Tag: our sunday visitor

Don’t listen to thoughts you have when you’re tired

I am a life-long insomniac, and please believe me when I say I have tried everything. I do all the right things, and avoid all the wrong things, to encourage good sleep, but it just seems to be my fate that sometimes I lose the knack, and long periods go by when sleep eludes me, night after night. I just forget how to do it, and the only thing to do is wait until I get the hang of it again. Staying asleep is like trying to stay underwater while clutching a giant beach ball: You can go under for a bit, but pretty soon you’re bobbing around on the surface again, blinking and frustrated, high and dry.

But nighttime is still different from daytime. The thoughts you have when you’re awake, and shouldn’t be, are very different from the thoughts you have when it’s just regular daytime. Nighttime thoughts can take on a certain urgency, even a certain spiritual compulsion.

Not long ago, Catholics on social media were talking about liminality: of “threshold” experiences when we are passing, or trying to pass, from one state or stage to another. We feel a sensation of peculiar and unsettling ambiguity, when we are neither this nor that, here nor there, but maybe we paradoxically feel a sharpened awareness of our in-betweenness.

There are some places on the planet that tend to make people feel this way – mountaintops, caves, very open spaces, heavy fog — and also some experiences: sitting with the dying, having sex, giving birth.

Sometimes insomnia puts us in this state. Eyes wide open in the darkness, body looking for all the world like it’s fully at rest when it’s actually tense and alert. The harder you try to push through from consciousness to unconsciousness, the more stuck you become in this liminal state.

Many people say that, if they can’t sleep, they pray. They say that, if they’re going to be awake anyway, they might as well be sure they’re passing the time well. Someone even told me once that God wouldn’t let her sleep until she said a whole Rosary for me (and I was very grateful when I found out, because I had been in labor, and struggling). And some people freely admit that they just keep on saying Hail Marys until they drop off to sleep. Call it boredom, call it tapping into some kind of mind/body magic, or call it faithfully letting your guardian angel finish the set, but it works for some people.

What I find, more often, is a different kind of spiritual experience…..Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

“Insomnia” photo by Alyssa L. Miller via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Sarah Norton of Conversion Street Studio: Meeting Jesus, again

On Sarah Norton’s second day of college, someone asked her to join a Bible study group. It was the beginning of one of many conversions. But at the time, it just seemed like a way to meet people.

“I needed friends, so I said, ‘OK,’” she said.

Norton, now 33 and the mother of four, as well as the artist owner of Conversion Street Studio, originally went into college as a vocal music major. She was Catholic, but even though she had gone to Catholic school, she perceived her faith as “rules to follow, not a relationship.”

In college, she dropped her faith and started partying. When someone from FOCUS Campus Ministry invited her to join their group, she went along with it, purely for the social aspect. She went to weekly Bible study but didn’t always attend Mass.

It wasn’t until a year in, when the leader asked her to join the ministry as a leader, that it started to get personal.

“I had to come early to college campus, and all the Bible study leaders were going to daily Mass and praying, and they had a joy about them. I wanted that. So I followed them,” she said.

Twelve weeks later, in her sophomore year, she was at Mass and looked up, and she saw Jesus.

“It was him. He gave my whole life to me. I’m gonna give my life to him,” she said.

That process wasn’t seamless. Norton slowly chipped away at the partying lifestyle she was leading and learned how to take her faith more seriously. At the same time, three years into her studies as a music major, she realized that music wasn’t meant to be her life. She ended up with a liberal arts degree and “one hundred minors in music.” And she took a few art classes.

Norton also felt the pull to make good on an inheritance of sorts she had gotten back in fourth grade.

“A family friend died, and her mom was an artist. For whatever reason, I inherited all of her oil paints, thousands and thousands of paints,” she said.

When she changed her degree, she decided to try to make use of this gift. She only had a few art classes under her belt, but quickly discovered she had a love for color and an aptitude for painting.

“I felt like I was dancing when I was painting, and I still do,” she said.

After college, she married her husband (also a FOCUS missionary), and he introduced her to a sort of hidden Marc Chagall museum in D.C.

“This opened my mind,” she said. “I love that he had his own style. I love his floating people. And he was so good at color. And I loved how strongly his Jewish heritage came out, how his religion came out in his art.”

Norton began to paint in earnest, learning through online tutorials, and often following the practices of prayer she learned in FOCUS. In the lectio divina, she said, you meet Jesus in Scripture, intentionally imagining the scenes as described in the Gospels.

“I was pretty on fire,” she said.

She and her husband had their first child right away, and then life shifted… Read the rest of my latest artist profile at Our Sunday Visitor. 

