“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
–EUDORA WELTY
Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. Wikipedia
On April 10th, 1925, Charles Scribner’s Sons published The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel, which Fitz had begun drafting almost three years before.
“The whole idea of Gatsby,” Fitzgerald once wrote, “is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it.” (That would be in regards to his failed love affair with Ginevra King, who inspired Daisy Buchanan. Bet Zelda loved that.)
Famously, the book was almost called something else—a number of something elses, in fact. “Before reluctantly deciding on The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald hemmed and hawed over more than half a dozen names,” writes Dustin Illingworth. “Gatsby; Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires; Trimalchio; Trimalchio in West Egg; On the Road to West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; Gold-Hatted Gatsby; and The High-Bouncing Lover. As late as one month before publication, he was still trying to change the title. His final opinion of the name of his masterpiece was not exactly a ringing endorsement: ‘The title is only fair, rather bad than good,’ he said.”
Though The Great Gatsby was received warmly by Fitzgerald’s peers and enjoyed (mostly) positive reviews from critics, it did not sell well, particularly as compared to Fitzgerald’s previous two novels, This Side of Paradise(1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned(1922). (Maybe it was the title.) By the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, he considered the book—and his entire career—a failure.
But books can have long lives. During WWII, The Great Gatsby was selected by the Council on Books in Wartime to be one of the titles sent to American soldiers stationed overseas—and its popularity soon soared.
Now, The Great Gatsby is, of course, one of the perennial candidates for what we think of as the Great American Novel. “Gatsby’s magic emanates not only from its powerhouse poetic style—in which ordinary American language becomes unearthly—but from the authority with which it nails who we want to be as Americans,” Maureen Corrigan writes in So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures. “Not who we are; who we want to be. It’s that wanting that runs through every page of Gatsby, making it our Greatest American Novel. But it’s also our easiest Great American Novel to underrate: too short; too tempting to misread as just a love story gone wrong; too mired in the Roaring Twenties and all that jazz.”
So if you’ve been on the fence (or out of high school for A While), consider this your sign to pick it up again.
There is but one emotion that claws at the heart with the twin talons of anger and shame, savaging self-regard with haunting ferocity that feeds on itself. “Jealousy,” wrote the Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel in his insightful treatise on love, “is precisely love’s contrary… the most passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself.” And yet jealousy is also one of the commonest human experiences — one that visits upon even the noblest heart, warping reality and reason beyond recognition.
The complex psychological underpinnings of jealousy, and what they might reveal in the way of relief, and how they might illuminate the most hopeful frontiers of love, is what the pioneering psychiatrist Leslie Farber (July 12, 1912–March 24, 1981) explores in his 1973 essay “On Jealousy,” found in his altogether penetrating collection The Ways of the Will (public library).
Every jealous person knows jealousy to be a brutally degrading experience and resists with all his might revealing the extent of his degradation.
Defining the central animating spirit of jealousy as “a state of virtual paralysis in which the will races around a single point,” Farber investigates its most salient psychological characteristic and its relation to the will:
What sets jealousy apart from other possible responses to real or imagined infidelity — such as rage or grief — is its quality of obsession… Literally, obsession means being oppressed or besieged, as if by an evil spirit. On the one hand, one wills one’s obsession to disappear, thereby ensuring its perpetuation. On the other hand, the obsession is the condition of the will — simultaneously assertive and impotent, simultaneously frenzied and paralyzed. The role of the will here is crucial. Whether one is alone or with others, whether one rages or is silent, berates one’s mate with questions and accusations or refrains from berating one’s mate with questions and accusations, the internal drama remains the same: the will has become fixed in a rigid orbit of injury — it spins and burns, but cannot escape its tiny, terrible sphere.
This internal drama takes on a life of its own, contracting the whole of reality into its narrow aperture of self-concern, and eventually subsuming reality altogether — a gruesome counterpoint to the unselfing through which we attain the heights of our nature and the antithesis of Iris Murdoch’s wonderful definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Farber writes:
In the grip of jealous passion one’s state is reduced to a kind of craven non-being. One strives to appear to be the person he was, but he knows that he has lost his autonomy — his sense of self — and has become a slave whose diminished existence is at the mercy of his mate. His human space has shrunk to the narrow boundaries of the jealous melodrama in which he must perform. The world beyond those boundaries seems utterly alien, unreal, and his participation in it — insofar as it is compelled — will strike him not as reassuring and comforting, but hollow and mocking.
This bottomless craving for reassurance leads the jealous person to seek constant evidence of their mate’s presence, compulsively reaching out for contact as their experience of the relationship becomes increasingly “tortured and fragile.” The paradox is that no amount of external affirmation can counteract the internal melodrama of the obsession, leading every littlest gap in presence to read like total abandonment and betrayal, like death itself:
Once the mate goes through the door, moves outside the allotted space, the jealous one dies; the mate holds, in the shift and attention of his or her very eye, the power to grant or withhold permission to be. Small wonder that jealousy contains so striking a portion of anger. In his desperate need to prove the unprovable — namely affection, both his own and his mate’s — [the jealous person] wills what cannot be willed, demanding an enactment of relation that can only be grotesque in its deceits and disgusts.
In a sentiment that calls to mind Adrienne Rich’s poignant definition of honorable human relationships, Farber notes that in such a dynamic neither person is “morally qualified” to use the word love — for it is exceedingly rare “that a fit of jealousy, whatever its provocation, is met with an outpouring of love from a guileless heart.” Instead, what commonly happens is a catastrophe of confirmation bias, wherein the mate’s every gesture and movement is seen as affirmation of the jealous person’s suspicions. Farber captures the parasitic nature of this ouroboros of thinking:
Jealousy is self-confirming; it breeds itself… In no simple way (such as: OK, I was wrong all along) will this state of torment and anguish give up its claims or its existence.
