Intervention Thoughts

In the fall of 1983, there was this movie about a college friends who have rather lost touch, fifteen years after graduation, gathering again for the funeral of one of their peers (Kevin Costner in the hands and suit shot of the deceased in the casket).  Although I am was a Baby Boomer, then, and thus inevitably, now, I was only seven years out of college and not quite fully into the disenchantment portrayed in the film which starred the now geriatric crew of Glenn Close, Kevin Kline, William Hurt, Mary Kay Place, Tom Berenger and Meg Tillie as the 20 something squeeze of William Hurt's character. I seemed to have missed a lot of the seminal moments of my generation by being just a little younger than those in the thick of it. I mean I was 15 when Woodstock was held, not far from where I was spending my summer stringing beads with my younger cousins, while my somewhat older peers were riding their VW's--long hair flying and beads already made and adorning their counter-cultural selves-toward Yasgur's White Lake New York Far. I think I have said in these pages that while I am intellectually and spiritually sanguine about the fact I really never was a card carrying member of the first wild child group which set the tone for all that has come after, good and bad, emotionally there has always been this little tinge of regret. There I have said it. But withal I am glad I did not face the risk of being a wild child. Many came out unscathed by free love, drugs and rock n' roll. Many did not. I don't think I would have survived it.

Anyway, the crew of mid-30  somethings of this movie, "The Big Chill", spend their time together lamenting selling out their Vietnam Era principles for the capitalistic world.  Kline has a big house (he and his wife have a successful running shoe business), in which they eat, toke and drink, idealizing the idealism of days gone by. One of them, a lawyer, hopes that one of the guys will stop the ticking of her biological clock and Kevin's character is volunteered by his wife for the task. He is not displeased with the assignment. It is a movie about choices made, regrets, and friends both saying what they think to one another, and holding back what they think. There is deep caring, and resentment. They have kicked and screamed their way, metaphorically, and sometimes literally, into mid-adulthood.



This past weekend I found myself way out of the demographic and experiential ball park as I watched "The Intervention" written, directed and acted in by 38 year-old Clea Duvall (second from left in the picture below).



A group of thirty something friends who have rather lost touch gather together for a purported reunion weekend the real goal of which is to tell one couple, who have been unhappily married for ten years, they should get divorced.  Of course, each of them is really in no position to make suggestions for the happiness of others. Ms. Duvall plays the sister of the wife in misery, both psychologically and physically (she has a broken leg, which was written into the script when the lead actress had an accident). Another couple has been planning, and cancelling, their marriage, because one of them has problems committing, along with a substantial alcohol problem. One fellow, played by Ben Schwartz, whose wife has died a year or so before, brings along a nubile young thing, who reminded me suspiciously of the Meg Tillie character in "The Big Chill".  As was Meg in the earlier film interested in both Jeff Goldblum and William Hurt, she is happy to share her affections, in accord with our evolving modern sensibilities, bi-sexually. Let's just say that no one is exactly having the life hoped for. Life was tough in 1983. It is still tough in 2016.

We have come a long way? I don't really think so.  I liked the movie, I will admit. I think Clea Duvall, who was at the Arclight for a question an answer period (that with the narcissistic interruptions of actor Ben Schwartz was less high end movie critique and nuance than occasions for him to ejaculate the F-word, and offer discourse on bathroom functions), is an articulate talent. I wish she had been alone for the discussion. I would have asked her about the influence of "The Big Chill". I have since read that she was aware of it.

But what I came away feeling about the whole experience was kind of what I did- and maybe it was intended that the reader feel- in perusing "Wuthering Heights", the book, not the movie. The story of Cathy and Heathcliff is passionate, energetic, engaging. The second half of the book (the movie had no second part) was the story of their children having much the same sad path, but without the passion, the energy and the engagement. And that's how I felt about "The Intervention".  It felt as if it was a faded copy of "The Big Chill", a derivative, although it had its original threads. And it also occurred to me that the elements that make my boomer generation whiny and rather bad models for the Gen X and Millenial folk (Gen X was born between 1965 and 1984; Millenials are 1984 to date) who primarily populate "The Intervention" are exacerbated in their children, on screen and off.

I wasn't crazy about the generation portrayed in "The Big Chill". I am even less crazy about the ones portrayed in "The Intervention". It terrifies me that this might be who we all really are and what we consider important. I am reminded of that line that Cher says to Danny Aiello in "Moonstruck":

"I just want you to know no matter what you do, you're going to die, just like everybody else."

Shouldn't we be looking to something bigger than ourselves then?

Some Things Should Not Change, The Sad Loss of History at the Academy of Mount Saint Ursula

The end of an era. 

I know. Change is the inevitable. After all, did not Heraclitus say that you cannot step into the same river twice? But this one really rankles and I am not sure I can get over it.

