Gratitude, Fortune and Boldness
My humble thanks and an explanation of why I am doing this
First, let me just say thank you for all the support I have received in subscriptions and private messages. To all my subscribers, but especially the paid subscribers, I am extremely grateful for your confidence in me. I hope you will be proud of the work I will be doing in the coming months and years.
As I ramp up, I will be sharing the resources I have found helpful in my development as a parent, advocate, writer and life-long learner. My areas of knowledge range from special education, parenting, literature and the arts, the study of beauty as a philosophical concept (aesthetics), and more.
One of my extremely smart and talented friends mentioned privately to me that raising money for my education through Substack seemed like a “dicey proposition"—and I agree. But here’s the thing: life is a dicey proposition. We never know what will happen, who will get sick, or when we will die. Only God knows that. But I understand her concern.
Let me tell you why I am so passionate about getting this MFA. A friend of mine who has a doctorate in social work and had been doing in-home therapy (IHT) for many years lost a young client to suicide last year. If a client had this level of in-home therapy they also have access to more community wraparound services. (I know this because our family had accessed these services for a decade.) The client likely had a supportive family who loved them very much. If a child had access to all these resources then why did they die by their own hand?
During the pandemic my friend who is a priest had to preside over the two separate suicides of children. Why?
There are often no straightforward answers. Why is often the hardest question to ask in these circumstances. It is the one word question that sticks to sorrow like tar.
In what is likely one of the greatest recent works of Orthodox Christian philosophy, The Ethics of Beauty, the author Timothy G. Patitsas has this to say about the failure of our modern approach to dealing with trauma:
I would never have set out upon the journey that led me to The Ethics of Beauty had I not read Jonathan Shay’s observation in his Achilles in Vietnam that contemporary analytical psychotherapy has been largely unable to heal the suffering of the soldiers afflicted most severely with post-traumatic stress disorder. I have slowly come to see that another way to read Shay would be to say that the initial focus of soul-healing must be on Beauty rather than on truth, on a living vision of a loving and crucified God, rather than on an autopsy of the broken self.
According to Shay, The Iliad brought large numbers of veterans together when it was recited at the Panathenaic Festival, a safe space where they could eat, drink and relax. In The Ethics of Beauty, Patitsas writes,
And within this space, war’s survivors were taught by the poem to love beauty again and to awaken within themselves their empathy for all soldiers. The result, Shay postulates, was that the veterans thus learned to practice a more complete empathy for themselves.
Could an epic poem be affective in healing trauma? I believe Shay and Patitsas are saying yes.
As I have committed myself to reading great literature, looking at great art, and listening to great music, I have come to believe that maybe the way for us to help those who are suffering profoundly, like the children and the soldiers I mention above, is to not just to give them more therapy and more pharmaceuticals. Maybe another way (and more effective way) to save them is to make this world so beautiful that they would not want to leave. We would need to make art that speaks to their souls and comforts them in times of suffering.
I enter into this new phase of my education working with this idea: Humans need Beauty in order to survive. Because we all suffer. Beauty is the intangible force that draws us to each other, and within this relationship we can offer consolation, understanding, and compassion. When one soul can speak to another there is something of the divine. Agape. The highest form of love.
Last night, my Catherine Project class concluded our studies of The Aeneid. In it the warrior Turnus says,
“audentis Fortuna iuvat.”
Fortune favors the bold. Okay, it didn’t work out well for Turnus, but it could still work for me and my “dicey proposition” on Substack. There is another saying that is not as old but maybe more true,
“The harder I work, the luckier I get.” — Samuel Goldwyn
I plan to work very hard. And, yes, I have already been pretty bold. I welcome the challenge. Thank you so much for reading! I love you all.