[…]
The imagination not to imagine is an important power of intelligence disabled here by the seeming necessities of obsession.
As jealousy folds consciousness unto itself with self-reference, the jealous person grows insentient to the impact of their jealousy:
The experience of jealousy always includes so strong a conviction of being injured that it is most unusual for the jealous person to be able to consider the injury his jealousy causes others. For this reason, the real guilt that is jealousy’s inevitable consequence is seldom acknowledged by a jealous person; it is obliterated by his overriding absorption in his own injury.
The extreme passions of jealousy can also be mistaken for other emotions, further blinding the jealous person not only to external reality but also to the internal, occluding the very nature of the relationship within which the passions play out:
These paradoxical surges of desire, in the midst of reduction and alienation, may be misconceived by either partner or both as a transcendent return to being-in-love and an escape from jealousy’s claims. Because of this misconception, jealousy has brought about marriages that were ill-advised, and prevented the dissolution of relationships in which meaning had altogether failed.
Farber considers how open relationships — a standard attempt to bypass the very potential for jealousy, aiming at “the achievement of an attitude toward, and practice of, sex that would combine total freedom with total invulnerability” — may in fact misunderstand and underestimate the force of these fundamental psychological dynamics. He cautions:
It seems unlikely to me that such an ancient fox as jealousy will be so simple-mindedly outwitted. I suspect that the new permissiveness offers him a vastly enlarged arena for his operations. If the new generation is serious about its ambitions in relation to sex and serenity of mind, it may be forced to reinvent fidelity.
Locating what he calls the “ground of jealousy” in the developmental psychology of childhood and the elemental pain of our quest for individuation, he writes:
As the child grows gradually aware of the absolute separateness of his being from all other beings in the world, he discovers that this condition offers both pleasure and terror. On the one hand he cherishes his separate, individual, regal self, and on the other he yearns for the loneliness of his autonomy to be relieved by relation with others. The manner in which he seeks and finds such relief, and the manner in which those about him not only answer his overtures but also turn to him for their own consolation, will have considerable bearing on his interpretation of his (and their) condition — and his handling of it.
If this delicate process of interbeing is mishandled, if the child learns that approval is the ground for connection, a kind of constant apprehension sets in — one that can metastasize into a dangerous alienation from ourselves:
This apprehension will, of course, proceed from, and present itself as, sensations of inadequacy, unaccaptability, and so on, requiring an habitual dissembling on his part to render himself lovable. This uneasy state is both painful and corrupting, the pain and the corruption… being consequences of his low self-esteem and fear of others’ indifference or rejection, which in turn causes him to project himself falsely.
So habituated, we can begin to lose sense of our true selves as the approval-seeking falsehoods take on a life of their own. This erects an insurmountable obstacle to love, for all emotional intimacy requires, as Tom Stoppard knew, “the mask slipped from the face” — a mutual revelation and mirroring of innermost truth. As Adrienne Rich so memorably wrote, “an honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” Without access to our own truth, we are forever doomed to withholding it from one another, withholding the very breath of love. Farber writes:
Telling the truth is, to be sure, no simple thing. Sometimes it is uncalled for; often it is hard. But telling it is by no means always the most difficult aspect of truth. That may be knowing it. Ordinary people — you and I — not in the grip of inner separation… often encounter uncertainty and confusion in their efforts to reveal by word and gesture what they do actually think and feel. They, too, cherish their integrity, and tend to believe that what they say, by virtue of their saying it, does indeed accurately represent them. Often it is only later, when the moment has passed, that one realizes, gradually and grudgingly, that, for one reason or another, caught up in the occasion, one falsified. One spoke with silence would have been truer; one was silent when he should have spoken. One spoke, and aimed at the right meaning, but used words of the wrong color. And so on. Most of us do not habitually betray ourselves — or others — with sweeping deceits. We just crowd a little here and there, we make ourselves a bit more comfortable than our good sense or loyalties should permit, we take refuge in discretion… One way and another we compromise in tiny steps until, we come to realize — perhaps with a shock — we are standing on alien ground. To make such discoveries, and to retrace our steps, it is essential not to be willfully caught up in sustaning an illusion of truth-telling. It is hard enough without it.
[…]
There are some things it is impossible both to do and at the same time to impersonate oneself doing. Speaking truthfully is one of them.
This tendency to impersonate ourselves is an essential form of self-abandonment that inclines us toward that dangerous territory of relinquishing our self-regard to the approval of others. With an eye to “the inevitable jealousies that lie in store for a life lived on these terms,” Farber writes:
Out of this ground, with its racking insufficiency of self and harsh dependence on the excessive regard of others — no degree of excess ever being truly adequate — springs again and again the inescapable jealousy that follows the failure of one person after another to fulfill the impossible demand: make me whole.
That obsessive longing to be made whole by another is the pulse-beat of jealousy. Observing that obsession is “so poignantly lonely a condition” — what a searing insight — Farber charts the common ground between jealousy and its counterintuitive twin:
There is another affliction of passion which may be seen as a companion obsession to jealousy; that is the state called being-in-love. Unlike jealousy, about which, to my mind, there is really nothing redeeming to be said, being-in-love does have pleasures, even virtues, which can survive its transformation into some more reasonable relation. But the state of being-in-love itself is strikingly similar to jealousy. The imperative of total possession rules them both. In being-in-love each appropriates the other’s history as painlessly as possible (“I want to know everything about you, but be careful with the details”), at the same time that they rush to develop their own history and mutuality together, metaphorically fortified by their restaurant, song, drink, movie, first fight, and so on. Not only do they merge their lives, loyalties, passions, but their beliefs, attitudes, and opinions must match as well. Any hint of imperfection in his fusion… causes crisis. The smallest real difference of opinion… stands for the impossibility and unreality of the ideal of total mutual possession, and thus provokes jealousy, even in the absence of any rival whatsoever.