I am a product of Catholicism, pre-Vatican and Post Vatican II. I started school in 1959, in Kindergarten, on the bucolic grounds of the oldest Catholic girls school on the East Coast, Mount Saint Ursula. The Kindergarten building wasn't part of the imposing one above; it was a bit more south, down the grass and apple tree covered hill, past Our Lady, whom we crowned every May. There I learned to read "Dick and Jane" and was introduced to the idea of playing the piano by grandmotherly Mother Anna, an Ursuline. The Ursulines are a teaching order, and she was my first introduction to them. She was probably in her 80s then, and a gentler soul I don't think I have ever met. She stood with me, and my little friends, when I received Holy Communion in the fully wood interior and exterior, "Old Chapel" which was behind the convent building, half of which, the right side in the pictures below, housed the grammar school which I was now attending and from which I would graduate in 1968, before going on to the high school, built in a bland mid-century style, next door. The process of downsizing, a word we hadn't created in 1968, had begun. Mine was the last of the grammar school class. This was an early casualty of the post Vatican II reality. Whatever Vatican II actually was, what got translated to the boon docks of the Bronx, and pretty much to the whole of the United States was chaos. Truth did remain, but those who were in charge of our continuing education and spiritual growth did not purvey it. Even St. Ursula was given the "heave-ho" as she was kicked out of the lexicon of saints.  Apparently she did not exist. I do wonder what happened to that painting. Maybe it is still there. For now.

Even after I was in high school, I'd like to visit the Convent Building. The ceilings were high and ornate and the stairwell was right out of an English novel, wide wood bannisters and stairs. The plentiful windows in the classrooms were from virtually the floor to the ceiling. You needed a special pole to open the top part of window. There was this special corridor, on the second floor. Dark, but not depressing, with a rather dramatic canvas of St. Ursula being chased by the Huns, round some high mountain on the left and doors to the "convent library" containing such tomes as "The Silent Spire Speaks" where we occasionally were led for some lecture, even when we were high schoolers. There I was told that I had become a member of the National Honor Society. There, I believe, is some kind of name placque with my late mother's name, though I realize I never got back to see it. A little further down the hall were two swinging doors that led to the actual convent, where the nuns who taught us, Mother Emmanuel, Mother Ursula, Mother Ignatius, Mother Alphonsus, Mother Carmel, Mother Cornelia, Mother Marie, Mother Florence Marie, lived. Only rarely did we go through those doors, and then very quietly, for fire drills, that would take us to those steps you see in the front, where we'd wait in silence for the word to go back to our classrooms. Also occasionally, when a nun died, we were shepherded to one of the inner parlors where a casket had been placed to pray for the usually quite elderly member of the congregation, rosary and yellowed vows in her crossed hands. In later years, before I moved to California from New York, I visited Mother Alphonsus and Mother Cornelia and Mere Carmel (she was our French teacher) there. It was a mysterious and lovely place. I think perhaps my love for earth tones, dark wood and libraries came from my 12 year formation at the Mount, along with my love of books and of theology. There was such a lot of the "Trouble with Angels" about the locale, and some of the children too. I alas, was not one of the adventurous ones. The nuns were my authority and I wanted their approval, as much nearly as I wanted my mothers. I got theirs more often than I got it from my mother, although there were a couple of blips, as there would be for any normal child. First grade was on the first floor across from the piano studio, a series of small rooms each with a baby grand as I remember it. I would begin lessons there when I was 9. For reasons that remain an enigma to me, when you went to the rest room, then called only the "lavatory" you were not allowed to speak to any other occupant. It was an offense that would lead to your name being placed in a box for a report to your mother. I was washing my hands with that soap that always smelled like ginger to me (for years I hated ginger because of it) while one of my classmates in a stall was chatting amiably. As I protested in came Mother Ursula finding only me talking.  She shooed me out of the room with a missed swat at my rump, and the surprise of a janitor who was mopping the hall way floor. I was now on the list for the box wherein my failure would be reported to my mother, and this was akin to sending me to an execution. Behind whatever book we were reading, I sobbed uncontrollably (In later grades Mother Florence Marie would suggest to my father that I was a crybaby. I was) in utter fear for my near future. After while, I heard something along the lines of "All right, I won't report it to your mother." Reprieve.

In that building, back on the second floor, I think, I took art classes with Mother Ignatius, a female St. Francis, whose two sparrows would fly around with us as we dabbed our oils on canvas. And laughed and enjoyed the hour. It was there I discovered that I did not always have to be quiet and contained. She taught me that. And maybe from her I developed my love of animals, it occurs to me. She could always be found feeding birds near the old chapel. That old chapel was condemned because it was wood and a new chapel was built in 1965, a round modern thing that I never warmed up to, but I see from the notations of alumna of later years was loved greatly.

And now, it will become a community center for the seniors who will live in the renovated convent building, no longer part of the Mt. St. Ursula school complex. For the first time in what, over a century? no chapel will be on the grounds.







