2013

Come February, I'll be back from a time-out in London and Paris and blogging once again.  

May the New Year begin well for all!

It's About Time

Writing from London

In these dark days at the end of the year -- twilight begins between two and three p.m. here -- I treasure the light even more than usual.  A few days ago I watched the winter solstice sunrise at Avebury, a village of sacred stone circles about 19 miles from Stonehenge -- but even older than that more famous site.

In those fields of crop circles, cows and sheep, appreciation for light in winter reaches near-mystical levels, a throwback to the relatively recent times when families closed their doors as soon as dark fell, and only jumping flames from cook fires and candles lit their nights.

My friends were astonished I chose to be in England. "You've written a book about the Maya, spent years in their lands.  Why aren't you going to be at a Maya site?"  As the last day of the 5,126-year Maya calendar, 2012 was a very special solstice indeed in Maya country, in the rain forests and highlands of Central America.  But I reckoned sacred sites the world over shared something, that the priests and commoners of ancient Maya lands would understand those who worked to place giant stones just so among Avebury's green fields, both peoples honoring Mother Earth and the sun that warmed her, providing them with food.

Exactly one year ago, in 2011, I did go to a Maya site for the winter solstice.  Earlier this month, the travel writing site, Gadling.com, ran my account of that visit.

SUNRISE AT IZAPA, MEXICO, THE PLACE WHERE TIME BEGAN

WINTER SOLSTICE, 2011 – The darkness enveloped us like a warm blanket as we walked carefully toward the center of the ancient ruins of Izapa. We carried a flashlight but did not turn it on, believing our eyes would adjust to the dark. With no warning, from the direction where I thought the royal throne should be, light shot into our eyes, blinding us to a halt.

                                    To continue reading, please go to Gadling

Gore Vidal's Old House

For more than a decade, I lived in a house in Antigua, Guatemala, around the corner from the house where author Gore Vidal had lived in his early novel-writing days. The day he died in Los Angeles, July 31, 2012, I passed it one more time. Recently, this ran on Gadling.com

By Mary Jo McConahay

In later years...President Theodore Roosevelt's daughter, Alice Longworth, congratulated me every time we saw each other: "You got out. So wise."
"Reflections on Glory Reflected,"
-- Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952-1992

The day Gore Vidal died rain fell hard on the roof of his old house alongside the ruins of Our Lady of Carmen in Antigua, Guatemala. Braids of thick plaster twisted gracefully around chipped columns, dripping after the downpour that signaled the end of the canicula. Those golden weeks of sun and hummingbirds in the midst of the rainy season were over.

                   Read the rest of the story on Gadling.com

"Anais Nin visited her dear friend Gore in this house, even nursed him through a near-fatal case of hepatitis caught eating from pots in the market..."

"The day Vidal died, I stood on the curb across the wide street and considered the rich life in the author's house at the beginning of his career: sex, politics, the magical work of writing..."

 "You need only read him to see he understands the concept of "empire," because he lived in an outland of the American imperium..."

Read the entire story on:    Gadling.com

What is Creative Nonfiction? Let's Talk...

A discussion coming up for members of Left Coast Writers: 

Currently, many of our best magazines - The New Yorker, Harper's, Vanity Fair, Esquire - publish more creative nonfiction than fiction and poetry combined. Universities offer Master of Fine Arts degrees in creative nonfiction. Newspapers are publishing an increasing amount of creative nonfiction, not only as features, but in the news and op-ed pages, as well.---Lee Gutkind

So what is Creative Nonfiction?

A start:

Monday, July 2, 2012 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera || 51 Tamal Vista Dr.
Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Join Mary Jo McConahay in a discussion about “The Varnished & Unvarnished Truth”.  She will be speaking about her experiences writing award-winning creative nonfiction, as well as the genre as a whole.

http://www.leftcoastwriters.com/literary-salon-mary-jo-mcconahay/

Agent and Author

Pink Smoke Over the Vatican

CATHOLIC?  EX-CATHOLIC?  WANNABE?  ANTI-?  

     

                                 SEE THIS MOVIE!

            I always knew there was a place for a woman at the altar besides in a coffin.

                              --Newly ordained woman priest

             When I was a young girl, I used to help after school by banging erasers together to get the chalk dust out. One day the Catholic nun who was my teacher said, "Let's stop now.  I want to show you something."

           We walked across the empty schoolyard, she in black habit and veil, a long rosary swinging from her waist, I in a uniform blue jumper and white blouse, hurrying to keep up with Sister's long stride. We entered the parish church by a side door. 