There is a blasphemous character to this endeavor, in which each singles the other out as an object of worship. To do this, and to be “worthy” of it, each implicitly yields — or tries to yield — up his separate existence to the exalted unity. He abandons — or tries to abandon — or tries to appear to abandon — his independence of spirit as though it were a false idol. Of course it doesn’t work. No matter how willing, one can never totally possess or be totally possessed by another. But before disillusionment sets in, and while the inevitable interruptions of jealousy are serving, paradoxically, both to cripple and to keep feverishly alive, being-in-love is often experienced as a miraculous rebirth, a time of exhilaration, inspiration, and ready transcendence, not to mention overstatement. Like jealousy, and all obsessions, it is addictive, requiring larger and larger doses of itself to satisfy the terms of its illusions.
With an optimistic eye to the capacity for self-transcendence that dwells in the human soul even at its most tangled, Farber adds:
But it is possible for two people and their relation to survive being-in-love. With enough appetite for each other’s company and enough hope in the possibilities for commonality that this life affords, they may go on to find a way of being together that includes being apart, a way that combines passionate affection with the reality of distance. A way that is also uncertain, vulnerable, and ever open to the contaminations of jealousy. There is no happy ending. But there is happy getting on with it.
All sorrow is, on some elemental level beneath cause and circumstance, an act of forgetting our connection to life, to one another, to the grand interbelonging of existence.
All joy is the act of remembering — the hand outstretched for reconnection, for felicitous contact between othernesses.
This awareness emanates from poet and gardener Ross Gay’s essay collection Inciting Joy (public library) — a tendril unfurled from his infinitely life-affirming Book of Delights.
With an eye to the community orchard he helped create — a “long sweaty collaborative dream” — Gay writes:
Though I didn’t yet have the words for it, planting that orchard — by which I mean… joining my labor to the labor by which it came to be — reminded me, or illuminated for me, a matrix of connection, of care, that exists not only in the here and now, but comes to us from the past and extends forward into the future. A rhizomatic care I so often forget to notice I am every second in the midst of. By which I came to be, and am, at all. Despite every single lie to the contrary, despite every single action born of that lie — we are in the midst of rhizomatic care that extends in every direction, spatially, temporally, spiritually, you name it. It’s certainly not the only thing we’re in the midst of, but it’s the truest thing. By far.
Tapping into that microrhizal mesh that stretches between us — between all of our individual joys and sorrows, lacing them together into an ecology of interdependence — is our surest way of tapping into joy itself. Gay reflects:
My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.
This animating spirit of joy as a force-field of connection comes alive in Gay’s poem “Patience” from his altogether vivifying collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (public library):
PATIENCE by Ross Gay
Call it sloth; call it sleaze; call it bummery if you please; I’ll call it patience; I’ll call it joy, this, my supine congress with the newly yawning grass and beetles chittering in their offices beneath me, as I nearly drifting to dream admire this so-called weed which, if I guarded with teeth bared my garden of all alien breeds, if I was all knife and axe and made a life of hacking would not have burst gorgeous forth and beckoning these sort of phallic spires ringleted by these sort of vaginal blooms which the new bees, being bees, heed; and yes, it is spring, if you can’t tell from the words my mind makes of the world, and everything makes me mildly or more hungry—the worm turning in the leaf mold; the pear blooms howling forth their pungence like a choir of wet-dreamed boys hiking up their skirts; even the neighbor cat’s shimmy through the grin in the fence, and the way this bee before me after whispering in my ear dips her head into those dainty lips not exactly like one entering a chapel and friends as if that wasn’t enough blooms forth with her forehead dusted gold like she has been licked and so blessed by the kind of God to whom this poem is prayer.
The unfolding of life does more than fray our bodies with entropy — it softens our spirit, blunting the edge of vanity and broadening the aperture of beauty, so that we become both more ourselves and more unselved, awake to the felicitous interdependence of the world. And yet the selves we have been — young and foolish, hungry for the wrong things, hopeful for the right but winged by hope into hubris — are elemental building blocks of who we become, unsheddable like the hydrogen and helium that made the universe. Joan Didion knew this when she observed that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Jane Ellen Harrison knew it when, in her superb meditation on the art of growing older, she cautioned that “you cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no ‘you’ except your life — lived.”
That transmutation and integration is what poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) takes up with uncommon soulfulness in his long poem “Youth and Age,” penned in his early forties, shortly after he completed The Prophet.
Kahlil Gibran, self-portrait
In his youth, Gibran reflects, he felt doomed to insignificance, dwarfed by a universe that seemed immense and remote. But as he matured, he learned to live with “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great” — to inhabit that elemental aloneness with a sense of boundless belonging to the universe and every other aloneness in it.
In a sentiment consonant with the aging Walt Whitman’s reckoning with what makes life worth living, he traces his path:
In my youth the heart of dawn was in my heart, and the songs of April were in my ears.
But my soul was sad unto death, and I knew not why. Even unto this day I know not why I was sad.
But now, though I am with eventide, my heart is still veiling dawn,
And though I am with autumn, my ears still echo the songs of spring.
But my sadness has turned into awe, and I stand in the presence of life and life’s daily miracles.
The difference between my youth which was my spring, and these forty years, and they are my autumn, is the very difference that exists between flower and fruit.
A flower is forever swayed with the wind and knows not why and wherefore.
But the fruit overladen with them honey of summer, knows that it is one of life’s home-comings, as a poet when his song is sung knows sweet content,
With an eye to the restlessness of youth, Gibran echoes his earlier reflections on befriending time as he contemplates what might be the supreme reward of growing older — our widening capacity for patience, for the spaciousness that meets life on its own terms and becomes one with the unfolding mystery:
In my youth I longed for the unknown, and for the unknown I am still longing.
But in the days of my youth longing embraced necessity that knows naught of patience.
Today I long not less, but my longing is friendly with patience, and even waiting.
