The Accursed Defiler of this Land

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 18 August 2015.

Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens

Maybe all of this is too abstract, too remote from my own experience.

Jesus says, "Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me" (Mark 9:37).

I satisfied that requirement, right? I've received seven such children into the world. But how do I react when my 4 year old knocks over the whole bowl of eggs I let him whisk? When they don't do their chores completely or competently? When they misbehave in public? What is happening in my heart at that point? It's hard to describe exactly, but it isn't good. And in the collapsed morality of the Gospel, in which thinking something is tantamount to doing it, in which looking lustfully is tantamount to adultery, in which anger is tantamount to murder, how am I not a habitual murderer?

How am I not the "accursed defiler of this land"?

In the collapsed moral universe of the Gospel (as well as that of Oedipus the King), saints and heroes identify themselves as defilers. In this universe, we find that even language collapses in on itself as "the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you" (Matthew 5:2). This does not mean, as some have concluded, that we don't say anything, that we retreat into a chastened quietism, that we don't show up at the various rallies, protests, vigils, etc. But the mystic and artist shows up to these things with characteristically empty hands due to his experience of collapse. There is no "other."

There is only a trinitarian civilization of something. Love, death, sin, what?

Mystic theologians have always affirmed the crucial nature of this work. Maybe we got into it because it was fun or ecstatic or whatever. But allowing oneself to become sin in this way and be nailed to the cross, we help bring redemption in a way that more polemical or political means cannot.

Again, this is because the devil "seeth every high thing," except that which goes on in this dark night of collapse.

Call Me By My True Names

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 18 August 2015.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Continuing on to some of your other letters, I see that you interpreted my question--"to what extent does reflecting 'the devil we are possessed by' necessitate identifying with that devil?"--with "devil" meaning enemy, as in Donald Trump or Dan Gilbert. And indeed, the tendency in our polarized time is to demonize anyone who is not on my side. The spiritual practice you recommend is a good one, akin to metta, or loving-kindness, meditation practiced in Theravada Buddhism.

So I agree. But we also have an obligation to stop people who, for whatever reason, think they have a right to kill other people--starting with the weakest and most innocent and working our way up from there. Otherwise any commitment to loving-kindness becomes incoherent.

I should clarify that what I meant was identifying with actual, damned, irredeemable devils. The souls of Donald Trump and Dan Gilbert are still "in play." But maybe what you and I are talking about is a distinction without a difference.

My point is that the artist and mystic, following in the footsteps of Christ, operates in a much more "collapsed" reality than do other crusaders.

In some mysterious sense, he identifies his own sin as fundamental, as constitutive of the world's problems. So if babies are being dismembered, it is because I am in some sense a dismemberer of babies. I am Pharaoh, I am Herod. I am so unwilling to allow Moses or Christ into this world that I kill everything that resembles him within myself and others. This sentiment is not unlike the one expressed in Thich Nhat Hanh's poem, "Call Me By My True Names":

Call Me by My True Names 

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive. 

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. 

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive. 

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly. 

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog. 

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda. 

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. 

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp. 

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans. 

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one. 

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

On the Side of Life

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 18 August 2015.

Albert Camus

Thank you for sharing Peter Maurin's distinction between liberals and radicals. Of course, the same distinction could be made between conservatives and radicals, which may point to the fact that both are (were once?) rooted in similar bedrock principles. To make matters even more confusing, I used the terms "the left" and "the right" as in socialists and nationalists, which themselves have different meanings.

In defending your own position as not liberal but radical and then pointing out the follies of conservatism, I wonder if you were seeing me as a conservative (I wasn't seeing you as a liberal by the way). I don't think that fits me any more than it did Camus when Sartre and company ostracized him for not getting on the Communist bandwagon, turning a blind eye to its brutality. I am not in married to any ideas about the free market, trickle-down economics, strong military, small government, right to bear arms, greed, Don Gilber, etc.

As Camus said somewhere, "I am on the side of life."