            The simple stone chapel that had served the town for decades was being absorbed into a modern design. Inside, by the dusty half-light of a building under construction, I could see a brand new stepped altar that would be visible from three sides by the congregation. I followed Sister all the way to the front, walking around scaffolds. When she bid me mount the altar with her, I was astonished.

            This was before the momentous changes of Vatican II, a time when a young girl knew she had no place on the altar where mass was said.  I had memorized the Latin responses, but unlike my brothers, I would never serve mass.  I was not a boy.

              Inside the new parish church, I hesitated about stepping on the altar. "It's all right," Sister said. "It's not consecrated yet."

            Vatican II called on all members to participate more fully in the life of the Church, carving an opening for the voice of the laity and communities of the faithful to be heard, although women priests was not on the agenda.  Nevertheless, by showing how the Church might remain the same even as it changed, Vatican II opened the door to fresh thinking that even today's conservative hierarchy is finding hard to overcome.  And let's not forget the beauty of synergy: Vatican II's effects unfolded at the same time a wave of feminism was breaking over much of the world.

    Pink Smoke Over the Vatican, filmmaker Jules Hart's compelling new documentary, uncovers the history of women priests in the Catholic Church from its beginnings, showing how an increasingly patriarchal institution squeezed out women from formidable roles over the centuries.  Churchmen wrote laws that said an exclusively male priesthood was so central to doctrine that it was a given, a rule that could not be broken. Nevertheless, some clear-eyed bishops have begun again to ordain women, believing that the unmistakable interior call to the priesthood, a vocation, is not restricted to one gender.

            Where there is smoke, of course, there is fire. The bishops who ordain women -- they can be counted on one hand -- are considered renegades. As insistence grows, especially from the laity, to ordain women openly and with joy, the Church digs in its heels, lashing out at the new priests and their supporters.

           When she was ordained, a South African nun who went to jail under apartheid for quietly accepting all races into the school of which she was the principal, was kicked out of the Dominican community that had been her home for decades.

Fr. Roy Bougeois, awarded the Purple Heart for military service in Vietnam and a Maryknoll priest for almost forty years, is being excommunicated for his support of the women, the most severe punishment the Church can inflict.

            This is a strong film, although for me, using the stereotypical "Pink" in the title is a minus.  So is a brief section, too facile, I think, suggesting priests' sex abuse crimes would have been fewer or non-existent had women priests been accepted in the Church.   I believe more gender balance in the priesthood would obviate many difficulties, enabling it to minister to, and with, the faithful better. The sex abuse crimes are not about "men," however, but about the arrogant, hurtful behavior of some priests and a hierarchical system riddled with corruption and impunity.

            You will learn from Pink Smoke and even laugh with it. No matter what you bring to the movie from your own history, it's difficult not to admire the women aspiring to ordination, to answering their call, and their Catholic brothers who support them.


Pink Smoke Over the Vatican - Eye Goddess Film
eyegoddess.com/pink_smoke.php

            

No More Sister Moon: THE NEW CLARE

Remember Zefferelli's almost hallucinatory "Brother Sun Sister Moon?"  There's another take out there now.
         
St. Clare of Assisi, for eight hundred years regarded as the "little plant" who grew alongside the great mystic poet saint, Francis, is emerging as a towering figure in her own right, thanks to a burst of scholarly interest by medievalists and feminist historians.  The wealthy girl who fled her father's house to work and pray alongside Francis and his friars, founded an order of religious women that continues to follow the first Rule written by a woman.  From the period that produced the scholar and linguist Héloïse (of the tragic couple Héloïse and Abelard), and the theologian and visionary Hildegard von Bingen, Clare's writing and the disinterred oral testimonies of several who knew her in life are drawing attention to this woman who found a path to the divine through a life of voluntary poverty.


On May 10, Santa Clara University presented one of a growing number of symposia dedicated to the new work on Clare, headlined by Franciscan scholar Brother Bill Short, academic dean at the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, with discussion and reflections by five other speakers before an audience of more than a hundred persons.

My small contribution, as spoken:


I have been educated in the Ignation tradition, and I am a journalist -- in Central America I covered war, displaced people, regional militaries. It is natural for me, as it might be for any of us, to look for dimensions of the life of Clare, of the spiritual tradition she represents, in the life of the world I know.

And she is present.

In some areas where I work, poverty is as extreme as you will find in the world. Clare chose her life of poverty, indeed had to struggle for it. Residents of Brazilian favelas and the ungiving countryside of Chiapas do not choose their poverty. 

But I have met many who do not despise it.

