Postcards from a Charged World
Yes, there was an election. But the world is full of so much more than that. Pictures and notes from Notre Dame University and Chicago.
On Tuesday, November 5 (a.k.a. Election Day in the United States), I was flying back from Chicago and got into an interesting discussion on the plane, which I described in a recent note:
I suppose it is worth it to mention that all of us on the plane were in this state of suspension, a limbo in the sky. Results were coming in, but my conversation partner and I were not looking at our screens nor were we checking our phones. We had done our parts, having voted early. Of course, we know the results now.
But before that moment had I flown out of Boston to Chicago and drove all the way to South Bend, Indiana to watch my friends give speeches, present papers, moderate panels, and do other cool things at the annual de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame fall conference and biannual Catholic Imagination Conference.
All Saints’ Day happened to fall in the middle of the conference so I had the great privilege of attending Mass at the beautiful Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the university campus.
The church was so packed that I ended up standing for the whole Mass in an overflow spot right behind one of the most beautiful tabernacles I have ever seen in real life.
My friend Tamara Nichol-Smith1 from Catholic Literary Arts was the chair of a panel called Art, Atomic Theory, and Resurrection in Wartime: A Poetry Reading and Discussion. Philip Metres was unable to make it, but Shann Ray and Laura Reece Hogan were there.
I asked if they had heard of Hiroshima survivor and peace activist-poet Sadako Kurihara’s “Let Us Be Midwives!” and recited it for those who didn’t know it. It is a poem that speaks to resurrection in wartime:
And so new life was born in the dark of that pit of hell.
And so the midwife died before dawn, still bathed in blood.
Let us be midwives!
Let us be midwives!
Even if we lay down our own lives to do so
On the morning after the conference a few of us from the University of St. Thomas in Houston got a tour of Notre Dame University from our program co-chair James Matthew Wilson (a.k.a. “the finest Poet-Philosopher of the Modern Age”).
I drove from South Bend to somewhere near Chicago and spent time with family and friends. On the morning of my flight I got to have breakfast with my friend Elijah Blumov, poet and host of one of the best poetry podcasts out there: Versecraft. (He also recently gave a virtual talk for the 2024 THINK Critical Path Symposium about Melville and Gnosticism which I attended and thought was very well done.)
And then I flew home.
The next morning the world seemed changed and more fearful—but everything I experienced of the past week reminded me that the world is also charged with beauty, as in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins which I heard more than once during my time away:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
And I am also reminded of Lincoln’s first inaugural address:
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
We all know what happened after that, but we need not enter into some type of civil war. What Lincoln said is still poetic and true.
We are not enemies, but friends.
Let us all be guided by better angels.
Hopkins is a tonic in the hardest times. I love the lines you quoted, and also “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”
The Lincoln quote is apt.