I just set up the crèche in my living room, an act that gives me tremendous pleasure every December.  Creches are supposed to focus on the manger scene with Mary and Joseph looking down on a crib housing the baby Jesus.  Usually, creches include the 3 magi with their flashy gifts; some even have an ox and a cow.  My crèche bears no resemblance to that pattern.  Rather it mirrors a beautiful poem John Milton wrote early in his career:  “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.”  The poem devotes the only 4 or 5 short stanzas to the actual birth but the majority of this splendid poem is about the effects of that birth on the world in which it occurred and on the present-day world.  So the baby and his putative parents figure tangentially.

That’s how it is with my little house.  I bow to convention and have, tucked away in the back of the manger itself, tiny terra cotta figures of Mary, Joseph, a cow, an ox, and a tiny crib with an infinitesimal babe in it.  These I found years ago in a religious shop in Paris near my hotel and the large Catholic church of St. Sulpice.  But my crèche tells the story of how a few people and many, many animals and birds have come to stand in amazement as they realize what the tableau inside the manger is going to mean.  Some of my figures are expensive, e.g., 2 magical old women made in Germany and given me by a clergy-woman long ago, a tiny sterling silver rabbit, a stately bronze stag with a wide rack of delicately carved horns.  But most of them are delightful ornaments contributed by many friends—a wooden white and black cow resting on her feet, a fluffy yellow camel bought at a community fund-raiser for some worthwhile organization, many cows and chickens of various sizes and compositions, a very pink china pig that was part of a friend’s own childhood collection, a white wooden cat who has lost his two stick arms widely akimbo but who still wants to be present at this strange moment in human history.  The oldest piece is a faded orange camel made of the earliest plastic material used for such objects.  That camel is all that remains of my original crèche given me by my mother when I was four and set up every year on a shelf in our living room where I could sit and move the various pieces around as long as I wanted to do so.

Children who come to my house at this season are fascinated by this set up of mine, especially the two precious little girls who live next door.  Seriously observant Jews at the tender ages of 7 and almost-nine, they ask me around Thanksgiving “When are you going to set up your house?”  I let them stand in a chair so they can get close to the bizarre but powerful scene.  Adults who come to my house at this season respond along a wide continuum:  some “get it” about what I’m doing with the whole display; some really don’t “get it” and so wonder about the seriousness of my Christian observance; some see how delighted I am by it all and indulge me by looking for new additions made each year.

The birth of the human person, Jesus of Nazareth, did indeed come to have a tremendous impact on the world around him and on the future of western thought and worship.  My amassing my motley crew attests to my firm belief that humans are not the center of the entire universe; we merely inhabit and share it with the rest of God’s creatures.  St. Francis of Assisi understood this and learned to communicate with the animals and birds around him.  Many philosophers and aestheticians believe that at some stage of evolution, all species could comprehend one another.  The story of the Tower of Babel is a later reflection of the separation of humans from their fellow beings.   I believe we lost more than we gained by that separation and so I bring more and more silly and beautiful animals to my manger scene.  This year, because I feel so hopeful about his papacy, I’ve put the two-inch high lovely wooden figure of St Francis with a tiny white dove perched on one figure front and center.  He fits right in with my bunnies and chicks and camels and pigs.

Earlier this week, I had the first public reading from my new memoir, Into the Paradox. The audience was attentive and responsive, asking me hard questions about how I manage to belong to a Catholic church, given my self-definitions. My response was rather lame:  I invoke the mantra from 12-step programs of “take what you like and leave the rest.”

What I didn’t say is much of the book is about my figuring out exactly how to maneuver that “paradox.” Listening to the earnest questions that night convinces me that some readers will engage the text using that lens; I can only hope that by the end, most will see the path I have woven for myself.

All that day I had felt unusually anxious, asking myself whence came the butterflies in my stomach and the shortness of breath.  I lectured to large groups of students for years and have held many readings/signings of my other writings.  Finally it dawned on me that the source of my anxiety lay in the simple fact that in my world people don’t talk about God, Jesus, and faith at the drop of a hat.  In many cases, they don’t engage these subjects at all unless it is to critique them and their adherents.  As I was coming to this understanding of my own uneasiness, I was reading an article in the September 16 New Yorker about Flannery O’Connor’s personal journal, kept from 1946 to sometime in 1948 when she was in her very early 20’s.  This journal is a series of letters to God in which she bares her innermost thoughts and fears about her relationship with that being and about her development as a writer.   The more I read of the essay, the closer I felt to this Southern writer who has long fascinated me because of how she was able to put into words her fierce “take” on Christianity.   In these letters, O’Connor tells us of her belief in hell that actually comes more easily to her than a belief in heaven; she speaks movingly of her worry that she may be “keeping [her] faith by laziness”; she asks God to help her write a story that will “be made too clear for any false & low interpretation .”  As I put the pages from the magazine, brought to me by a friend who knows of my fondness for O’Connor, into my recycling bag, I reflected that if only it had been published three years ago, I might have finished writing about my own faith journal a little sooner.

I write this on an early Sunday morning.  Soon I’ll drive down Hennepin Avenue to the Basilica, light my three-day candle as usual, kneel beneath the bright mosaic of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and pray to be able to put aside my arguments with church doctrine so as to be present for the mystery of the eucharist and the beautify of the choir.  I’ll then enter into community with all the other people who have gotten themselves to this gorgeous edifice for what I assume are a wide variety of reasons.  I will feel part of something bigger than myself and I will be nourished by the repetition of words I’ve heard and spoken since I was a little girl in Alabama.

Welcome to my new website and blog. I’ve decided to embrace this aspect of technology because it will allow me to share thoughts on a wide variety of subjects and to tell people how they can access my writings and classes. As I move into the second half of my 70s, I don’t want always to be thinking in terms of the “next book,” though I know I want to continue writing.  So the shorter format provided by blogs suits me. I also enjoy virtual exchanges and even conversations about things that matter to me and others, so this format lets me hear back from you who take the time to read my jottings.

Just to let you have an idea of the kinds of postings you are likely to encounter here, let me say that I am an inveterate reader, a passionate gardener, an active citizen at various levels of political and social engagement, a worried environmentalist, and someone who loves snow and the shoveling thereof in winters in Minnesota. So watch for entries dovetailing with these aspects of my personality.