Friday Links
May 23, 2025
National Shrine of St. Rita, South Philadelphia
St. Rita of Cascia
A Rose in Winter
Matthew Milliner: The Puffins and Evelyn Underhill
Itxu Díaz: The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Tara Isabella Burton on transgression and art
St. Rita of Cascia
St. Rita of Cascia is probably my favorite saint. Her feast day was yesterday. Normally, I’d celebrate and honor her by going to the National Shrine of St. Rita on Broad Street in South Philadelphia, where the South Philly Italians know how to honor this beloved saint. But, this year, and last, I was not well enough to go and it sort of breaks my heart. A small thing, yes, but still . . . Denise Trull’s reflection on St. Rita on her Substack, The Inscapist, was a nice reminder of St. Rita’s role as peacemaker.
Rita, canonized by Pope Leo XIII, was an Augustinian nun (a nice tie in to our new Pope Leo), though first she was a wife and mother. Rita, as Denise, writes, is well known as a peacemaker and I’ve found that she always responds to any requests for help with difficult relationships or situations. But, she is also so much more. Rita is a companion and example for all of us in every stage of life. I think her main example, even more than as a peacemaker, is one of abiding. Throughout her life—from the difficulties of her marriage to the hardships she faced in the convent—Rita did more than merely endure. She abided. If we look at the etymology of abide, we see that it means more than waiting—it is, instead, an active, fruitful kind of waiting (in the same way that silence is not merely the absence of noise). Other meanings for abide include “dwell,” “wait for,” and my favorite, “remain in service of.” This is what Rita did and what she can help all of us to do. In the early, painful years of her marriage, she abided, that is she prayed and waited for grace to work on her husband, she remained in service to him by praying and sacrificing for his salvation. Throughout her life, Rita shows us many other examples of this sort of abiding. She shows us how to dwell in sanctity, to dwell in trust of God and his mysterious, sometimes perplexing, plan. When her husband died and her sons were so angry that they were willing to risk their souls to avenge his death, she again abided—this time by praying that God do whatever was necessary to prevent them from avenging their father’s death, even if it meant their deaths. This is a shocking thing, to pray that your sons die rather than commit a mortal sin. But it is also a shocking thing, in this day and age, to abide in suffering, losing, in humiliation. Rita shows us, though, that our suffering may be a way of saving us and those we love from a far greater evil. We can’t know this for sure, of course, but we must trust that it is so. Rita can help us to be courageous enough to remain in this active kind of waiting while God does his work.
St. Rita is the gentlest of saints, a truly loving friend who will bring out the best in you, not by humiliating you or making you feel unworthy or unloved or worthless, but by abiding with you, by lovingly remaining in service to you, and teaching you how to dwell with God. She is a treasure.
A Rose in Winter
The prologue of Frank La Rocca's oratorio, A Rose in Winter with Maestro Al Calabrese conducting and text from Matthew Lickona. This is really beautiful.
Matthew Milliner: The Puffins and Evelyn Underhill
Another fascinating segment from the Material Mysticism series:
Underhill’s last book, which finally earned some grudging respect from her many critics, was simply titled Worship, giving due attention to all the main branches of Christianity. In it, she insists that the institution “checks religious egotism, breaks down devotional barriers, obliges the spiritual highbrow to join in the worship of the simple and ignorant.” Still, there was never anything churchy or romantic about her chosen attachment to recognizable, routine Christianity. She once compared the church to an essential service like the Post Office, where “irritating and inadequate officials behind the counter” will always tempt exasperation. Even so, she insisted to one of her directees, “the adoration to which you are vowed is not an affair of red hassocks and authorized hymn books; but a burning and consuming fire.”
Itxu Díaz: The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Díaz spent a few days in northwestern Spain at his family’s country home. To the slow, steady ticks of an old clock, he re-read the Spanish mystics and found:
One can never return to the mystics too many times. Now perhaps more than ever, their writings soothe the spirit, silence the frivolity of our days, and awaken the sleeping soul to the divine reality that exists beyond the noise, beyond the screen.
Tara Isabella Burton on transgression and art
Really interesting essay here from TIB on transgressive art. Her point that “[m]ore recently, transgressive art has taken the form of the banally blasphemous (Piss Christ, Satan Sneakers), or else the “racism for racism’s sake” of most anti-Woke comedy . . . lacks the humanistic joy of the most interesting transgressors” is, I think, absolutely true. So much of it, after the shock, is poorly done and just boring. Actually, a lot of it, isn’t really all that shocking, either.
It’s probably a Christian cop-out here to say that I think we can, and should, distinguish between transgression as something with a purpose, from the kind of nihilistic transgression that seeks to destroy the idea of purpose altogether. There are plenty of people who might fairly take issue with the idea that there can be “good” and “bad” transgression. But there are, I think, two kinds of transgression: the humanistic and the nihilistic, represented, in the literary canon, by the aforementioned Renaissance satirist Rabelais and the Enlightenment-era pornographer Sade.
