. Open a Catholic Worker house.
9. Get a Montblanc fountain pen.
10. Read all the books on my shelves.

It struck me how some of these list items are in direct contrast to one another: How many Catholic Workers who live in voluntary poverty would even think of wanting to have a Montblanc fountain pen or being pampered in a spa–if only for a day? I thought of the entry in Dorothy Day’s diaries from The Duty of Delight where she writes that women are always interested in clothes, no matter how old they are. There’s a certain frisson in holding something so beautiful that it appeals to the senses without necessarily being something you would, or could, actually ever own.

Some of my choices made it on the list just because of curiosity. I love fountain pens and Montblanc is the epitome of fine writing instruments. One of their collectors’ series featured pens commemorating William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, three of my favorite authors. I can look through the Montblanc mall window like a child outside a candy store just ogling their elegantly crafted pens and dream about writing with one. I don’t think I could ever feel good paying hundreds of dollars for something to write with when my Parker fountain pens do a fine job, but looking doesn’t cost anything.

Wanting to improve my health by running again and being blessed with more years of life to see my grandchildren grow are honorable things. I would rather fulfill those two items than the other eight. Traveling with my husband would be a fine thing, too, since I enjoy his company now as much as I did when we first met in 1981. After 25 years of marriage, we still like working side-by-side and conversing.  

It was fun to write my list and to come to grips with choices that are so divergent. It’s not likely that I could ever check off all 10, but it doesn’t matter. Flights of fancy never require boarding passes.

For the last several nights at dinner, I’ve been reading at The Duty of Delight, Dorothy Day’s diaries during the years of the Catholic Worker. Sometimes her entries are incredibly brief and at times they are epic. They are always consistent, though.

This blog began on Holy Innocents Day 2007, but the spans between entries have sometimes been long as life got in the way. I’ve been unemployed, re-employed, become a grandmother three times, saw my husband fracture his skull and end up in a trauma unit and then witnessed our 13-year-old survive five weeks in a coma and five weeks in rehab. Since October 2007, life has been a maelstrom of sorrow, prayer, anger, acedia, joy and resignation.

For a diary or a blog to serve its purpose as confessional and record of daily life, it must have continuity. As our daughter continued to improve each day, the light at the end our tunnel grew nearer and brighter. Now it’s time to step out into the sunshine of God’s love and see life with fresh eyes.

Long or short, trivial or deep, these entries will continue.