I almost want to just leave it at that, because that's all there is to it for me. It is the simplest, most coherent of all positions, constitutive of all other values.

Now, I may need to understand that position more deeply, to integrate it more completely. But more contemplation, more sanctification, more poverty and/or personal fidelity to the Gospel will never change the fact that I am on the side of life. And not just on the level of the "fundamental option," but categorically (more on that later). Camus, who carried the philosophical project started by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche through to its most harrowing, coherent conclusions, arrived at this certainty. Dostoevsky seems to have finally arrived at a similar conclusion in his final short story (I read about this today on Brainpickings). And so have all of the saints.

Of course, it isn't fashionable to talk about the negative moral precepts associated with "I am on the side of life," namely, "Thou shalt not kill." After all, we're not supposed to be close-minded. But as Chesterton famously wrote,

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. Otherwise, it could end up like a city sewer, rejecting nothing.

The Church has always affirmed the existence of negative moral precepts. St. Pope John Paul II states this unequivocally in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor,

In the case of the positive moral precepts, prudence always has the task of verifying that they apply in a specific situation, for example, in view of other duties which may be more important or urgent. But the negative moral precepts, those prohibiting certain concrete actions or kinds of behavior as intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception. They do not leave room, in any morally acceptable way, for the "creativity" of any contrary determination whatsoever. Once the moral species of an action prohibited by a universal rule is concretely recognized, the only morally good act is that of obeying the moral law and of refraining from the action which it forbids.

He contrasts this commonsense theological understanding with a perversion of the "so-called fundamental option," the idea that "freedom is not only the choice for one or another particular action; it is also, within that choice, a decision about oneself and a setting of one's own life for or against the Good, for or against the Truth, and ultimately for or against God." All of this, he says, has been an important and positive development in moral theology. But certain theorists have taken this line of thinking too far:

In some authors this division tends to become a separation, when they expressly limit moral "good" and "evil" to the transcendental dimension proper to the fundamental option, and describe as "right" or "wrong" the choices of particular "innerworldly" kinds of behavior: those, in other words, concerning man's relationship with himself, with others and with the material world. There thus appears to be established within human acting a clear disjunction between two levels of morality: on the one hand the order of good and evil, which is dependent on the will, and on the other hand specific kinds of behavior, which are judged to be morally right or wrong only on the basis of a technical calculation of the proportion between the "premoral" or "physical" goods and evils which actually result from the action. This is pushed to the point where a concrete kind of behavior, even one freely chosen, comes to be considered as a merely physical process, and not according to the criteria proper to a human act. The conclusion to which this eventually leads is that the properly moral assessment of the person is reserved to his fundamental option, prescinding in whole or in part from his choice of particular actions, of concrete kinds of behavior.

Of course, the Church teaches that there are certain intrinsically evil acts that cannot be done with your "heart in the right place." Certain acts, by their very nature, constitute a decision against God, a "no" to God. We know these as mortal sins. And though the Church acknowledges certain psychologically complex situations which may mitigate guilt, these are never normative.

Help My Unbelief

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 18 August 2015.

Flannery O'Connor

Later in your letters, you kindly affirm that my struggles are "symptomatic of a faith so unrelenting it's seeped beyond your existence and into your essence." Let me disabuse you of these notions with a quote from Flannery O'Connor's letters:

For you to think this would be possible because of your ignorance of me; for me to think this would be sinful in a high degree. I am not a mystic and I do not lead a holy life. Not that I can claim any interesting or pleasurable sins (my sense of the devil is strong) but I know all about the garden variety, pride, gluttony, envy and sloth, and what is more to the point, my virtues are as timid as my vices. I think sin occasionally brings one closer to God, but habitual sin and not this petty kind that blocks every small good.

Lest you waste any more of your precious time trying to rescue me from spiritual despondency, I also believe what she says next:

However, the individual in the Church is, no matter how worthless himself, a part of the Body of Christ and a participator in the Redemption. There is no blueprint that the Church gives us for understanding this. It is a matter of faith and the Church can force no one to believe it. When I ask myself how I believe, I have no satisfactory answer at all, no assurance at all, no feeling at all. I can only say with Peter (sic), Lord I believe, help my unbelief. And all I can say about my love of God is, Lord help me in my lack of it.