Instead, in Latin America are those who see a pattern and purpose to their lives in reflection upon the very poverty in which they live, asking questions about what they might expect of a dignified life in this world.  The faithful often ask questions rooted in the Gospel, which they have heard their whole lives and in many cases study with each other, even those who cannot read, dynamically making connections with their own lives.  


In countless interviews, I have heard ordinary Salvadorans, for instance, identify their station with that of Jesus, much like Clare wrote to her dear friend Agnes of Prague, looking at "that mirror suspended on the cross."

The very first story I reported in El Salvador was in the capital where some two hundred peasant families fleeing the violence  in the countryside camped with torn blankets at a church on the floor of its patio.  It was Advent.  A boy had drawn a picture of the creche in the stable, and written underneath in a child's hand:  "Even the Baby Jesus had no house to be born in."

Over the years I realized the highest praise that could come from the struggling people was to say of a particular bishop, or someone from the outside,  "Esta con los pobres.  He is with the poor."

Franciscan scholar Regis Armstrong has written, "Clare's experience of poverty taught her to open herself completely to God, to come before God with increasing confidence."

In Central America, where 50,000 people died in tiny El Salvador in the 1980s, 17,000 in Nicaragua -- most as a result of the Contra war managed and funded by the United States -- and some 200,000 died or disappeared in Guatemala, almost all unarmed civilians, it has been women, sometimes indigenous, invariably poor, who have risen above stereotypes, and led the post-war quests for justice and healing. 

I have been to many exhumations, where the remains of those massacred in numbers are disinterred from anonymous burial places, so they may have proper burials, their names and very existence acknowledged by a wider world.  Almost always it has been the women of the community who have faced authorities, brought in the forensic scientists, to make sure these extraordinary processes take place. 

Armstrong has said of Clare, "vulnerability leads to strength." But who would choose to live on less than the minimum daily caloric requirement as most Central Americans do? Or in one of several countries where income is less than $1000 a year? If we are not poor, knowing Clare might inspire us to being with the poor, and learn from the poor of our own day.

As a reporter, I always wrote what is called the first draft of history, getting a story as quickly as possible and putting it out.  Now as an author on Latin America, I feel I may be writing second drafts. I have also come to realize how much history is a collection of stories, of life stories.  Some are so outstanding, rich with valor and self-examination, they serve as models, like that of Clare.

But they must be true.

The first draft of Clare's story, the medieval woman, the "little plant" that grew near St. Francis, the Clare that we know from her canonization decree written by churchmen, was not untrue.  

However, recently we are seeing a burst of scholarship based on Clare's own writing, and on oral testimony of many who knew her in life, scholarship that is going deeper.  The moment could not be more timely, to shed light on the dynamic Claretian spiritual tradition.

Witness the shocking and complex recent Vatican assessment of American sisters, which begs the questions, not for the first time:  What is the place of religious women, or any women, in the Church which does not grant them the space, time, even a few words of their own to dialogue on the priorities of their lives? To what extent do U.S. women religious (with their vow of poverty) represent women in the Church?

Not as a journalist who has investigated this with independent sources, but as a woman educated in Catholic institutions who is a practicing Catholic, I have a hunch.  I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest that yes, the vision and priorities of our women religious is not unreflective of those among Catholic women, and of men among our Catholic brothers.

I regard Clare as a saint for a lifetime.  As a young girl I was enchanted by the other young girl from the far past with the -- let's face it -- radical, unconventional behavior, a girl who followed her soul. 

Now, much older, older than Clare was when she died, I am most amazed and respectful of her consistency over a lifetime, her unwavering position in the face of challenge, and in the face of vulnerability she might have escaped at any moment of her choice.

Early on the morning of Nov. 17, 1989, I was among four journalists first to arrive at the scene of the massacre in San Salvador of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter.   Four bodies were on the grass of the priest's yard, covered by white sheets. Fr. Jose Maria Tojeira, then Superior of the Central American Jesuits, quickly took me to see the others who had died.  When we returned to the bodies on the grass, two photographer colleagues had arrived.

I said, "Father, you have to take off the sheets."

Something like alarm seemed to cross Tojera's features but passed quickly. He said, "Promise me these photos get to the Jesuits." 

When the sheets were taken away and I saw the faces of those I had known in life, my first impression was not, "They received the martyrdom they sought."  

Instead, a thought came strong and clearly to me: "They died because they were consistent, unwavering. " 


Eight hundred years ago, Clare, our contemporary, wrote:

What you hold, may you always hold,

What you do may you do and not stop,

but with swift pace, light step, feet unswerving so that even your steps stir up no dust, may you go forward, securely, swiftly and with joy.