And I know that all this desire that moves within me is one of those laws that turns universes around one another in quiet ecstasy, in swift passion which your eyes deem stillness, and your mind a mystery.
In a poignant reminder that our aversive reactions reveal not the nature of the things we abhor but the nature of our blinders and the limits of our understanding, he adds:
In my youth I loved beauty and abhorred ugliness, for beauty was to me a world separated from all other worlds.
But now that the gracious years have lifted the veil of picking-and-choosing from over my eyes, I know that all I have deemed ugly in what I see and hear, is but a blinder upon my eyes, and wool in my ears;
And that our senses, like our neighbors, hate what they do not understand.
In my youth, of all seasons I hated winter, for I said in my aloneness, “Winter is a thief who robs the earth of her sun-woven garment, and suffers her to stand naked in the wind.”
But now I know that in winter there is re-birth and renewal, and that the wind tears the old raiment to cloak her with a new raiment woven by the spring.
Ever/After by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)
Touching on a concept known in Eastern spiritual traditions as non-identification — the ability to inhabit our vaster nature beyond transient circumstances and conditions — he writes:
In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons.
Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down.
He ends the poem by looking back on the sad alienation of his youth as the rudiment of his fruition, indispensable and sacred:
Yes, in my youth I was a thing, sad and yielding, and all the seasons played with me and laughed in their hearts.
And life took a fancy to me and kissed my young lips, and slapped my cheeks.
Today I play with the seasons. And I steal a kiss from life’s lips ere she kisses my lips.
And I even hold her hands playfully that she may not strike my cheek.
In my youth I was sad indeed, and all things seemed dark and distant.
Today, all is radiant and near, and for this I would live my youth and the pain of my youth, again and yet again.
Protesters outside the courthouse in Manhatten wait for Trump’s arrival on April 4th.
Diane was up at six this morning, customizing a Christian flag for the former president.
I met her as we stood in a park in lower Manhattan, at the fringe of what the New York Young Republicans Club promoted as a rally to support Donald Trump, who was arraigned today at the courthouse behind us. Diane brushed her yellow-blonde curls off her face, the thin, whippy flagpole in her hand. She’d ordered the flag, she said, and added the slogan herself: “GOD BLESS PRESIDENT TRUMP.” “The white represents Christ’s purity. The blue represents baptismal waters and faithfulness of loyalness of Christ. And the red, of course, the blood of Jesus.” The flag symbolizing the crucifixion, one of which was carried on the House floor on January 6, was flying here during holy week, while Trump at last stood before a judge and was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Such displays of faith outside court on Tuesday were meant for us, the media as much as themselves, to witness. There was little else to see.
The two big advertised speakers, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec, had come and gone before many people knew they’d even arrived. Greene, who on Monday night released an ad calling the current president a predator and members of his party pedophiles, spoke briefly to dozens of camera lenses, and that’s it. Whatever she said was consumed by successive waves of jeers of “Go home!” and “Liar” and “Our kids are being murdered in schools!” set to the screeching of whistles—some of which may have been friendly fire, Trump fans who “had no idea she was even there,” NBC’s Ben Collins reported, though many were part of a noise demo organized by her opponents.
If the crowd around Greene—largely made up of the press—missed her, well, there was the guy wearing red wire-rimmed granny sunglasses and a Colonial Williamsburg–esque coat, standing in a ring of cameras, a barrel-size Bluetooth speaker around his neck, lip-syncing to a version of “The Carnival Is Over” by The Seekers.
Mostly, though, the people there would turn to any camera that came near and bemoan the unjust prosecution of the most popular man, the man they say won in 2020. Some Trump watchers have been saying his supporters will liken the defendant’s plight to Christ’s. Or at least these charges will be a way for his supporters to more strongly identify their own personal issues with the former president’s. As one guy in the Trump camp put it, “If they can try to do this to him, they can do it to anyone.”
If this is faith, it’s faith built on spectacle and reinforced by mutual grievance. And it’s unlikely it is disintegrating, even as the Trump saga grows more self-referential. In the park where the rally was held, there was a strange, life-size jail cell door, its bars backed with mirrors, reflecting back the faces of the people surrounding, with the courthouse as backdrop. One cop guarded the “door,” more a museum docent than a C.O. It wasn’t clear what the message was. Later in the day it ended up covered in Trump flags to block out the mirrors.
The metal NYPD barricades dividing the pro- and anti-Trump sides didn’t mean very much, either. There on the anti-Trump side was the guy in red granny glasses, the one I’d watched on the opposite side earlier, talking to a guy holding a sign that said: “Put Him in the Same Cell as Stewart Rhodes So That They Can Enjoy a Night of Eye-Socket Lovin’!” Which side was he on? I yelled at red-glasses over the weird demilitarized zone the cops filled in the six or so feet of empty space between the barricades. “The Carnival Is Over?” Well, he began, it had started as a joke, mock-serenading the Trump rally over the “crazy relationship” that was ending, but then he realized, “There’s real love to it.”
Arguing with these people is a joke, he said. He knows Trump supporters. At the end of the day, they aren’t going anywhere—they’ve always been here.
Dressed in traditional Zapotec attire, muxes in Juchitán, Mexico, partake in a parade for the annual
By Harmeet Kaur
(CNN) — In the town of Juchitán de Zaragoza, located on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca, one variation of a local legend goes something like this.
San Vicente Ferrer, the patron saint of Juchitán, was carrying three bags of seeds meant to be distributed around the world. The first contained male seeds, the second contained female seeds and a third bag contained a mixture of the two. But as San Vicente was passing through Juchitán, the third bag ruptured — and from it sprang the town’s famed community of muxes.
Muxes, a group long recognized within the indigenous Zapotec people of Mexico, are often referred to as a third gender. Embodying characteristics of both men and women, their existence challenges the gender binary that is so deeply entrenched in Western society.