Catholic Church'ing?

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 18 August 2015.

Dorothy Day

Okay, here goes. Just about everything is in agreement with what you've said. But before I started typing everything out like I said I would, lots of things started coming to mind. I knew I just needed to just get it all down.

I'm actually starting (mostly) with the first "Haunted by God" illuminated letter.

I want to first address the question of communicating as widely as possible. This is something I may have worried about earlier, but I've come around. I have a somewhat obvious realization about the four of us (and actually the 6 of us if we open it up to Father and Max): we are all Roman Catholics--post-Vatican II ones--and a fairly representative ideological slice at that. Due to this, our communications are a participation in the Body of Christ, the Church.

Inasmuch as God does not desire "that any should perish" (2 Peter 3:9), all people participate in this reality. Furthermore, due to the fact the Spirit "blows where it wills" (John 3:8) and that Jesus has "other sheep that do not belong to this fold" (John 10:6), we must think of the reality of the Church in the widest sense, indeed--as with all things Catholic--"according to the whole." So I agree with you when you quote Dorothy Day's words: "Many who serve Him officially have never known who He was, and many who do not even know His name, will hear on the last day the words that open to them the gates of joy." St. Augustine says something similar in his City of God.

That said, I don't think it is presumptuous to assume that we have a privileged position due to our closeness to the Church and the Sacraments instituted by Christ. Christ seems to be speaking directly to us as Catholics when he says, "Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more" (Luke 12:48).

If you more or less agree with what I've written here, I'm going on to the similarly banal, obvious point that we, as Catholics, should do everything we can to stick together as the Body of Christ. Lots about that in the daily readings in recent days, perhaps most clearly in St. Paul's beautiful exhortation in Ephesians 4:1-6:

Unity in the Body. 

I, then, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received,
with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another through love,
striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace:
one body and one Spirit, as you were also called to the one hope of your call;
one Lord, one faith, one baptism;
one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

And I'm not good at this. I am a big burner of bridges and have a polemical side to my personality. Of course, plenty of our saints have suffered from this as well, and God has used it to build the Church. As I've said before, we're always building one of three buildings: the Church, the Pyramids, or the Tower of Babel. All too often, I've been building the latter two: pressing others into service and/or collaborating with others, both for prideful reasons. As we know from these stories and from our own personal experiences, both lead to scattering of minds, confusion of tongues, cacophony: the opposite of the unity proper to the Body of Christ.

So, long story short, I agree that we should keep cc'ing (Catholic Church'ing?).

Daisies

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 17 August 2015.

Okay. I mean wow.

I'm going to postpone response and give you my workflow for all this if it's okay. I'm going to print out, reread, and then type this all up. I think typing it will be a decent way to continue meditating on what you've said (although perhaps in an inappropriately linear, Gutenbergian way). I will include all the cross-outs, etc. Once I've done that--and that may be days from now--I'm going to try wrapping my mind around what you've said in a response.

I'm a little dazed and dazzled right now, so signing off...thanks always for the generosity of spirit! Go back to nature and stuff.

Here's something:

Daisies
by Louise Glück

Go ahead: say what you’re thinking. The garden
is not the real world. Machines
are the real world. Say frankly what any fool
could read in your face: it makes sense
to avoid us, to resist
nostalgia. It is
not modern enough, the sound the wind makes
stirring a meadow of daisies: the mind
cannot shine following it. And the mind
wants to shine, plainly, as
machines shine, and not
grow deep, as, for example, roots. It is very touching,
all the same, to see you cautiously
approaching the meadow’s border in early morning,
when no one could possibly
be watching you. The longer you stand at the edge,
the more nervous you seem. No one wants to hear
impressions of the natural world: you will be
laughed at again; scorn will be piled on you.
As for what you’re actually
hearing this morning: think twice
before you tell anyone what was said in this field
and by whom.