This is the eleventh in a monthly series of profiles of Catholic and Catholic-friendly artists for Our Sunday Visitor. 
Previous artists featured in this series:
Eileen Cunis
Daniel Mitsui
Mattie Karr
Jaclyn Warren
Daniel Finaldi
Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs
Chris Lewis
Kreg Yingst
Sarah Breisch
Charles Rohrbacher

If you know of (or are) a Catholic or Catholic-friendly artist you think should be featured, please drop me a line! simchafisher at gmail dot com. I’m not always excellent about responding, but I always check out every suggestion. Thanks!

On my summer list: Less screen time

This is the time of year when I make a list of things I definitely want to do this summer.

Some of it is just for fun, and I consult with all the kids to make sure nobody’s idea of fun gets overlooked (which can happen to the quieter kids in a big family). Visit that aquarium before our membership runs out! Learn how to make mozzarella! Go back to that state park with the waterfalls! Try our hand at paper marbling! Spend time at the ocean!

Some of it is things I must force myself to do: Teach at least one teenager to drive! Do something about the attic! Do something about the bathroom ceiling and the mold thereon! Do something about the teenagers in general!

There is also one thing I must force myself to do, that the kids definitely don’t want to do, but it’s so we can all have fun: Institute a weekly screen-free evening. We already do this during Lent, and most years, we do it during Advent, too. It’s stupidly hard. But the rewards are almost immediate; and I hope they are long-term, as well.

The thing about screen time — whether it’s video games, or TV, or movies, or social media or whatever — is that it doesn’t just take up the time it takes up. If you spend two hours staring at a screen, it’s very hard to just snap back into other activities where you use your body and heart and senses and imagination at the end of those two hours. Screen time leeches the life out of the rest of your day, and makes everything non-screen begin to feel arduous and irrelevant, and before you know it, you can’t really remember how to do anything else. So you don’t. You just look at your screen.

I say this as a screen fiend. I have a very hard time putting my phone down, even if I’m busy and really need to do something else, or if I’m exhausted and really need to sleep, or if everything I see and hear on my screen is intensely irritating or deathly boring. It’s just so easy to scroll, scroll, scroll, and the more I scroll, the harder it is to do anything else. So I have a lot of sympathy for my kids when they don’t want to put their devices down.

But I’m still their mom, and I still get to say what goes on in my house. Here’s one of the great secrets of doing what’s best for children: It often forces you into doing things that are good for you, too, even if only so they can’t accuse you of hypocrisy (which is a child’s greatest joy in life).

Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Eilieen Cunis: The art of whatever is asked for right now

Eileen Cunis, 67, makes banners for churches. Not those primitive and graceless felt-and-burlap banners that dominated liturgical decor through the ’60s or ’70s, but thoughtfully crafted, dignified works of art produced by a woman who just wants to walk through whatever door the Lord has opened for her.

One of Cunis’ pieces, a processional banner of Mary Mother of the Eucharist, was recently accepted for the National Eucharistic Revival Art Exhibit, and it will travel from Connecticut to Indiana. It is a shining, intricate, iconlike work with many layers of fabric and brocade carefully pressed, folded and sewn into position, the faces and hands of Mary and her baby delicately rendered in paint.

As delighted as Cunis is to have her fabric work honored, she’d really rather be painting. She prefers the freedom and flexibility of working exclusively with paint, and she’s starting to wade into the deep waters of iconography, with its profound theology of light.

“I would love for a priest to say, ‘I have this big wall and I want you to do a big mural, and it’s going to be in the church for 50 or 100 years,’” she said. But it all comes down to how the Lord is leading her right now.

Right now, she’s just finished a set of four tapestries for Sacred Heart Church in Bloomfield, Connecticut, a building that had some vast, empty spaces to fill. It’s a gymnasiumlike structure, and that’s not just a coincidence. The church was built in 1962, when Catholicism in the United States was still burgeoning. The congregation assumed their parish would continue to flourish and grow, so they built the church intending to eventually convert it into a gym for the Catholic school.

“It just didn’t happen,” Cunis said. “People were caught flat-footed, and the gymnasium church remained the church.”

The school closed in the ’80s, a nearby church also closed, and the large, simple structure of Sacred Heart became the main church building for the congregation. It had been decorated and made suitable for worship, but still had a rather bleak facade on the apse wall.

The pastor saw Cunis’ work in a local shop, and a lightbulb went on. The gray space has now been transformed by a small host of angels rendered in shining fabric.

Cunis’ first banner, though, wasn’t designed to enliven a large space, but just the opposite…

Read the rest of my latest artist profile at Our Sunday Visitor. 

