Conversations with a Priest and with Myself
Given the current American zeitgeist, with the proliferation of fake news sites, the “factual feeling” syndrome and the country’s inability to come to grips with the feminine or anima principle, it’s hard to know where to turn to for advice.
I thought about Father Butler, a priest I used to celebrate Catholic Mass with. My last earthly chat with him was thirty years ago when I buried my mother. He did show up for a quick ceremony when I had my father’s disinterred remains buried next to my mother in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I am feeling a little guilty now, knowing that I moved my father’s bones into Trump-voting territory. I suspect Fr. Butler would remind me that the cemetery is a neutral zone and I should bury my pride and get on with the work at hand.
I was a great admirer of the priest, mainly for his no-nonsense approach to life, his willingness to forgive and his endless compassion. His church, Holy Infancy, was within walking distance of Lehigh University where I earned my PhD in Philosophy and English. Nearby was Bethlehem Steel, still in business then but dying at the edges. I had a fondness for this industrial giant spread out along the Lehigh River. After serving in the Navy, I worked as a crane operator at a mill in Pittsburgh to help pay for college. I loved moving steel from the rolling mills to the sulfur pits and then onto train cars.
I recall chatting with my late father-in-law, who worked as a welder in the Bethlehem Steel plant in Johnstown, PA. He would talk fondly about those two or three hour lunches while on the job, cooking fresh deer meat on an industrial grill. The mill survived long enough for him to retire. His son was not so lucky. He lost his job and became a bus driver. Private prisons appear to have become the new growth businesses in these areas that all went for Trump. Whatever the wound, it’s been festering for a long time. Bill Joel sang about the factories in Allentown, PA, closing down in 1982.
I often think of my movement from immigrant to the military to steel mill to college and then into media. There’s nothing particularly compelling about this movement; it is the immigrant arc, for me fueled by fear, inadequacy and my father’s dying hope that his three sons would be better off in America. I was fifteen when he died, but I carry his words as if they have been burnt into me.
I am fond of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs because I am well-acquainted with being “pinned down at the safety level” and lacking the basic necessities. I am also aware of the price it takes to undergo what he called self-actualization. I have always thought that this is the real American story and promise.
I wrote horrid poems when serving on an ammunition ship in the Tonkin Gulf during the Vietnam conflict. I had just become a U.S. citizen and wrapped myself in the flag. About a decade later, I published “That Kingdom Coming Business,” a poem that would anchor my first book of poetry. This was an early attempt to look at the shadow side of religion. I pursued this interest in my PhD dissertation on the “Maria Cross syndrome,” the intersection of Mary and the cross in a number of Catholic authors. This fiction reflected the difficulties the church has with the feminine and sexual matters within its male pantheon.
No, I didn’t take up this theme with Fr. Butler, though he knew that I was looking at religion and psychology in a number of novelists. I had told him that I thought the Catholic Mass in its structure, organization and prayerfulness was an inspiration for poetry. I was working on a few things. He wished me well and I don’t think we spoke after that. But I have never forgotten my conversations with him.
Years went by and I always seemed to circle the Catholic Church in my poetry and fiction, wary of its power and influence. Religion showed up in peripheral ways in my novels including “Limey Down” and “The Sirens of Vulture Creek” (an early look at Trump country); and “In the Shadow of the DMZ,” a book of poetry that places religion and war in that danger zone.
I thought of Fr. Butler a few years ago when I had a dream about the late John Paul II, now a saint, slipping softly into the feminine earth while a priest turns me away from the altar. I am a student of the psychologist Carl Jung and know that I should treat such dreams metaphorically, but it still stung.
This dream became the poem, “Chanting the Feminine Down,” that became the basis of my upcoming novel by that name (www.chantingthefemininedown.com) about a young woman’s efforts to find shards of the feminine in the Christian tradition. Dreams provide much of the content. Pope Francis was a regular night visitor. So was Father Butler, who continues to watch over me.
Jung wrote “The Red Book” about a hundred years ago but it was only recently published. I understand that for a long time his family was reluctant to publish a book that showed Jung’s descent into the underworld in language that seems at times to border on the psychotic. Actually, the book is a brave account of Jung’s embrace of his interior life, his dreams and the archetypal forces that demand attention. In “The Red Book” Jung writes that we should all prepare our own red books, which will serve as church, cathedral and silent spaces for the spirit. This is both a religious and a creative act. “Chanting” is my version of a red book.
Somewhere along the way I have heard, either from the poet Rilke, Fr. Butler or perhaps Ecclesiastes that we were not put on the earth to be idle. There is both a time for reflection and a time to be at the barricades.
I have work to do.