The Fat Lady is Every One of Us (Part 7 of 7)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

So, Art ("and others"), here we are back where we started; back to your question regarding to what extent reflecting the devil necessitates identifying with the devil. To what extent, I tell you this: (And "I tell you this," as Mary Oliver writes, "to break your heart, / by which I mean only / that it break open and never close again / to the rest of the world.") THE UTMOST EXTENT.

And what joy there is to be found in this revelation, in identifying this inner conflict as a catalyst for love! How blessed are we to possess the belief and self awareness needed to acknowledge these demons within us as components of ourselves! May they serve as our daily reminder that THE FAT LADY IS EACH ONE OF US, DEMONS AND ALL, AND THE FAT LADY IS CHRIST!

As St. Anselm said, "We understand these sufferings because we believe." And to remain a believer amidst persecution, loneliness, and prolonged inner turmoil is to have triumphed over your demons daily, little by little, brick by brick.

One of the saints, when asked what he would do if he were to find out he was going to die the following day replied that he would go on doing exactly what he was already doing.

That is the state of mind that we too must cultivate. That is the answer to your question.

Peace and prayers from the Porcupine Mountains,
Liza

The Fat Lady is Every One of Us (Part 6 of 7)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

More Dorothy Day:

Is suffering and death, and the strength to bear them, all there is in this struggle? This search for God would be a pretty grim affair if this were all, and transcendence too high a goal for simple folk. 

Let us remember other elements too. 

“What is it that I love when I love my God,” St. Augustine cried out in his Confessions. It is a certain light that I love and melody and fragrance and embrace that I love when I love my God–a light, melody, fragrance, food, embrace of the God-within, where for my soul, that shines which space does not contain; that sounds which time does not sweep away; that is fragrant which the breeze does not dispel, and that tastes sweet which, fed upon, is not diminished, and that clings close which no satiety disparts–this is what I love when I love my God." 

And Catherine of Siena assures us that “all the way to Heaven is Heaven, because He said, I am the Way.”

This is all to say, by restructuring your perspective on your suffering (and this goes for all of us), I think you'll soon discover that these burdens are blessings. In one of Day's most moving passages, she refers to our slow and painful procession toward death (what St. Paul called "the body of death") as "a life in the womb."

A life in the womb! What a fine perspective!

I have such a fondness for this particular outlook on our journey that it reminds me, and I frequently need to be reminded, that every moment of every hour of every day we are still growing, still learning, still failing, still succeeding in these failures, sprinting decades backward only to crawl one scoot forward. And all our lives, this is how it will be. Do babies give up when they toddle over, subjecting themselves from that first fall forward to a life of self-willed paralysis? Of course not.

That's silly to ask, even rhetorically. But what are we now if not babies in the womb caught in the amber of preparation for that glorious day when we are "released from bondage," the moment we "at last burst out into glorious day?" And how many are there among us who impose that spiritual paralysis upon ourselves after falling but once from our elevated state of grace in the garden?

The Fat Lady is Every One of Us (Part 5 of 7)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

Dorothy Day from a Symposium on "Transcendence" sponsored by the Church Society for College Work, 1968 (continued):

All men are brothers, yes, but how to love your brother or sister when they are sunk in ugliness, foulness, and degradation, so that all senses are affronted? How to love when the adversary shows a face to you of implacable hatredness, or just cold loathing? The very fact that we put ourselves in these situations, I think, attests to our desire to love God and our neighbor. Like Daniel, we are men of desires. And Daniel was rewarded by God because he was a man of desires. I believe because I wish to believe, "Help Thou my unbelief." I love because I want to love, the deepest desire for my heart is for love, for union, for communion, for community. How to keep such desires, such dreams? Certainly, like Elias, who, after making valiant attempts to do what he considered the will of God, fled in fear, all courage drained from him, and lay down under a juniper tree and cried to God to make an end of his misery and despair. 