I did and did not learn about Jesus at the eclipse

A week before the solar eclipse that passed over much of the nation, I wrote an essay about it. I had a whole thesis worked out about how the sun is like Jesus and the moon is like the sacraments. I said that the power and glory of Jesus is like the blinding blaze of the sun, and although we live every day in its presence, we can only look upon it when it’s covered. Jesus is like the life-giving, illuminating, warming, but unapproachably brilliant sun, and he covered himself in mortal flesh for thirty-three years so people could live and walk with him, and now he covers his divinity under the species of bread and wine so we can see him, and eat him, and not be burned up. Someday, I said, our spiritual eyes will be changed so that we don’t need protection, but can behold him directly for eternity in Heaven.

Then I thought, maybe I should see the eclipse first.

So we packed a gigantic lunch and our special sunglasses and piled into the car, and plowed through hours of traffic to the spot up north where we could see the eclipse.

Did you see it? Were you there?

I saw it. I was not prepared.

I know why a solar eclipse happens. I’m very familiar with the science, and I’ve seen the little animated models, and I’ve seen countless amateur and professional photographs of total solar eclipses, too. I’ve also seen a partial solar eclipse and many lunar eclipses. I saw Haley’s Comet, and I’ve seen the rings of Saturn, and I’ve seen meteors so big and bright they leave a green streak across the sky. I’ve seen things in the sky that filled me with wonder and left me gasping and grateful for the strange beauty of the universe.

This was different. And it was not Jesus.

Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image: Flammarion engraving (public domain)

When the darkness passes, do not forget the Lord

It was four years ago, at this time of year, that COVID social isolation began in earnest. Remember?

First we started staying home from Mass, then from school, then from everything else. The thing that brought me up short, though, was when it dawned on me we wouldn’t be back to normal in time for Easter. It seemed so terrible not to be present for my favorite day of the liturgical year, such a loss.

Then my father died suddenly, just before Easter, and I had to adjust my views on loss.

It was a strange thing. Instead of planning for my father’s visit, we were planning his funeral. All through the Easter Vigil, live-streamed on a laptop, I was aware that this wasn’t ideal. We should be inside the actual church, actually receiving Christ’s body and blood, and instead we were crammed into our living room watching a tenor singing out “Christ our light” into an empty building.

But I couldn’t stop smiling.

It was a strange thing. The seminarian started to read from Genesis, telling us how the world was empty and void, and then God spoke, and there was light. He told us how God made the water, and fish to swim in it, the land, and creatures to crawl on it, and sun, moon, and stars to rule the day and night, and man. And breath for man, the breath of God. It was a good story, and I wanted to hear more. I was spellbound through the entire Mass, as if it were all new. Out of the void, God made something firm, something real, something for us to stand on. And then he gave us life.

When I got the call that my father was dead, even as I cried, I kept finding little stepping stones of joy. It was like trying to make your way across a dark, formless swamp. No one would dispute that death and grief are dreadful and cold, but there was always something to stand on, something good.

I kept thinking: At least he died at home in his comfy chair, not hooked up to the beeping hospital machines he loathed. At least he was a praying man, and he had been to confession. At least the last thing I told him was that I love him. There was something for my feet to stand on amid the grief.

At least I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. It’s a good story, and I want to hear more. I kept thinking of it at his burial, where my siblings and I stood six feet apart, in an almost comically tragic scene straight out of a Russian novel, with fog and mud and solitary mourners by an open grave; and I smiled then too.

That was the year when one thing after another started to unravel in my life. I kept losing things, precious things, that I thought I utterly depended on; but I also kept finding firm ground under my feet. Not a lot of ground! But enough…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

Image via PickPik

“My conscience will not allow me to make boring art for God”: Artist Daniel Mitsui

Daniel Mitsui likes drawing on calfskin vellum the best.

It’s popular with artists who, like Mitsui, create works in a medieval northern European style. But it’s not mere tradition or attachment to history that makes calfskin so appealing to Mitsui.

“It’s really, really, really nice,” he said. “It’s a very precise medium because, on a microscopic level, it’s an organized layer of skin cells. You get a more precise line, and you can make corrections easily by scraping away a layer with a knife.”

Try that on paper made from vegetative matter, and you’ll tear your picture up. But calfskin vellum is forgiving.

“People sometimes say, ‘How can you be so precise?’ That’s part of the secret. You draw on a better surface,” Mitsui said.

Mitsui, 41, has spent decades doing the work of carefully sorting, modifying and balancing tradition with innovation — or, more precisely, “combinations of influences, rather than wholly new ideas,” he said.