Some years ago, I thought there was going to be an effort to preserve this small part of our Catholic History, when alumna were asked to donate for work on the roof. I gave my admittedly small contribution. Maybe I should look to myself a little then for the fact that this historic building with its historic history is not part of the school any longer, even tangentially. Another building near where the old kindergarten was, was long ago converted to housing for the community at large.
Now will this building become a senior space. I have struggled over this. I struggle as I write. This is good, isn't it? We must serve those in need. But something very big is being lost. There are no nuns at the Mount any more. Women don't want to become nuns. Part of me, the modern woman, understands. The religious side of me does not. These teaching nuns are the reason I achieved in my life (my parents too, but in a different way) and their absence from this campus has cost us as Catholics. And now even the vestiges of them, and of a world that had a sense of time and place, is being usurped. What is Mount Saint Ursula without that which was its genesis? Its foundation?

I am glad for the girls of Bedford Park who are getting still a good education at the high school, though I wonder what passes for religion classes these days. By the time I got to high school, it was Jesus Christ Superstar wherein Mary Magdalen was hoping for a little cuddling time. There was no frame. Modern dressed nuns who had been my teachers at the end of the semester, were married or pregnant by the beginning of the next. Without a clarity of faith to assist me during a teenage time of interior battle, I lapsed for over a decade. So I cannot imagine what the students are told now is the essence of Catholicism.



Over the years I have seen some photos on line of the Mount as it once was, but they were few and now harder to come by. If you look up the names of the nuns I mentioned in this piece, there is nothing about them. Maybe there is an archive somewhere. I pray that there is, because that will be all that is left, aside from the fading memory of baby boomers like me.

As I look at the picture just above, I want to cry. At least until the late 1980s I visited there, and I always felt that if I did now, I would find so much tangible to accord with my memory, and the memories of my compatriots who attended there from the late 1890s to the 1960s or so. All of our histories would be there, for the duration of time, at least that is what I thought. But no more. It's gone now. With the news of this latest change, alas, I felt a little bit of life go out of me. It's hard to explain. The piano room is long gone. The children are long gone. The Speech Center where I spent a summer working is long gone. I have no desire ever to go back there.

Of course as Teresa of Avila reminds us, all things are passing. Only God suffices. But I am a flawed human, and this change that is offered as a necessity or a matter of celebration deeply wounds. I ought to be better than that. Maybe one day I will be.

Third Anniversary

Prayer was, is, everything for him.

I was reading an article today in New Oxford Review (a Catholic magazine) about the Post-Vatican II funeral services at which it is not only assumed, but pronounced, that the deceased was immediately transported to Heaven. Naturally, the article took issue with this modernistic, and secular-ly informed, assertion. In the understanding of the philosophical and theological world preceding us by thousands of years today seen by the modern gnostic as quaint--maybe Heaven is not the final destination, or if it is, that happy condition is preceded by the purification of Purgatory. In a world of relativism, where good is variously defined and bad is banished from consideration, we all receive a celestial reward, (if you believe in such things at all) much as on earth the losing team members get a trophy too. We Catholics have been sold for our psyche's sake on the latter outcome. Sin, what sin? 

The article put me in mind of my former pastor, spiritual mentor and friend, Fr. Parnassus, who died, just about three years ago. Like the rest of us, the clerically consecrated, the religious layperson-even, dare I say, the enlightened humanist of New Age or no faiths, he frequently did not successfully practice what he preached. Those of us who knew Monsignor fairly well, and perhaps particularly, those of us who shared some of the same faults, recognized in his stunning homilies references to his pride, impatience and insensitivity toward our fellow man to be battled not only with resolution but with the Grace of the Sacrament of Confession (today called Reconciliation) sought frequently. He often reminded himself and his parishioners that the Devil, that fallen angel, both dismissed and embraced (after all, do we not have a TV show out there called, "Lucifer", hero of the day?) by our society, was sitting right next to us, speaking words of deception to us. He was what we were, a sinner, and he remonstrated with us, both publicly and privately, to remember that he was surely going to have to endure Purgatory. We must pray for him when his time came. He seemed even to fear that in that confusion of this century, even practicing Catholics would fail to do it, assuming transmission directly to the beatific vision for all souls.

The markers in the priest section of Holy Cross Cemetery in Los Angeles are uniform. They include the name of the priest, date of ordination, date of birth and death, as was pointed out by the Holy Cross administration at the time of his burial. But Monsignor had made his instructions known very clearly and so, his marker includes the plea, "Please pray for him". It is a plea that he insisted upon for all we love, when they die. 

And so, we pray for them. For him. We will make a formal remembrance of the third anniversary of his death on August 14, 2016 at the 12:15 Mass, then again, at the 8 a.m. Mass on the 20th, with a road trip for the rosary at his grave site thereafter. And perhaps he will intercede for us, still burdened by the Cloud of Unknowing, and ask the Lord to help keep us faithful when it is ever so hard to be.