“We are people of two spirits,” Felina Santiago says in the Oaxaca episode of “Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico.” “We are the duality, neither man nor woman. You are neither less nor more.”
Indigenous communities in Mexico have recognized a third gender since before Spanish colonization and its ensuing influence of Catholicism, with anthropologists pointing to Aztec priests who wore clothing associated with another gender and Mayan gods who were both male and female. Today, the muxes of Juchitán are just one of several communities around the world who don’t fit into the gender binary, such as hijras in India, bakla in the Philippines and fa’afafine in Samoa.
“Their way of life represents a form of resistance against the Western colonizing forces that have historically imposed their beliefs and behaviors on indigenous peoples,” Jacobo Ramírez, whose research with Ana María Munar has explored muxes and gender in indigenous communities, wrote in an email to CNN.
Muxes are generally assigned male at birth but tend to present in typically feminine ways through their behaviors, clothing and occupations. Many are skilled in embroidery or other artisan crafts, or work as merchants in the markets that drive the region’s economy. Often, they are caretakers for elderly relatives and community members, said Ramírez, an associate professor in Latin American business development at the Copenhagen Business School.
Still, there isn’t any one way to be muxe. There are muxes who are teachers, lawyers and social justice activists. Many muxes wear feminine attire in their daily lives, but some continue to wear masculine clothing at work or in other settings, donning more feminine clothing only for certain occasions. But muxes aren’t defined by their appearance.
“What is muxiedad for muxes?” the poet Elvis Guerra muses in the HBO Max documentary “Muxes.” “A way of living. This is how we were born.”
(CNN and HBO Max share parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.)
Being muxe is a distinct identity
It might be tempting to equate muxes to transgender people or classify them as part of the wider LGBTQ+ umbrella. But according to muxes and experts who have studied their communities, those labels impose a Western lens and don’t quite capture the nuances of being muxe.
Muxes consider their identities to be distinct — generally, they don’t identify as women and they don’t all experience gender dysphoria. (The definition of a muxe is evolving among a younger generation that is more open to hormone therapy.)
“I’ve always said if I was born again, I’d choose to be me,” Kristhal Aquino, a muxe activist, says in the “Muxes” documentary. “I am a muxe at heart.”
Rather, muxes are “more of a social and gender category than a sexual classification, and one firmly anchored in indigenous Zapotec conceptions of gender and sexuality,” Mirandé wrote in the 2015 article “Hombres Mujeres: An Indigenous Third Gender.” Indeed, muxes are proud of their Zapotec heritage, Ramírez said. Many muxes play a key role in preserving Zapotec culture, upholding culinary traditions and other rituals.
Given these roles, Ramírez said muxes enjoy a level of respect and acceptance in Zapotec society. Some people consider having a muxe in the family a blessing, because of how muxes have traditionally been expected to live at home and care for their elderly parents in adulthood. Even the Zapotec language is accommodating — it has no grammatical gender, only one form for all people.
Muxes still face barriers
Despite the general acceptance that muxes experience in Zapotec society, Juchitán and the broader Isthmus of Tehuantepec is far from a queer paradise.
Though women have considerable autonomy in Zapotec households and generally tend to be sensitive to children who they recognize as muxe, a culture of machismo and patriarchy persists, according to Ramírez. As a result, some muxes experience rejection and exclusion at home.
In the documentary “Muxes,” Kristhal recounted how their father ordered them to leave home after seeing photos of them in a dress and of them kissing a man. But Kristhal said their grandmother and mother wouldn’t allow it, and instead sent their father packing.
“I felt my mom was being really courageous as a woman,” Kristhal says in the film. “She said her kids were more important than a man.”
Muxes also encounter physical violence and discrimination in education and in the workplace, as well as legal and public health barriers. But though programs and initiatives in recent years have sought to protect muxe rights and make the community safer, there is work to be done.
“There are still significant levels of discrimination and prejudice towards muxes in some parts of the country, and they continue to face significant challenges in terms of achieving full equality and acceptance,” Ramírez said. “Despite these obstacles, muxes have maintained their rights and identities, and they continue to be an important and valued part of Mexican culture.”
Muxes are creating space for themselves
Outside Juchitán, the muxes are perhaps most well known for the festival they put on each November: “La Vela de Las Auténticas Intrépidas Buscadoras del Peligro,” or “The Vigil of the Authentic, Intrepid Danger-Seekers.”
Founded by muxes in 1976 in response to the persecution they faced, the three-day celebration draws thousands of visitors from Juchitán and beyond. The festivities feature a parade of colorful floats, a Catholic mass and dancing. There’s also a catwalk show that culminates in the crowning of a queen. Everyone dresses for the occasion — some wear the traditional embroidered blouses known as huipiles, while others opt for glittery dresses and high heels.
“Vela de las Intrépidas,” as it’s also called, is a way for muxes to assert themselves in a space that’s their own. And with muxes and non-muxes alike partaking in the fun, it stands as a notable example of the wider community embracing the muxes.
What started as an independent act of resistance has since turned into a widely attended community celebration. But for all the joy and revelry it brings, there’s pain and heartbreak just underneath the surface.
In 2019, Óscar Cazorla, a muxe activist who helped found “Vela de las Intrépidas,” was killed at home. The circumstances around the killing are still unclear.
“This struggle was meant to tell people, ‘This is me, I’m a human as well and I also have rights. I want the same recognition as everyone else,'” Felina Santiago, who has served as president of the organization behind the festival, said in the film “Muxes.” “They were brave enough to come out and not to hide.”
Today, the muxes’ struggle for recognition continues. As Rafa Fernández de Castro reported for Fusion in 2015, there’s also debate within the community about what it means to be muxe — whether the identity is inherent at birth or shaped by society, whether muxes must have Zapotec origins, whether undergoing gender reassignment therapies changes the calculus. There’s also the question of how an increasingly globalized world might affect muxe identity.