His work is distinctly medieval but brings in elements of Persian, Celtic and Japanese art.

“I think of it as a living style, rather than a historical one,” he said.

“In religious art, there’s a requirement that you try to uphold tradition in some manner, but I think that tradition is mostly in the content and the arrangement of the picture. It’s not really stylistic, so much as what you are showing, and with what associations,” Mistui said.

Thus he brings his audience “Great Battle in Heaven” in the style of a Japanese woodblock print.

On his site, he explains how he synthesized the appearance of the angelic warriors, who look like the heroes in prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, with a composition from one of Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic works. The result is at once arrestingly unusual and weirdly familiar, like a vivid but coherent dream where the mind feels free to draw on any meaningful image.

He is aware that not every viewer will be well versed in the Patristic writings and artistic conventions that enrich his work, so he tries to write descriptions to help the viewer understand more fully what they are seeing.

“It’s something I’m not as on top of as I’d like. I’m a relatively fast artist and a relatively slow writer,” he said. “I’m always behind.”

He said that medieval art is full of well-established symbolism, which is not necessarily obvious when you first look at it, but a little bit of analysis will provide the background to show how well it corroborates with what the Church Fathers have always taught.

“I very strongly value tradition as a theological concept, as the basis of Catholic epistemology. It’s how we know what we know as Catholics. That underlies my artwork; that’s part of what I’m trying to communicate,” he said.

But his work enjoys enormous appeal across a wide range of audiences because the images themselves are so compelling. And remaining faithful to tradition doesn’t mean limiting his scope.

“There’s really very different views on artwork even in traditional Catholicism,” he said. “If you even go back to the 12th century, the Victorines and the Cistercians had very different notions of aesthetics. I can’t just say, ‘My work depicts traditional Catholicism.’ Well, which part of it?”… Read the rest of my latest artist profile at Our Sunday Visitor. 

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Image: “Jesus Christ in Majesty with Cherubim and Seraphim” by Daniel Mistui

 

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This is the ninth in a monthly feature on Catholic and Catholic-friendly artists I’ve been writing for Our Sunday Visitor. 
Previous artists featured in this series:
Mattie Karr
Jaclyn Warren
Daniel Finaldi
Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs
Chris Lewis
Kreg Yingst
Sarah Breisch
Charles Rohrbacher

If you know of (or are) a Catholic or Catholic-friendly artist you think should be featured, please drop me a line! simchafisher at gmail dot com. I’m not always excellent about responding, but I always check out every suggestion. Thanks!

All possible questions about Lent, answered

Dear Simcha,

Somebody told me that “Lent” is actually an acronym for “Let’s Eliminate Negative Thinking,” and it’s always been a time for focusing on our sense of self-worth as valuable members of God’s organization. But someone else told me that’s a foolish modern innovation, and it actually stands for “laborare errare nobis tacitumitas” and it has something to do with hard work making you silent? But when I ran that past my Latin teacher, she just gave a little shudder and pulled a flask out of her top drawer, and wouldn’t even look at me. So where does the word “Lent” actually come from?

Signed,
Little Miss Etty Mology

Dear Miss,

It is a word that comes directly from the Middle English word “Lent,” which comes from the Old English word “Lencten,” which is derived from the proto-Germanic “lengentumpen” which means “quit trying to be cute.” Lent is Lent. You guys know what Lent is. Say your prayers, make with the alms, and don’t touch that burger. That’s what Lent means. 

Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

Superbass, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The freedom of wearing your faith on your sleeve: Artist Mattie Karr

Mattie Karr wanted to be an infiltrator. The 28-year-old Kansas native had big dreams of traveling to Hollywood and stealthily planting spiritual seeds in the work she did, smuggling religious themes into mainstream stories and animation.

“I loved the idea of being incognito with my art. I could be this Catholic evangelizing spy, almost,” she said.

It didn’t work out, and she is so glad.

First of all, she loves living in Kansas and loves the parish where she just finished a massive commission, three years in the making. It consists of two 15-foot high triptychs that bring color and warmth to either side the rather austere apse of Holy Name of Jesus in Kansas City.

Second, she found that she couldn’t stop making religious art if she tried. “As I grew in my faith, I couldn’t help it. The art just came out and it was all religious, mostly Mary. I couldn’t stop drawing Mary,” she said. The big shift came when she went on retreat, and some people prophesied over her, saying that God was calling her to do something and that she needed to be brave and step out.

“It was very clear he wanted me to leap,” she said. A week later, she did, quitting her job in sales, and launching her full-time career as an artist. Karr paints and draws sacred and liturgical art and also does commissions with specific religious themes, depicting spiritual tableaux that are particularly meaningful to her patrons.