The grace of hope, this consciousness that there is in every person, that which is of God, comes and goes, in a rhythm like that of the sea. The Spirit blows where it listeth, and we travel through deserts and much darkness and doubt. We can only make that act of faith, “Lord I believe, because I want to believe.” We must remember that faith, like love, is an act of the will, an act of preference. God speaks, He answers these cries in the darkness as He always did. He is incarnate today in the poor, in the bread we break together. We know Him and each other in the breaking of bread. 

Catholics do not generally ask for miracles. Spiritual graces, yes, they ask for these, but when it comes to asking for relief from pain and suffering, it is almost as though they thought, “Why should I refuse what is the common lot of humanity? Why should I ask to be spared when I see the suffering of the family next door?” Suffering borne with courage means to the devout mind a participating in the suffering of Christ and, if bravely endured, can lighten the sufferings of others. It is not a cult of suffering. It is an acceptance of the human condition. (...) 

[In reference to victim souls and martyrs] The importance of the liturgical celebration itself implies a correlative importance in what we do, after the liturgical celebration, in daily living.” Certainly we can say that the worship offered by a Martin Luther King resulted in his great mission and in the courage with which he expected his own martyrdom.

These people worked on the plane of this world, but it was the spirit that animated the weak flesh. Henri de Lubac wrote: "So long as we talk and argue and busy ourselves on the plane of this world, evil seems to be stronger. More than that, whether evil distresses us or whether we exalt it, it alone seems real. The thing to do is to enter upon another plane, to find that fourth dimension which represents the kingdom of the spirit. Then freedom is queen, then God triumphs and man with him."

The Fat Lady is Every One of Us (Part 4 of 7)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

Easier (as with most matters that require our patience and daily devotion) said than done. How are we of weary eye and soul to transcend sensory experience, to recognize the divine image in its lowliest form? We begin, I think with step one.

• Step 1: Acknowledge that Seymour Glass' Fat Lady is indeed Christ Himself

• Step 2: Acknowledge that there isn't anyone out there who is not Seymour's Fat Lady

• Step 3: Read aloud the following:
• Carlton Farthington is the Fat Lady.
• Don Gilber is the Fat Lady.
• That student who talks over me every single day in class and blatantly disregards all guidance and direction is the Fat Lady.
• Donald Trump is the Fat Lady.
• That person who perpetuates cruelty to our most vulnerable and oppressed is the Fat Lady.
• Hitler, ISIS, and Stalin are all Fat Ladies.
• My inner demon is the Fat Lady.
• I am the Fat Lady.

• Step 4: Repeat Step 3, but with conviction this time.

• Step 5: Acknowledge that each of the aforementioned is, indeed, Christ Himself. Acknowledge this every day.

• Step 6: For instructions on utilizing this mindfulness to combat our daily human propensity to judge our enemies (demonic as they and we may be) with love and mercy, I invoke at long last the luminous Dorothy Day (from a symposium on "Transcendence," sponsored by the Church Society for College Work, 1968):

God made men and women to be happy...yet how can we be happy today? How can we transcend this misery of ours? How can we believe in a transcendent God when the Immanent God seems so powerless within time, when demonic forces seem to be let loose? Certainly our God is a hidden God. I would say there are evidences of transcendence in the striving for community among the poor and destitute among whom we live in city and country. Men and women have persisted in their hope for happiness. They have hoped against hope though all the evidence seemed to point to the fact that human nature could not be changed. Always they have tried to recover Eden, and the history of our own country shows attempts to found communities where people could live together in that happiness which God seemed to have planned for us. (...) But how to love? That is the question.

The Fat Lady is Every One of Us (Part 3 of 7)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

Sure, feeling like a demon of sorts at times isn't exactly the greatest joy of living. Nor, I suppose, is to sense a demon within you at all times. But what is the greatest joy of life if not the gift of clarity, the ability to see our own delusions and still seek a different path? Baudelaire calls this "the downward path which leads to salvation." St. Paul calls this "putting off the old man and putting on Christ." St. Augustine calls this, well, his autobiography. Francois Mauriac explains the discovery of this clarity with such attentiveness and specificity to make a man (okay, me while reading this passage from The Long Loneliness atop Mount Houghton yesterday) open up his tearducts and bleed unceasing tears.