Still, as LGBTQ communities continue to come under attack in the US and around the world, the muxes’ integration into broader Zapotec society might be instructive.
“The muxes are a great example of how cultural diversity and nonconforming gender identities can coexist and thrive in different societies,” Ramírez said. “They are a reminder that there is no single way to express gender identity, and that gender norms are socially constructed and can be challenged and transformed over time.”
New Thinking Allo • Apr 6, 2023 Emptiness vs. nothingRobert Thurman, PhD, is professor emeritus at Columbia University where was a teaching professor for 50 years on Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies. He was the first Westerner Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is author of many books, including Why the Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet, and the Whole World and Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within. His most recent book is Wisdom is Bliss: Four Friendly Fun Facts That Can Change Your Life. His website is bobthurman.com. Robert shares how wisdom is bliss. Ignorance is not bliss and can cause suffering. He describes the four noble truths of Buddhism as four friendly fun facts and encourages you to use your life to become generous, compassionate, and enlightened. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:24 Wisdom and Buddhism 00:25:28 Why we come to earth 00:28:50 Emptiness vs. nothing 00:30:26 Karma Theory nothing 01:02:49 Pleasure and suffering 01:06:34 Where is nirvana? 01:28:58 Four noble truths as friendly fun facts 01:37:35 What Buddha would say to world leaders 01:51:28 Conclusion Edited subtitles for this video are available in Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, and Spanish. New Thinking Allowed CoHost, Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is an intuitive healer and health coach based in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com/ (Recorded on February 24, 2023)
“I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real.”
– Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor
From Krista, about this week’s show:
It’s fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. And she preached the most extraordinary sermons, and turned them into books read far and wide. Then in 2006, she wrote Leaving Church — about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she’s written, “alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.”
She’s written other books since, with titles like An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy. I might even use a religious word — it feels like a “blessing.” And this is not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being “spiritual but not religious.” We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time — even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara’s Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined.
Barbara Brown Taylor is the author of many books, including An Altar in the World, Leaving Church, Holy Envy, and Learning to Walk in the Dark. Her 2020 book is Always a Guest, a compilation of recent sermons. She is the former rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church of Clarkesville, Georgia, and she taught for two decades in the religion department at Piedmont College. Image by Jean Santopatre.
Transcript
Transcription by Alletta Cooper
Krista Tippett:It’s fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime — and in the work I’ve done very intently since the turn of this momentous century. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. And she preached the most extraordinary sermons and turned them into books read far and wide. Then in 2006, she wrote Leaving Church — about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she’s written, “alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.” She’s written other books since — with titles like An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy — I might even use a religious word — it feels like a “blessing.” And it’s not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being “spiritual but not religious.” We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time — even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara’s Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined.
I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.
[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]
Barbara Brown Taylor came of age in an earlier era of shifting religiosity. Her parents encouraged her to go to the library instead of to church. And Time Magazine was asking on its cover whether God was dead — and she studied at Emory University as one of its theologians helped make that case. I was in the On Being studios and she traveled to Georgia Public Broadcasting to speak with me.
Tippett:Hello?
Barbara Brown Taylor:Hello.
Tippett:Hi, it’s Krista.
Taylor:Krista Tippett, it’s Barbara Taylor.
Tippett:I’m so glad to meet you. You know, I thought all these years that our paths would actually cross with bodies on and they never have. [laughter] And you know, as I started delving in, I kept seeing this word “peregrination” show up from across the years. I looked it up and it comes from the Latin “to live or travel abroad,” but it’s really a meandering journey, which felt like good framing for your life and faith and callings, and also the evolution of religion and religiosity and God in the course of your lifetime and mine, and especially in this century, which is also something I want to draw you out on.
So, literally, you had a peregrinating — there was a lot of peregrination in your childhood. It looks like you moved nine times before you were in ninth grade.
Taylor:That’s true.
Tippett:A lot of moving around. And then, in terms of the religious background of the world you grew up in, God was officially dying.
Taylor:Um-hm.
Tippett:But interestingly, it seems that you were not deterred or frightened by God’s death. You kept investigating church. How do you think about what you were looking for, what you were searching for?
Taylor:Oh, there’s so many answers because in high school, I was looking for friends and all my friends went to churches and wanted me to go with them to churches. So that was the belonging stage. And after that, it was mostly realizing I hadn’t found it yet. So it was mostly a sense that I was being drawn to a place with people I cared about, but what I was looking for wasn’t there. So what was I looking for? Some sense that I was being told the truth about the way things really were. And instead, I think I often found caricatures or warnings about the way things were. Especially as a young person, a lot of people lobbying for my soul, both denominationally and theologically.
So it took me until my middle year of seminary to walk into a church in downtown New Haven and feel like I was home. Though now when I look back on it, it was like Hogwarts. I mean, I can’t believe that’s what I fell in love with, but I did.
Tippett:You mean that church, that high Episcopal Church?
Taylor:Yeah. Very high. I think no women even in the choir.
Tippett:Yeah. Lots of — what do they say? “Bells and smells” and all of that, all the high ritual. I love this story about — it sounds like, again, you were on this wandering exploration and you went to many kinds of churches and then the story about when you landed in this Episcopal Church in your mid-20s and the priest who said to you when you went to talk to him about this, he said, “Deary, you are an ecclesiastical harlot. Let’s be sure you’re really in love this time.” [laughter]
Taylor:Yes, no, he has passed onto his blessed rest. I hope that he knows I did — I stayed faithful in my way.
Tippett:Yeah. You were in love and you were eventually ordained a priest. And your book Leaving Church is one that a lot of people read. And I like the structure of that book, which is in three parts: “Finding,” “Losing,” and “Keeping,” which also feels like a good framing for this journey, not just that you’ve been on, but that we’re on as a culture. One of the things that intrigued me that you wrote about leaving parish ministry in 1997 — then you became a college religion teacher. I want you to unfurl this for me. You said that moving from church to classroom was “the beginning of my theological humiliation.” [laughs] What does that mean?