Now that she’s surrendered to the idea of being a sacred artist, she said life has gotten so much easier.

“The images come a lot quicker. It doesn’t feel like as much of a struggle,” she said. “I appreciate wearing my religion on my sleeve in my business. It’s much more freeing.”

Karr said she once met a priest at a wedding, and he was adamant that she is an iconographer. Although Karr has done a painting that, at the request of a client, borrows some elements of traditional iconography, most of her work is in a very different mode. But the priest insisted, “Your spirituality is that of an icon painter. I can tell you pray through it.”

And this is so.

“Even if I’m not consciously praying, I’m praying,” she said. “Even in artist mode, I’m aware of the Holy Spirit.”

When she’s working with a client to develop a commissioned piece, she prays with them, and asks the Holy Spirit to give her an image for them. This is what happened when a client asked her to portray Mary, Undoer of Knots.

She collaborated with a client whose wife is a mental health counselor and had a recurring dream of Mary dressed in work clothes, diligently unbinding the tangles in a long ribbon that shines in the light falling on her shoulders.

Karr said that, although the image was made for one client, it often brings people to tears, even if they previously knew nothing of this traditional title of Mary.

“I’ve seen how much God can speak through these images. Beauty has this quality of stopping people in their tracks and making them pay attention,” she said. It breaks through the silence, even a silence we may not be aware of.

“So many people in their relationship with God don’t think he has much to say to them. Even devout Christians don’t experience the love of God in their lives,” she said. But sometimes beauty can speak to them with God’s voice.

“It’s a collaboration with the Holy Spirit. I’m always asking,” she said.

Sometimes that collaboration seems to come in the form of failure…. Read the rest of my latest monthly artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor.

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This is the eighth in a monthly feature on Catholic and Catholic-friendly artists I’ve been writing for Our Sunday Visitor. 
Previous artists featured in this series:
Jaclyn Warren
Daniel Finaldi
Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs
Chris Lewis
Kreg Yingst
Sarah Breisch
Charles Rohrbacher

If you know of (or are) a Catholic or Catholic-friendly artist you think should be featured, please drop me a line! simchafisher at gmail dot com. I’m not always excellent about responding, but I always check out every suggestion. Thanks!

This potted plant life: Lessons on prayer for the new year

Let’s talk about prayer. Let’s talk about how January is a wonderful time to start or restart a habit of daily prayer.

But first, let’s talk about winter.

I’m not a big fan of this time of year. There are plenty of unpleasant things about the winter months where I live: The way the coldness makes you cold, the way the darkness is so dark, and the way the dark and the cold make you kind of stupid.

But the thing that really hurts is how all the green goes away. You look outside, and everything is gray and white and brown, and it’s just sad. I need green! This is why, of course, people have houseplants. Nothing livens up a living space like living things. It’s the obvious solution to my green starvation, right?

Not so fast. I’m an absolute plant assassin. I love having plants around, but I’m terrible at keeping them alive. If plants were people, I’d be on an FBI watch list for the sheer number of suspicious disappearances associated with me.

Take, for example, my little fig tree. I had put it outside on the patio over the summer, but then a frost came and I forgot to bring it in. The poor thing turned brown, all the leaves fell off, and it went from a luxurious, broad-leafed beauty to a dry stick in a pot. I was so sad.

But I’m telling you about it because I realized that I’ve actually learned a thing or two in the last several years — and what I’ve learned dovetails very nicely with what I’ve learned about prayer. Just as I suffer when there is no green outside, so too do I suffer when I don’t have a naturally flourishing relationship with God; and just as the solution to green starvation is having houseplants, the solution to spiritual starvation is prayer.

And if this metaphor doesn’t quite work out perfectly, just assume it’s because it’s dark and cold and I’m stupid. Not my fault!

I am the queen of letting plants dry out in between waterings. Then, when I finally do remember to do it, the soil has become so parched that the water goes straight through it and runs out the bottom. Depending on the plant, you can fix this by either flooding it with water from the top down, or putting it in a second pot of water and letting it absorb it from the roots, or you can give it little sips of water very frequently until it softens up and is ready to accept more.

But the point is: There are consequences to letting it get that dry. If you neglect it for long enough, you can’t expect to just leap back in and pick up where you left off. The same is true with prayer. If you’ve been out of touch for a long time, you might be able to reestablish contact by flooding God with your passionate prayers; or maybe you need to sit and quietly meditate for a long time; or maybe you need to start small with short, frequent prayers until your soul softens up and feels ready for more. But there will be a period of adjustment…Read the rest of my latest monthly column for Our Sunday Visitor