"What glorious hope!" he writes, "There are all those who will discover that their neighbor is Jesus himself, although they belong to the mass of those who do not know Christ or who have forgotten Him. And nevertheless they will find themselves well loved. It is impossible for any one of those who has real charity in his heart not to serve Christ. Even some of those who think they hate Him have consecrated their lives to Him; for Jesus is disguised and masked in the midst of men, hidden among the poor, among the sick, among prisoners, among strangers. Many who serve him officially have never known who He is, and many who do not even know His name will hear on the last day the words that open to them the gates of joy. 'Those children were I, and I those working men. I wept on that hospital bed. I was that murderer in his cell whom you consoled."

What glorious hope, indeed, Mr. Mauriac. To remember this always (difficult, absolutely impossible, of course not) is one method of attack against those pesky inner demons that validates the righteousness of this daily battle and through this validation makes these monsters more manageable and more meaningful. To begin and end each day boundless with compassion and infectious with joy is to reconfigure our pain into pleasure; it is to propel us little by little toward those glorious "gates of joy."

The Fat Lady is Every One of Us (Part 2 of 7)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

Take II:

Where were we? Ah, yes. In a nowhere of sorts. To place us somewhere, though I know not which where myself just yet, some preliminary thoughts.

Quick clarification: Art, in referring to your inner conflict as "universal," I by NO means intended to lessen your struggles or impersonalize them for you. On the contrary, I used this word as an affirmation--an acknowledgment that to endure such suffering in prolonged states of hyper-awareness is to see the face of God and live.

Let me elaborate. While I believe there's a universality in existential suffering, the level at which you're able to dissect your internal aches and pinpoint their origins is (to me) symptomatic of a faith so unrelenting it's seeped beyond your existence and into your essence. Saint Anselm has a thing or two to say about this, but more on that later, for what matters most is the here and the now (which I'm slowly falling into as I write this).

Which brings me to my final thought on the universality of suffering: it's my firm belief that the secularization of society yields the quintessential breeding grounds for nausea, bone-aching misery, isolation, and all-encompassing emptiness. How blessed you, and the rest of us in this thread presumptuously are, to have suffered (and continue to suffer) your way into a fullness of soul and spirit. It is a blessing not despite the admission that what you're full with is a throng of inner demons, but rather because of this admission.

The Fat Lady is Every One of Us (Part 1 of 7)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group during her electronics-limited "dispersed camping expedition" through the Keweenaw Peninsula during the month of August 2015. We will publish short excerpts of these illuminated texts over the course of the next several days along with a corresponding portion of the original photo.

HELLO TO ALL WHOM THIS MESSAGE EQUALLY COC C N ERNS. MO TH AT WAS SUPPOSED TO SAY CONCERNS. TYPEWRITERS ARE WEIRD.  MOVING ON. ART: IN RESPONSE TO YOUR MESSAGE_ *:  I THINK THIS IS ESSENTIAL. AND MORE THAN ESSENTIAL, UNIVERSAL. I AM GOING TO INVOKE MY GIRL DOROTHY DAY TO EXPLAIN WHY AND HOW, ASETHIS IS SOMETHING SHE TOUCHES ON FREQUENTLY IN THE LONG LONELI  NESS. FOR THESE INVOCATIONS, HOWEVER, I AM GOING TO EMPLOY THE USE OF A GOOD OLD FASHIONED PEN, AS TYPEWRITING IS MORE  DIFFICULT THAN ANTICIPATED BY CAMPFIRE GLOW. MAY TRY AGAIN  LATER IN CASE OF HAND CRAMP. (FAREWELL FOR NOW, YE OLDE REMINGTON.