Taylor:Well, it was a surprising move. You got it right, though. I’m really happy you understood “leaving church” meant leaving parish ministry because I got many consolation notes shortly after that offering to help me find my way back to God. And I said, “Nope, don’t need help with that. Just needed a vocational change.” But what it meant was leaving a church where I was solo pastor — I had special vestments I put on. I had a time when I got to talk and nobody else talked. I had a parking spot. But to move into a college situation where there was not even a religion department, but that came under the Department of Humanities meant that literally, I walked to the door of my new office and it said “Barbara Taylor, Department of Humanities.” And I thought that is such a long ways from being a “Master of Divinity”…
Tippett:“Master of Divinity,” right. [laughter]
Taylor:…with some miles on the odometer. And I had a lectern instead of an altar. And the most distressing thing was to find my language didn’t work anymore. The plural “we”: we believe, we’re called, we are here because we’ve come to baptize this child. All my language was gone. So it was a great time in my life to reinvent, though I’m very happy students didn’t know that I didn’t know what I was doing.
Tippett:One of the things you wrote about teaching, something that came to you, you said, “the great gift” — and you pointed at this a minute ago — “the great gift of the unbelievers in class.” Well, a couple of things. You said, “the students in my [classes] who distanced themselves from religion often knew more about the faith they had left behind than the students who stayed put without question.” And then you said, “the great gift of the unbelievers in class was to send me back to my historic vocabulary list to explore its meaning in the present.” That you now had to translate, as you say, things that were said ritually.
What this makes me think of is something that’s been on my mind in the last couple of years — which is not what you were talking about then, but bringing that into the present — I am having this experience that theological and liturgical language and practices, at the same time that we can tell a story of churches emptying out, that theological and liturgical language and practices feel more resonant for the world we inhabit than ever before. And I’m thinking of confession and repentance and lamentation and redemption.
And also, I feel like what I see from where I sit in terms of all the energies and curiosity around this part of life — this religious and spiritual part of life, this life of faith — is so much more complicated and richer than the phrase “spiritual but not religious.”
Taylor:Yeah, I’ve been offended by the category of the nones, N-O-N-E-S, because it sounds like a null set. I don’t know if this is what you’re talking about, but the whole way for many years that people who were embedded in church communities dismissed the spiritual but not religious was being frivolous, non-committed individualists who just wanted to design their own religion. And now, lo-and-behold, it turns out they’re really part of an evolution we’re in the middle of. And I hope we find a word better than “Nones” to describe them, not only because they’re now 30% of the US population.
Tippett:Yeah, N-O-N-E-S.
Taylor:Yeah.
Tippett:Well, part of the reason that word is destined not to be profound is because it emerged from a poll. The context in which it was formulated is lacking.
Taylor:And “unaffiliated” is not very lovely, is it? We’ll have to find something else. “The peregrinaters”? “The peregrines.”
Tippett:Yeah. Is that the category you’d like to recommend?
Taylor:I don’t know. I think they’ll think of their own names and I hope there’ll be a lot of them, a lot of different ones. Because again, the N-O-N-E-S is a category that includes a bunch of people who are very different from one another as well.
Tippett:Yeah, yeah. In the beginning of the section of Leaving Church, you have a quote from Teilhard de Chardin, which I really loved: “What we are all more or less lacking at this moment is a new definition of holiness.” And it almost felt to me like that’s a better descriptor of the search that is on. I don’t know, where does that language of “a new definition of holiness” take your theological imagination right now?
Taylor:It takes me in so many directions. I realize as we speak, I’m thinking of things like my age and the region in which I live, and the ways in which holiness is used. Where I live, it’s most often in terms of Pentecostal Holiness churches. So that would be the free association for that. And yet, the hunger for holiness in terms of a sense of being rooted — grounded in shifting ground — which oddly means that to be, what, to be holy is to keep one’s balance while the earth moves under our feet.
There’s a lot. I would love to play with that word for the whole rest of our time, but I like it much better than “religious” or “spiritual,” but to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real. But not just the materialist really real, but the really real that’s got layers all the way down.
[music: “The Gerimo” by Blue Dot Sessions]
Tippett:I’d love to walk through — as I was reading through your work and your writing and interviews you’ve done across the years, also just finding what you had written about going from the church to the classroom, or sending you back to the “historic vocabulary” for its “meaning in the present.” And, of course, that present you were talking about in the 1990s was different from ours. And one of the pieces of theology that you invoke again and again is this notion of incarnation, a spirituality and a theology that — a spirituality that is embodied. In your book, An Altar in the World, you titled the chapter about incarnation, “The Practice of Wearing Skin.”
You’ve talked about “the daily practice of incarnation — of being in the body with full confidence that God speaks the language of flesh.”
Taylor:That’s what came up quickly and clearly for me, was no longer standing up to speak in a community that shared a language and spoke it with some coherence back and forth, also some lively variation and what they meant by all those multisyllabic theological words. But then, all of a sudden, to be in a college classroom with students of many faiths and no faiths to whom it meant little, next to nothing. When I compare the teaching of World Religions, which was full of practices, dance and music, and body decoration and mandalas, and going from that to Intro to Christian Theology, it was like going from a festival to a cemetery, in terms of where the body just vanished. It all went up into the head to figure out whether our ontology fit with our eschatology and whether our doxologies were adequate. It was a big challenge for me to either stop using the language or find a way to put skin and flesh on the language. And I’ve kept that through the years. I’m a champion of body language when speaking of the holy, which for some people is counterintuitive, because they’ve been taught the body has nothing to do with what is holy. But I beg to differ.
Tippett:Yes, you wrote about the Christian reverence for the body: “the neighbor’s body, the leper’s body, the orphan’s body, the Christ’s body — the clear charge to care for the incarnate soul.”
Taylor:And these days, more and more for the body of the tree and the body of the mountain and the body of the river. And I think — and that train pulled through the station a long time ago with people like Sallie McFague at Vanderbilt, lots of people who did ecological work that now has a new fire under it: that if we don’t take the body of this earth seriously, it will no longer be our host.
Tippett:Yeah. It’s also that what we have referred to as “body” and what we’ve referred to as emotion and spirit, that those things in fact are completely entangled. We know this now in a way we didn’t even know this 20 years ago.
Taylor:It’s true. I just listened — this will be highly inappropriate. You can take it out, too — but I just listened to Lady Gaga sing at the Academy Awards, and that woman sings from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. And as soon as she started belting out that song, I had this rush, this physical rush that went head to foot. And I think it was awe. I don’t know what that was. It was certainly amazement at the full embodiment of her purpose in community at that moment. So there. The Academy Awards just made it into our talk.
Tippett:[laughs] Excellent. I also just love this language: you said, “Here we sit, with our souls tucked away in this marvelous luggage, mostly insensible to the ways in which every spiritual practice begins with the body. Our bodies have shaped our views of the world, just as the world has shaped our views of our bodies.” You’ve been thinking about that for a long time. And again, science is meeting it now.
Taylor:Oh, thank you. That made me sound ahead of the time. [laughter] I don’t think I was. I’ve always felt way behind. You live long enough, the circle comes around again.
Tippett:Yeah, there you go.
Taylor:When we talk about theological language, I was mid-20s when I discovered it, largely in seminary. And then it was the most wonderful thing I had ever discovered. It was like a field guide and somebody had given me a book with the names of things that I had experienced, but I didn’t know there were these names for them. And so it was a gift of language along with a community that spoke the language. And so it was a kind of taxonomy of holiness. Late in life, that same language often feels to me like a seatbelt, like it’s trying to keep me in a car. I want to get out of the car; I want to get my feet on the ground. But the language keeps saying, “No, no, no, here are the boundaries of the taxonomy.”
I just want to start all of a sudden now saying, “Look: bird with white spots on it and some red,” instead of going to my field guide to see what the bird’s name is, how long its wings are, what it weighs, where its migration patterns are. So I guess in other contexts, I’ve talked about the rewilding that happens after a while.
Tippett:Yeah. I want to talk about wilderness. I definitely want to get there. What comes to mind if you think about that taxonomy that you learned that was a gift? And I also had that experience studying theology. It was like this — there were these riches that had been hidden away, even though I went to church three times a week.
Taylor:Yeah, and as you spoke about it earlier about the appropriateness of the language for a lot that is going on now in the headlines, if not in churches. But where I live, the language is either — the language is required or it’s rejected. The language, even if it fits right now with a lot of people I’m in community with, will not be used because of the abuse associated with it in the past. Even some of the good language, you know? If we want to talk about good language and bad language, or frightening language and “redemptive” language, to put one of the words in there. But I really — I spent a lot of time with people who don’t want anything that sounds like the church they were hurt in.
Tippett:One of the things, when you talk about incarnation and the body, you said, “Deep suffering makes theologians of us all.” And you said, “The questions people ask about God in Sunday school rarely compare with the questions we ask while we are in the hospital. This goes for those stuck in the waiting room as well as those in [the hospital] beds.”
Taylor:Yes. [laughs] Yeah. I was never good at hospital calls. Because I was pretty sure I knew why I was there, but it meant offering to pray preferably from The Book of Common Prayer. And that never seemed to me like what was called for once I was in the room. And quite often, if I would sit there quiet long enough — I don’t mean to be a bummer here, but what people would get around to saying is how odd it was that they did not feel the presence of God. That in their hardest hours they felt abandoned. And that called for a different kind of prayer.
But again, that was probably the point at which my theological training required me to learn how to be an improvisational holy person. And that called for as much creativity as I could come up with, but mostly not many words. Whatever that says about the theological language. Nope. It was better to rub someone’s feet or just sit and breathe together. But then, I always wondered if I was doing my job.
Tippett:You’ve written so interestingly about prayer. You had a chapter on prayer in Altar in the World, and I noted that in the first few pages you said, you wrote these different things: “I know that a chapter on prayer belongs in this book, but I dread writing it,” and “I am a failure at prayer,” and “I would rather show someone my checkbook stubs than talk about my prayer life.” [laughter]
Taylor:I’m not a good role model, Krista, but I’m representative. [laughter]
Tippett:Somewhere though — and this was more positive — I think you said, “Sometimes, when people ask me about my prayer life, I describe hanging laundry on the line.”
Taylor:Or all kinds of things. Hanging laundry on the line, like they’re prayer flags and thinking of the people whose laundry it is, and being grateful to the wind for blowing it around. And then, going from that to filling a horse trough with water so that these great big vegetarians can get something to drink during their days. But thank goodness for people like Brother Lawrence in Christian religious tradition, or others who found their vocations in kitchens and sweeping.
Tippett:Brother Lawrence. The Practice of the Presence of God, which, I think — washing dishes. [laughter]
Taylor:Yeah. Oh, he said it was enough to flip a pancake for the love of God because he cooked for his monks. I think he always was a Brother and never went above being a lay Brother. But thank goodness for him and others like him who at least carved out a wedge in the Christian pie for those who did the most ordinary things in the world with reverence, or at least with some awareness that reverence was possible in the most ordinary things on earth. That’s where I live.
Tippett:And I think that language, also that word “reverence,” which is sometimes connected to the notion of sacrament, that does feel like language to me. Especially the word “reverence” that is inviting, even to a modern secular mind that feels like a word and a thing we might be missing.
Every jealous person knows jealousy to be a brutally degrading experience and resists with all his might revealing the extent of his degradation.
